Fewer Broken Pieces

Codex Sinaiticus is being placed in an online, searchable database.  Too bad Slashdot’s post on the subject is incredibly inaccurate:

“The British Museum is putting online the remaining fragments of the world’s oldest Bible. The Codex Sinaiticus dates to the fourth century BCE and was discovered in the 19th century. Very few people have seen it due to its fragile state — that and the fact that parts of it are in collections scattered across the globe. It’ll give scholars and those interested their first chance to take a look. However, I’ve got a feeling that some people won’t be happy to see it online, since it makes no mention of the resurrection, which is a central part of Christian belief.”

Let’s start with the hit parade of errors and possible mistaken implications:

• Codex Vaticanus may actually be older than Sinaiticus.
• Codex Sinaiticus is dated in the 4th century CE or AD, not BCE.
• Codex Sinaiticus may be the oldest extant copy of the entire Christian New Testament, but there are older copies of all of the individual books (except perhaps Revelation).
• Codex Sinaiticus does indeed contain many accounts of the resurrection.  I believe what the submitter was mistakenly referring to is the fact that Sinaiticus contains the short ending of Mark’s Gospel, which still mentions the resurrection, but does not include the resurrected Jesus himself.

Thankfully these errors were mentioned in the comments and moderated up, but only after a whole lot of ignorant fear, uncertainty, and doubt was spread.  We resurrection-believing Christians will in fact rejoice that it is online, because Codex Sinaiticus is an important part of our heritage.

“Short Goliath” is the working title for my thesis. Here is the opening:

The story of David and Goliath is among the most loved of all Bible stories. It is ubiquitous in our culture, from being a staple of children’s Sunday school curricula to being employed as a popular and poignant metaphor for the struggle of the disadvantaged against a seemingly invincible foe. It is a prime example of a passage which is valued much more for its affective qualities than for its scholarly nuances.

Yet very few readers would be aware that there is underlying the beloved story a fascinating textual situation which defies any easy explanation. The Old Greek text of the David and Goliath pericope, which is comprised of 1 Samuel 16-18, is dramatically shorter than the version found in the Hebrew Masoretic text, which is the basis for most translations of the Hebrew scriptures. This variance is made quite stark by the absence of any Greek text corresponding to the Hebrew of verses 12-31 of the seventeenth chapter. So the differences in this section are not a consequence of translation style or the occasional, accidental omission. Rather significant portions of the story are missing in the Old Greek.

The missing text omits nothing which most readers would consider central to the story. Two different readers could approach the text, one in Hebrew and one in Greek, and still come away with the same basic impression of the story. Yet there are quite a few details which are lost in the Greek version.

Beyond the purely inquisitive desire to know how these texts came to be so different, this case has text critical implications. Typically, when a translation is strikingly different than its vorlage, the variation is written off as the result of poor translation practices and is not given much (if any) weight in textual criticism. However, as with the whole of textual criticism of the Hebrew scriptures, the oldest extant copies of the Old Greek are centuries older than the oldest extant copies of the Masoretic text. Additionally, thanks to historical sources, we can ascertain the general time period in which the books of the Old Greek were translated. All of them were apparently finished before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore we know that the Old Greek represents a much older snapshot of the Hebrew text than does the Masoretic text. So textual differences in the Old Greek are quite important for the textual criticism of the Hebrew scriptures.

The implications for Hebrew textual criticism are interesting, because it could be that the Masoretic text of 1 Samuel 16-18 is longer than the Hebrew vorlage from which the Old Greek was translated. If that were the case, it would stand to reason that the Masoretic text represents some editorial addition to the David and Goliath story, or perhaps a conflation of two (or more) different versions of the pericope, only one of which is represented in the Old Greek. So a solution to this problem must be found if the original text of the story is sought.

Another important aspect of this problem is that the dramatic differences between the Old Greek and Masoretic text are localized in only three chapters of the book of 1 Samuel. In other books of the Old Greek, there are significant divergences from extant Hebrew copies. However, these tend to be pervasive throughout an entire book (e.g. Jeremiah) rather than localized in a single pericope. So it is not clear why 1 Samuel has such a stark, sudden variance while the rest of the book follows the Hebrew closely enough.

So the issue of the differences between 1 Samuel 16-18 is both multifaceted and significant is several regards. The purpose of this inquiry is to pursue the answer to the following question: Why is the Old Greek of 1 Samuel 16-18 45% shorter than the Masoretic text? A several-step process will be employed to find the answer to that question.