The prism of time: the factor of information transfer

In this regard, it is not possible to determine which copy corresponds more to the original.

To date, all found and more or less preserved manuscripts with copies of “Naturalis historia” (they are called codex) are divided into two groups according to the time of creation.

The group “vetustiores” (translated by the author from Latin as “an older”) is more ancient (V-VIII centuries) and includes five manuscripts, each of which has its scientific code: M, N, 0, P, Pal. Chat (Reynolds, 1983, p. 308).

The group “recentiores” (translated by the author from Latin as “a recent”) is more modern (IX-X centuries) and includes seven manuscripts, each of which also has its code:

D+G+V (these three codexes are combined into one for convenience), Ch, F, R, E (right there, p. 311).

However, as it turned out, such a division into groups is more formal than real. This strange fact was described by the British Latinist Leighton Durham Reynolds in his book “Texts and Transmission”. He notices that the dating of the manuscripts is so badly distorted that some of the so-called “recentiores” are older than some of the applicants for the “ordo vetustiorum” due to confusion between age and quality (right there, p. 308).

After much research, the first attempt to restore and publish a single collection of “Naturalis historia” was carried out in 1469 in Venice and the second in 1476 in Parma (Plinius Secundus, 1967, p. xiii). However, the most popular version of the work was the edition published in Berlin in 1866. It became the main source for most modern publications of “Naturalis historia” (Plinius Secundus, 1967, p. 13).

And although all published editions of “Naturalis historia” allow us to get acquainted with the approximate text of the work, it is necessary to understand that all of them are only possible versions of the work and not its original version. But it will most likely be impossible to restore the original version of the work, because, as Eric Herbert Warmington noticed, many of the textual problems raised are manifestly insoluble (Plinius Secundus, 1967, p. 12).

5. The Bible.

At the same time, both “Naturalis historia” and the works of other ancient and medieval authors can be confidently called classic examples of how the repeated transfer of a text from one medium to another led to the occurrence of different versions of the text as well as questions about the authenticity of the text and its connection with the author.

But if the existence of such questions about the works of ancient and medieval authors is quite understandable, then the presence of such discussions about the Bible is very surprising. However, there are many more questions about the Bible than answers.

After all, we don't know anything about the origin of the Christian Bible (which consists of “The Old Testament” and “The New Testament”), because to date no guaranteed confirmed originals of biblical texts have been found.

Professor of biblical studies Jerry L. Sumney asked wonderful questions about this: where are the guarantees that we are reading the Bible today, which the church defined in ancient times as such through which God speaks most clearly and authoritatively? Where are the guarantees that these texts have not changed over time, and how did these texts get to us at all? (Sumney, 2014, p. 19).

Here is an example from “The New Testament”, which was written and compiled later than other biblical texts, which theoretically should make it easier for the researcher to determine the authenticity of its texts.

So, conditionally, 27 books belong to “The New Testament”, namely, 4 canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), the Acts of the Apostles, 14 Pauline epistles, 7 general epistles (Catholic letters), and the Book of Revelation (Parker, 2008, p. 5).

According to the traditional point of view as well as according to the information contained in the “Gospels” (in Greek “evajyehov”) and in the “Acts of the Apostles” (in Greek “npa&iq AnooroAmv”) all the texts of “The New Testament” were written by the twelve apostles (Rogerson, 2005, p. 21).

Based on this, it can be assumed that all parts of “The New Testament” should have been written before the end of the 1st century AD, when the apostles were still alive.

However, to date, not a single manuscript with biblical texts has been found that could be dated to the 1st century AD and is guaranteed to be considered an original document.

As usual, only copies of the original texts were found.

At the same time, the found manuscripts with copies of the texts of “The New Testament” can be divided into the following three classes: the Greek manuscripts, the ancient translations into other languages, and the quotations from “The New Testament” made by early ecclesiastical writers (Metzger & Ehrman, 2005, p. 52).

According to American biblical scholar Bruce Manning Metzger, the Greek manuscripts should be considered the most important group among such manuscripts, because they date from the earliest period (2-6 centuries AD) and are written in ancient Greek, which is considered the language of the original text (right there, p. 54).

However, there are also versions of the texts of “The New Testament” translated into other languages.

The most famous among them are the following five Syriac Versions of “The New Testament”, created between the end of the 2nd century AD and the beginning of the 9th century AD: the Old Syriac, the Peshitta (or common version), the Philoxenian, the Harclean, and the Palestinian Syriac versions (Metzger & Ehrman, 2005, pp. 96-97).

