At SBL last fall I gave a paper on the future of text-types for the session on the IGNTP anniversary. Hugh Houghton kindly asked if I would record it for the IGNTP YouTube channel and the videographers at my school kindly lent their time and talents to record it. (If it looks like I had the paper memorized, I did not. It’s just a camera trick and a teleprompter.) The outline of the paper is as follows:
- Intro
- Text-types as a solution (2:00)
- Text-types as a problem (5:25)
- Suggestions for progress (13:50)
- Define “texts” (14:02)
- Clarify their purpose (16:02)
- Specify their relationship (17:08)
- Conclusion (18:12)
- Postscript (19:30)
Besides giving an overview of where I think the discussion on text-types is (and needs to go), this video explains why we are centering our TCI colloquium this summer on this question.
I absolutely loved the video. The way you present the subject is excellent. Thank you. Are you publishing the paper?
ReplyDeleteYes, a longer form will be published in a book.
DeleteBrilliant. Looking forward to read it!
DeleteThoroughly enjoyed your splendid presentation, Pete! Although, when you said "end quote", I feared you might do a Biden and add "repeat the line".
ReplyDeletePeter, this is a great presentation. Very helpful to frame the discussion around the question of how closely manuscripts are related under the reality that they all are related. The challenge is agreeing upon criteria to use for the evaluation.
ReplyDeleteI would tend to agree with the exclusion of nonsense readings, but then there are examples where a copyist dutifully copied the same nonsense in a manuscript that is otherwise related. And sometimes the confusion over ημιν and υμιν, for instance, could result in nonsense, or in other places, either option could fit the context as is the case in John 11:50. I found in my research in John 11:50 that most manuscript families/clusters have members that fall out on both sides of this ημιν vs. υμιν, due to the similar sound, and so the variation has little value toward establishing relationships. Even so, there is one very closely related cluster with five members, and all five agree, reading υμιν.
And I appreciate the point you briefly alluded to around the disparity that is often found within one given manuscript. Having collated over 2000 manuscripts that include John 11, I have seen numerous times where within one manuscript a significant portion of the chapter departs from the Majority Text, displaying the text of one of the known families like F1, F13, Pi, etc. There are even some lectionaries that have behaved this way.
Looking forward to your book on this topic.
I agree with you that text types need a definition and a purpose or else we can simply dispense of them like they do with the CBGM.
ReplyDeleteMost of us when we examine different readings between manuscript cannot help but notice manuscript groupings on the basis of many readings they share which are not necessarily explanable by the priority of their readings. It is of course most obvious in the so-called Western type manuscripts because they have many wrong readings, but also noticeable among other groups that aren't close enough to be a family. I think that the situation is analogous to weak members of textual families. Why are there weak members of textual families? Usually it's because an exemplar of that family was revised using another kind of manuscript, considered as being standard/correct by the scribe. If we had many weak members of a textual family but no strong representatives because they all had been lost, we could see a relation between them, that would be similar to what we call a text type.
So my definition of text type is: A group of readings that share characteristics (often found in the same manuscripts, same kind of errors/change, etc.) such as they have a high probability of having been present together in the same source manuscript. And then later individual manuscripts should not be described as being of a particuliar text type, but rather as a mix in certain proportions of those readings (and by extension of the text types they define).
What would be the purpose? Having an additional basis for determining coherence of readings. The way coherence is used in the CBGM is good, but doesn't work perfectly. Sometimes a reading which appear incoherent with the CBGM is actually coherent if we consider that the manuscripts that share it are all partly of a certain text type which could have transmitted that reading.