We’ve Never Found the Original Bible Manuscripts  🔗 **Source:** [We’ve Never Found the Original Bible Manuscripts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5so_9VVLEA#transcript) > [!note]+ Document Notes > --- > tags: > - biblical-textual-criticism > - bible-manuscripts > - religious-literacy > - manuscript-variants > - history-of-scholarship > author: > - Dan McClellan > - Dan Beecher > source: Data Over Dogma on YouTube > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5so_9VVLEA > date created: 2026-08-04 > --- > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside > [!quote] blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > # 🏷️ Title > We’ve Never Found the Original Bible Manuscripts > # 🧭 Table of Contents > - References > - Summary > - Main content and notes > - Source references > - Paraphrase > - Newsletter > - Action items > - Hypotheses and methodology > - Questions and future research > - Implications > - Learning, accessibility, and DEIB > - Logical validity and DARVO > - Conclusion > - Refactor appendix > - Template library > # 🔗 References > - [YouTube source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5so_9VVLEA) > - [Data Over Dogma](https://www.youtube.com/@dataoverdogma) > - [Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts](https://www.csntm.org/) > - [Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library](https://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/) > - [Codex Sinaiticus](https://www.codexsinaiticus.org/) > # 📝 Summary > ## What happened > Dan McClellan and Dan Beecher introduce biblical textual criticism: the comparison of manuscripts and versions to reconstruct the earliest recoverable forms of biblical texts. They stress that no original handwritten manuscripts of biblical books survive. The episode traces the practice from ancient comparison of Greek literature through Origen, Erasmus, early printed Greek New Testaments, modern critical editions, and distinct Hebrew Bible and New Testament editorial methods. > ## Why it matters > Every Bible translation depends on decisions about variant readings. Textual criticism does not create manuscript differences; it makes the surviving evidence and editorial decisions visible. The method can challenge claims that one late translation or printed edition uniquely preserves an untouched original. > ## Stakeholders > Readers of scripture, clergy, translators, historians, textual critics, religious educators, publishers, apologists, skeptics, and communities whose beliefs are shaped by translation choices. > ## Risks > The hosts sometimes mix careful methodological explanation with ridicule of opponents. Technical terms are delivered rapidly and some are distorted by automatic transcription. Listeners may confuse “earliest recoverable form” with certainty about an author’s first draft. Examples centered on Christian and Jewish textual traditions need contextual framing so the discussion does not imply that manuscript variation is unique to the Bible. > ## Bottom line > No original biblical manuscripts are available for inspection. Scholars compare surviving witnesses, scribal patterns, historical context, and editorial probabilities to build transparent, revisable critical texts. > # 📖 Main Content > ## 🗒️ Notes > ### 00:00–04:30 — Certainty versus evidence > The hosts introduce textual criticism and quote a King James–only source that rejects modern criticism because it increases uncertainty. They answer that seeking certainty is not the same as seeking what the evidence supports. They also note that the King James Bible rests on earlier acts of manuscript comparison and editorial judgment. > ### 04:31–09:20 — What textual criticism tries to recover > The older ideal of recovering “the original text” is complicated by composition, compilation, oral tradition, multiple editions, and revision. The hosts describe the more cautious target as the earliest recoverable form. They note that no autographs survive and discuss the small John fragment commonly called P52, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Great Isaiah Scroll, and the long gaps between composition and surviving copies. > ### 09:21–14:15 — Ancient and late-antique comparison > Manuscript comparison predates Christianity and appears in work on Greek literature. The episode describes Origen’s Hexapla as a multi-column comparison that marked additions, omissions, and other differences among textual traditions. > ### 14:16–19:20 — Print, Erasmus, and editorial pressure > Erasmus used a small set of Greek manuscripts for a printed New Testament and back-translated the end of Revelation from Latin when his available Greek witnesses lacked it. Later editions changed as more evidence became available. Publishing schedules and commercial concerns interacted with scholarly judgment. > ### 19:21–27:15 — Rules as probabilities > The hosts discuss the preference for a more difficult reading because scribes often clarify a text. They use John 1:18 to show why this is a tendency rather than a mechanical rule: manuscript age, abbreviation, theology, accidental change, and internal style can point in different directions. They also question whether the shorter-reading preference is consistently reliable. > ### 27:16–34:00 — Critical editions and the Textus Receptus > The episode moves from editions built on the Textus Receptus to nineteenth-century critical texts assembled independently from a broader