Among the Latin Versions, two versions are the most well-known, namely, the Old Latin Version and the Latin Vulgate. At the same time, the earliest manuscripts of the Old Latin Version date back to the third century AD. In turn, the earliest manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate date back only to the beginning of the fifth century AD. However, it was these manuscripts that were taken as a basis and approved by the Roman Catholic Church (right there, p. 122-123).

In addition, there are also several other versions of “The New Testament” in other languages, which also belong to the main versions of this work: the Coptic Version (the earliest manuscript dates from the fourth century AD), the Gothic Version (the earliest manuscript dates from the fifth century AD), the Armenian Version (the earliest manuscript dates from the eighth century AD), the Georgian Version (the earliest manuscript dates from the ninth century AD), the Ethiopian Version (the earliest manuscript dates from the tenth century AD), the Old Slavonic Version (the earliest manuscript was created by Cyril and Methodius and dates from the tenth century AD) (right there, p. 117-118). These texts are not just called versions - they differ from each other and, sometimes, significantly.

The reason for this was that the main texts of “The New Testament” (if they existed) were edited and changed already at the initial stage when creating their first copies.

For example, Bruce Manning Metzger reports that the manuscript “p66” (which dates back to the second century AD and is considered a partial copy of the text “The New Testament” in Greek) contains about 440 alterations placed throughout the text. At the same time, he notices that this text also contains many elements that are typically Alexandrian and Western as well as several passages with unique readings (for example, according to “p66”, in 13-5 of the Gospel of John, Jesus took not a “basin” but a “foot-basin”) (right there, p. 57-58).

If we abstract from the idea that the original texts of “The New Testament” once existed and look at the manuscript “p66” with an independent eye, then it may seem that this is not an attempt to create a copy of this work but an attempt to compose “The New Testament”. In this case, it can be assumed that this is not a copy of the text but its original, and in the first century AD none of the apostles wrote any texts of “The New Testament”.

Or perhaps it is an attempt to rewrite the original texts of “The New Testament” in a new way by the author of the manuscript. After all, isn't it strange that the very first copies of the texts of “The New Testament”, dated to the second century AD, survived during the 19th century to our times, and the original texts created only 50 years earlier than these copies were lost? In this case, it can be assumed that the original texts were not lost but deliberately destroyed, so that no one could ever find out the truth, and allegedly copies with heavily modified text were created instead.

In any case, even if the original texts of “The New Testament” did exist, their frequent editing by scribes at their discretion already at the initial stages of copying led to the occurrence of many different versions of “The New Testament”, which do not allow to establish the authenticity of the original text.

In turn, modern publications of “The New Testament” are no longer even versions of “The New Testament” but a kind of interpretation of its different versions. Therefore, a modern researcher of the Christian religion should be very careful in his conclusions, if they are made based on modern publications of this work.

6. The Qur'an.

The situation is no better with the Qur'an (it can also be written as Koran), despite its much later appearance.

According to Islamic history, it was revealed to people by the prophet Muhammad who lived around the period 570-632 AD.

In the book “Muhammad and the Believers: at the origins of Islam”, the famous American scholar of Islam and Professor at the University of Chicago Fred M. Donner sets out the generally accepted religious tradition according to which the Qur'an appeared around 610 AD, when Muhammad first began to receive revelations from God, transmitted to him by the archangel Gabriel and recorded later by followers of Muhammad (Donner, 2010, pp. 40-41). According to the same tradition, finally, about twenty years after Muhammad's death, the scattered written and unwritten parts of the revelation were collected by an editorial committee and compiled in definitive written form (right there, p. 53).

Thus, it can be concluded that the modern form of the Qur'an (which we can read today) is based not on the original texts written by the prophet Muhammad, but on texts that were repeatedly rewritten and edited by other people many years after his death.

German professor of Religious Studies and the History of Christianity at the University of Saarland Karl-Heinz Ohlig confirms this version and also reports that according to the main religious hypothesis (which, however, is disputed by some Shia Muslims), the work on combining the revelations of prophet Muhammad into a modern form of Qur'an was carried out eighteen to twenty-four years after the death of Muhammad by a commission of three Meccans under the leadership of Zayd ibn Thabit from Medina (this work occurred in the caliphate of Uthman between 650 and 656 AD) (Ohlig, 2010, p. 8).

There are also scientific hypotheses concerning the “pre-Islamic” origin and “late origins” of the Qur'an described by Fred M. Donner. According to the first theory, the Qur'an originated as pre-Islamic strophic hymns of Arabian Christian communities, which Muhammad adapted to form the Qur'an (Donner, 2010, p. 54). According to the second theory, the Qur'an crystallized slowly within the Muslim community over two hundred years or more and mostly outside of Arabia, mainly in Iraq (that is, the Qur'an is not a product of Western Arabia in the early seventh century C.E.), and its official origin is merely a pious back projection made by Muslims of later times who wished to root their beliefs and the existence of their community in the religious experience of an earlier prophetic figure (Donner, 2010, p. 54).

