One Of The Most Revolutionary Thoughts I Have Read

It does­n’t hap­pen too often, but every once in a while I become aware of some new piece of data that explodes what I think I know about some area I’m inter­est­ed in. New Tes­ta­ment schol­ar (and fel­low Pen­te­costal) Lar­ry Hur­ta­do just dropped a bomb on me.

In his blog post How Long Were Man­u­scripts Used? he men­tions some­thing that had nev­er occurred to me before. Not even a lit­tle bit.

One mat­ter Hous­ton address­es is how long man­u­scripts appear to have been in use. On the basis of man­u­scripts from Oxyrhynchus and from Her­cu­la­neum in par­tic­u­lar, Hous­ton notes numer­ous exam­ples of man­u­scripts dis­card­ed when they were ca. 2–3 cen­turies old. Over­all, he judges that the evi­dence indi­cates “a use­ful life of between one hun­dred and two hun­dred years for a major­i­ty of the vol­umes, with a sig­nif­i­cant minor­i­ty last­ing two hun­dred years or more” (p. 251). And, as he notes, the evi­dence from Qum­ran leads to a sim­i­lar view.

This is of poten­tial rel­e­vance for ques­tions about the trans­mis­sion of ear­ly Chris­t­ian texts, espe­cial­ly those that became part of the NT. If ear­ly copies were intact for some­thing approach­ing a cen­tu­ry or more, then this could be a fac­tor against notions that these texts were high­ly unsta­ble and sus­cep­ti­ble to major revi­sion in the course of trans­mis­sion. But we might adjust our think­ing to allow for an ear­li­er wear­ing-out of NT man­u­scripts through greater fre­quen­cy of usage. OK. Let’s sup­pose that ear­ly man­u­scripts of NT writ­ings typ­i­cal­ly wore out soon­er: twice as fast (ca. 50–75 years)? That still means that the man­u­scripts from which copies were made remained avail­able for poten­tial check­ing for a fair peri­od of time.

This prob­a­bly means noth­ing to most of you, but this is huge if you’re inter­est­ed in the tex­tu­al reli­a­bil­i­ty of the New Tes­ta­ment. This is sur­pris­ing and strong evi­dence in the “Bible is reli­able” col­umn. Check out his com­ments sec­tion where Dr. Hur­ta­do unpacks this a bit more.

Some­thing Dr. Hur­ta­do does not men­tion is that this makes it plau­si­ble that our ear­li­est papyrus frag­ments (such as P52 or one of the hand­ful of oth­ers from the mid-sec­ond cen­tu­ry) might actu­al­ly be direct copies from the auto­graph or only one gen­er­a­tion removed. It’s impos­si­ble to know, of course. But the mere fact that we can even think it plau­si­ble is mind-bog­gling.

Dr. Hur­ta­do got this data from UNC’s George W. Hous­ton in his arti­cle “Papy­ro­log­i­cal Evi­dence for Book Col­lec­tions and Libraries in the Roman Empire,” in Ancient Lit­era­cies: The Cul­ture of Read­ing in Greece and Rome, ed. William A. John­son and Holt N. Park­er (Oxford/New York: Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2009), 233–67.