Blog (1) Andy Mehlhorn

    This chapter of textbook was very interesting to me because although I have been raised in Catholic teachings and in Catholic schools all of my life, I had never heard nor considered that the Bible's text could be altered so much from the original writings. The part of the text that I found to be the most interesting was the style of writing known as scriptua continuo, which is a style that leaves out “punctuation, capitalization of letters, or paragraph and sentence division.” [1] With this style being implemented while trying to transcribe the oral messages of the disciples or Jesus, I can see how easily confusion would arise in translating the different gospels. This was probably a factor that led to their being different translations of the same gospel writing, but with different wording. Even attempting to read the passages could prove to problematic for people of that era or later eras since their are no breaks in sentence structure or punctuation. I could see why scribes would use this technique since it is similar to some of the shorthanded writing styles of the modern era. However, with these passages only being written on papyrus or wax tablets, it was probably even more difficult to understand when scholars were trying to understand the writings. 
     The fact that the scribes took their own personal beliefs and social concerns into account when transcribing the writings of the gospels also presents problems for understanding the true words of the writing. Because scribes often changed the writings to adhere better to what they thought, I wonder if there were much repercussion if a scribe was caught changing the writings, but the text does not address it. When reading the works and keeping in mind that the writing may have been altered because of a scribe's personal beliefs, you also have to keep in mind the age, quality, geographical spread, etc of the witnesses to this work.  When trying to ascertain if a work is altered or completely true it becomes difficult considering that there are so many variables to consider, it's a wonder that works we understand today correlate to one another at all.

[1] B. D. Ehrman. The New Testament (4; New York; Oxford; 2008), 492.

Bibliography

Ehrman, Bart D. The New Testament. Fourth edition. New York: 2008, p 487-499