Lessons in Writing: The Palaeolgraphy of the Bible

The teacher you would do anything for as an elementary school kid...

My apologies. I had gotten sidetracked on several projects in preparation of the winter season soon upon us here in West Michigan. I took off about three weeks to work through 400 sq yds of woodchips (about 16 full dump truck loads) which I had dumped by loggers working behind us clearing off a tract of land. Once collected, with the help of my 93 year old neighbor and his tractor, he would spread it out as I raked it in, across an acre+ of land due to water erosion around the ponds, driveway, yards, and fields. After this I went to the local farmer's elevator to buy roadside grass mix for its hardiness to then spread across the woodchips previously laid in and to plant native plantings into the chip distributions to strengthen it against water runoff. 

While doing this I also weeded out all unwanted weeds and non-native growths around the property. Since buying this tract of land a few years ago my goal has been to restore it to its wildness and to create an urbane kind of preservation where man and beast might live together. It was a timeful expenditure which left my older body sore and aching nearly every day. As an ex-amateur athlete, it felt good to work with my hands-and-back and to feel the pain coursing again through my body. Pain is not always evil, many times it can be good or serve as a warning to strengthen a part of it. In addition, I just needed to close up the outdoor areas with the change in colder weather rapidly descending, visit our grown children, manage various committee affairs, and so on. This is my so-called non-eventful life in the Covid-19 era living out in the country near a frenetic metropolis, itself in the throes of chaos, change, and livelihoods.

Today I'd like to introduce the subject of paleology/palaeology, which is the study of antiquities (adj. var., paleologist, palaeologist, n. — paleologic, palaeologic, paleological, palaeological) and its subset paleography, which is the study of ancient manuscripts:

Wikipedia - Palaeography (not to be confused with Palaeogeography) - Paleaeography (UK) or paleography (US; ultimately from Greek: παλαιός, palaiós, "old", and γράφειν, gráphein, "to write") is the study of ancient and historical handwriting (that is to say, of the forms and processes of writing; not the textual content of documents). Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts,[2] and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of scriptoria.[3]

The discipline is one of the auxiliary sciences of history. It is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating ancient texts. However, it generally cannot be used to pinpoint dates with high precision.

Application

Palaeography can be an essential skill for historians and philologists, as it tackles two main difficulties. First, since the style of a single alphabet in each given language has evolved constantly, it is necessary to know how to decipher its individual characters as they existed in various eras. Second, scribes often used many abbreviations, usually so as to write more quickly and sometimes to save space, so the specialist-palaeographer must know how to interpret them. Knowledge of individual letter-forms, ligatures, punctuation, and abbrevia-tions enables the palaeographer to read and understand the text. The palaeographer must know, first, the language of the text (that is, one must become expert in the relevant earlier forms of these languages); and second, the historical usages of various styles of handwriting, common writing customs, and scribal or notarial abbreviations. Philological knowledge of the language, vocabulary, and grammar generally used at a given time or place can help palaeographers identify ancient or more recent forgeries versus authentic documents.

Knowledge of writing materials is also essential to the study of handwriting and to the identification of the periods in which a document or manuscript may have been produced.[4] An important goal may be to assign the text a date and a place of origin: this is why the palaeographer must take into account the style and formation of the manuscript and the handwriting used in it.[5]

Document dating

Palaeography can be used to provide information about the date at which a document was written. However, "paleography is a last resort for dating" and, "for book hands, a period of 50 years is the least acceptable spread of time"[6][7] with it being suggested that "the 'rule of thumb' should probably be to avoid dating a hand more precisely than a range of at least seventy or eighty years".[7] In a 2005 e-mail addendum to his 1996 "The Paleographical Dating of P-46" paper Bruce W. Griffin stated "Until more rigorous methodologies are developed, it is difficult to construct a 95% confidence interval for NT  [New Testament] manuscripts without allowing a century for an assigned date."[8] William M Schniedewind went even further in the abstract to his 2005 paper "Problems of Paleographic Dating of Inscriptions" and stated that "The so-called science of paleography often relies on circular reasoning because there is insufficient data to draw precise conclusion about dating. Scholars also tend to oversimplify diachronic development, assuming models of simplicity rather than complexity".[9]

The Wikipedia article goes on to give a practical introduction to the science and study of ancient documents by chronological age and geographical region. Reading through it will prepare one for viewing the accompanying technical videos I have placed below regarding the subject of the formal and cursive writing of Greek texts. None of this is difficult to comprehend. It's simply something many have not thought about or studied from a paleographical viewpoint. New words, different subject topics, and newer technical aides. All in all its pretty cool.

