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Originally Posted by Yakk
Martin, I was under the impression that there isn't a pre-1 CE agreed upon text for the Torah -- heck, Jewish faiths and Christian faiths often disagree which books to include in the OT?
The NT, similarly, was put together from lots of different accounts, selected a few centuries after 1 CE.
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Hebrew scriptures are much harder to fix. The older date of composition means that copies just aren't as available.
For a long time, the closest Hebrew copies we had were older than the NT, in midival times. This is known as the Masoretic texts. But when we find the dead sea scrolls (circa 100 BCE), despite some changes...they do affirm both the cannon (which writings are in) and the basic texts of those writings. Today, Protestants and Jews agree on what should be in the OT/Tanak, and the only additions are some greek compositions that the Catholics and E. Orthodox add. The headline isn't the uncertainty, but the relative reliability of the text over time. Now, this doesn't say anything about interpretation...and that's an open game. But the basic text seems to be fairly agreed upon in most circumstances.
With the NT. The cannon appears to start setting with various compendiums around 2nd century to 3rd century. Certainly by Nicea, there is an accepted list of writings. For the Gospels, we have multiple copies, dating back as old as 125 CE. A few changes here and there, and the basic text is again agreed upon. The most common textual disagreement is brief add ons. Mark gets a new ending to round out what is otherwise a bit of a cliff hanger. John has a story from Mark stuck in to it. But by and large, manuscript copiers were remarkably faithful with important texts, such as scriptures. Paul's letters generally have somewhat fewer copies, but seem to have circulated in a fairly set form.
I don't mean to come off as saying that there aren't ANY problems with fixing the text of the Bible. But a few scholars have gotten quite a lot of attention for claiming to have changed the whole meaning, by finding a different text. yes, we have multiple attestations of what these texts should be. Sometimes it's hard to figure out, sometimes it's pretty obvious that the copier made a mistake (line skips, syllable repeats, things of that nature.) But in the end, the primary challenge of Biblical studies is to understand the writings in their context...not some wild goose chase for what the Bible "really" said. I'm sure more than one PhD has been given out for such work...and some of it is important. But for the layperson's understanding of our field, i think those cases get very much overblown.