greetings and welcome to word magazine this is Jeff riddle I'm the pastor of Christ Reformed Baptist Church in Louisa
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Virginia and in this episode of word magazine I want to look at the topic of
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the 900,000 manuscripts of Mount AOS and the
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failure of the Reconstruction method so I was recently
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listening to a podcast that I follow that is about new books in the field of
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academic studies and in particular in the field of uh biblical studies and I
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was listening to some of the podcasts and the archives and I ran across an
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interview with a scholar uh about a book that she published a few years back uh
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this was a scholar that I wasn't familiar with it's a Jewish uh scholar her name is mala Z
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simovich or simovich sorry and at at any rate she was discussing her book which
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was relatively new at the time that podcast was recorded that's titled
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discovering second temple Judaism it subtitled the scriptures and stories
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that shaped early Judaism again that's Mala z
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simovich uh this was published by the a joint project of the University of
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Nebraska press and the Jewish publication Society like I said back in
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2018 so she's talking about various sources for the study of second temple
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Judaism H or helenistic Judaism I guess we could call it and as part of that
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discussion she made a passing reference to the large number of
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manuscripts that have been discovered that haven't yet been digitized and
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haven't yet been studied and she made particular reference to a place called
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Mount AOS which is in Greece and about the large number of manuscripts there
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that have never been collated never been digitized never been studied and so I
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wanted to read more about this and so I I got the book here through inter
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Library loan I didn't purchase it but I got it through inter Library loan through the the college where I teach
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and I was recently uh reading through some of it and I read uh the second
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chapter in it which discusses this issue which she mentioned in the podcast uh
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that chapter is titled manuscripts and monasteries and in that chapter she
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gives kind of a historical overview of some of the famous
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manuscript discoveries of the past in places like uh St Katherine's Monastery
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at Mount sa in Egypt where Tish andorf famously discovered
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some would say stole um the uh sinius
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manuscript uh she also talks about the large number of slavonic uh monasteries and libraries
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that there are across uh Russia and uh she talked about she has a section in
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there about the Vatican library and also about m AOS and then
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she has a section where she talks about uh the the number of um uh
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monasteries that haven't been uh thoroughly examined in Ethiopia this is on page 36 she says
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thousands of churches and hundreds of monasteries throughout Ethiopia house ancient manuscripts and
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she talks some about in particular about the book of First Enoch um and then she
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she has an interesting discussion about uh some relatively recent uh discoveries
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uh in the 21st century in Afghanistan of all places uh and she has a discussion there
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of a cache of Jewish documents that were basically the Holdings of a a Jewish
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Family in Afghanistan uh that family was the Abu Nasser bin Daniel uh family and only I
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guess uh in the early 2000s was this cache of manuscripts
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discovered that have some value for the study of uh early Judaism and also of
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the Old Testament um but she has a section within that chapter
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specifically about Mount AOS uh in Greece if you're not not familiar with
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Mount AOS uh it's located on a remote isolated peninsula in northeastern
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Greece and mount AOS could be called the center of monasticism in eastern
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Orthodoxy uh it is said that there have been monks who have lived uh in the area
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around Mount Mount AOS uh since the 4th century and maybe even as early as the
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3D Century there are today 20 uh Monastery complex es when you say
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there are 20 monasteries there you're not talking about 20 singular buildings some of these monastic
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complexes it is said are the size of small cities um and this is an isolated
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place it's physically isolated um it's also legally isolated
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Greek law contemporary modern Greek law uh forbids uh uh easy access to this
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location and in fact only men uh can enter into the the mount AOS uh
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monastic uh uh collection or man estic uh areas and so uh women are not allowed
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to enter uh several years ago I remember there was a a segment on the news
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program 60 minutes and one of the reporters Bob Simon uh did his segment
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on a visit to mount a Po and I remember watching it several years ago and really being intrigued by uh his visit there
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his interview interviews with the monks Etc and so I'll try to put a link if I
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can to that 60 Minutes interview you can just search for it 60 Minutes at Mount
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AOS uh and it will come up um so actually with with respect to
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mount AOS uh not too far from where I live about 45 minute drive away between
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the the the towns of Lynchburg Virginia and uh appam maox Virginia where Lee uh
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famously made his surrender uh to Grant uh there's a little uh Community sort of
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it's closer to Lynchberg uh and there's a historical marker there but there's an
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old um uh antibellum uh Plantation I think it was
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built about the year 1800 by a man who was a friend of Thomas
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Jefferson uh and that uh Plantation was called Mount AOS I think it's since long
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since burned down but there is still a historical marker in interestingly enough where as they seem to have done
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in the colonial and the early American days to have named a lot of places after
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places uh in the ancient world um so anyways
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uh back in uh back to simovich is uh
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book um it she has this section on Mount AOS and just let me let me read for you
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a little bit of what she says we're going to get to this intriguing comment she makes about
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900,000 manuscripts so this is on page 30 she starts off the discussion uh it's headed
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scriptures in the monastic libraries of Mount AOS she says other monasteries in
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the lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea also house ancient manuscripts one
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of the largest collections of Jewish texts can be found in a community of
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monasteries inhabiting the isolated Mount AOS Peninsula a 30 m long stretch
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of land in northern Greece populated such ancient times the peninsula is now
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home to some of the oldest Greek Orthodox monasteries
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worldwide uh she continues the largest and oldest of these is the great
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lavra uh Monastery founded by St aan
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athanasio Circa 920 to Circa 13 uh that was those are the dates for
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St AOS Athos AOS athanasios sorry for my pronunciation
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problems uh so it was built by him under his Direction in 963 of the Common Era or ad uh she
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continues over time other monasteries were founded on the Holy Mountain and
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thousands of manuscripts were collected and preserved in the monasteries
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libraries but because access to the peninsula was so restricted both by
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terrain and by policy it took until the end of the 19th century for most
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manuscripts to be cataloged the first catalog a Greek book entitled catalog of
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the Greek manuscripts on Mount AOS was published in the year 1895 and a second
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volume was published five years later so that would have been presumably uh in uh
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1900 even then she continues however there was no information about the manuscripts found in some of the mount
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AOS libraries such as those in the great lava Monastery later cataloges published
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in 1924 and 1925 fill in some of the gaps but contemporary Scholars do not
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view them as comprehensive because they exclude thousands of Library titles written in
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Russian Slavic Bulgarian and other languages and so let me pause here so
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she's saying uh there was an effort in the 19th century um beginning on into the early
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20th century to catalog some of the many manuscripts that are at Mount BOS and I'm I'm
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assuming from what she says that was primarily the Greek manuscripts but she says that uh
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cataloging was not comprehensive it didn't include include all the monasteries it also didn't include
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a lot of the uh books that were written in different languages whether that was
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Russian Slavic uh or Bulgarian or she says other
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languages and I might just add who knows if they were able to catalog all the Greek manuscripts you wonder how many
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manuscripts are found exactly in among those 20 uh
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monastic uh communities that exist at Mount AOS so at the very end of this
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discussion this little part of the chapter on uh Mount AOS uh she says this
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this is Page 34 she says the precious manuscripts of Mount AOS will soon be
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available online to all people male and female she just had a previous
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discussion as a female Jewish scholar about how she thought it was so unjust that women we're not allowed to go there
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uh she continues in 2014 the Secretary General of
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telecommunications and the helenic post office of Greece a man named menus
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descal dascal having a hard time with these names announced that efforts are
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underway to digitize all the manuscripts in the mount AOS
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libraries an initiative estimated to cost 8.5 million Eur
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and here's the last sentence that I found so intriguing and this is what she made a reference to in that
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podcast officials estimate that once completed more than
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900,000 manuscripts will be digitized as well as more than
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146,000 pieces of Art and those pieces of art can be very important those are
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some of those are probably icons paintings uh maybe statuary to some
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degree although I think that's less common among the Eastern Orthodox and it would be among the Roman Catholic uh
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monastic communities but those are very important because those sometimes become
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interesting sources for biblical studies I I was thinking about uh the the book
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by uh Cano Knust and and waserman on the woman taken an adultery passage because they
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have a section in that book where they talk about some of these fourth Century
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Ivory uh jewelry boxes that have drawings on the outside of them of uh
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the samarit Christ meeting the Samaritan woman at the well from John 4 and then
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Christ uh forgiving the woman taken in adultery in John 753 through 811 so it's
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not a textual but it's a it's a um a physical artifact artistic artifact that
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gives evidence of uh knowledge of the woman taken an adultry passage and
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places it also on an item that includes
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the a a visual reference to another passage in the Gospel of John showing
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that the account of the woman taken in adultery isn't some floating tradition but it's in the Gospel of John here's
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the woman uh at the well John 4 he's the the woman taken in adultery in John 8 so
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there are 146,000 uh pieces of art uh that they're
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saying that this project would hope to digitize now again she's writing this in
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2018 and she says this effort uh to do this digitization uh was approved in
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2014 and I'm not an expert in this but but I just I I went online and I did a
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little bit of looking around to see uh what is U the status of this
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digitization and I've heard here and there a few uh reports on this but uh I went and looked
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online let me share a couple of these things with you here is one page from
