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Craig A. Evans on the New Testament Autographs: A Response

6/29/2015

30 Comments

 
Craig A. Evans
The latest issue of the Bulletin of Biblical Research (25.1) features an article by NT scholar Craig A. Evans that has been the subject of much discussion on social media over the last few weeks. Evans’ article, titled “How Long Were Late Antique Books in Use? Possible Implications for New Testament Textual Criticism,” has three main arguments. The first argument, which relies on George Houston’s work on ancient libraries, is that some literary manuscripts were in use over a long period of time, sometimes for 100 years or more. The second argument, which hinges on the first, is that the autographs of the New Testament probably also remained in use (i.e., being copied, read, and circulated) for 100 years or more. The third and final argument is that, since the autographs and first copies probably continued to be copied throughout the second and on into third centuries, the New Testament text was stable and therefore did not undergo any major changes.

There are many problems with Evans’ article, but here I would like to respond to a few of the more serious ones. It should be stated at the outset that the New Testament autographs—i.e., manuscripts containing the original or authorial text—are lost to us today. Just like any other ancient text, we do not possess the manuscripts that the original authors of the New Testament wrote and we do not know what their texts looked like immediately as they left their hands (or mouths, if produced via dictation). Our earliest manuscript evidence of the New Testament is a handful of fragments, most containing only a few verses, dating from the second and third centuries. The majority of our earliest evidence for the text of the New Testament stems from the fourth and fifth centuries and is represented by major codices like Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Bezae. The text of the New Testament as it existed in the first and second centuries has been a point of debate for many years, primarily because we have no first century evidence, and only minimal evidence for the second century. But what must be remembered is that the autographs are lost to us today and we do not know what those texts looked like exactly.

The most controversial claim in Evans’ article is that the autographs circulated and continued to be copied throughout the second century, and even on into the third century in some cases. There is not a shred of evidence for this claim. As mentioned above, Evans bases this claim on the work of Houston. So what does Houston say? According to Houston, who gathered only a small amount of data for ancient libraries, some literary manuscripts can be shown to have had “a useful life of between one hundred and two hundred years” (251). It is apparent that some literary manuscripts were indeed kept in use for this period of time before being discarded. (It should be noted that there are some problems with respect to how Houston’s “concentrations” are established, especially in regard to the dating of papyri and the potential contamination of a collection; see 248.) But that was certainly not the normal practice. Houston himself even admits that “a considerable majority of volumes in our concentrations were not that old when they were discarded or (in the case of the Villa of the Papyri) destroyed” (250). Manuscripts were frequently retired, discarded, or destroyed for various reasons (see examples and further discussion in AnneMarie Luijendijk’s work on “Sacred Scriptures as Trash”). Multigenerational use of literary texts was an exception to the rule and so extrapolating Houston’s data to permit longevity of the New Testament autographs is highly problematic.

In the end, we have no idea how long the New Testament autographs were in use. If they were treated like other literary manuscripts of the time, they were probably discarded within a generation or so. But even if they were “kept alive” for a century or more, as Evans wants us to think, we have no evidence that they were still being copied. Thus, Evans’ argument that the autographs were “in a position to influence the form of the Greek text” in the late second and early to mid-third centuries is sheer guesswork. How could we possibly know this when we do not even possess the autographs?! Evans ultimately attempts to use this scenario of preservation and use to argue for “the textual stability of the writings that make up the Greek NT” (35). In other words, he sees his imagined autographs as filling up the gaps in our early evidence. The idea that these imagined autographs afforded textual stability or control of the early New Testament texts is completely dubious. If this were the case, then how in the world does one explain the textual diversity in the earliest manuscript tradition?

New Testament scholar Michael Kruger read Evans’ article and concluded that “this makes the gap between our copies and the autographs shrink down to a rather negligible size.” In reality, however, not a single thing has changed. Evans has not discovered new evidence: he has invented it. There are no new links between the autographs and the earliest manuscript copies despite what Evans wants us to think. The gaps have not shrunk down to a rather negligible size, as Kruger claims. The autographs of the New Testament are lost, and we have no idea what happened to them. Thus, Evans’ arguments about the longevity of the autographs and their influence on the manuscript tradition are built wholly on multiple, untenable assumptions.

