In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries much older manuscripts were discovered. Such editions of the Greek New Testament as those of Erasmus (1516) and Robert Ètienne (Stephanus, 1551) were based on the available manuscripts which happened to come from the mediæval Greek Church, and contained a large number of accumulated errors. As far as Christian writings were involved, this concern was first expressed in regard to the works of the early Fathers. It cannot be denied, however, that a much more vigorous concern for ancient writings and manuscripts arose at the time of the Renaissance. Some early Christian writers were aware of the importance of old manuscripts for the study of the Bible, and copyists during the Middle Ages, both in the East and in the West, made efforts to find ancient models. For these reasons, and because, after all, we do have the Greek text, it seems fitting to deal with it rather than with something else.īut do we have the Greek text? Or what kind of Greek text do we have? This retranslation is harder to make than might be supposed, and where such efforts can be tested the proportion of successful retranslations is rather low moreover, experts in Aramaic have a tendency to disagree as to what the original was. (3) Finally, one must show that the passage if retranslated into the other language does make sense, and that some very simple error could have resulted in the text we now have. (2) Second, one must show that the Greek passage does not quite make sense. (If one is dealing with a really good translator, one cannot show that he has translated unless he has said so.) But most of the passages treated as bad Greek for this purpose can be shown to be at least acceptable in the Hellenistic Greek of the time. How does one prove that some text is not originally Greek but was translated from another language? (1) First, one must show that the Greek as it now stands is bad Greek. To be sure, some scholars have argued that parts, at least, of some of the books were written not in Greek but in Aramaic, and it may be worth while to state briefly why this view, while it may be interesting, can never be convincing. Ordinarily most people read these documents in various English translations, and therefore they may sometimes be tempted to forget that they were originally composed not in English but in Greek. Now we must go on to consider the documents not as a collection but as documents. In the previous chapter we considered the nature and contents of the New Testament as a whole, in order to see why it was that we were treating together these diverse documents produced within the Christian Church of the first century or even century and a half. Grant Chapter 2: Materials and Methods of Textual Criticism A Historical Introduction to the New Testamentīy Robert M.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |