"CAREFULLY REVISED AND CORRECTED by an ass"

One of the first criticisms leveled at old documents, especially ones held as authoritative, is that portions were added later, and are therefore not (as) reliable (eg, Mark 16:9-20).

This is fair if a few things are true:

1. There’s primary evidence (eg marginalia) that someone added it later; if we know who and when, we can often speculate why.

2. Those who had first-hand knowledge of the text and events were gone by the time the texts were altered. (Plutarch and those he wrote about and everyone that knew them are long gone.)

3. Those remaining wouldn't question the addition. (Despite the enormous importance of Plutarch to our understanding of prominent Romans, most high school and even college students today don’t know who Plutarch was, or Dryden for that matter. You might tell them them that 2nd century Romans wore knit caps and drank craft brews at gladiator games, and they wouldn’t bat an eye.)

4. Circumstantial evidence. Eg, certain groups or people were in the historical vicinity.

(It’s more complicated than that. I’m not a scholar. These are the ones that interest me. BTW, Dryden was a prominent poet and critic who bridged English literary traditions between Milton and Pope. Whether or not he was a good translator, I don’t know. I’ve read Pope’s translations of Homer, and they are more Pope than Homer, as his contemporaries said, but I think they’re more interesting for that. Just me.)

But there's good reason not to discount later additions:

1. Even with a decent collection of contemporaneous texts, we don't know if the spurious ones are actually the exceptions.  

2. Unlike us moderns, ancient peoples transmitted traditions orally, and much of what was eventually written down had already existed for generations. (See my post here, My mother picked the very best one (why ancient knowledge may be just what you think it is.) >

"That was added later" may actually be good evidence that the substance of the text had been living in oral tradition for generations. If so, the addition represents consensus of the community that valued and copied the stories.

Changing a Gospel (for example adding to Mark 16) would be like adding an 11th amendment to the Bill of Rights and hoping no one would notice.

As Bishop Fulton Sheen reminded me recently (via a radio rebroadcast - in fact, that's what got me thinking about this in the first place): “The Gospels did not start the Church; the Church started the Gospels. The Church did not come out of the Gospels; the Gospels came out of the Church.” Source >

(As delighted as I’d be to debate this with my Baptists brothers and sisters, I think we all agree on the events and their order, but we appeal to a quality of biblical absoluteness and independence that the Bible doesn’t even claim for itself. Which simply means that a missing biblical proof text isn’t proof that an idea isn’t doctrinally sound. You won’t find the word “Trinity” in the Bible, or a prayer of salvation.)

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Caveat (anticipating objections):

There's no reason why oral traditions can't be manipulated too, but I suspect it’s nearly impossible to tell that story without surviving records.

There is a lot of work that can be done with modern languages to illuminate the past - we can, for example, identify word stems in proto-Indo European that remain to this day in English, German, Greek, Hindi, Russian and hundreds more, all descended from our linguistic ancestors who lived in a region that stretched across what is now Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan.

I recall from my Linguistics days that there are performers in Turkey who can, like the ancient Greek rhapsodes, recite an entire epic over the course of hours or days, or condense it into a short story, a la Reader’s Digest. Some believe Homer was one of these performers and not the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were doubtless orally transmitted long before they were written down.

More next time. Already written, but I shifted gears, and I’ve already overstayed my welcome.

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[2016.08.03]