JEELEN, the evidence you present doesn't support your thesis at all. Remember that your claim was that later Christians substantially altered the text of the gospels in order to support later doctrinal developments. So citing scribal errors in transmission doesn't support that claim. Your comments about translations aren't very relevant either. The gospels were originally written not in Aramaic but in Greek. They were of course later translated into Latin and other languages, but that's no problem, because we have them in the original languages. If we
only had (say) the Vulgate then that would be a problem. But we don't. So why bring it up?
Of course the modern, critical text of the gospels has been established by comparing different manuscripts, rather than simply taking one particular manuscript tradition as definitive. But this is how the texts of all pre-printing writings are established. There's nothing special about the New Testament from that point of view, except of course that there's an unusually large number of manuscripts from an unusually early period, making it even better attested than usual. And of course there are minor variations between the various manuscripts. That's perfectly normal. But these variations are for the most part very minor. They are not the "interpolations" that you refer to, with the exception of the 1 John passage.
So of course we don't have the original "texts" in the sense of the actual autographs that Matthew and co literally wrote. But that's true not simply of virtually all ancient and medieval texts, but of most modern ones too. We
do have the original "texts" in the sense of the words that Matthew and co wrote, in the same way that my copy of
A history of western philosophy contains what Bertrand Russell wrote. The various small scribal errors that occur during the transmission of texts are, for the most part, negated by the fact that (just to emphasise this point again)
we are not reliant upon a single manuscript tradition. So an error in one MS tradition can be compared against other MS traditions. This is why we are not solely reliant upon very ancient MSS. For example, say you've got a MS from the twelfth century. That might not seem very reliable for establishing the text of something that was written a thousand years earlier. But perhaps you've also got another MS from the twelfth century, from a completely different place. The two MSS are variant, which indicates that one was not simply copied from the other - they are independent witnesses. Now you're in business, because even though those two MSS are not ancient, they are each the product of a different tradition going back to antiquity. You can compare them, and where they agree you know you can be reasonably certain that that is the correct text, and where they disagree you can consider which, if either, is likely to be the correct text, and which one is divergent. If you've got still more MSS then you're doing even better. The existence of different MS traditions is how scholars can be confident about the texts of all ancient writings, the vast majority of which are known from medieval MSS, not ancient ones. But you don't hear people going on about how the text of Cicero, or Plato, or Aristotle, or any other ancient author, is full of "interpolations" and "corruptions"; it seems there's something special about the New Testament, for some reason. But in fact there are far more MSS for the New Testament than there are for other texts - thousands of them, in fact. Have a look
here. That list is far, far longer than a comparable list of any other ancient text would be. And that's
just the MSS that are available to view online!
The existence of so many manuscripts is what allows scholars to be so confident that we have the correct text as it was originally circulated. So the fact that we have only two texts - the codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus - from the fourth century is not to the point. The point is that we have
hundreds of manuscripts from the next couple of centuries, and
thousands of them from the Middle Ages. These are
independent witnesses to the text. That means that they don't have to be incredibly early to be reliable, because you can establish the text by comparing them all with each other.
Just read a scholarly edition of any ancient text and you can see how scholars establish these things, and with what degree of reliability. Instead of making vague assertions based upon how you think ancient scribes might have behaved, get hold of a critical edition of the New Testament and
look at the actual evidence. That is what experts do, and they do not agree with you about the reliability of the text.
These vague claims that the text "must" be corrupted, and that this "must" be common knowledge among experts, without any
evidence or examples, reminds me of arguments like that discussed on the previous page which purport to show that evolution "cannot" be true, irrespective of how much evidence scientists produce in favour of it. I suppose if people have made up their minds, no amount of evidence to the contrary will convince them.
The fact that the different gospels contain different material, such as the saying about Peter which is present in Matthew but not the others, is
completely irrelevant to questions about the transmission of the text. The obvious way to explain the presence of certain material in Matthew but not the others is that Matthew had access to material that the others didn't, or that he simply made it up. If you think the former, that might lead you to conclude that Matthew is
more reliable, as a source for Jesus, than the others. If you think the latter, that you might lead you to conclude that he is
less reliable. But again, this has no bearing whatsoever on the question how reliably his text was transmitted by later copyists. The same is true of the fact that the first disciples were illiterate peasants and so on. That may be relevant to the question whether the material that the gospels contain provides reliable information about Jesus. But that is
completely distinct from the question whether that material has been copied accurately. You seem to run these two utterly distinct issues together. But surely it is obvious that they are different. We can doubt whether J.K. Rowling accurately reports real history, but we can still be confident that the text of
Harry Potter is as she wrote it.
Similarly, things like the different genealogies and birth narratives in Matthew and Luke are completely irrelevant. All that shows is that Matthew and Luke didn't agree with each other. Indeed, this is evidence
against your claim. If later Christians were busy rewriting the gospel texts to support their own views, don't you think they'd have rewritten them to make them agree with each other as well? The fact that the gospel texts were preserved even with all their contradictions intact indicates that Christians did not, as a rule, tamper with the text.
Incidentally, I don't think there was "heated debate" about the text of the canon in the early church. In fact there was surprisingly little debate at all. There was certainly disagreement, until the end of the fourth century, but this was mostly (a) very unheated, and (b) concerning peripheral texts such as 1 Clement, Hebrews, and Revelation. In the case of the gospels, the vast majority of Christians used either the four that are now canonical, or the
Diatessaron, which was an amalgamation of those four. The only people who differed about this were the Marcionites, who used only Luke, and various gnostic groups who used many more. The gnostic gospels are of course much later in date than the canonical ones and are of no value as sources for the historical Jesus.
I'd also point out that manuscripts of the New Testament itself are not the only source for our knowledge of the text. Early Christian theologians quote these texts constantly, to such a degree that if we didn't have the text, we could probably reconstruct it pretty reliably just from quotations. They tend to quote from memory and therefore somewhat loosely, so we probably couldn't establish the exact text. But they tend not to misquote in a way that is designed to support later doctrinal developments.
So in conclusion, no, it is not "common knowledge" among experts that these texts have been corrupted. If it were, you'd be able to cite some of these experts and theologians who think this. Experts do not base such strong claims upon "evidence" as shaky as the assumption that ancient copyists weren't very good. Experts rely upon
actual evidence, namely variant readings that you can actually point to and know exist. Anything else is pure speculation.