However, these hypotheses are not supported by proper evidence.

In turn, if we consider the main religious hypothesis, we can assume that before coming to us, the text of the Qur'an overcame at least five stages of transferring information to a new medium, namely: from God through the archangel Gabriel to the memory of prophet Muhammad, from the memory and mouth of the prophet Muhammad to memory of his assistants, from the memory of his assistants to a set of initial separate solid media (individual revelations or parts thereof), selecting information from individual solid media and copying it to the first common solid medium (combining all revelations into a single document), copying from the first common solid medium into a book of modern format.

And if the first stage is a divine act that we can neither confirm nor deny (we can only believe in it or not), then the subsequent stages are ordinary human activities related to editing and transferring (copying) large amounts of information to a new medium (as in the cases of the Bible and “The Histories” of Herodotus).

In turn, we cannot exclude the fact that at each stage of such transfer of information, it could be distorted, which ultimately could lead to the loss of some of the information from the revelations of the prophet Muhammad.

Conclusions and prospects for further research

1. The article includes many examples of events and circumstances that have influenced or could have influenced the perception of ancient information or its physical distortion.

Formally, all these events and circumstances belong to only one type, since all of them are associated only with the transfer of information from one medium to another (for example, when recording an oral story on a hard medium, when restoring text from the original, when editing, copying or translating text, or in another variant of transferring information to a new medium).

In this regard, they can be combined into one factor, which can be conditionally called the “factor of information transfer”.

As the examples have shown, the influence of this factor on the information most often occurs for three reasons: due to negligence, ignorance, or pretense.

2. The negligence may imply simple technical errors that text scribes make when copying large amounts of information.

It is possible to understand the extent of the influence of technical errors on the distortion of information if one regards the complicated way ancient information has overcome to reach the researcher since its creation.

So, in ancient times, at the initial stage, information was stored either in the memory of the narrator or in primitive ancient solid media.

According to Bruce Manning Metzger, in ancient times the main solid information carriers were clay tablets, stone, bone, wood, leather, various metals, potsherds (ostraca), papyrus, and parchment (vellum) (Metzger & Ehrman, 2005, p. 4).

At the same time, he emphasizes that the use of such ancient media was difficult since literary works were customarily published in the format of a scroll made of papyrus or parchment (the papyrus scroll was made by gluing together, side by side, separate sheets of papyrus and then winding the long strip around a roll; the normal Greek literary roll self- exceeded 35 feet in length (right there, p. 11-12).

In turn, the English professor of biblical studies at the University of Sheffield John William Rogerson reports that since most of the scrolls were prepared from the skins of animals, or on sheets of papyrus, they could only be reproduced by being copied by hand (Rogerson, 2005, p. 31).

At the same time, David Lateiner describes that an ancient “book” was very inconvenient to use since it existed in a stack of rolled papyrus manuscripts (before conventions of titling and dividing), it had no spine, each “book” had to be laboriously copied, written out by hand (Herodotus, 2004, p. 22).

The process of evolution of information carriers was very slow. According to John William Rogerson, ancient media began to take the form of a book (in the sense of sheets of paper or parchment bound at one edge so that the pages could be turned back and forth) only in the 2nd century AD (Rogerson, 2005, p. 31).

At the same time, according to Bruce Manning Metzger, in ancient times, most likely it was the church that first began to create prototypes of modern books (Metzger & Ehrman, 2005, p. 12). Such a book was made by folding one or more sheets of papyrus in the middle and sewing them together.

Certainly, the acquisition of a modern book form by manuscripts greatly simplified their use. However, even after that, copying information remained a very complex and timeconsuming process for quite some time. According to the American biblical scholar Bruce Manning Metzger, until the invention of printing with movable type in the fiftieth century, the text of every ancient record could be transmitted only by laboriously copying it letter by letter and word by word (right there, p. 13).

As a result, there was a high risk of technical errors associated with the manual copying of large volumes of text, which has always been a very difficult process, especially in ancient times. Even today, with the availability of modern technologies (paper, fountain pen, computer, etc.), manual copying often leads to errors in texts. What then can we say about the ancient and medieval periods, when one had to copy large volumes of text without any technical assistance, from the skin to parchment or papyrus, and so on?! Naturally, as a result of such a rewriting of the text, simple human errors could appear, at the same time made repeatedly, both in the ancient and the Middle Ages. Perhaps if the text was applied or transferred to the stone, there would be fewer scribes and a lower probability of error. But we have what we have.