manuscript base. It connects those editions to later English translations and to verses absent from early witnesses, including the longer ending of Mark and the woman taken in adultery. > ### 34:01–40:30 — Diplomatic and eclectic editions > Hebrew Bible editions have often been diplomatic, using one main manuscript with variant evidence in an apparatus. New Testament editions are commonly eclectic, assembling readings from many witnesses. The two fields have related but distinct histories and editorial aims. > ### 40:31–47:00 — Scribal mechanisms > The hosts explain accidental omission and repetition, including errors caused when similar beginnings or endings lead a scribe to resume at the wrong place. A Samuel example shows that an omitted block can be recovered from another witness while that witness itself contains a corrected omission. > ### 47:01–end — Conjectural emendation and limits > When all surviving witnesses appear corrupt, some editors propose a reading not directly attested by a manuscript. This remains disputed. The episode closes by emphasizing that textual criticism is probabilistic, evidence-based, and open to revision rather than a device for producing effortless certainty. > # 📚 References > The transcript refers to P52, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Great Isaiah Scroll, Origen’s Hexapla, Erasmus, the Textus Receptus, Griesbach, Lachmann, the Revised Version, Codex Sinaiticus, the Leningrad Codex, John 1:18, Mark 16:9–20, the woman taken in adultery, and manuscript evidence from Samuel. The episode does not supply a formal bibliography in the captured transcript. Dates, spellings, and technical Greek terms should be checked against catalog records and scholarly reference works before quotation. > # 🗣️ Paraphrase > Textual criticism compares witnesses because manuscripts differ, not because scholars decided to make the text uncertain. > The absence of original manuscripts means the field usually aims for the earliest form the evidence can support. > Ancient editors already compared divergent copies; modern scholars inherited and formalized that work. > Printed editions were shaped by both available evidence and practical publishing limits. > Guidelines such as preferring the more difficult reading describe tendencies, not laws. > A reading can be early, unusual, theologically convenient, or accidentally produced, so each case needs several kinds of evidence. > Critical editions expose editorial choices and variant evidence so translators and readers can evaluate them. > Scribal omissions and repetitions often have observable physical or linguistic causes. > Conjectural emendation makes the method’s limits explicit: sometimes scholars suspect corruption without possessing a surviving corrective witness. > # 📰 Newsletter > The Bible did not arrive through a single pristine file transfer. It came through manuscripts copied, compared, corrected, expanded, abbreviated, lost, and rediscovered. Data Over Dogma’s useful point is simple: textu ### Recovered transcript [music] Hey everybody, I'm Dan Mlelen and I'm Dan Beecher and this is Data Over Dogma where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan? Things are good. It's a it's it's a good time here uh here in the world. Uh I mean, not all the things are good, but my stuff's Oh, it's on the world's on fire. Um, but yeah, and it's 84° uh from what I can tell right now. So, it's it's a warm day, but we're inside for some reason. We're doing all right. We're doing all right. And we have a really fun and interesting topic to go over today. I'm looking forward to it. Uh, it is something that we have discussed quite a bit on the show or we've touched on. It has something it's something that looms over much of what we do here on the show. Yeah. Uh, it's a what's that? And we're talking about textual criticism, which is something I I think, you know, this is one of those things where a lot of people raise an eyebrow about it, but I think, you know, if your friends and family, if you tell them about stuff that that we've talked about on this show and they get, "Where did that come from?" this might be the episode to share around and let people know uh what what's going on. Yeah, this this is something that is uh does not have a a particularly ideological bent to it. This is this is [laughter] something that is it well this is uh used across the board like everybody engages in textual criticism and then they go and they engage in that textual healing. Yes. is is so important. All right. Well, let's let's let's just dive into it with what's that. [music] So, textual criticism. Now, not everybody is thrilled about textual criticism. I can tell you I uh when I was looking at it, when I was looking it up, I did find uh at least one place way of life literature uh at Way of Life Bible College uh has has a little thing and they and in in their thing on textual criticism um this is an this is exerpted from uh faith versus the modern Bible versions, a course on Bible texts and versions of a tenfold defense of the King James Bible. Okay. Uh and they start with the words, "We further reject modern textual criticism because of its terrible fruit, increasing uncertainty and skepticism, a weakening of the authority of scripture and the promotion of ecumenical of the ecumenical movement." Uh and so what their claim is is that uh modern textual criticism has resulted in uncertainty in the biblical text. Uh and what I