No ‘Original’ Manuscripts - Post #1 on Old Testament Manuscripts, Source Texts, and Textual Analysis

No ‘Original’ Manuscripts

It’s becoming more well known among modern Christians (thankfully) that the Bible was not originally written in King James English. What is still NOT very well known, however, are the sources that translators use to derive our modern translations.

The assumption is often that translators simply take “the original” Hebrew manuscripts and translate them to English (or Spanish, or whatever modern language), and they take “the original” Greek manuscripts and do the same. One problem….“the original” manuscripts (called the autographs) didn’t survive. We don’t have them. Translators don’t have them.

What they are working with are copies….thousands of copies of manuscripts and manuscript fragments, particularly for the NT (which contain some variations - hence the need for deep textual analysis and research), and reconstructed texts (both OT and NT) that were previously compiled through their own process by scholars (also based on manuscript copies, and also containing variants).

We’ll get into the New Testament Greek sources soon (generally the Nestle Aland and UBS being the primary sources; sometimes the Textus Receptus), but for now I’ll discuss the Old Testament.

The Old Testament in modern translations, for example, is generally compiled using the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (which was developed through a century of textual research), as well as the Septuagint, The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Latin Vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta, and various other sources. There is a tedious process of textual research and analysis (called Textual Criticism) that goes far beyond just translating a word or phrase from Hebrew to English. Scholars have to deal with thousands of textual variants comparing the different source texts with each other, scribal errors, corruptions in the text, which vowels may be the most appropriate (since ancient Hebrew in general did not have most vowels in its written form….they were inferred by the reader according to tradition, but were added later in the Masoretic Text in the Middle Ages - which is now the base source text), and the overall task of constructing the best possible translation using all the tools, expertise, and research available to them.

The Codex Leningradensis was discovered in the 1800’s (it is the oldest Masoretic text found in its complete entirety, dated around 1008 A.D.) and included in later editions of the Biblia Hebraica.

My point is there are many more layers than just simply translating from Hebrew to English (as if that were simple anyway). There’s not simply an “original” Hebrew manuscript to translate from. There’s also not just one source text. Multiple sources are consulted, most of which went through their own previous process of compilation.

________________________________________ Some Resources:

Textual Research On The Bible https://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/Intro-ScholarlyEditions-GBS_2.pdf

Foundations of the Bible https://bit.ly/2QxHT3g

The Masorah of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia: Introduction and Annotated … By Page H. Kelley, Daniel S. Mynatt, Timothy G. Crawford  https://bit.ly/2QynPxD

Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Third Edition, Revised and Expanded) https://www.amazon.com/Textual-Criticism-Hebrew-Bible-English/dp/0800696646

Searching for the Original Bible by Randall Price https://books.google.com/books?id=R7ZHjZencgIC&pg=PA45&lpg=#v=onepage&q&f=false

Codex Leningradensis https://biblemanuscriptsociety.com/Bible-resources/Bible-manuscripts/Leningrad-Codex

NKJV (preface) http://www.bible-researcher.com/nkjv.html

NRSV (preface) http://www.bible-researcher.com/nrsvpreface.html

ESV (preface) https://www.esv.org/preface/

NASB (preface) http://www.bible-researcher.com/nasb-preface.html http://www.lockman.org/nasb/nasbprin.php

NIV (2011) (preface) http://www.bible-researcher.com/niv2011-preface.html