Much like the study of our own handwriting from its earliest remonstrances through grade school, college, and into middle age and beyond, so to with ancient documents. My earliest memories were of formally writing in capital letters between a top and bottom ledger line. After the capitals of the alphabet were learned then I graduated to learning how to write in lower-case letters using four lines: the middle top for extending the "b, f, h, k, l" and so on; and the middle bottom for extending the "g, j, p, q" and so on.

    

Then came my first impression of cursive writing which I thought was ugly, quite disorganized, and how I didn't like it. I imagine the ancients went through this same kind of thing when the younger generations came in with their "new-fangled ideas". If the royal formalisms of the day dictated formal capital writings then to transition centuries latter to cursive writing was probably something that just "wasn't done" in royal societies! Thus, the difference between majuscule (caps) and miniscule writing (lower cursive). Human societies have learned to use the tools at hand such as dictating by shorthand - which was all the rage in the first part of the 20th century - then Dictaphones, with steno pools to transcribe the spoken words into typed print, and later document imaging, faxing, etc. The ancients were no less adept even though technology turned at a slower pace back then because of restricted communications between geographic, cultural language, and dominionist boundaries.

At the last, knowing the history and development of an ancient culture’s ideas have assisted future human civilizations to look back on the good, the bad, and the ugly of mankind's achievements. Myself, I've come from a background of fundamental and later, conservative evangelical, biblical training which emphasized the importance of knowing the language, syntax, and grammatical senses of the literary tracts of the bible. It was especially important to not say any more or any less than what the "original" biblical passage did in its day. The trick after that was to determine from comparative literary analysis of other ancient documents extant at the time from other early cultures the passage's sense of meaning and application to its day. Much like our discussions of interpreting the U.S. Constitution in its "originalist and textual" sense so biblical interpretation does so in itself.

Through the past recent years, I've begun to take a different tact on ancient manuscript reading. Using the U.S. Constitution as an example, the document isn't much good if the ideals and the deficiencies of its hoary history cannot be translated into today's contemporary democratic culture of ideals and injustices. If the Constitution is simply a revered dead document with no relevancy to America today it's of no use except to be twisted and politicized out of its original intentions (as we have seen in the recent presidential impeachments by the Republican lawyers and party). If, however, the Constitution is considered as a living document meant to be imminently meaningful to today's masses then we must be able to discuss social inequality and injustice in terms of systemic racism and political partisanship running rampant under the Trump administration.

So too with my feelings towards evangelical biblical interpretation today. I think it important to know the bible's hoary history and linguistics of the day, but it must be imminently translatable to today's weary masses. Weary of war, division, resource theft, personal and communal usuary and abuse, impoverishment, death, and deformation. I decided several years ago when creating Relevancy22 to restore to theology its imminency by concentrating on highlighting our Father-God as a God of supreme love and goodness. To take all I was trained in and to lift it up beyond its current evangelical boundaries to the humanitarian levels of what it means to live in this world today as a Christian of faith sharing a cosmoecological gospel of people and land restoration, redemption, renewal, reformation, and hope.

If we only concentrate on creating formalized doctrinal rules maintaining dogmatic distinctions such as the "literal, historical, grammatical, contextual" interpretive rules I grew up with, then it doesn't allow one to do much thinking outside of the "biblical evangelical box" we've placed ourselves in. For myself, I needed to erase those boundaries, to not think in literal terms but in societal terms of biblical meaning, and to recognize even theology is bounded by its philosophies which governs it century-to-century. I took the pains to remove myself from Calvinism's unhelpfulness and to concentrate on uplifting Weslyean Arminianism to where it is today, rightfully seated in "Open and Relational Theological" discussions platformed on top of Process Philosophy. I use to call this neo-Postmodern Orthodoxy but now its simpler to simply describe it as Process Theology and along with to fit a new process-based Natural Theology around it.

These weren't easy tasks to do when flying solo by myself but over the years but by the guidance of the Spirit of the Lord it became possible to look beyond my historic roots and origins to the promising lands beyond. Remembering, at the same time, to revisit the past, such as today's subject, and to always remember the earlier foundations which might be transcribed into the impressionable and translatable living cultures we live where as contemporary Christians we might speak, share, minister, and evangelize why Jesus is the bedrock of all of life, its philosophies, and the world itself.

Jesus had discovered when growing up how distant his faith had become from the God of His forefather's, who they themselves had once learned - as roving scallywags of God's outreaching love - to be humble become teachable to the Lord's Spirit. We are no different today. Our faiths and our churches have lost sight of the love of God and what His salvific sacrifice meant to the world in terms of hope and promise. We are not to create counter-religious cultures of legislative laws but imbedded cultures of faith ethics, serving, and doing.