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this project that is uh the so-called
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repository uh this this digital repository you can see uh there's some
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kind of reference to the EU and to um this being a a project also the Greek
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government from 2014 to 20120 and I'm not sure if that means that this project
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was funded to through 2020 now she again she was writing in
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2018 but this tells you a little bit about the project um it says the the
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holy community of Mount AOS with commitment in respect to the millenary spiritual and cultural tradition of the
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athonite fathers has decided to undertake new forms of action with the
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view to preserve and disseminate its cultural heritage so they were saying they wanted to do this uh corresponding
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with uh the year 2000 so the second Millennium of uh at the second
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Millennium Mark of Christianity the main purpose of this effort is to explore
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exploit uh modern information and communication Technologies by
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digitalizing documenting and disseminating its cultural heritage so
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they that tell you a little bit about what they achieved um and it seems like
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they fell quite short of what sovich was talking about in 2018 but still um they
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did a lot they have an archive containing 200,000 documents um
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and there are approximately 3,300 manuscripts parchment and or paper there
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are also uh 1,512 uh if I can pronounce this
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correctly in Kabula and those are early printed books
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and then there are they have digitized some
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22,000 objects icons religious objects relics
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Etc so that's a little bit about this digitization um process and here's
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another page also from the same uh site the same project and you can look at the
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collections that they have and uh so here are various things that they have
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taken pictures of coins um paintings
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Ceramics um and one of the categories is manuscripts
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and let's just look at that for a second so there are manuscripts that you can look up of uh various uh written
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documents and there's a little description there at the top let's just read that it says the monasteries of
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Mount AOS possess and manage the largest collection of Greek manuscript it says
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codes I'm assuming they mean codices in the world approximately this says
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15,000 um so 15,000 Greek manuscripts uh dating from the 4th
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that's very early that's earlier than the um the unsealed manuscripts are so
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prized by modern critics uh up to uh uh
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again from the 4th to the 19th century the manuscripts and parchment and paper preserved in Mount anthus cover a large
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thematic area from religious subjects to Scientific and philosophical treatises decorated with Priceless illuminations
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and decorations that render them works of art so all these 15,000 in Greek are
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not uh parts of the Bible but they cover all types of of fields the majority of
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the manuscripts preserved uh are written in the Greek language which amount to more than 15,000 furthermore there are
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also o a a collection of syonic manuscripts and they're talking about about uh it's hard to see here they're
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talking about what is held at Mount AOS and not necessarily about everything that they've been able to digitize
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because if we go back to this it says there are 3,300
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manuscripts that would apparently be out of 15,000 uh that they have so the the
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number that they've actually digitized is only uh part
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um it talks about the fact that they have 100 late Georgian
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manuscripts uh this says the manuscripts I'm assuming it's referring to the Georgian manuscripts date from the 10th
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to the early 20th century um so that's a
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little bit more about uh these manuscripts that are held at Mount AOS
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um but uh well let me let me let me say this there are other places that you can
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find online uh uh archives of some of the materials that are at Mount Athos here's
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another place uh where you can find a collection of digital images taken from
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Mount AOS and this is from the United States Library of
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Congress and you can see that let's see if we can expand it a little bit um it
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says the 20 man monasteries which comprise historic and legendary yet largely
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inaccessible monastic complex on Mount AOS in Greece house a rich collection it
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says of over 11,000 manuscripts in 1952 and 1953 the Library of Congress and the
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international Greek New Testament project filmed the largest group of manuscripts in the history of AOS it
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doesn't say the the largest number of manuscripts of the it's the the largest that had been recorded up to that time
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in the 1950s it says this collection included 209 Greek and Georgian manuscripts of
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the Bible along with some 44 apocryphal writings as well as various documents on
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Byzantine music and letters so I think there are also several other places
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online if you were looking around that you could find some of these digitized manuscripts from uh Mount
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AOS but um I want to go back again to sim kovic's statement um she's saying
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that there are many many more manuscripts than 11,000 or
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15,000 uh there are there are who knows how many uh there's a mention there that
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these monastic communities uh are sometimes closed off to
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Outsiders so probably many of these collections have never really been gone
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through by Western Scholars who knows what is sitting on the
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shelves uh in uh these libraries monastic libraries at Mount
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apos and then beyond that how many uh
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other types of manuscripts are there in monastic libraries in Russia in uh
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monasteries uh that are either still functioning like St Catherine's or ones
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that are buried in sand in Greece uh in the hundreds if not thousands of places