Like Evans, many scholars continue to overemphasize the “early” in order to argue for textual stability, but this method is flawed. It is wrong to assume that “earlier” manuscripts always contain better readings and that late manuscripts always contain bad readings. Indeed, readings in later witnesses have been found to have early support. As J.K. Elliott has rightly warned, “to emphasize their [i.e., the papyri] early dates is deceptive. The age of a manuscript is of no significance when assessing textual variation, unless we know how many stages there were between the autograph and that copy and also what changes were made at each of the intervening stages. No one has such information” (223).

Evans attempts to strengthen his claim that the early text of the New Testament was stable by turning to the “Gnostic manuscripts.” According to Evans, the “Gnostic” writings were less numerous and less sacred than the New Testament texts, were read and studied in private, and were not taken as seriously as New Testament texts (“the NT writings were taken more seriously by their readers and copyists, with the Gnostic writings—probably read and studied in private—seen more or less as ‘interpretations’ of the dominical and apostolic traditions” [36]). These points, he suggests, “seem to show significant instability in the Gnostic manuscripts—in marked contrast to the NT manuscripts, whose text is considerably more stable” (36). We can probably all agree on the first point (i.e., the Nag Hammadi texts were less numerous than New Testament texts). But how in the world can we know that the Nag Hammadi texts were considered less sacred? And the assumption that readers took the text of the New Testament more “seriously” than the Nag Hammadi texts is absurd. In short, Evans appeals to a canonical-bias approach here: he undercuts the non-canonical texts by showing that they were unstable, unpopular, read in secret, and so on, in order to argue for the superiority and textual stability of the canonical texts.

All in all, I—and a whole slew of other scholars—am baffled as to how this article, full of faulty assumptions and claims, came to see the light of day. Its publication in the Bulletin of Biblical Research demonstrates that this journal’s editorial and peer-review standards seriously need to be reevaluated.


Update: See contributions to this discussion by my astute colleagues Brent Nongbri, Malcolm Choat, J.K. Elliott, Gregg Schwendner and others in the comments section below.  


Elliot, J.K. “The Early Text of the Catholic Epistles,” in The Early Text of the New Testament (ed. Charles E. Hill and Michael J. Kruger; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 204-224.

Evans, Craig A. “How Long Were Late Antique Books in Use? Possible Implications for New Testament Textual Criticism,” Bulletin of Biblical Research 25 (2015), 23-37.

Houston, George W. “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: Oxford University Press, 2009), 233-267. 

Luijendijk, AnneMarie. “Sacred Scriptures as Trash: Biblical Papyri from Oxyrhynchus,” VC 64 (2010): 217-254.
30 Comments
Mike Gantt link
6/29/2015 02:13:28 am

Methinks you doth protest too much.

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Brice C. Jones link
6/29/2015 02:30:16 am

Nah, I just call bull when I see it :)

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Keefa
6/29/2015 02:47:57 am

nice work on the article. I enjoyed it. Any more information please do share.

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Malcolm
6/29/2015 04:32:03 am

I agree with what you say here Brice; I don't think the article is able to bring any positive evidence forward to support its arguments. There are certainly interesting questions we could discuss further about how long books were in use for, though I'm not sure the Oxyrhynchite rubbish dumps provide the sort of evidence Houston assumes they do and Evans wants them to (I think Gregg has some notes on this on his blog). One thing which occurred to me was different ways in which papyrus survived (or didn't) at various places around the Mediterranean: although Houston has a chapter on Herculaneum, Evans relies on his chapter on the Egyptian papyri; in Egypt, of course, papyrus survives for a *lot* longer (the reason we still have them now, of course); from other places, we don't have papyri (except carbonised ones), and that's not just because it's 2000 years ago: it made me think of what Galen says in Peri Alupias 19, talking about the libraries in Rome: "These (books), then, did not cause me a small pain when copying them. As it is, the papyri are completely useless, not even able to be unrolled because they have been glued together by decomposition, since the region is both marshy and low-lying, and, during the summer, it is stifling". Just something to throw in the mix when we think about how long papyri might survive in various places. I don't know where the NT autographs were (does anyone?) but I've always assumed they weren't in Egypt.

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Brice C. Jones link
6/29/2015 10:28:43 am

Excellent observations here, Malcolm, and the reference to Galen is brilliant. Thanks for this. And how right you are to think that the autographs were likely composed outside of Egypt.

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Frédéric Paché
12/29/2015 10:17:58 am

Here is something to pay attention concerning Autographs.
I'm following the NT308 course from Logos Software.
Here is what Dr Craig A. Evans is lecturing in this course (transcript text from the video session):

Can the Autographs Be Recovered?

