There's a lot of fuss in McGowan's book (The Divine Spiration of Scripture) about the inspiration of the Bible about "hypothetical" lost autographa, the original documents of Scripture. He seems to think of the claim to inerrancy applying only to them and this being a rather bothersome blind alley of pointless speculation.
I was just wondering if a claim that the Scriptures are inerrant "as originally given" would strictly necessarily require inerrant autographa? For example, in the case of a spoken prophetic oracle, would an error in recording the message in writing be excluded by the claim that the Scriptures as originally given are inerrent? If Paul dictated his letters, is it Paul's dictation or the amanuesnsis' scribing that is without error?
I guess so, actually, as terms like Scripture and Bible require a written document. Worth being accurate about that. You could still say the Scriptures were not originally given in written form but I reckon that's stretching it a bit.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
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7 comments:
I am liking McGowan more and more!! I must buy the book ;-)
I think he's right: the original autographs thing is a weak point for the Chicago statement, for sure.
Marc, what do you want to do with the Hebrew scriptures and the problem of vocalisation? If you think that Scripture = written, then where does a partial text that only contains consonants which are meaningless until spoken aloud with interpolated vowels come in? And in particular what do you do with those words/phrases/sentences which are easily susceptible to more than one vocalisation and thus more than one meaning? It seems to me that the inspired words consisted for a long time of more than just the letters on the text but also on the oral tradition that went alongside the written letters to give them their sense.
On your point Ros - is there a sense in which this is sort of true for the greek NT texts too though. What Paul means by a particular word, for example, is only rightly understood within his own historical (add other adjectives here too) context. This is not the same, I admit, as the MT needing the oral tradition to be even readable, but there is at least some sort of connection here maybe?
I think Marc's point was that the word scripture requires a text (such that the idea of 'originally given' can't be understood divorced of an actual physical text), but not that the meaning of that text can be determined totally divorced from the context(s) in which that text was formed.
There is a difference between saying 'originally given' can be understood a-textually, and saying it must mean 'text-in-context' isn't there?
I'm not sure that 'solves' the issue of what 'as originally given' actually means for the Hebrew though.
In answering the question we've reall got to think in terms of what the statement is intending us to conclude.
1. Something about God -His truthfulness
2. Something about the reality as we see it today -of course there are copying errors.
3. Something about what is achievable -to what extent you can have confidence that a level of accuracy is possible in our reading of scripture.
That requires some assumption with Pete's view that we can find out how Paul used words and that for a consonantal language that there are rules about how you determine which word is meant by a certain set of consonants based on things like context, syntax...that are presumably not too different from where you have exactly the same vowells and consonants and it can mean different things.
You'll realise that this is different from saying that the imspored word includes an oral tradition alongside the written letters.
Is it as simple as that Dave? I'm not sure. The consonantal text would be totally unintelligible without the vowel system at points. And there are plenty of places I think where there really are several options for what it could be, and we only have the 'tradition' as enshrined in the MT to go on (and we can look at what the LXX did etc.).
I'd be wary of the idea of it going alongside the inspired text. I think I'd rather say that the inspired text is always a text-in-context, and that the oral tradition we find in the MT is our best way of accessing some of that context stuff.
The difficulty still is, however, to what extent is it actually a complete text without the vowel system?
Pete,
Sure -I think that's more or less what I was trying to say but perhaps not very well.
The point is that we aren't dealing with a written tradition and an oral tradition that says something different. We are dealing with a written tradition and orally transmitted rules for how to read it. Those rules apply to sacred and non sacred text. They are not specially developed rules for handling divine revelation.
Thanks for your comments.
I think you make a good point, Ros, that strictly speaking the words of God as originally given in the case of the Hebrew portions of Scripture are not identical with the autographs since the originally given words contained vowels whereas the originally written texts did not.
That does not, of course, exclude the autographs from being inerrant if they accurately recorded the consonants given.
Dave, deciding or knowing the vowels is not just a matter of following rules though, is it?
The oral tradition is a guide to interpreting the written texts. Presumably we say that the oral tradition when first given was inerrant since it simply was the words of God, the consonants of which were then written down.
We could allow errors in the transmission of the oral tradition just as we would in the transmission of the written text without questioning the inerrancy of the words of God as originally given.
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