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 editions, methods, 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?
A decade or more? They had better check the latest critical text, because the words have changed.
ReplyDelete"I covered new editions..."
DeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
DeleteI 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!
Delete"Consensus of editions" versus "consensus of leading text-critics" versus "consensus of manuscripts" -- wonder which one I would trust more. :-)
ReplyDelete"Consensus of early localized text-forms" is another option.
Delete'early localised text-forms': this could enter a contest for the world's most problematic agglomeration of terms.
Delete"Consensus of the various editions of the Textus Receptus" is an option.
DeleteText = Canon = Community.
Right?