Thursday, February 01, 2018

What a Pastor Should Know about Developments in Textual Criticism

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Over at my seminary’s blog, I have written a three-part series on what a pastor should know about developments in textual criticism. (Generally, I had in mind someone who’s been out of seminary for a decade or more.) I covered new editionsmethods, and digital resources. One thing I didn’t touch on but could have is the accumulating number of excellent studies of individual manuscripts. But you can’t say everything. What would you add?


9 comments

  1. A decade or more? They had better check the latest critical text, because the words have changed.

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  2. I think the biggest thing that pastors need to recognise is that (in NT at least) the textual world is shifting from a broadly consensual and methodologically balanced approach (exemplified in the original Nestle principles [print the text where the great editions agree, at least two out of three], and in the editorial personnel and practice of the NA26/UBS3 revision) to an approach where competing methods and even institutions produce different published editions (NA28ff via ECM and CBGM; THEGNT; SBL) which are each more cut off from the whole history of the discipline that previous editions (up to NA27 you would know what was the old Nestle reading from NA25; and you had an appendix of readings in different editions; NA28 doesn't offer that). It is a new world for anyone brought up on earlier NA or UBS editions.

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    1. I am not sure about the 'consensual and methodologicaly balanced'. Just that scholars did not put their articles and approaches and conclusions into a coherent edition and the NA tradition therefore appeared to go unchallenged when looking at it from a distance, doesn't mean that the field was consensual. Far from it, it seems to me.

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    2. I guess what Pete's getting us that the 'Nestle' edition was originally based on a consensus of editions and then on the consensus (or at least the majority vote of) then-leading text-critics. But I agree that the field as such was by no means consensual: in one generation you have Tischendorf, Tregelles, and WH, then you have the likes of von Soden, Hoskier, and the Lakes in the next. Crazy world!

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  3. "Consensus of editions" versus "consensus of leading text-critics" versus "consensus of manuscripts" -- wonder which one I would trust more. :-)

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    1. "Consensus of early localized text-forms" is another option.

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    2. 'early localised text-forms': this could enter a contest for the world's most problematic agglomeration of terms.

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    3. "Consensus of the various editions of the Textus Receptus" is an option.

      Text = Canon = Community.

      Right?

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