I’ve always wondered if, supposing some ironically specific divine catastrophe, all recorded copies of the Bible were lost (This includes any copies written down, chisled, or in electronic form. Also any quotations of the bible written on signs, bathroom walls, tatoos, etc.), would mankind be able to reproduce the Bible word for word?
There’s obviously many different versions of the Bible and many languages of each version, I suppose I would be asking about the most widely popular ones like the KJV in English.
Which Bibles would we be sure to lose? The ancient Hebrew ones?
And how much of a fight would there be if there was any disagreements over wording? Would this be a project the Vatican would oversee, or would it farm out the rewriting process and have votes on whichever passage most people think is the correct one?
Or is there a guy somewhere who everyone already believes knows the whole Bible and this problem would be moot?
Personally, if a “divine catastrophe” specifically eliminated all copies of the Bible, I would take that a pretty clear sign that the Almighty was sick and tired of our misusing it, and I would not want to risk being smited for trying to recreate it.
But, I tend to truckle under to authority figures.
You could do an interesting experiment if you had the time and money.
You could get some bible scholars whose expertise includes one particular book and get each of them to type it into a file. You could then use software that effectively takes each copy and merges it using a ‘voting’ scheme where there are differences.
As Danger Man says, there are plenty of people who have memorized the entire Bible and many more who have memorized significant sections of it. (Some of those people are out on the missions field where Bibles are not all that common or even illegal to own.) When I went to camp in my high school years, we would memorize an entire book during the week and I could still recite it with only a few mistakes the next year.
I suspect you’d lose some of the original language texts (the Hebrew and Greek ones) but maybe not. It wouldn’t entirely surprise me if some people had those memorized too.
I don’t think identifying mistakes would be a real problem. If four people recited verses, you’d see which guy’s wording was the outlier very quickly. Since many people standardize their memorization on King James, I’m sure that’s the version we’d wind up going back to.
I believe it would be rewritten. Many people have large parts of it memorized and others would paraphrase/edit as already been done
The Book has been written in many forms multiple times (even in New-Age self-help versions) as everything in there already resides in the actions, minds and the nature of human beings. Both the positive and negative.
this is what always gets me when people are knocked out by ancient bards like Homer committing to memory long texts that they were capable of reciting syllable for syllable.
Yeah, right, like there was somebody checking up on them (“Hey, three years ago, you called her ‘grey-eyed Athena’ in that line, you fraud, not 'the wise goddess,”) or that they coiuld prove discrepancies with a tape-recording .
Bible translators already have to deal with this. When you look at the original documents, you see some small variations. So you take 12 copies. If 10 of them share the same wording in one area, you can be pretty sure that’s the original. This is, of course, a simplified explanation and omits the standards used to select the 12 copies. But the fact is that it’d be quite easy to recreate the Bible accurately from people who have memorized them. You just compare the various versions like scholars have done for millennia.
But most classicists don’t believe this was how epic poetry was performed. The whole point of having all these epithets is for the poet to have a grab-bag of verses that they use whenever they need to make the meter or rhyme or whatever work out. They didn’t memorize things word-for-word, they created these poems semi-extemporaneously. Because, like you say, the audience wants to hear the poem, and they haven’t memorized it syllable-by-syllable either. Yeah, there were parts that were performed word for word, but lots of it was freestyle variations on a theme.
Well, classicists may believe that now, but when I got educated (thirty, forty years ago) a lot of my professors would marvel over the memories of the ancient bards.
I’d give it a 99% certainty we could reconstruct the whole thing. I don’t know of any single individual who has memorized the entire Old and New Testaments, but I’m sure that amongst the more than one billion or so Christians out there we could recover the whole thing. Even the long boring list of “begats” have been memorized somewhere by somebody.
As an interesting side note, it’s quite common in the Islamic world for people to memorize the entire Koran.
No way. Rabbis have incredible memories for scripture; there are probably a few who could reproduce the Talmud from memory, never mind the written OT. Not to mention that at least for the 5 books of Moses, traditional Jews hear the entire thing in the synagogue over the course of every year, and are supposed to read the weekly portion in private twice every week, plus commentary.
Trust me, in the unlikely (and to us religious folk, horrible) event that something destroyed every Torah scroll in the world, Jews would have a much easier time creating a new one that’s identical in content to the old ones than probably anyone else would.
I think most popular religious texts could be recreated verbatim, including even punctuation and grammatical quirks, by pooling the knowledge of its adherents, for whom memorization and veneration of the text is important. The Bible (including Deuterocanonical books) in several versions, the Quran, the Book of Mormon and other LDS texts, A wiki-style collaboration site would speed recompilation along tremendously, and would also serve well to point out any areas that remain in contention.
Interestingly, I think recreation could be done for some non-religious works; I imagine most, if not all, of the currently available works of Shakespeare could be recreated, quite a few epic poems, etc.
Not sure about the Bible, but there are quite a lot of people that have memorized the Qur’an word for word. And unlike the Bible, the language of the Qur’an has not changed… museums have copies hat are over 1000 years old and they are the same as today… I am sure that makes it easier, plus it is poetry which also help make memorization easier.