On this occasion, the outstanding American linguist and historian Roland G. Kent said the following:

“... the speed with which a copyist transcribes with pen upon paper or parchment, is a factor leading likewise to greater error than the slowness with which the engraver transfers his text, letter by letter (not word by word), to its place of permanent record. On the other hand, the inscription may be copied in an alphabet differing from that in which the original draft stands and this will produce a series of corruptions to which manuscript copies rarely afford parallels, except that we may compare how Greek words in Latin texts have been copied by the scribes” (Kent, 1920, pp. 289-290).

Thus, these examples show that ancient information in its journey through time, in most cases, underwent many stages of editing and copying (including manual).

At the same time, original media with original information recorded by its author may have been destroyed by scribes or time, or simply lost.

In this regard, most of the modern research on ancient works is carried out only based on their copies, most often made from other copies.

That is, very often the authenticity of these works remains unconfirmed. At the same time, there is always a risk that in ancient times under physically transferring (copying) information from one medium to another such information could be distorted as a result of a simple technical or editorial error.

2.3. As for ignorance, this is a kind of intellectual reason, since the distortion of information, in this case, is not accidental but intentional. That is, a person who transfers information from one medium to another meaningfully distorts such information, thinking at the same time that one is doing the right thing (for example, one uses the wrong font when writing a new copy of the text, or replaces old words with new ones but incorrectly, or incorrectly translates words from one language to another, etc.).

This can easily be understood by taking the example of the ancient works that initially did not have a modern structure and have come down to us in their existing form only from the manuscripts of ancient and medieval scribes, who, in turn, used the manuscripts of other scribes, used different alphabets, and also often edited and structured the text at their discretion.

In addition, ancient works could be repeatedly translated into another dialect or language by people who lived much later than the period of their creation.

In turn, the translation into another language additionally affected the distortion of the source text in not the best way.

For example, Bruce Manning Metzger describes the effect of translation on the distortion of the source text using the example of the “New Testament”, early versions of which were translated into Syriac, Latin, or Coptic, to assist in the propagation of the Christian faith. In his opinion, not only were some of the translations prepared by persons who had an imperfect command of Greek but certain features of Greek syntax and vocabulary cannot be conveyed in a translation (for example, Latin has no definite article; Syriac cannot distinguish between the Greek aorist and perfect tenses; Coptic lacks the passive voice and must use a circumlocution. In some cases, therefore, the testimony of these versions is ambiguous) (Metzger & Ehrman, 2005, pp. 94-95).

Naturally, all such processes of transferring information to a new medium, especially those related to its editing and translation, could lead to numerous errors. Such a probability of distortion of the text increased significantly, given the fact that medieval and ancient editors often used not logic but personal preferences. As a result, such actions could lead not only to errors but also to the appearance of new elements (which did not exist in the source text). In addition, it is necessary to take into account the fact that ancient and medieval scribes could, at their discretion, both borrow foreign words from the source text and replace obsolete words with new ones but with slightly different meanings. Such editors and scribes, despite all their efforts, did not have the opportunity to receive comments and explanations of the information directly from the ancient authors.

2.4. In other words, we can say that the imperfection and personal preferences of the person who acted as a copyist as well as the linguistic diversities and complexity of the process of transferring information from one medium to another in ancient and medieval times could have a significant impact on the distortion of the ancient information under study.

Thus, it can be concluded that there is a high probability that over time most of the ancient information could have undergone significant distortion during its repeated transfer from one medium to another.

Such distortions (committed by scribes of information intentionally or not) could affect both the structure and sequence of the presentation of information and the correctness of the information presented in the works of ancient authors. In turn, this could affect the essence of the information and our perception of such information.

2.5. However, the most unpleasant and unpredictable reason for the appearance of such a factor is pretense - when the real creator (or a group of creators) of the information declares that one is only a copyist, and the author of the information was another person who either lived much earlier and was more famous or was invented altogether. At the same time, subsequently, such a fictional person can be used by other ancient or medieval authors as a literary character (for example, to build dialogues or to make the work more interesting or meaningful). And this confuses the situation even more.

In this case, it is almost impossible to establish the authenticity and authorship of such a text without the original carrier of information, which in most cases is not preserved as well as official information about the existence of its author.

2.6. In any case, it is necessary to understand that regardless of the reasons for the occurrence of “the factor of information transfer”, its influence on ancient information is enormous.

Accordingly, a researcher of ancient information who is unable to work with the original, but is forced to work only with its copies, should take into account the possibility of the influence of such “the factor of information transfer” on the information under research.

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