That because the future is open and not determined we, with our mighty God, might create a kingdom of heaven on earth without the use of corrupted "civilized" laws. Laws of love unbounded by civil laws "of duty". Spirit laws written on the heart instead of upon the scrolls of religious and civil documents. We follow the Author of our faith and not the idols of religious zealots too corrupted to see the Jesus of their day. We are seekers of God and of humanitarianism. We live by love, eat by love, serve by love. It is that simple. For these things Jesus died and empowered all the world to follow Him that it might be saved to the higher plains of spiritual worldliness in the hallowed halls of the Lord God's creation of solidarity and love.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
October 17, 2020

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Site Resources

University of Oxford, Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents

the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM)

Evangelical Textual Criticism

Files and Information on Early Jewish and Early Christian Copies of Greek Jewish Scriptures

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Sample Illustrations

Juan Hernandez Jr. of Bethel University, St. Paul, MN, presented a paper titled
“Codex Sinaiticus: The Earliest Greek Christian Commentary on John’s Apocalypse?”

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Helpful Introductory Videos

Clark Bates on the Origin of Greek Minuscule

Clark Bates, Text & Canon Institute Fellow and PhD candidate

at  University of Birmingham, discusses the origin of the

Greek minuscule script, Sept 20, 2020

Joey McCollum on Identifying Textual Clusters

with Non-Negative Matrix Factorization

Joey McCollum of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

presents his research on using non-negative matrix factorization to

identify textual clusters in the Greek New Testament, Sept 24, 2020

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Helpful Textual Resources

Created by Evangelical Textual Criticism Group

http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/p/resources.html

Listed here are resources, book reviews, interviews, links, and other such things that have been collected over the years by the blog editors and contributors. For a huge list of topics covered on the blog, see the topics page. If you see something amiss, let the editors know.

 Resources and Advice

• List of text-critical commentaries
• Index of Variants Discussed in Relation to the CBGM
• Historic editions of the Greek New Testament online
• How to check Patristic citations
• Coptic digital resources
• Where to do a PhD | 10 Tips on Academic Job Hunting
• Theses in NT Textual Criticism
• Greek Lectionaries: An Introduction
• Distribution of NT MSS by Century | More statistics
• Number of Variants in the GNT | Percent in the NA/UBS | Quantifying them in the Apostolos
• Defining the Byzantine Text & the Overall Quality of Byz MSS
• Differences between KJV (1611) and RV (1881)
• The libraries of famous NT text-critics
• Value of the comparative argument; the argument as (ab)used by reasoned eclectics and Dan Wallace’s response | Ehrman’s comparative argument
• Important series in NT textual criticism

 Bibliographies

• Syriac New Testament
• New Testament Textual Criticism
• Scribal Habits
• Greek Lectionaries

 Book Reviews

• Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus
• Charles Horton, The Earliest Gospels
• Lunn on the Ending of Mark
• Robinson and Pierpont, The New Testament in the Original Greek
• Samer Yohanna, The Gospel of Mark in the Syriac Harklean Version
• Tyndale House Greek New Testament
• All posts tagged “Book Reviews”

 Interviews

• Bart Ehrman
• Stanley Porter
• Dan Wallace
• Maurice Robinson (Part 1 and Part 2)
• John Karavidopoulos
• Hugh Houghton (Part 1 and Part 2)
• Charles E. Hill (Part 1 and Part 2)
• Thomas Hudgins
• Paolo Trovato (Part 1 and Part 2)
• All interviews

 Theological Topics

• Apologetics posts
• Do we really want an eclectic Hebrew Bible?
• Significance of Hebrew pointing
• Scripture’s self-attestation and textual criticism
• Evangelicals and the Qur’an
• How important is TC for evangelicals?
• Inerrancy, more inerrancy, inerrancy and TC
• Preservation: Bill Combs discusses; earlier comments; does inspiration require preservation?
• What are we trying to recover?, more of same
• Why didn’t God preserve the autographs?
• The autographs in early Protestant theology
• All posts tagged “theology”

 Downloadable Files

• “Misquoting Manuscripts: The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture Revisited” (Tommy Wasserman)
• Jac Perrin, F13 in John’s Gospel
• Mark 1:1 handout (T Wasserman)
• Dirk Jongkind, Review of Royse, Scribal Habits
• Ivo Tamm, Theologisch-christologische Varianten?
• James Royse, SBL 2008 Book review (response)
• Juan Hernandez, Review of Royse, Scribal Habits
• Phil Payne Critique of “Putting the Distigmai in Their Place”
• Phil Payne on 1 Cor 14_34-35
• Tommy Wasserman, GNT MSS in Sweden (and Jerusalem Colophon)
• Simon Crisp, “Jude as a Rapper”
• J. Harold Greenlee. Full Bibliography

