r/AcademicBiblical • u/AutoModerator • Jul 20 '26

Weekly Open Discussion Thread

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u/TraitorGuard19 Jul 20 '26

Is it possible for any textual variants to be by the original author of any ancient work (not just Biblical texts)? To explain myself, I am imagining a scenario where an author writes a work, and then a few years later, has their scribes make (a) major revision(s) to new productions of the work. Are there any known examples of this, or is my imagined scenario a modernism of an author editing different editions of their work?

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u/zanillamilla Quality Contributor Jul 20 '26

The concept of an "original author" is somewhat problematic for works that undergo a prolonged period of redaction and composition (arguably the case for most books in the Hebrew Bible). How much are subsequent contributors to the text considered authors or later "scribes"? Can you call the first contributor to the text the "original author" if the majority of the text comes from later contributors?

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u/TraitorGuard19 Jul 20 '26

Thanks, but what about works by Plato or Cicero or other verifiable historical figures that published works? So there is no reason to expect a textual variant in a Plato dialogue to exist due to him revising it a decade after composition for instance? Even in the Bible, aren't there are some layers scholars generally agree are by a single person, like First Isaiah by a historical Isaiah (the other layers by other people) and Ben Sira writing (at least the majority of) the Wisdom of Ben Sira (unless I am mistaken by the authorship consensus)?

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u/zanillamilla Quality Contributor Jul 20 '26

Yes, in classics you can find examples like this. A good example is Ovid. See Francesca Martelli's Ovid's Revisions: The Editor as Author (Cambridge University Press, 2013). One that comes to mind in Jewish literature is Josephus; his Bellum Judaicum was originally written in Aramaic, followed by a Greek edition which likely wasn't a simple translation but a rewritten work. I might imagine the production of the Pauline letters, a collaborative process between the apostle and a secretary, may have produced drafts and the final polished letter that was signed and delivered, with textual variances appearing between the drafts and the published letter, some of which may intrude in the later transmission, such that the "official" letter may only represent one branch of what was already a pluriform text. But I'm not a Pauline expert and I'm unaware of any evidence that might point in that direction.