The following is a guest post from Peter Montoro who is currently a doctoral student at the University of Birmingham. It gives a sample of his important paper at the Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament earlier this year, which was, in turn, based on his BD dissertation for the University of London. An expanded version of this material will be published in the proceedings of the Colloquium. —Peter G.
The particular value of patristic citations, as opposed to versions and continuous text manuscripts of the New Testament, is, as Gordon Fee put it, “[W]hen properly evaluated...the Church Fathers have the potential of offering datable and geographically certain evidence.”1
As has now been well established, recovering usable citations from patristic witnesses poses a number of methodological challenges. Yet while much progress has been made on many fronts, it seems sometimes to be forgotten that the task of “proper evaluation” is incomplete without a careful investigation of the manuscript transmission of the work in which a given patristic citation is located.
It needs to be more clearly recognized, in practice as well as in theory, that the usability of patristic citations is directly dependent upon their stability within the manuscript tradition of the work from which they derive.
Though a father may have used two different forms of a text at two different times, even in the same work, it is rather difficult to use two different forms at the same time. When a single citation in a single location is itself an instance of variation, that citation is not “stable,” in the sense that I am using the term, and this therefore precludes it—until and unless the priority of one of these textual forms has been clearly and decisively demonstrated—from being utilized as the “datable and geographically certain evidence” that patristic citations are intended to provide.
For this study, I examined those portions of Chrysostom’s Romans Homilies that contain his exegesis of Romans 8 (found in homilies 13–15 using Migne’s numbering), in seven of the eight extant and catalogued manuscripts of the work that date to the tenth century or earlier, as well as two additional eleventh century manuscripts and six editions of the printed Greek text. (The published version of my work will include full data from all extant manuscripts dating to the fifteenth century and earlier.)
Chrysostom’s citation of Rom 8:33–35 provides a clear and striking illustration of the results of the analysis of this dataset as a whole and is what I want to focus on in this post. A PDF containing brief info on each of the manuscripts and editions used, as well as a full collation of the initial citations of 8:33–35 in these manuscripts and editions is available here.
Within the eight manuscripts examined, there are no less than five significant variation units in which two or more manuscripts differ from the others. All five of these non-singular variants are also found in the manuscript tradition of the book of Romans itself. In other words, the variants in the manuscript tradition of the Romans Homilies largely offer a selection of the very same variants that are present in the manuscript tradition of Romans itself. This is the case, not only for individual variants, but also for the particular combination of variants found in each of the two manuscript clusters found in the early manuscripts of the Romans Homilies.
The fifth of these variants, found in 8:35, is particularly interesting. After ἀπὸ τῆς ἀγάπης τοῦ, one cluster of manuscripts reads θεοῦ, while the other cluster reads χριστοῦ, followed by the significant comment, Καὶ οὐκ εἶπε· τοῦ θεοῦ· οὕτως ἀδιάφορον αὐτῷ, καὶ χριστὸν καὶ θεὸν ὀνομάζειν (“And he does not say ‘of God,’ so indifferent is it to him whether he mentions the Name of Christ or of God”).2 Phrases such as the Καὶ οὐκ εἶπε(ν)... found in all printed editions at this point, have traditionally been considered the “gold standard” for textual stability in patristic citation. Indeed, Tischendorf thought this phrase so significant that he included the entirety of it in his textual apparatus for this verse.
Yet upon examination of the manuscript tradition of the Romans Homilies, not only is this phrase absent in a significant number of early manuscripts, but also the reading which it is clearly intended to support is itself a point of variation, rendering this traditional “gold standard” for textual stability a rather shaky foundation on which to build one’s text-critical house.
In order to properly evaluate patristic citations, it is not enough to determine from a printed edition that a citation is actually a citation—one must also go behind the edition to consider the stability of the manuscript tradition that underlies it. In the case of Chrysostom’s Romans Homilies, an initial survey of the manuscript tradition demonstrates significant textual instability, raising serious questions about the usability of any of the currently available printed editions of this work as a basis for citations of the form of the text used by Chrysostom in the late fourth century. Given that Chrysostom’s Homilies on Acts—for which similar textual instability has been demonstrated—served as the source for more than a quarter of the entire apparatus of patristic citations in the recent ECM of Acts, the answers that we give to these questions will have a significant impact on the shape of future critical editions of the New Testament.
It is important to note that I am not by any means asserting that these printed editions never give us access to the text of Chrysostom—indeed, in most cases they probably do. Yet this is to say very little indeed. The text of Romans is itself sufficiently stable that the same claim could be made, with equal validity, for almost any purely Greek (excluding the bilinguals, which present special challenges) manuscript or edition of the text of Romans, however far removed from Chrysostom.