say to that is if that's your main concern and your main concern isn't trying to really understand what the text is trying to say and what the text is and what it means and stuff, you may be a you're not really searching for truth. You're just searching for certainty and that could be a problem. Yeah, I'm a little curious. The Way of Life Bible College just sounds [laughter] kind of silly just uh just off the bat. I'm trying to find some information on this, but uh like their blog the the they have a post that they just reposted first from 2008. They just reposted it today and the the title is just beware of Tony Campolo. [laughter] Um, so I don't know who that is, but I don't know, but they're doing personal attacks on the blog of this quote unquote Bible college. So, um, forgive me if I don't have a lot of confidence in anything that they do or say, right? Uh, but they they I see there's a book available, why we hold to the King James Bible. And here's the thing. King James onlyism is you're basically required to hate textual criticism, at least modern textual criticism, because textual criticism like immediately you're like, "Okay, well the King James Bible is out." Um because and so if you want to hold on to the King James Bible, you have to be like, "Well, wait on a minute. Wait a minute. Maybe the problem is with all of the experts." Um, and you have to uh hate on modern textual criticism, but the King James Bible is a product of textual criticism as well. Like the the process itself is is in the background. It's it's baked into the foundation of the King James Bible as well. You just don't like the outcomes of of more developed textual criticism. But textual criticism goes all the way back to um prior to the life of Jesus. uh and it actually uh originates outside of the Bible. Okay, it's actually we got to go back to like the librarians at Alexandria and people who were were bringing together the the main cannons of Greek literature and things like that. And so specifically Homer and the Iliad and these other things where you have a variety of different manuscripts, there are different versions of it. And if you are bringing them together and you happen to be comparing them, you're like, "Wait a minute, [laughter] are different. Why are they different? Where's my favorite story? Why isn't it in here?" Yeah. Um, and so all the way back over 2,000 years ago, they started asking why do these manuscripts differ from one another and which one is correct? Yeah. And that is the main question of textual criticism. correct is is you know more of a value judgment. But textual criticism it we used to think of it as trying to recover the original text, the text. We don't really talk about it that much anymore because there might not be an text for an awful lot of the texts we're talking about. Like it gets really complicated if a given book of the Bible like was compiled from a bunch of different texts and then those texts came together from different traditions and some of them were written and some of them were oral and then later traditions alter like you can't go back to an original text a lot of the time. And so now really what textual criticism at least textual criticism in the Bible is mainly concerned with is trying to uh reconstruct the earliest recoverable form of a given text. And unfortunately for the biblical texts the earliest recoverable form is not all the way back to the autographs. It's not all the way back to what was written by the authors again because we don't have those. I I we don't have those. I think there's a lot of people that would be surprised to learn that there's we don't have access to any original text for any of the books of the Bible, including the the uh the New Testament, right? The the closest we have is there's a little fragment of uh of papyrus uh p-52 which contains like 35 or 36 words, half on one side, half on the other of the fragment. It's about the size of a credit card that preserves parts of the Gospel of John. 35 or 36 words that really eager uh enthusiastic textual critics would say might date to around 120 125 CE which would be maybe 20 30 years after the gospel of John was written. Other there are others who would be like maybe it's around 150 but it could be as late as like 200. So even even that's not going to be in the handwriting of the original author. No, no, it's going to be it's it's going to be at least a copy of a copy of a copy. Um and but the you know that's not the entire Gospel of John. We don't know what's going on with a lot of the parts of John that are open to text critical debate. Uh so yeah, we don't we don't even get close. When it comes to the Hebrew Bible, our earliest copies for the overwhelming majority of the verses in Hebrew come from couple thousand year, no about 1500ish years after they were probably originally written. Right now, we do have less than half of the verses of many books of uh the Hebrew Bible preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. When it comes to the book of Isaiah, we happen to have almost the entire thing. the overwhelming majority of it preserved in the great Isaiah scroll. U and so there is a you have this window from maybe as close as 20 to 30 years away from the the original composition all the way to 1500 years or more uh for any for given verses. And so what can happen within those those decades and those centuries a lot. Um right and that's that's the problem that I guess