Dumb question time: What original bible texts do we really have?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

6. simple answer? None.

More detailed answer?
There are no original texts, in fact, given the Councils of Trent and Nicea (and the radical surgery they performed on texts) it is impossible to have One Original Text.

Most of the stories in Ye Olde Testament were repeats of even older societies and tribes. They were eventually translated in a written form, often, several competing forms, and took on their own lives.

The first problem the honest translator faced was that ancient alphabets contained letters that were written, or graphed, in similar ways, especially when dealing with paleo-Hebrew or Aramaic characters. Unfortunately, they can have very different meanings. For example, the prepositions kaf (“like”) and bet (“in”) are interchanged in the Masoretic and Dead Sea Scroll versions of Isaiah.

Another serious problem was the lack of punctuation in Aramaic. Take the words, “I copulate with women hating cats at night.” Simply placing periods or commas in different places radically changes the meaning. Did I mean to write that I am screwing cats, women, or that I dislike excess felines after the sun sets? Or worse, is this group of words supposed to go with other words in front and behind this grouping and not with each other? Did they alternate right to left and left to right, as the Egyptian hieroglyphs sometimes do?

Translation between any languages is no easy business, especially a dead or dying language. Personal bias and misunderstanding play a huge role in the final product. To make matters worse, there were no copy machines, typewriters, or computers in these early days. Dictionaries were unheard of and dialects varied almost as much as languages themselves. Everything had to be hand copied, causing even greater errors. We won’t even get into the different rules of grammar that existed in different languages.

A more serious problem is that not all languages contain identical words. Some words simply do not exist in other languages. This was particularly true when moving from Hebrew to Aramaic, and then to Attic Greek and Latin.

Aramaic’s own rudimentary beginnings created other problems. It consisted of 22 consonants, and contained no vowels. In Aramaic, Dick Cheney’s famous suggestion that an opposing Senator beget himself, would read “gfkrslf.” It is easy to see how differences and errors arose when translating anything from Aramaic to more modern languages.

The Aramaic Targums were pieced together, revised and edited from around 900 BCE.
Scholars today admit that these contained major errors.

The Septuagint consists of several efforts to translate the Aramaic text into old Greek, dating back to about 300 BCE. In 130 BCE, the Aquila version was an effort to translate the Jewish Torah, what we know as the Old Testament, from Hebrew into Greek. Theodotion’s Greek version came some 300 years later. Although much effort was made to be more accurate than the prior translations, problems cropped up and transliteration was required because of so many missing or nonexistent words.

Still another Greek translation by Symmachus relied on various older works. Although not many Greeks seem to have read his version, Saint Jerome later relied on it for his famous Vulgate bible. (The Vulgate, with all its widely divergent versions and serious flaws, would later become the gold standard of bible translations until the 1500s.)

Because the many different versions were sowing confusion and causing serious dispute among members and leaders of the christian cult, Origen of Alexandria tried to fix the problem with his Hexapla. He created a novel approach by placing the Hebrew and Greek texts, and the Septuagint, Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion versions in parallel columns. Missing texts, interpretation issues and changed meanings became obvious. Origen also created marks to highlight words that existed in the Greek but not in the Hebrew and vice versa. With the help of this Religious Rosetta stone, translations improved somewhat.

The Coptic version of the bible was translated from both Old Latin and Old Greek into the Coptic language. By this time, many parts of their bible were at least 3 languages away from the original Aramaic text.

The Armenian version (400 CE) was translated only partly from Syriac, (a counterpart in time to Aramaic). It also required the invention of a whole new alphabet. Missing words were still a problem. Some decades later, the Georgians came out with their version, based partly on the Armenian and even older Greek versions.

In the early and mid 400s, the Gothic and Old Latin versions came to be before we finally get to the famous Vulgate text created by Saint Jerome. Despite his hard labors, his work solved nothing. Old Latin and Vulgate texts were soon mixed, matched and often contradicted one another. Because more than 8,000 versions of the Vulgate and Old Latin eventually came into existence and have lasted through the ages, their differences, writing and translation errors are easy to spot. Still, because of his faith, reputation, and probably more than just a bit of successful self-promotion, various parts of Jerome’s Vulgate had an impact for over a thousand years. Unfortunately, its existing errors were compounded over time with even more changes as many unnamed scholars did their own revising. Some of these changes were based on scholarship; many others were based on politics. Think back to Greed and Fear.

So, you see, there is no easy answer, except, perhaps, the original None.