Many years ago I was discussing theology with a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses when they started quoting scriptures out of their own special version of the Bible. I mentioned that the verses they were quoting were radically different from the same verses found in my trusty King James Version, and they informed me that, unlike the KJV (which was a translation of a translation of a translation…), their Bible was directly translated from the original source documents.
Now, I realize full well that the the Bible underwent a lot of changes and retranslations before it turned into the KJV, and I have no illusions whatsoever that the KJV is completely accurate. But I am also extremely skeptical that anything even remotely like the “original source documents” (whether for the Old or New Testaments) still exist today. And yet, I’m always hearing about people (such as the Jesus Seminar) doing analytical research of the Bible in the original languages. So, the question remains: are there any surviving “first draft” copies of ANY of the Biblical text, and if not, how old are the earliest surviving copies? And what degree of reliabilty, if any, is there that the existing copies are close to the originals?
The Dead Sea scrolls are the oldest sources for the Old Testament. They come from about 50 BC, so they were written several hundred years after the original.
For the New Testament the oldest copies are from 200-300 AD, I believe.
Even though they don’t address your question there are a series of Staff articles on the Bible that are excellent reading.
Zimaane: Actually, I read the Staff articles about “who wrote the Bible” before I posted my OP. They are extremely interesting, but as you said, they don’t really address my question. I am less concerned with who wrote the Bible as I am with how do we know that the Bible we have today is what was actually originally written.
All the analysis in the world won’t help if we can’t verify the authenticity of the source material.
If you want a translation based on the oldest origonal sources, have a look at theNew English Bible (which is about thirty years old now). Even the Catholic bibles in present use are much closer to the sources than the old Douay translation was. No translation is perfect, but I think that claims made by various groups that others are using a “corrupt” Bible don’t hold water. Current transalations are certainly as good as anything the Jay Dubs are using.
We’ve got some Jay Dubs who are regulars in our neighborhood. Nice folks. They never brought this up. Maybe I’ll ask them the next time I see them.
Cal: Well, the purpose of my postw asn’t to slam Jay Dubs, and it’s very possible this particular pair were just talking out their ass. It’s just that I instinctively knew that their claim couldn’t possibly be true (“why, yes – we do have the original manuscripts penned by Mathhew, Mark, Luke, and John”), but didn’t have any facts to back up my claim that they were full of it.
The question still remains, though: How old are the “oldest original sources” used by the New English Bible, and how reliable are they?
(For those whose local paper carries Wiley’s Non Sequiter cartoon, Sunday’s got off a great turn-about joke, somewhat at JWs expense.)
If you can scrounge up a copy Bruce M. Metzgers The Text of the New Testament you can learn plenty about the viscissitudes of hand-copied documents in general and the NT text in particular. Certainly there are other books on the subject, but Metzger is the most readable.
Though the gap between original OT autographs and the earliest known copies is much larger, Jewish scribes were obsessively careful about their work (counting the number of letters in a book, etc.). I seem to recall that someone compared a chapter from Isaiah from amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls with a copy made 1000 years later, and found only one difference, which did not affect the meaning.
The JW statement about KJV being a translation of a translation is something of a canard. While they maintained continuity with previous translation (as the RSV did with the KJV), they did work from a Greek text. As far as the JW New World Translation goes, I’ve read that it’s a passable translation, but has some “ideosyncratic” translations in places (i.e., translation slanted toward JW doctrine).
So far as a “completely accurate” Bible goes, forget it. The originals have long rotted away and textual criticism can go only so far. How closely the current “received text” matches the original is a matter for guesswork, but it is probably fairly close.
For the NT, the oldest existing text is a fragment of the Gospel of John from around 200 AD. The oldest more or less complete NTs date from the fourth century. They have names like “Codex Claromontanus, Codex Vaticanus” etc. Try Googling those names or look at the Catholic Dictionary site for more info.
The oldest physical documents that I recall for the Jewish Tanakh would be those of the Qumran Scrolls dating to the second and first centuries B.C.E. Interestingly, those are not “direct line” documents. The Essenes were a specific sect within Judaism who were in opposition to the groups who controlled the Temple (where any “official” documents would have been kept, presumably). When Qumran scrolls were discovered, they were compared against the Masoretic recension (the effort to carefully reconstruct the earliest writings by an exhaustive comparison of the various variant documents that was completed in the late ninth century). The comparison showed an amazing correspondence between the first century B.C.E. scrolls and the corrected copies of several books, notably Isaiah. On the other hand, there were verses in the Qumran scrolls that more closely matched the Septaugint (2d century B.C.E. Greek translation) than the Masoretic text, indicating that by the first century, there were already variations among some manuscripts.
The oldest New Testament document is Papyrus Fragment P[sup]48[/sup], a fragment of the Gospel of John dating to around 125. (There is a claim made for a fragment of Mark’s Gospel that is supposed to date to 50 or so, but I find the arguments particularly strained and it is not recognized by most scholars.) The earliest more or less complete texts date to the fourth century.
Paper, papyrus, and vellum rarely last more than 100 years, especially when they are used regularly to read from. The only way in ancient times to have a text last generations is to copy the text onto a new medium. The original manuscript then rots away.
Scrolls and fragments that are two thousand years old are so rare, that they exist only a few instances and only under the most extraordinary of circumstances. And even then, these are likely to have been copies of the original (or copies of the copies of the copies… of the original).
And so, there are no originals left of any Biblical text.
Scholars try to recreate the original text by comparing all the ancient copies they can find. Sometimes, existing documents are ancient translations of the originals. The final re-recreation is call a ‘received text’ (‘textus receptus’).
Most modern Biblical translations are translated from the received text. And thus, they are translations of the original text as best as can be determined by the existing ancient evidence of ancient copies.
If JWs are claiming that their bible is a translation of the very original texts from the very original physical documents, then they are making a supernatural claim about their bible, for the originals don’t exist.
Really, it was Jehovah’s Witnesses? I wasn’t aware that they made this claim. I know that Mormons have a Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible that is supposed to fix mistranslated and lost portions, but it’s not generally used, especially in theological arguments with non-Mormons – and it isn’t claimed to have been translated from original documents, but by God inspiring Joseph Smith to correct various parts of the King James Bible.
But I’m not as familiar with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, so I’d like to find out if they really do claim to have an earlier-and-therefore-better version of the Bible than the King James Version.
the JW NWT Bible is from the Westcott-Hort Greek text which was compiled from the earliest NT texts (most notably Codex Sinaiticus & Codex Vaticanus, which date around the fourth century), and representing what’s been called “the Alexandrian” textual tradition. The KJV & Douay are translated from the Textus Recptus (the Recieved Text) which was passed along & perhaps added to over the centuries, and represent “the Byzantine” tradtion.