textual criticism is facing is just you know there over those over the the the long period of time this has been transmitted and transmitted and recopied and recopied and recopied and there are scribal errors as we've talked about on the show. There's scribal additions, there's amendations, all sorts of stuff. And you got to figure out what's what. You got to figure out. So, uh, so obviously that's impossible and we should all just give up. [laughter] Well, it's it's not an exact science. We can't rub a special piece of paper on the manuscript to see if it turns pink, meaning this is the original, you know, this matches the original uh text. Uh but over the centuries we've developed some observations about how things tend to happen. And you know again some kind of textual criticism goes back over 2,000 years. But we have when people are collecting manuscripts of the the Bible at Kuman the Dead Sea Scrolls there's a degree to which there would have been some textual criticism going on as these people gathered these different manuscripts. And a lot of the manuscripts differ some in in very significant ways from each other, but they still held on to them. uh you go a few centuries down the road you get to origin uh in the 3rd century CE an early Christian who put together uh the hexopla which is like a six column side byside comparison of uh the Hebrew a transliterated version of the Hebrew the septuagent like a bunch of different versions and compared things and started using little symbols and signs to indicate here's where this version has extra text here's where this version is missing text. Here's where this version has a different text. Here's where this version has a different word order. And and we started kind of cataloging the different kinds of variance and the different kinds of differences that can occur between manuscripts. And then we have to go we have to go many many years down the road before it starts to become what we might call something approaching a science. uh in in the Reformation, the Renaissance when comparative literature begins to um kind of become a thing, you have a lot more comparison of text translators who are putting together uh translations of the Bible. For instance, Desidarius Arasmus in the early 16th century, what did he do when uh he wanted to put together the the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament? He went to his library in in Switzerland and he uh said, "Give me all the manuscripts, the Greek New Testament manuscripts you got." And they they put they threw seven of them on the on the counter and said, "This is this is everything." and he then had to decide, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take two of them as my base text and then the other five I'm going to compare to the base text and I'll make changes where I think a certain reading is probably better. Now, Arasmus was not uh a textual critic in in the sense that we use the the label today and so some of his decisions were better than others. Uh and then for the the last chapter of Revelation, he didn't have they didn't have that chapter covered in any of the seven manuscripts. And so he just took the Latin Vulgate and just translated the Latin back into Greek and then and then just wrote that down. But he did multiple editions of that. With each new edition, he had access to more manuscripts and made changes regarding the text critical decisions he made. So, so here's where you have kind of the the collision of a concern for original text uh along with professional printing concerns and publishing concerns. It's like, okay, well, we want another edition. We want to make changes. We also want to sell books. So, um you know, this turns this into something that people are taking more seriously. Uh, and we get into the this 1551 is when a guy named Stfanos decided he was going to uh divide everything in the New Testament out into individual verses. That division into chapters and verses has had happened earlier with the Hebrew Bible. We talked about that in in a recent episode. That's right. Uh and then we get to it's really in the 18th and 19th century that textual criticism turns into something we might call a science. Something where where people started methodologically kind of figuring out what are our standards, what are our rules, how are we doing things and we we adopted a number of observations. So for instance and and we still like to use these Latin titles lectio deficilior potor which which means the diff more difficult reading is preferred. Um and the idea there is look when scribes make changes more often than not those changes are to make the text easier to understand or comprehend or accept not harder. Right? And so the more difficult reading when we're comparing two manuscripts, the one that makes less sense is probably the earlier one. Not a hard and fast rule, but just a trend. Just a Yeah. Just just a guidepost. Yes. And when it's a when you say when you ended that phrase with is preferred, you just mean if we're guessing it older. Yeah. Not as opposed to as it may not be a better message or whatever. It may not be but it is but it is more likely to get to originality. Yeah. More likely to be earlier uh in in the sense of the reading that preceded the other one. Uh so the other some examples we should give like concrete examples of some some of these things. Yeah. I I suppose I I could have pulled some examples up. U [laughter] but