As a point of comparison, the Textus Receptus and the NA28, normally considered to be at opposite ends of the textual spectrum, differ from each other only eighteen times in the entirety of Romans 8, four of which variations are merely orthographical. In this same chapter, there are no less than twenty-two differences between the Romans text found in the two textual clusters of Chrysostom’s Romans Homilies, a number that only includes those instances where all three manuscripts identified as belonging to the one manuscript cluster differ from all five of the manuscripts that belong to the other.
In other words, there is actually more variation between the various manuscript clusters of Chrysostom’s Romans Homilies than there is between the Textus Receptus and the NA28. Until and unless the priority and originality of one of these clusters has been decisively established, no citation from this work, no matter how apparently secure in the printed text, ought to be considered as providing “datable and geographically certain evidence.”
Notes
The particular value of patristic citations, as opposed to versions and continuous text manuscripts of the New Testament, is, as Gordon Fee put it, “[W]hen properly evaluated...the Church Fathers have the potential of offering datable and geographically certain evidence.”1
As has now been well established, recovering usable citations from patristic witnesses poses a number of methodological challenges. Yet while much progress has been made on many fronts, it seems sometimes to be forgotten that the task of “proper evaluation” is incomplete without a careful investigation of the manuscript transmission of the work in which a given patristic citation is located.
 |
| Saba 20, Folio 145r |
Though a father may have used two different forms of a text at two different times, even in the same work, it is rather difficult to use two different forms at the same time. When a single citation in a single location is itself an instance of variation, that citation is not “stable,” in the sense that I am using the term, and this therefore precludes it—until and unless the priority of one of these textual forms has been clearly and decisively demonstrated—from being utilized as the “datable and geographically certain evidence” that patristic citations are intended to provide.
For this study, I examined those portions of Chrysostom’s Romans Homilies that contain his exegesis of Romans 8 (found in homilies 13–15 using Migne’s numbering), in seven of the eight extant and catalogued manuscripts of the work that date to the tenth century or earlier, as well as two additional eleventh century manuscripts and six editions of the printed Greek text. (The published version of my work will include full data from all extant manuscripts dating to the fifteenth century and earlier.)
Chrysostom’s citation of Rom 8:33–35 provides a clear and striking illustration of the results of the analysis of this dataset as a whole and is what I want to focus on in this post. A PDF containing brief info on each of the manuscripts and editions used, as well as a full collation of the initial citations of 8:33–35 in these manuscripts and editions is available here.
Within the eight manuscripts examined, there are no less than five significant variation units in which two or more manuscripts differ from the others. All five of these non-singular variants are also found in the manuscript tradition of the book of Romans itself. In other words, the variants in the manuscript tradition of the Romans Homilies largely offer a selection of the very same variants that are present in the manuscript tradition of Romans itself. This is the case, not only for individual variants, but also for the particular combination of variants found in each of the two manuscript clusters found in the early manuscripts of the Romans Homilies.
The fifth of these variants, found in 8:35, is particularly interesting. After ἀπὸ τῆς ἀγάπης τοῦ, one cluster of manuscripts reads θεοῦ, while the other cluster reads χριστοῦ, followed by the significant comment, Καὶ οὐκ εἶπε· τοῦ θεοῦ· οὕτως ἀδιάφορον αὐτῷ, καὶ χριστὸν καὶ θεὸν ὀνομάζειν (“And he does not say ‘of God,’ so indifferent is it to him whether he mentions the Name of Christ or of God”).2 Phrases such as the Καὶ οὐκ εἶπε(ν)... found in all printed editions at this point, have traditionally been considered the “gold standard” for textual stability in patristic citation. Indeed, Tischendorf thought this phrase so significant that he included the entirety of it in his textual apparatus for this verse.
Yet upon examination of the manuscript tradition of the Romans Homilies, not only is this phrase absent in a significant number of early manuscripts, but also the reading which it is clearly intended to support is itself a point of variation, rendering this traditional “gold standard” for textual stability a rather shaky foundation on which to build one’s text-critical house.
In order to properly evaluate patristic citations, it is not enough to determine from a printed edition that a citation is actually a citation—one must also go behind the edition to consider the stability of the manuscript tradition that underlies it. In the case of Chrysostom’s Romans Homilies, an initial survey of the manuscript tradition demonstrates significant textual instability, raising serious questions about the usability of any of the currently available printed editions of this work as a basis for citations of the form of the text used by Chrysostom in the late fourth century. Given that Chrysostom’s Homilies on Acts—for which similar textual instability has been demonstrated—served as the source for more than a quarter of the entire apparatus of patristic citations in the recent ECM of Acts, the answers that we give to these questions will have a significant impact on the shape of future critical editions of the New Testament.
