The Dead Sea Scrolls have shown that not much has been changed in the important texts of cannon scripture.
This is a marvelous sentence, with its claim precariously balanced between the vacuous and the vague. What constitutes
"not much", and what the hell are
"the important texts [as opposed, presumably, to unimportant text]
of cannon [canonized?] scripture"?
So, what can, in fact, be asserted. In the following quote, abbreviations employing unavailable characters are replaced with full names within braces:
6. Variants in the Qumran Texts
There are many differences in readings between the individual Qumran texts, or, phrased differently, these texts reflect many variants vis-a-vis {The Masoretic Text}. ... Phrased again differently, the Qumran texts, as well as differing from one another, relate to {The Masoretic Text}, {The Septuagint}, {The Samaritan Pentateuch}, and other texts in a ramified system of agreements and disagreements. ...
The fact that all these fifferent texts were found in the same Qumran caves probably eflects a certain textual reality in the period between the third century BCE and the first century CE. In our reconstruction of the history of the biblical text in that period in pp. 187-197 this situation is described as textual plurality and variety.
- see
Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, by
Emanuel Tov
Furthermore, by the mid 3rd century BCE, textual transmission had long since entered the preservation stage. Any degree of agreement reflects only the degree of import assigned to various texts, and says absolutely nothing about the process or integrity of composition and early transmission.
[This message has been edited by ConsequentAtheist, 11-01-2003]
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