there there are some there are some famous ones. And here's why it's just a, you know, a tendency and not a hard and fast rule. Because let's take a look at uh the gospel of John chapter 1 verse 18 has an incredibly famous text critical problem. Uh and here is the John 1:18 in the according to the NRSVU says no one has ever seen God. It is only it is the only son himself God who is close to the father's heart who has made him known. And this is actually a very problematic attempt to uh eat one's cake and have it too because in the Greek uh you have the manuscripts say the the main preferred manuscripts say one of two different things monogos or monogos. Monoganese means, you know, in the King James version it's translated only begotten, but really it it means one of a kind or unique. Okay. Um, and so is it the one-of-a-kind or unique son, or is it the one of a kind or unique God? And we have manuscripts that say each. The ones that say God actually come from earlier. The ones that say son come from a little later. However, once you get that reading, that is like almost every other manuscript that we have and then you know you have little differences when it comes to whether or not it has a definite article or something like that. But ledio would come into play because monogist is not anything that has ever that is you that phrase doesn't occur anywhere else in the in the New Testament. Monoganese huos does occur in the gospel of John. And so it would be more difficult because it doesn't match what we have elsewhere and so it doesn't make as much sense. And so the argument is does this mean monog or monogist if it was more early somebody would have a scribe would have been like uh why does it say that I'm changing it to what I know it says elsewhere. Right? So that that's uh sounds like a more reasonable change. How did the change happen? Why did the change happen? At the same time, however, one could push back and say, well, it's actually the easier reading if this change occurred in the period of these christoologgical debates over the divinity of of Jesus during during Nika, somebody um might have been like, "Oops, I changed it to monogists." Or it it could have accidentally been changed. Uh in the earliest manuscripts we have what are called nomenakra which are abbreviations of words and titles for divinity. And so in the Greek it actually just says it actually just uh has a theta and a sigma. And the difference between theos and whios in the using nomen sakra would have just been one letter. So one letter if it was transcribed sloppily could have resulted in the confusion. And so you have to you have to bring all that into consideration to weigh which reading you think is more likely because it's not impossible and and it's not incredibly uncommon for scribes to correct something they know to be an error in which case lectio deficilior might mislead you right because if if whios is original and somebody oops I changed it to theos because I find that theologically helpful and then other scribes came through later went stop doing that and changed it back to hios uh you know that's that's also something that could have happened. So so this is what makes textual criticism in in many ways just as much an art as a science because we're weighing probabilities. We have to consider all different kinds of ways to contextualize what's going on to get inside the heads of the scribes who may have been transcribing this to figure out when it may have been transcribed uh to when it dates and things like that. So that that's one example there. Another example is um leio brevior which would mean the shorter reading is the preferred reading. Now, we had uh Lincoln Blumel, a friend of mine on the show, and I don't know if you recall, but he mentioned that there were a number of textual critics these days who are actually saying sometimes the shorter reading is actually not preferred. In fact, the to the degree that we may have to overturn that standard in textual criticism, maybe lectio brevior is false. Maybe it is the longer reading or it is the um the longer reading that is preferred. Now, I I have not followed up with that particular debate, but you know, we we saw an example of that with our passage in John with uh the elect lady. Um and I don't remember what episode that was, but maybe in the the show notes we can refer to that episode if somebody wants to go check out uh the discussion there. Um so, so those are a couple of the most common text critical uh considerations that that go into this. Interestingly enough, when we look at um Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the the text critical industries are are quite a bit different between the two of them. Although we're we're trying to kind of coordinate them and bring them closer together so they're not operating under different standards. But when we get into it's really the New Testament that kind of leads the way for uh textual criticism of the Bible. You have a guy named Johan uh Jacob Griezbach who put together his own critical edition of the Greek New Testament. It was based on this was in uh 18th century 17 like 1772 to 1775 I think was uh or 1777 something like that was his first edition and he was based on the textual receptus. So the tradition that was started by Arasmus but he had access to even more manuscripts because in the 17 and 1800s we discovered a lot of manuscripts of the New Testament. A lot more became available