I think it would be likely that a Pauline autograph would be readily recognized. Do you think we’ll actually find one? Well, I’m skeptical. Why? Because Paul didn’t write a letter, so far as we know, to the Christians at Oxyrhynchus. He didn’t write a letter to somebody who lived in an arid setting, where a letter written 2,000 years ago had a pretty good chance of surviving. He wrote his letters to Greece, to Asia Minor—at least one to Rome, in Italy—and those places get rainfall. Those places are not dry deserts. There’d be little chance for an original letter to be left in the city trash and then survive for 2,000 years.
No, I don’t think we’ll ever recover a Pauline autograph. But if by some fluky chance a NT autograph—especially if it’s a letter with a distinctive signature—should it turn up in the dry sands of Egypt, should it have gone to a place like that near the Dead Sea in Israel, for example, then at least theoretically I think it would be possible to find one and identify it.


Evans, C. A. (2014). NT308 The Reliability of New Testament Manuscripts. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

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Roger Pearse link
7/26/2019 05:09:14 pm

May I add a bit more context from Galen, Peri Alupias? The work "On Grief", is describing the losses of books in the fire of 192 AD.

18 In fact, those on the Palatine were destroyed on the same day as mine; the fire not only destroyed the storehouses on the Sacred Way, but also, before them, the (libraries) by the Temple of Peace, and afterwards, both those on the Palatine and the so-called Tiberian house in which there was also a library full of many other books; but some, on the contrary – on account of the negligence of those continually robbing (them) ………. – at the time I first went up to Rome, were on the verge of destruction.19

19 These (books), then, did not cause me a small pain when copying them. As it is, the papyri are completely useless, not even able to be unrolled because they have been glued together by decomposition, since the region is both marshy and low-lying, and, during the summer, it is stifling.

The reference is to the neglected collection in the Domus Tiberiana, the Palace of Tiberius. But bear in mind the date... the end of the second century! Some of these rolls from the Domus Tiberiana at that point may have been 160 years old.

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jim link
6/29/2015 05:25:04 am

nice work debunking rampant speculation and pure guesswork.

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Gregg Schwendner
6/29/2015 09:58:51 am

There is more to be said, but this is enough for now.
http://papyreviews.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-trouble-with-autographs-craig-evans.html

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Brice C. Jones link
6/29/2015 10:35:01 am

Excellent points and observations, Gregg. The analogy of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address works well here.

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Mike Gantt link
6/29/2015 10:50:41 am

If you think we do not have a stable NT text, why do all versions of the New Testament say the essentially the same thing?

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Brice C. Jones link
6/29/2015 11:03:34 am

A "version" in textual scholarship usually refers to a "translation." So, I'm assuming that is what you mean here. If so, you are incorrect. The versions differ remarkably in many places and in many different ways. The Greek manuscripts themselves (or the "source manuscripts") differ significantly among each other. That's why NT textual criticism exists as a discipline: to sort through all the differences. Anyway, "stability" is here being used in reference to the early period for which we actually have no manuscript evidence.

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Mike Gantt link
6/29/2015 09:59:25 pm

I am willing to consider your contention that "the versions differ remarkably and in many different ways." Toward that end, please identify for me the three most remarkable instances. I ask this only because I have never found any major differences in New Testament renderings - only minor ones. Yet I am willing to be corrected.

Mike Gantt link
6/29/2015 10:06:57 pm

I know you don't consider the extant NT mss qualifying as a "stable" text. Therefore, let me ask the following question merely on a theoretical basis. If the extant mss did indicate a stable text, would it be possible to have an unstable text during the early period for which there is no mss evidence?

I ask this because I cannot logically conceive of a stable text arising from an unstable one unless there were some controlling authority to bring about uniformity in the text - and I am unaware of any such controlling authority in that period.

Joshua Mann link
6/29/2015 10:20:34 pm

It may be worth noting an early form of this argument appears in Evan's piece at The Bible and Interpretation site: http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/eva358021.shtml. I see you and others urged caution then.

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Hector Avalos link
6/30/2015 02:25:15 am

Brice,
Thank your for your incisive analysis. As you point out, and as I have argued elsewhere (The End of Biblical Studies, pp. 65ff), without the autographs, it is impossible to know if any extant manuscript matches the autographs.

