Over at the Tyndale House website, we are now hosting a blog dedicated to the Greek New Testament we have been preparing. This blog will be devoted to that project only, but rest assured, with the exception of the first introductory post, we will cross-post everything to our beloved ETC Blog, which will also be the place where comments are welcomed (there is a direct link between the two). Rather than asking you to check (or subscribe to) an additional address, it seems better to keep things centralised. The blog at the Tyndale House address functions to give the posts a sense of thematic continuity and visibility and catch some of the search traffic that is targeted at our edition.And for the purists - one might notice the hand of Peter Gurry in its design.
Is this really what we need, yet another "critical" edition, based on an ecclectic method? In what way is it better than NA28 and ECM, except for perhaps in minor details? I am not saying that producing editions with the aim "to provide a text of the Greek New Testament that reflects as closely as possible its earliest recoverable wording" is wrong. But there are several problems with such an aim. It is often very difficult to know what is the earliest form, and sometimes it is meaningless to try to recover it. We do not know if the authors of the Gospels (or of the letters and other books) revised their own text or encouraged others to improve it. In that case the earliest form would be the inferior text.
ReplyDeleteThe New Testament has a fluid text tradition, but strange enough few NT textual critics have embraced new philology, which is used by more and more editors of ancient and medieval texts. That would be the best way to deal with the multitude of NT manuscripts, redactions and versions. What we need more of is projects like the "Marc multilingue", i.e. synoptic editions that do not favour a specific edition or manuscript, but treat all in an objective way. See http://www.safran.be/marcmultilingue/index.html
I recommend the new book "Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology", ed. by Hugo Lundhaug & Liv Ingeborg Lied.
Britt Dahlman