for scholarly consultation. And so he was like okay there are a lot of problems with the Texas receptus. So I'm going to use the Texas receptus as my base text but I'm going to go through and make a bunch of notes and talk about why I think this reading is better and that reading is is better over there. So his critical edition was a bit of a departure from the Texas receptus which was kind of dominated and that's the what is underlying the King James version. So when people talk about how textual criticism is the devil [laughter] um and the King James version uh is is the only version of the Bible that is the very word of God. They are champions of the Texas receptus. Right? And then in the uh 1800s we had uh 1831 Carl Lachman published his critical edition and instead of like Greebach using the Texas receptus as a base text and editing it he just threw it out the window and said I'm creating my own critical text based on the manuscripts that are now available to us. Yeah. And so this this is the the first iteration of the critical text as as we understand it today. which is not tied to the Texas receptus. And this is this is basically um you know the the kingdom of Satan uh coming home to roost according to the King James only right uh and that led to uh in 50 year 50 50 or 51 years later I can't I think it's 1881 it might be 1882 but I 1881 is in my head is when we have the first English translation of the New Testament that is actually based on the critical text rather rather than the text receptus and that's the RV the revised version which basically took the King James version's New Testament and then uh edited it according to a critical uh edition of the New Testament that was available in that time. And I have that big old Bible that uh that I pulled out to take our pictures with for YouTube thumbnails. Yes. Um that is an 1882 I think Bible. 1881 or 1882. It is the the first publication where they actually put the RV and the King James version side by side. So they publish the two of them together. So you could compare the the revised version to the King James version. And that's where they actually have, you know, if you go look in Matthew 17:21 or any one of a number of other about 16 other passages, they just omit the verse altogether. Because through the process of examining all the manuscripts, comparing them, and making judgment calls about which readings are better, we arrived at the conclusion that there are over a dozen full verses in the New Testament that are secondary editions to the text that were not written by the authors of these texts. We have manuscripts where they are absent and we can and it's the explanation that they were added later is uh a far stronger conclusion than the explanation that they somehow fell out right prior to our earlier earliest manuscripts. And this and the funny thing is that some of these things you know obviously the the glaring example is the woman taken in adultery. We've talked about that. Yeah, there are two glaring examples. that one and then the what we call the long ending of Mark uh verses 9- 20 of Mark 16 which are not in our earliest manuscripts and the and the point that I was going to make is that like the woman taken the story of the woman taken in adultery is great. Yeah. Like it's a good like it's a good addition to the book. I like it. But but like so so I I I think it's important to clarify that when we say uh this is a good translation or this is a you know texturally accurate thing. It's not that's not actually a a value judgment on what's good and what's not good in the Bible so much as it is just trying like the the the the project here is to get at some level of accuracy or some level of uh of understanding of what the original text may have said. Yeah. And um I know we don't have a lot of time left, but um this is I I mentioned that New Testament and and uh Old Testament Hebrew Bible textual criticism is is different. And much of that has to do with uh the fact that we're usually aimed at producing different kinds of results. Like critical editions of the Hebrew Bible have historically gone at it a little differently from critical editions of the New Testament. And the main difference is that when it comes to the Hebrew Bible, almost all of our critical editions have always been what are called diplomatic editions. So now we'll get into some of the glossery things. Diplomatic edition is a critical edition that is based on a single manuscript. And then right uh and and so our critical editions of the Hebrew Bible are the Lenenrad Codeex for the most part. And then in the critical apparatus we might say okay their kuman manuscripts say this or the septuagent says this or something like that and that allows a translator to make text critical decisions about what they're actually going to translate. The new testament there is no single manuscript that is considered as authoritative as the lengrad codeex which is the maseretic text. So we have always used what we call eclectic editions. So diplomatic is based on one manuscript. Eclectic editions are based on an addition of the source text that has been cobbled together from a bunch of different manuscripts. So that's the Texas Receptus and that's all the critical editions that have been published ever since unless you have like a critical edition of the Codex Citicus or something like that. But those are are very rarely used for translations into English. uh that