Dániel Kiss on Uncertainty in Textual Criticism

Its [textual criticism] reputation for arbitrariness can probably be ascribed to the fact that
having grown up in a late stage of the age of printing, we are used to carefully edited texts, and textual corruption strikes us not only as unfamiliar, but also as uncanny and somehow fundamentally wrong. But a doubt that affects the reconstruction of a passage in Catullus is no different in kind from one that affects how the same passage should be interpreted, nor from one that might affect Roman economic history in the late Republic. If textual criticism is difficult at times, that is not because it is arbitrary, nor because textual critics are incompetent, but because centuries of textual corruption have resulted in problems for some of which there is no easy solution. Faced with such difficulties, one can only make progress by strenuous and open-minded research.

—Dániel Kiss from What Catullus Wrote, p. vii–viii.

Textual Criticism as Rhetoric

From Richard Tarrant’s new book Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism (reviewed in BMCR here):

To classify textual criticism as a form of rhetoric is a way of highlighting the fact that its arguments depend on persuasion rather than demonstration. Textual critics cannot prove that their choices are correct; the most they can hope to do is lead their readers to believe that those choices are the best available ones.

Facts do, of course, play an important part of textual criticism. But in the end the facts cannot yield a definitive answer, only a relative probability, which is where the critic needs to employ rhetorical argument.

This point is not, of course, unique to textual criticism. All study of the past, certainly the ancient past, trades in probabilities and textual criticism is nothing if not a historical endeavor. So long as we are okay with probabilities, there is little here to really fuss about. Where the debate can be had is about just how probable any of our particular text critical judgments are. That, however, takes us beyond mere rhetoric since some judgments are better than others. Still, I take Tarrant’s quote as a welcome reminder that judgment is always involved.

For more along the same lines, see Gary Taylor, “The Rhetoric of Textual Criticism,” Text 4 (1988): 39–57.

What Motivated Bengel

Here is a good word from Bengel for your weekend.

Human selections of sayings and examples, taken from Scripture, have their use; the study, however, of the Sacred Volume, should not end here; for it should, both as a whole, and in its several parts, be thoroughly studied and mastered, especially by those who are occupied in teaching others. In order fully to accomplish which, we ought to distinguish the clearly genuine words of the Sacred Text, from those which are open to doubt or question, from the existence and authority of various readings, lest we should either pass by, and thus fail to profit by the words of the apostles, or treat the words of copyists as if they were those of the apostles. I have endeavoured to furnish such a text, with all care and fidelity, in my larger edition of the Greek New Testament, published at Tubingen, and in the smaller one published at Stuttgardt.

Gnomon, vol. 1, pp. 9-10

Holmes on Objective Evidence in Textual Criticism

In response to the notion that the use of internal evidence is more subjective than external and therefore less reliable, Mike Holmes says this:

The claim that some methods are more “objective” than others—in particular, the view that decisions based on external data are somehow more “objective” (or at least less “subjective”) than those based on internal considerations—is largely illusory and misleading. With respect to both external and internal evidence, what counts as “data” or “evidence” is a theory-driven decision, and the choice of what data to follow is inescapably subjective. (p. 103 n. 40).

Maybe he will permit me to offer a simplified version: there are no text critical conclusions achieved without human judgment.

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Michael W. Holmes. “The Text of the Epistles Sixty Years after: An Assessment of Günther Zuntz’s Contribution to Text-Critical Methodology and History.” Pages 89–113 in Transmission and Reception: New Testament Text-Critical and Exegetical Studies. Text and Studies Third Series 4. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2006.