 Links

• Amsterdam NT blog
• Byzantine Greek New Testament (CSPMT)
• Byzantine Paleography
• Center for Study of NT MSS (CSNTM)
• Codex Alexandrinus Images
• Codex Bezae Images
• Codex Ephraimi Rescriptus Images
• Codex Sinaiticus Project
• Codex Vaticanus Images
• Encyclopedia of NT TC
• Evangelical Theological Society
• ITSEE Blog
• Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung
• Institute for Biblical Research
• Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing
• Interpreting Ancient Manuscripts
• Jim Snapp
• LaParola (compare Greek manuscripts)
• Larry Hurtado’s blog
• NT Gateway, Textual Criticism Links
• New Testament Textual Criticism on Facebook (Carlson, Leonard, and Cate)
• NT Textual Criticism on Facebook (Snapp)
• Pro-Byzantine Textual Commentary (Robinson et al.)
• SBLGNT webpage (Holmes)
• SBLGNT webpage (SBL/Logos - download)
• Stephen Carlson
• TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism (online)
• Tregelles Greek New Testament
• Tyndale House Edition
• Tyndale House, Cambridge
• Virtual Manuscript Room (Birmingham)
• Virtual Manuscript Room (Münster)
• Virtual Manuscript Room 2.0
• Walters Art Museum MS Images
• Wieland Willker
• Wilbur Pickering

How God Came to Be

Amazon link

Book Description

In this remarkable, acclaimed history of the development of monotheism, Mark S. Smith explains how Israel's religion evolved from a cult of Yahweh as a primary deity among many to a fully defined monotheistic faith with Yahweh as sole god. Repudiating the traditional view that Israel was fundamentally different in culture and religion from its Canaanite neighbors, this provocative book argues that Israelite religion developed, at least in part, from the religion of Canaan. Drawing on epigraphic and archaeological sources, Smith cogently demonstrates that Israelite religion was not an outright rejection of foreign, pagan gods but, rather, was the result of the progressive establishment of a distinctly separate Israelite identity. This thoroughly revised second edition of The Early History of God includes a substantial new preface by the author and a foreword by Patrick D. Miller.

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Introduction

One of the areas I have failed to speak to as I should is How God Came To Be not only in the evolution of the Judeo-Christian religion but in the evolution of man himself. Of course, this then would directly affect how the bible would be read and discussed. It certainly would be different from how the bible is typically used when we quote Scripture familiarly without really understanding the depth of God's historical legacy from the earliest evolutionary times of ancient man to today's contemporary civilizations.

I touched upon this a little bit yesterday when posting a "book review" of The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries by Chris L. Keith, Helen K. Bond, Christine Jacobi and Jens Schröter. Here the early milieu of the New Testament is discussed in three weighty volumes by 70 different scholars to help portray the complexity of the Christian bible's development in the earliest days of the church. Likewise may be found similar discussions on the development of the Old Testament in the bible such as we have here with Mark Smith's edition.

For myself, beyond the academic language of biblical scholars, I quite accidentally stumbled across one of my favorite authors on this same subject in James Michener's novel, The Source, which opens up the idea of how ancient man became acquainted with God as a developing saga in the hoary story of revelatory religion, being and event. (to borrow part of a phrase from the renown philosophy Alaine Badiou; see link here and here).

Just the idea of God as an idea, or inkling of a conscious idea, only came to light slowly but slowly in the long experience of the ancient psyche of man; it is a story I think Michener has described quite aptly to the common, non-academic reader in readable narrative. That is, we have only come to know God through the accumulated experiences of many others from the earliest of times of man's evolutionary development until now. As such, I recommend reading Michener's novel ahead of all other biblical treatises on ancient Israel's evolving religion to help adjust our thinking about how God's apprehension of Being and Event came to be.

In summary, let me end by referencing Michener's book below as a follow up to Peter Enn's posting on Mark Smith's treatise on how the idea of YHWH formed within Israel. Enjoy.

R.E. Slater

December 23, 2019

Wikipedia Link

The Source is a historical novel by James A. Michener, first published in 1965. It is a survey of the history of the Jewish people and the land of Israel from pre-monotheistic days to the birth of the modern State of Israel. The Source uses, for its central device, a fictional tell in northern Israel called "Makor" (Hebrew: "source"‎). Prosaically, the name comes from a freshwater well just north of Makor, but symbolically it stands for much more, historically and spiritually.