In fact, I am not sure we could recognize the autograph of any NT writing even if we "found" it because the presumed "autograph" could itself be a copy of yet another prior manuscript/source that is no longer extant.

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Mike Gantt link
6/30/2015 03:54:20 am

I wanted to respond to this comment, but then I realized that I could not be sure that the text I was reading was actually written by the "Hector Avalos" who wrote the book to which the comment refers. All I know is what is showing up on my computer screen and who knows how many other people could have changed the words before they got to me. Same goes for the Avalos book. I am not able to conduct any controlled experiments on the book to be sure that it was indeed written by someone named "Hector Avalos." After all, Amazon has complete control of the texts they publish. Even their corporate assurances could not make me confident, because how could they be sure that there was not a renegade programmer in their midst who was altering each text before it was sent out. I could compare my copy with a neighbor's, but that would only make two of us and would not account for all other copies. Besides, how do I know my neighbor's not in on a conspiracy with Amazon...or someone else?

I know you probably think I'm being excessively skeptical and maybe even paranoid. But I can assure you that from where I sit, everything I've said is completely normal and reasonable.

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Hector Avalos link
7/3/2015 01:36:38 am

Mike,
Your skepticism about my authorship is actually justified precisely because the existence of computers makes it much easier to manipulate, edit, and falsify writings more than ever before.

I know scholars whose identity was stolen, and people believed that posts and e-mails were being written by someone who did not write them. Sock puppets are very common in blogging.

In addition, I personally experienced an editor changing a crucial word in the published version of my article on “Satan” for the Oxford Companion to the Bible. I did not know of that change until after publication. So, the assumption that all words in that article are mine would be mistaken.

However, there is an advantage I have over ancient authors. I am alive, and people can interview me to verify whether a writing is indeed mine.

Brice C. Jones link
7/2/2015 06:13:20 pm

Right on all points, Hector. And see Brent's comments below about the autographs.

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J K Elliott
6/30/2015 05:06:26 am

I wonder how Craig Evans thinks Revelation with John's fingerprints on it left Patmos to be read and used in say Alexandria, Caesarea etc. And the same for Mark's Gospel being lovingly taken across the Mediterranean to nascent churches to read the Gospel in Mark's own hand. It is not only the timescale but the geographical travels for each separate autograph that are unlikely.

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Brice C. Jones link
6/30/2015 04:53:15 pm

Prof. Elliott: Exactly! The words "each separate" in your last sentence are important here. They highlight the fact that there were autographs for each individual book of the NT. So when Evans says the autographs were “in a position to influence the form of the Greek text” in the late second and early to mid-third centuries, *which* autographs are we talking about, and *which* NT books were being influenced? Of course we cannot know that information.

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Brent
6/30/2015 12:11:01 pm

Thanks for this, Brice. (I tried to post this yesterday, but I must have messed something up): The article raises several issues. For now, I'll just build off Malcolm’s observation on the preservation of manuscripts outside the dry sands of Egypt. Evans mentions the story of the importation of Aristotle's library to Rome. He cites Plutarch (Life of Sulla) and Strabo as sources, but he doesn't quote them. If we actually look at these ancient sources, it turns out that moral of the story for them is not so much the miraculous survival of the library for 250 years but rather the very poor state of the texts carried on the manuscripts when they arrived in Rome! See Strabo's more detailed account here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0198%3Abook%3D13%3Achapter%3D1%3Asection%3D54
It is exactly because the manuscripts were so old, damaged by wet and insects, repaired and corrected by people of varying levels of skill, that the manuscripts reached Rome carrying texts that Strabo tells us were "full of errors." Further, Plutarch's story also mentions that there were early texts of Aristotle and Theophrastus still circulating among peripatetics even after Aristotle’s library had been taken away, but he notes that these manuscripts were "not accurately written." For me, the takeaway from this story is that proximity to autographs (whatever we might mean by this term) does not necessarily guarantee the production of good texts.

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Brice C. Jones link
6/30/2015 04:38:29 pm

Brent, I think there is a glitch with the comment field. Malcolm told me privately that he wrote his comment, posted it, and then had to rewrite the entire thing! Sorry guys---I will inquire about this with my hosting service.

As for your comments about the autographs, I completely agree. As I remarked elsewhere yesterday: Which autographs are we talking about? Do we really think that, e.g., the first production of Luke's Gospel conformed to the text as we know it today? What if the author revised his own autograph? If he did, then the autographs shouldn't be afforded any special status anyway. And thanks also for clarifying the context and meaning of the citations alluded to by Evans.

