#textual criticism

[wisdomfish]

"Archeology, textual criticism, linguistic studies, and scientific dating — have proven to be the Bible’s greatest allies, rather than its enemies."

Justin Huffman

[matikura]

trajectory of recovery in fictional abuse narrative

tw: mention of violence against children in a [unrealistic] fictional setting

Fanon? Partially canon reframing Dick' childhood with Bruce as extremely abusive and suffering coercive control, unnerves and discomforts me

Because the unspoken next step of a story like that is [ narrative enforced ] healing.

It takes away the obvious and well earned blame from the aggressor in the story, and shoulders the weight and responsibility of "Fixing the Damage" upon the blameless victim of mistreatment

It's a sick and twisted inversion of the childhood power fantasy genre, where instead of having agency by getting to explore the world and make a difference,

First the preteen protagonist is sacrificed on the alter, which functionally turns their entire identity in to " voiceless and perfect " victim with no fault or blame

then subsequently the narrative power of being the protagonist is thrust back in to their control, yet still they are essentially being forced on to a one track narrative,

Where the only natural course of action is to atone for being punished

which happened to them, at no fault of their own to begin with, if I may repeat myself

Yeah so the call to action becomes hollow as fuck, as the only personality trait left inside the person who's the focus of the story is " I am perfect and also disgusting, repulsive from being abused " by a shapeless formless convenient boogyman

Might as well be a story about recovering from a ghost rape, for all the sense it makes

I mean that [ ghost rape ] is probably a cross between sexual repression and religiously motivated censorship dodging, so no shade on actual ghost rape stories.

Derogatory comparison made for the sake of pointing out how removing all possible avenues of self doubt in the vessel of the abused, is about as reasonable a premise as a dream doing real physical damage to a person's body.

[lenbryant]

Eyewitnesses? Yeah, right.

[aelstudies]

Tuesday September 26th

More library photos, as that is where I’m studying this afternoon. I still can’t get over how pretty my college library is. There are several other libraries on campus, but I haven’t yet explored any other than my own because this one is so lovely.

Had New Testament class this morning. I spent almost an hour afterwards talking with the professor about New Testament textual criticism. It was really fun.

I have class again this evening, so I will stay around the college. There’s not really much point in going home; especially since I get more done and less distracted when I’m on campus.

[maps-and-elvis-and-zelda-n-shit]

Fragment of a 1,750-year-old New Testament translation discovered

About 1,300 years ago a scribe in Palestine took a book of the Gospels inscribed with a Syriac text and erased it. Parchment was scarce in t

New gospel of Matthew just dropped before winds of winter

[books-typo-and-so-on]

Textual criticism is very interesting, but it sure is a lot of work! (and also knowledge...)

On Friday, we had a free day so I went to the library. If it weren't for the very high temperature combined with lack or a very low-level air conditioning, I think I would've transcribed the whole text that day. As it was, I've managed to do around 80% during five hours there, and then decided I'm done for the day. I finished the rest yesterday evening, and today I'm once again going through everything to make sure I don't leave any mistakes. (I've already found too many for my liking). There are a couple of questions to my professor to be asked tomorrow and then I think I can send the file to my examinator.

[eelhound]

"As one playful formulation has it, rather than being straightforwardly 'about' something in particular, every text is inevitably surrounded by a 'vibrating aboutness cluster'. The context, content and range of that cluster must be accounted for as part of an analysis.

Some writers in some situations may strain against rhetorical shenanigans, for example striving for the specificity of logical notation: the cluster of reasonable meanings of such texts may well thus be less diffuse than for those which, say, revel in pun and performance.

But a text with one 'true' meaning is a chimera. Analysis is not closure, but an attempt to discern reasonable meaning(s) close to the core of that cluster, and to contest those that range too far from it."

- China Miéville, from A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, 2022.

[eli-kittim]

Was the Septuagint Destroyed When the Library of Alexandria Was Burnt Down in 48 BC?

By Author Eli Kittim 🎓

The Argument

Some people (typically Jewish apologists) claim that the Septuagint doesn’t exist because it was destroyed when the Library of Alexandria was burnt down in 48 BC.

This conclusion, however, is both textually misleading & historically erroneous.

