Thos Sumner's Speech of 27 November 2012

RELIABLE INFORMATION SOURCES  III
                   Thos Sumner  November 27, 2012

In this discussion of the problems for reliable information sources
introduced by translation, transcription and selection we will use
the Judaeo-Christian Bible as our exemplar. It serves well for this
purpose because it has a long history in all three areas. It is also,
of course, a document of extraordinary significance since a 
substantial part of our population derives their ethics directly
from it and routinely seeks its counsel to guide their actions.

Taking the selection issue first,we see that it is billed as a
search for truth and authenticity but may be equally well viewed
as a form of censorship to impose the views of the party which
controls the selection.

When we view the selection process we come immediately to the fourth
century when the canonical selection for the New Testament books by
the Catholic Church was effected. The full formal definition
was, surprisingly, not until the sixteenth century Council of Trent
when it was called for as a response to the rise of Protestantism.
Protestant selection was made in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.

For centuries efforts were extended to suppress the unselected
Christian writings; so very little of what was apparently a very rich
literature survives. The suppression of this literature is only
a fraction of the effort to suppress dissent from the official view
-- extending to the systematic murder of detected dissenters,
a practice which in the present day religious sphere is largely
confined to Islam.

It is, perhaps, significant that such tactics are common to the
periods in which the organized religion and the state are conjoined
or such a juncture is pursued. When it reaches the point that,
not only cowed themselves, parents indoctrinate their children
for their own protection and it becomes imbedded in the culture for
succeeding generations. In such an environment any documents which
might be regarded as "incriminating" are subject to deliberate destruction.
This comes on top of the losses due to accident , fire, theft and
physical deterioration. 

Presenting the indoctrination as a religion provides it with authority
or at least an excuse for absence of justification and arbitrariness
of application. As an example, think of the convenient "revelations" to
Mohammed of the special privileges to be enjoyed by the "Prophet" and
the swift punishment which followed any challenge to his authority.

Dogmatic religion is not really about the doctrines; it's about power.
Consider Galileo Galilei. His "crime" was to challenge the Catholic
Church's power to declare "truth" without regard to evidence. The
differences between the official teaching and the Copernican theory had,
in themselves, no practical consequences at the time. The issue
was joined solely to preserve the totalitarian rule of the church. 

Two recent books have particular relevance to the translation and
transcription problems:

  "And God Said" by Joel M. Hoffman dealing with the Old testament

and

   "Misquoting Jesus" by Bart D. Ehrman dealing with the New testament

and I will use these as sources without explicit citations. Both books
are recommended for further insights.

The Bible presents particular difficulties for new translations
because many people have become emotionally attached to the old
translations even when they are demonstrably faulty. In particular
the translation commissioned by the English King James (which will be
referred to hereafter simply as "the King James") enjoys this status.
Those who have expended great effort to memorize portions of it or use
it as a basis to support their beliefs are naturally hostile to changes.

None the less, there are many defects in the King James some of which
are derived from the source materials on which it is based. Many more
and older manuscripts have become available since it was produced.
In general, older manuscripts are given more weight because they
have had less time to accumulate errors either deliberate or accidental.

Only about a century after the King James was published John Mill
published (1707) a critical edition of the Greek based on anaysis
of some 100 then extant Greek texts (an order of magnitude greater
than the sources used for the King James) pointing out some 30,000
variant readings in th New Testament -- more than the number of words
in the text.

Consider that more than two centuries had elapsed between the deaths 
of the last eyewitnesses of the events described in the Gospels and 
Acts and the time of deciding what the Christian scriptures should
include. First of all the generational turnover was much faster
than anything in recent experience. With a life expectancy under
forty years and with reproduction beginning in the early to middle 
teens the turnover was something like every twenty years. Today
it is commonplace to have teachers in their sixties or seventies
teach students in their teens and twenties giving a turnover more
like fifty years.

That alone makes the gap more like five hundred of our years. Add
to this the technology gap for travel and communication. It was on the order
of twenty miles a day on foot or animal transport compared to several
hundred on a nineteenth century train or the several thousand miles
by air today.Transmission of messages was only by courier and was limited
to the elite by expense and the need for scribes to read or write the messages.
Remember that the populace, even the upper class, was largely illiterate.
Reading and writing were viewed as a craft, not a standard part of
upbringing.

The only fast communication technology was the heliograph but it was still
in a very primitive state and limited to military  or naval signaling.

Most of the transmission of information was oral which means that the
mutation rate was pretty high. Think of the "telephone" oral relay game.
I can remember being introduced to the game in the Boy Scouts as a
cautionary exercise. The message started out as "The man left home
with a hat and scarf." and ended up as "The man had a first aid kit
in his car."