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Brent
7/1/2015 10:16:47 pm

Yes, I suppose there are two questions: First: How would we know an "autograph" when we see one? I think of P.Oxy. 17.2070 (picture here: http://163.1.169.40/gsdl/collect/POxy/index/assoc/HASH018a/7707a7e8.dir/POxy.v0017.n2070.a.01.hires.jpg ), of which the editor wrote "the frequent alterations which have been made in the text, apparently by the original hand, and are difficult to explain except on the hypothesis that we here have a fragment of the author's own manuscript." So again, it is the visual INstability of the text of a single manuscript that may well be the best indication identifying a manuscript as an autograph. Second: For the New Testament documents in particular, I completely agree with you: Have we really come to terms with Epp’s article on the "original" text? What does the "autograph" of 2 Corinthians look like? What does that even mean?

Jason
6/30/2015 03:13:17 pm

Whether in the form of a single copy or several versions, it seems reasonable to me that each NT document is descended from a form or forms of an original of some sort. This is, like anything, debatable. But it is a reasonable starting point. That being said, is there some place for making informed speculation by comparison with what we know about other manuscripts? Of course, it would be unhelpful to claim it an something other than speculation, but speculation isn't always bad is it?

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Timothy Mitchell link
7/2/2015 10:52:44 am

There is a real need to align our definition of "autograph" with our knowledge of ancient publication/circulation practices. The "autograph" could be defined as that version which the author released for circulation/publication. In regards to letters, this would be pretty straight forward. The final version of the letter that was dispatched by a courier to its destination.
Now, these letters, especially extensive letters, may (would) have undergone heavy editing by the author and or their scribes who may have actually penned the letter before releasing it in its final version. But it is the final version that was dispatched to the sender that would have (theoretically) been available for copying and circulating and not those draft copies of the letter prepared while the author still had control over the document and had not released it for circulation.
I think it is this definition that Evans has in mind and not the initial drafts prepared by the author before dispatching the letter. Now of course, the dynamics change quite a bit when discussing formal literary works in which the author released more than one version for publication.

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Pete Malik
7/2/2015 09:35:20 pm

I think the matters may be a little more complicated here. What if the author supplied various copies of the same work to his reading community/friends/etc? Would these versions have been the same? Probably very similar, but given our knowledge of scribal behaviour, there had to have been variations of one sort or another (and I'm not even talking about major editorial differences which there could have been). Obviously, these musings are more relevant to literary texts than letters, but NT is not comprised of letters alone, so I think there are some points of contact. But even with letters, an author could have kept a copy to themselves. Would this copy have been the same as the one sent to his addressee? Again, probably similar, but really we have no idea (and of course we have no idea that such a personal copy did exist either).

I think, ultimately,what an editor can and should do is to try to understand the textual tradition as we have it and avoid meaningless conjectures that are of no historical—let alone theological—value.

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Timothy Mitchell link
7/3/2015 06:40:43 pm

I agree Peter, thank you for clarifying. I was merely attempting to point out that the "autograph" would be that version that was initially released for circulation. Holmes made similar comments when he wrote;
"I suggest defining the 'earliest recoverable stage(s) of the texts transmission' as the form(s) of text in which an early Christian writing first began to circulate and be copied." p. 657.

The various criticisms of Evans' speculation are valid. Yet these criticisms are themselves filled with similar levels of speculation.

“From ‘Original Text’ to ‘Initial Text’: The Traditional Goal of New Testament Textual Criticism in Contemporary Discussion.” Pages 637-681 in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis. Second Edition. Edited by Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes. New Testament, Tools, Studies and Documents 42. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

John Podgorney
7/6/2015 09:22:53 am

If we will never have the original autographs, how do you know the Alexandrian manuscripts are correct? And how is that Alexandrian manuscripts contain Byzantine readings? In these discussions the Byzantine texts seem to get shortchanged. And I believe the Lucian Recension is a fable.

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Frédéric Paché
12/29/2015 06:18:57 am

"How Long Were Late Antique Books in Use? Possible Implications for New Testament Textual Criticism"
In this title of the article I read the word "possible". In my humble opinion (I'm not a scholar) does it not mean just that the author is talking about a possibility (and not a pure mere and strong evidence) that NT autographs were used longer than "we" thought before ?

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