First

The Alexandrian Library and its collection were not entirely destroyed. We have evidence that there was only partial damage and that many of its works survived. According to Wiki:

The Library, or part of its collection, was

accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during

his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how

much was actually destroyed and it seems

to have either survived or been rebuilt

shortly thereafter; the geographer Strabo

mentions having visited the Mouseion in

around 20 BC and the prodigious scholarly

output of Didymus Chalcenterus in

Alexandria from this period indicates that

he had access to at least some of the

Library's resources.

Second

The Septuagint had already been written and disseminated among the diaspora since the 3rd century BC, and so many of its extant copies were not housed in the Library of Alexandria per se.

Third

Textual Criticism confirms that the New Testament authors used the Septuagint predominantly and quoted extensively from it. If the Septuagint didn’t exist, where did the New Testament authors copy from? And how do you explain the fact that the New Testament and the Septuagint often have identical wording in their agreements?

Fourth

The Dead Sea Scrolls also demonstrate that the Septuagint was far more accurate than the 10th-century-AD Masoretic text. See, for example, the textual controversy surrounding Deuteronomy 32:8. Both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint have “sons of God.” The Masoretic text is demonstrably inaccurate because it has “sons of Israel,” a later redaction. Israel didn’t even exist at that time!

Fifth

Emanuel Tov, a leading authority on the Septuagint who has explained the various textual families (or text-types) of the Old Testament, never once mentioned that we lost the Septuagint, or that it was destroyed, or that it was no longer in circulation. On the contrary, he claims that it continued to be in use during the Christian period and that it is much more older than the 10th-century-AD Masoretic text, which the Jews call the “Hebrew Bible.”

Sixth

If the Septuagint was completely destroyed, as some have erroneously suggested, from where were the later revisionists and translators copying from? We have historical evidence that they were, in fact, copying from the Septuagint itself. Wiki writes:

Theodotion … was a Hellenistic Jewish

scholar, … who in c. 150 CE translated the

Hebrew Bible into Greek. … Whether he was

revising the Septuagint, or was working

from Hebrew manuscripts that represented

a parallel tradition that has not survived, is

debated.

So there’s evidence to suggest that the Theodotion version is a possible *revision* of the Septuagint. This demonstrates that the Septuagint existed in the second century AD! Otherwise, where was Theodotion copying from if the Septuagint didn’t exist?

Seventh

The great work of Origen, Hexapla, compiled sometime before 240 AD, is further proof that the Septuagint was still in use in the 3rd century AD! Wikipedia notes the following:

Hexapla … is the term for a critical edition

of the Hebrew Bible in six versions, four of

them translated into Greek, preserved only

in fragments. It was an immense and

complex word-for-word comparison of the

original Hebrew Scriptures with the Greek

Septuagint translation and with other Greek

translations.

Encyclopedia Britannica adds:

In his Hexapla (“Sixfold”), he [Origen]

presented in parallel vertical columns the

Hebrew text, the same in Greek letters, and

the versions of Aquila, Symmachus, the

Septuagint, and Theodotion, in that order.

Eighth

Besides Origen’s Hexapla, we also have extant copies of the Septuagint. According to wiki:

Relatively-complete manuscripts of the

Septuagint postdate the Hexaplar

recension, and include the fourth-century-

CE Codex Vaticanus and the fifth-century

Codex Alexandrinus. These are the oldest-

surviving nearly-complete manuscripts of

the Old Testament in any language; the

oldest extant complete Hebrew texts date

to about 600 years later, from the first half

of the 10th century.

Ninth

There’s also historical and literary evidence that the Greek Septuagint was in wide use during the Christian period and beyond. Wiki says:

Greek scriptures were in wide use during

the Second Temple period, because few

people could read Hebrew at that time. The

text of the Greek Old Testament is quoted

more often than the original Hebrew Bible

text in the Greek New Testament

(particularly the Pauline epistles) by the

Apostolic Fathers, and later by the Greek

Church Fathers.

Tenth

Today, Biblical scholarship has a *critical edition* of the Septuagint. If it was destroyed in 48 BC, where did the critical edition come from? The Göttingen Septuaginta (editio maior) presents *a fully critical text* and should silence the skeptics and critics who try to mislead the public. They deliberately mislead the public by trying to discredit the far more reliable and much older Septuagint in order to get people to accept the much later Hebrew Masoretic text from the Middle Ages!