No printing technology existed beyond hand scribing each copy and this
largely on an informal basis for the Christian literature. Much of the
copying was done by non-professionals of limited literacy and in
catch-as-catch-can circumstances. It was centuries before the rise
of professional copyist scribes became general.

Already in the second century there were many controversies over both
the selction and the contents of the writings in circulation.
Many copyists freely edited their materials to make them reflect
and support the doctrines they themselves held.  Marcion (later
declared a Heretic --i. e. The loser in an ecclesiastical controversy)
proposed a Canon of eleven books including only one gospel.
Irenaeus countered proposing four gospels (the four eventually
selected) but the controversy continued

Furthermore, new methods and understandings of the translation
process have come into use in the last century and a half. And
archaeology has provided insights into the culture and circumstances
of Biblical times which had previously been completely unavailable.

Sometimes the actual meaning of a word in old manuscripts is simply
not known.But if such a word appears in more than one context it
may be possible to infer its meaning. An example is the word in the
tenth Commandment translated as "covet" in the King James  but since
the contexts where the word appears deal in acts it probably
refers to the unlawful use of another's property called "conversion"
in modern times.

There is sometimes a temptation to try to arrive at a meaning by
deconstructing a word but this is fallacious as we can see in English
where we "drive on a parkway" but "park on a driveway". Or think
of trying to understand "hostile" from "host". 

Again in the commandments, the word "kill" is improperly used as
a translation when the Hebrew means "kill unlawfully or negligently"
as in murder or manslaughter. This is a case where no single English
word with the exact meaning exists. That killing a person is not
blanketly forbidden is shown by the other contexts which expressly
command killings (such as of an idolator.) No freedom of religion
there!

Probably the most doctrinally consequential translation error
in the KIng James was not made by the English but by the translators
who produced the Greek text from which the English worked. This
was the mis-translation of the prophecy in Isaiah replacing "young
woman" (Hebrew "alma") with "virgin" (Greek "parthenos"). When
we consider the culture of the times when virgin birth myths were
taken as signs of greatness and ascribed to such figures as Plato,
Alexander the Great and Caesar Augustus it is not improbable that
this substitution was deliberate. It is believed that the authors
of the Matthew and Luke gospels worked from the Greek translation
of the Old Testament. The Mark gospel, which was earlier, does not
include this.

The "thou shalt not" occurrences are really not negative statements
about the future but a an expression of what in English is the
imperative mode. It is reminiscent of the Spanish use of the future
subjunctive in writing laws (as far as I know, this is its only use.)

Structural differences between languages as well as the different
vocabularies involved can lead to misinterpretations.

Word order is very significant in English as in other languages.

   "John is hard working." describes John's character, while

   "John is working hard." describes his state of activity.

but both make perfect sense so getting this word order wrong
is harder to detect than cases of errors producing nonsense.
Different languages have different rules on word order,
e.g. Spanish adjectives prefer to follow their nouns whereas
in English they normally precede but especially in poetic usage
they may follow.

Both the source and target languages vary with time so a knowledge
of contemporary usage may be misleading in translating a medieval manuscript.
And we all have some familiarity with the problem in English. It is only
two centuries since Jane Austen penned her novels but they already
need editor's notes or interpretation to make sense of some passages.

The King James is twice as old and just the disappearance of the distinction
between the familiar and formal second person pronouns and the the consequent 
abandonment of the familiar verb forms alone is enough to give it
an archaic feel. Encountering "thou hast" instead of "you have" now feels
formal to us while it is actually the familiar form of address.

The really problematical passages are not those where something has fallen
into disuse but where the meaning has actually changed: "prevent" which now
means "cause not to happen" meant then "precede" or "come before"
which is closer to its Latin roots.

Going back another two centuries or so we find the work of Chaucer still
further removed and, while not a foreign language, it is quite strange
to a modern (21st century) reader.

Some examples of recent changes in American English:

Loss of precision:

      momently = in a moment

replaced by 

      momentarily = for a moment

making "He will come momentarily." ambiguous.

Similarly:

      healthful = conducive to good health

   replaced by

      healthy = possessing good health

so "Eat healthy spinach." could be a warning against cooked
spinach since the latter is surely dead, therefore not healthy.

So divergence continues.

Metaphors present a distinctive problem; they are largely conventional
and metaphorical references to something which is not (or no longer is)
a part of our experience may be meaningless now. In addition
if the cultural role of the reference is not understood we
cannot ascribe the right characteristics to the reference.
Does saying something is "a rock" when it is not actually a stone
mean that it is inert or resistant to change or merely that it is heavy?