When I started this project my original intent was to finish reading and commenting on the Bible in one year. That, for various personal reasons, obviously didn’t happen, but at long last, I’ve finished the larger part, the Old Testament.
It’s been quite a slog, and I know now why so many people simply don’t bother, even among the faithful. While the interesting bits are there, most of it is repetitive, often droning. Some of it is not intended really to be ‘read’, but rather as something to be recited. While there are aspects that are coherent, there are also competing theologies, made all the more complex when one layers in the New Testament.
The over-reaching theme of the text, if there can be said to be one, is that obedience to God is good, and brings reward, while disobedience brings destruction. God punishes those who fall away from him. This is centrally against the Israelites, but also sometimes to a province, a city, a family or an individual.
The Books of the Old Testament have varied authorship. For many of them, their origin remains unknown, and others we have to infer through complex textual analysis. Speaking of the Bible in History, the actual physical objects themselves are important. We have examples in Greek and Latin from the 4th Century CE, and fragments prior to that. The Dead Sea Scrolls were so critical in that they provided a variety of textual examples dating from the 3rd to 1rst centuries BCE. Transmission of works via copying, by hand copying, entails an increase in potential errors. Errors that can then more complexly become disagreements of doctrine or understanding. If my Holy book says “God is in the field” and yours says “God is on the field” we may develop essential doctrinal differences on the basis of a single letter, with no essential way of determining which of us is correct.
I, for example, am using a copy of the King James edition transcribed into Christianity.com. That actual data probably only dates back to the mid 2000’s, most likely transcribed from a physical copy(though of course, it could be a copy of an earlier digital copy). Most likely it was transcribed from one of the numerous physical copies made, and that have been remade over the centuries. Our modern era presumes the power of making reliable copies; a property of the printing press, though even there the possibility of error is far from zero. Once you go back before the invention of the printing press, every copy is made by one or more scribes, in handwriting.
So if we were to look at what I’m reading, I’m looking at a copy, of a copy, most likely of a copy, going back to some edition of the King James Bible in the 18th century. Those made from compiled copies and editions going back to the ‘Standard’ Text of 1769. That made to deal with the various discrepancies the editions produced since the 1539 ‘original’ produced. Including my favourite, the ‘Wicked Bible’, an edition published in 1631 in which an error omitted the ‘not’ from “Thou shalt not commit adultery”. This was reprinted and copied in a number of editions before being found.
What comes, in the end, is very fascinating; A modern Canadian Atheist, reading a copy of an English translation done by 16th century Englishmen in the wake of the Reformation. A translation of works originally in Hebrew, but largely being translated into English from Greek and Latin sources, themselves copies of earlier Hebrew sources(or other now extinct languages). Those Hebrew sources copies of other sources, or recordings of oral traditions, largely regarding the religious and political situations of several different ‘periods’ of history, from the earliest Isreali kingdoms to the Exile and Babylonian captivity to the creation of the second temple.
Imagine reading a cookbook that was an English translation of a Japanese translation from 200 years ago that itself was a translation of a Chinese work from 400 years ago, and just the beginnings of the problem come into focus.
This becomes all the more apparent as we move into the New Testament and a new generation, separated from the Old Testament as we are from the writers of the King James Bible, by centuries, utilise it and it’s religious traditions while describing their text.
We dive now into the Gospels, and confusing dating conventions, with Matthew.
Future Scribe 