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where manuscripts are held in Ethiopia and what other
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undiscovered um monastic libraries buried in sand or uh family collections
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like that one discovered in Afghanistan how many more such documents are there
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and again um I'm struck by that number she said of 900,000 manuscripts and she
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was talking about versions Russian and slavonic and and other things but um
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those can be very valuable also right having early
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translations uh for understanding the history of the transmission of the text and the the point that I came away with
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after hearing her and then after reading this chapter alongside of just I guess
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the standing body of information that I have on this topic is
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that we don't have uh or we have only a
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fragment probably of the extent manuscripts that would have some
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relevance for the study of the transmission history of the New Testament uh we have probably only a
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fragment of the existing extent manuscripts in Greek or in early
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translations and and and that's just talking about the extent manuscripts then you think about the
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fact that um there are there were thousands of manuscript if not hundreds
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of thousands of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament for example and early
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versions early translations of it that were destroyed during times of
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persecution like in the Diocesan persecution the great persecution from
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303 to 313 uh in the Roman Empire and there
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have been thousands hundreds of thousands of such manuscripts that have wasted away
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through constant use or you know simply wearing out or being
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damaged by fire or by flood Etc and so
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we have I think again only a fragment of the currently extent manuscripts and we
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have even a smaller fragment of all the manuscripts that have ever existed in
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the history of the transmission of the New Testament text sometimes when you listen to Modern Scholars who are
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committed uh to the so-called reconstruction method where they're going to use so-called the Art and
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Science of textual criticism and they're going to assemble all the empirical evidence that they have and say let's
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restore the text um what this chapter and this book
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reminded me of is the fact that the Reconstruction method has uh inherent
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weaknesses it has an Achilles heel and that is we can't assemble even right now
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the evidence of all the extent manuscripts who knows what's at Mount Athos in and other places we certainly
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can't pull back from the historical past these ones that have been lost and this
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undermines I think the whole reconstruction method whether you're someone who holds modern reason
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eclecticism or you're somebody who holds the so-called majority text pray tell
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tell me how do you know what the majority text is you you're saying the majority text of the extent manuscripts
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that you can presently identify but you would have to admit that you don't know how many extent manuscripts there are or
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how many extent manuscripts have been lost and so there's no way reasonably to determine what the majority text is
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using empirical methodology and there's no way using reason eclecticism to
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reconstruct the text because you don't have enough information you have inadequate
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information modern Scholars talk these days about the embarrassment of riches that they have and they'll give the
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estimate that we have 5,000 New Testament manuscripts of
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course the earliest of those are generally the Papi that are highly
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fragmentary only a verse or two a passage or two a page or two um the the
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the the when we have a whole book of the Bible or a whole uh copy of the New
28:43
Testament um that's generally coming from much later
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manuscripts uh so we have very few early manuscripts with which to try to reconstruct what the supposed early uh
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text of the New Testament was and so again this just shows I think the
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inherent weaknesses in general of uh textual criticism of modern textual
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criticism whether again it involves using reason to collectic ISM or whether
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it involves uh choosing the so-called majority text method the Byzantine priority method um both of those texts
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must of necessity say that the text that they have is only
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provisional and that it might change based on the discovery of supposedly
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newer and better evidence and so this group The those two groups modern
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eclecticism and Byzantine priority majority text say that our have to say
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our text is only provisional we cannot say with any measure of certainty
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exactly what the Bible is we can only only say what we think it looks like approximately based on the extent
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evidence that we have and this probably won't surprise you what this reinforces
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for me is that the Reformation text position or the confessional text
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position the traditional Protestant text view uh is a superior uh uh view a
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superior approach it's the only approach that says we have a text that is is
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stable we have a text that is assured why because it is not based on
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restoration but it's based on providential preservation it's really
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the Reformation text view the confessional text view is really the only position that can say with
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confidence look here is the Bible and here is what the Bible says and so for
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those reasons I think it is a far superior position and it's not going to
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be swayed by the uh digitization of 900,000 manuscripts at
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Mount AOS we have the word of God it has been preserved by God and it has been
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kept pure in all ages well with that I'm going to bring this episode to a
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conclusion I hope this has been helpful for those who are listening and edifying I'll look forward to speaking to you in
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the next word magazine till then take care and may the Lord richly bless you