Unlike most Michener novels, this book is not in strict chronological order. A parallel frame story set in Israel in the 1960s supports the historical timeline. Archaeologists digging at the tell at Makor uncover artifacts from each layer, which then serve as the basis for a chapter exploring the lives of the people involved with that artifact.

The book follows the story of the Family of Ur from a Stone Age family whose wife begins to believe that there is a supernatural force, which slowly leads us to the beginnings of monotheism. The descendants are not aware of the ancient antecedents revealed to the reader by the all-knowing writer as the story progresses through the Davidic kingdom, Hellenistic times, Roman times, etc. The site is continually inhabited until the end of the Crusades when it is destroyed by the victorious Mameluks (as happened to many actual cities after 1291) and is not rebuilt by the Ottomans.

- Wikipedia 

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We All Have a History. Even God.

Article Link

by Pete Enns, Ph.D.

Mark S. Smith’s book The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel opens with a quotation from the 6th c. AD writer on Roman antiquity, Lydus.

There has been and is much disagreement among theologians about the god honored among the Hebrews (De mensibus 4.53)

Indeed.

For the next 200 pages, Smith looks at the “role of Yahweh within Israelite religion” vis-a-vis older Canaanite deities like El, Baal, and Asherah (also known to us from the Bible).

Ferreting out how the ancient Israelites came to worship Yahweh and what that meant in the context of ancient polytheistic cultures has been a huge topic ever since modern biblical scholars/archaeologists began learning new things about (1) ancient Israel and (2) ancient polytheistic cultures.

The bottom line, mainstream view—I shudder even to attempt to summarize it in one sentence—is that the Hebrew scriptures contain a record of Israel’s diverse and changing views concerning God, where the experience of the Babylonian Exile was a major turning point in the emergence of monotheism (the belief that only one God exists) out of monolatry (many gods exist but only Yahweh is worthy of worship).

God, in other words, has a history—or at least on the pages of the Old Testament. We are seeing development over time in how God was understood.

This mainstream view does not rest well with the biblical progression of events, namely: Israel knew Yahweh as the/their only God from the time of Abraham, and how well they did as a people/nation depended on remembering that and worshiping/obeying Yahweh alone.

For biblical scholars of the last century or so, this picture is complicated by

(1) the Bible’s own hints and nods at a more complicated “early history of God” (hence Smith’s book), and

(2) our considerable and growing understanding of religion in general in the ancient Near East, especially Canaanite and Ugaritic religion, which are closest to Israelite religion.

I’m used to this sort of thing, but I know many are not. That’s fine. The point, though, is that the modern study of the Old Testament has irrevocably affected what we can expect from the Bible in terms of “brute information” about God.

The modern study of the Old Testament doesn’t tell you what to believe, like a bully, but it has placed the Old Testament firmly in its culture moments—so firmly, in fact, that a well rounded view can’t just make believe the last hundred or so years of thinking on this subject didn’t happen.

Here’s my take-away from all this—and I’m asking you (or at least humor me) to believe me when I say that this is not a last minute frenzied punt from my own end zone before the sack. My life, such as it is, is about synthesizing my own spiritual life with what I’ve been trained to do and what I do for a living, which is to say I’ve thought about this a good bit and hang out with others who have done the same.

Studying the Bible and Israel’s past is a regular reminder to me that my ultimate object of trust is God, not the Bible (or how I understand the Bible). That’s not knocking the Bible. It’s acknowledging that the Bible—even where it talks about God—is a relentlessly contextual collection of ancient literature that takes wisdom and patience to handle well, and in doing so drives us toward further contemplation of God here and now.

God is bigger than the Bible. 

I see Jesus and Paul already sounding that note when they began reshaping traditional expectations of God.

I haven’t come to this place quickly or casually, though from my vantage point today, it feels rather commonsensical to me—though I don’t impose that on anyone, at least not until I gain supreme, ultimate power, which is the plan.

One last point, to anticipate a common response: “But how can you know anything about God other than what the Bible tells you?” Fair question, but that potential problem does not dismiss the observation about God in the Bible. When you get close to the Bible, prepare to have your view of the Bible reoriented. The irony is that it is the study of the Bible that has led me down this path.

And it’s a nice path, at least for me. God is more outside of my control this way, which I can’t help but think is as it should be. As Lydus said over 1400 years ago, Yahweh isn’t easy to get your arms around—for Israelites or for those who have followed in their footsteps.

You can listen to my podcast on this topic HERE. You can read more about the nature of the Bible and Christian faith in The Bible Tells Me So (HarperOne, 2014) and Inspiration and Incarnation (Baker 2005/2015).