might be used for a translation into modern Greek, demote for uh you know the Greek Orthodox Church or something like that. Uh and so that's one of the the main differences. Uh some other glossery things that would be helpful for you. I use these words sometimes in my videos. I usually try to explain them, but when I don't, they just go scorching by over people's heads. But um you you'll hear about two different kinds of changes. One is hlography, one is dtography. Haplography is when something has accidentally been omitted. There's been a transcription error that results in text being lost. And frequently, and there are two different reasons that that happens mostly. One of them is called homoarchon. One of them is called homoon. So, I promised I would get to these words, but homoyo arton means same beginning. And so if you've ever ever transcribed a text, you go to your your exemplar, your source text, you read as many words as you can exactly remember and then you go over to your blank manuscript page and you write down the words exactly as you remember them and then you have to return back to your source text. Now, usually what you do is you either keep in your head how the word the last word you wrote down ended or you take note of how the next word coming up in the source text begins. Right? So, you go back and then when you come back to your source text, you go back to what you recall the word ended with or what you recall the next word began with with and you pick back up there. And if words that either end or begin the same occur multiple times within a line or within a couple lines or even a few lines of each other, sometimes you accidentally go back to the wrong word and you pick up either where you have already transcribed or you skip over stuff to pick up again. And so if you you know if homo arton two words that begin the same you accidentally go back and record a word or multiple words all over again that's called dtography. Dtography is where you have repeated or added material and then if you skip lines or words because of the way a word ended or because of the way a word began that is hypography. That's where you have omitted material. So in textual criticism, if you listen to a presentation given by a textual critic, they'll they they might push their glasses up on their nose and go, "And this was omitted because this is hypoglography as a result of homoarchan." And uh it all sounds very fancy and and we are very proud of our ability to remember these uh these Latin and Greek words and use them to try to help us figure out uh what reading was likely original. But it is it is a fun exercise to actually look at a text and be like, "Oh, wow. I can see now exactly how the scribe went about doing this." And they went from that word and skipped over these words and picked back up on this other line. And that's why in the the manuscript that I have, it skips over those things and, you know, it either does or doesn't make much sense. uh the resulting text, right? There are a lot of examples of of that going on. Uh we can even see in the Dead Sea Scrolls the largest correction that the Dead Sea Scrolls have helped biblical scholars make to biblical manuscripts in terms of just number of words is a part in uh book of Samuel where there is a whole paragraph that got omitted because of hypoglography because the scribe skipped from from one word to another. Yeah. and and we we found a manuscript of the Dead Sea Scrolls where it has that paragraph. But what's funny is you can even see in the Dead Sea Scroll manuscript that part of the paragraph had to be written into the margins by a different scribe because even within that Dead Sea Scroll manuscript, they accidentally omitted some of the paragraph. Yeah. So they did it within that manuscript and then later on the Maseretic text and and that that omission goes all the way back to the Septuagent like that happened very very early on in the transmission of the book of Samuel. So, and and then the last thing I'll point out is um what we call conjectural amendations because sometimes we are pretty sure this manuscript reading is not right, but we don't have an excellent manuscript that preserves a different reading. And sometimes we'll be like, we really, really, really think we know what happened here. And so you might have if if a critical edition or a translation is open to what are called conjectural amendations, they might just say, "You know what? We're just going to uh we're going to call an audible. We're going to make an executive decision here." I'm changing this to what we're pretty darn sure it originally read. Even though we don't have a manuscript that directly attests to that, there are textual critics who'll be like, "That is anathema. You can never do that. That is not allowed." you'll have other textual critics who say, "Yeah, we we're pretty darn sure we don't need to worry about this. We can make this change." So, conjectural amendations are a somewhat controversial uh aspect of textual criticism today as well. Well, there's a whole lot more to get to that we don't get to talk about out there. Uh all these all these textural textual critics out there just causing uncertainty in the biblical text, ruining it for everybody. Well, that's it for today. 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[music], We’ve Never Found the Original Bible Manuscripts, Dan McClellan and Dan Beecher, 01kz6hdvg1pk9ppk58v0k7183y.