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My Theory About Variant Readings
I have been a student textual criticism for nearly as long as I have been reading the Bible (12 years). Obviously I have had much more limited understanding of it in the early years, but with the challenges that I have been faced with by others concerning Bible translations and explaining why different versions have different readings, it has always appealed to me to understand and to explain to others why our infallible Word of God can read differently according to what English version you have.
This short article is only to give forth a theory that I believe in concerning omissions and additions that are found in certain versions of the Bible and the ancient Bible manuscripts.
One example of an omission in the Bible is the last chapter of the Gospel of Mark with verses 9-20. Some ancient Bible manuscripts totally omit those verses, while some manuscripts have it. A textual critic would compare the age of the manuscripts as well as the citations of the Early Church Fathers and then examine to see if there is any vocabulary and style that differs from the rest of the writing to determine if another person added anything, or whether some scribe left it out. Often you will have one of two conclusions, that is, it was from Mark, or that it was added after Mark by someone else; and it seems as if it comes down to an either/or dilemma. But this is where my theory parts ways with both schools of thought.
I believe that the authors of the Bible have more than likely written their accounts more than once, while adding more detail or giving less detail as they felt the need. There are many places where there are variant readings in the Bible manuscripts that could not by any means be a scribal error. The most obvious scribal errors are when words are misspelled or a scribe will accidentally copy the same line twice and similar errors that come from the monotony that comes from copying massive amounts of text by hand. But there are many places where there are variant readings that did not come by accident, and that is when these variant readings could have come by the very same author. Why has it become such an unwritten rule that the authors of the Bible could have only written their accounts once? It makes more sense to me that the authors wrote their accounts more than once in order to publish it and to get it into more hands, I would.
Of course we can assume that since some variant readings are additions because the style or vocabulary is different, which could very well be possible, but another likely case is that the authors could have written their accounts in different languages which would take on a different style and vocabulary. Most of the authors of the Bible spoke more than one language such as Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Just like that longer and shorter ending in Mark 16, some Greek manuscripts omit it while some add it. But the Aramaic versions of Mark have the longer ending, which could very well indicate that Mark wrote his account in Greek and Aramaic, and could have very well written the longer ending in one language while giving the shorter ending in another. And having studied the Greek version of Mark myself I saw where he wrote in Greek but had an Aramaic mindset. Maybe Mark wrote the shorter ending in Greek and wrote the longer ending in Aramaic, then someone later translated the Aramaic version into Greek which would make the style appear to be different.
There are many examples that I could present here but I just wanted to present a theory that may very well be an answer to many variant readings of the Bible that have been understood by a lot of scholars as being scribal errors or intentional alterations.
JohnLitteral |
Latest page update: made by JohnLitteral
, Jan 26 2009, 3:10 AM EST
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