It is important to note that I am not by any means asserting that these printed editions never give us access to the text of Chrysostom—indeed, in most cases they probably do. Yet this is to say very little indeed. The text of Romans is itself sufficiently stable that the same claim could be made, with equal validity, for almost any purely Greek (excluding the bilinguals, which present special challenges) manuscript or edition of the text of Romans, however far removed from Chrysostom.
As a point of comparison, the Textus Receptus and the NA28, normally considered to be at opposite ends of the textual spectrum, differ from each other only eighteen times in the entirety of Romans 8, four of which variations are merely orthographical. In this same chapter, there are no less than twenty-two differences between the Romans text found in the two textual clusters of Chrysostom’s Romans Homilies, a number that only includes those instances where all three manuscripts identified as belonging to the one manuscript cluster differ from all five of the manuscripts that belong to the other.
In other words, there is actually more variation between the various manuscript clusters of Chrysostom’s Romans Homilies than there is between the Textus Receptus and the NA28. Until and unless the priority and originality of one of these clusters has been decisively established, no citation from this work, no matter how apparently secure in the printed text, ought to be considered as providing “datable and geographically certain evidence.”
Notes
- Gordon D. Fee and Roderic L. Mullen, “The Use of the Greek Fathers for New Testament Textual Criticism,” in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis, ed. by Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 351–352. ↩
- The translation is taken from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers edition of the Romans Homilies. ↩
There's a lot of work to do in patristics textual criticism, apparently!
ReplyDeleteIn another matter, might this be evidence that the NT was generally copied more carefully and/or with less innovation than patristic literature, inasmuch as inner-patristic variation would seem to be more dramatic than inner-NT variation? (Of course, this is at most a big-picture generalization.)
Stephen, what this means is that the tremendous variation in the manuscripts has been greatly condensed through the process of editing two different competing texts, so as to limit the resulting differences between them. To compare apples with apples, one would need to compare hundreds of manuscripts of Romans 8 and count up all the differences.
DeleteThis is actually one of the research projects I have planned. The only way to really compare apples to apples here would be to calculate the number of different forms of Romans 8:33–35 found across all continuous text mss of Romans and compare that to the number of different forms of the same verses found within the much smaller corpus of mss of the Romans Homilies. But that will be a separate article!
DeleteI certainly wouldn't want to claim that the evidence I've put forward up to this point is sufficient to prove such a broad generalization! At the same time, I do think that we have far more evidence that patristic texts were edited to conform to codices of the New Testament than we do that codices of the New Testament were edited to conform to any later doctrinal standard. Furthermore, we have, in almost every case, far more and far better evidence for what the New Testament writers actually wrote in the first century we do for what the fourth and fifth century fathers said about those words.
ReplyDeleteFair enough!
DeleteAlthough Patristic evidence requires more caution than manuscript or even versional evidence, It still holds it's weight very well when dealing with larger omission/interpolation variant units (where slight variation is less important). That being said, Chrysostom is low hanging fruit in this arena (As also would be St. Ambrose, when it's already been conceeded that conformity took place) and therefore data concerning Chrysostom in this regard should not be confused as a window into what the average Church Father's textual stability looks like. I must say though, that I truly appreciate being given a peek into Chrysostom!
DeleteNow, if it can be shown that the works of other Church Father's follow suit and supply similar data, then and only then, do we have something on a more general scale. Either way, it seems to me that it's probably an every "Father" for himself situation and you'll likely have a mixed bag,i.e. some works will show evidence of textual instability and some will not. The sad part in all this is that there is truly no way to be certain what Chrysostom or any Church Father actually wrote when you come across this type of textual instability. It's pure guesswork. Textual Criticism can be ruthless, kudos to Mr.Montoro for chipping away at this most daunting task.
This brief look into your dissertation work shows that inter-disciplinary work is essential. Thank you for this work.
ReplyDeleteAssemani changed the longer quotations of the Bible from the Old Syriac version to the Peshitta version in his edition of Ephrem's works. Could MSS copyists have done something analogous to Chrysostom's works?
ReplyDeleteDan McConaughy
Not only could they have done so, they most certainly did. The fascinating thing about this is that it doesn't, contrary to what has often been asserted, affect only the "lemmas" but also the "snippets" of text repeated throughout the discussion and even, as here, the discussion itself. There is even one place where one group of manuscripts has altered a single article in no less than six repetitions of a single clause of the text of Romans, scattered across mutiple homilies. In one group of mss the article is present in all six places. In the other, it is absent all six places. Furthermore, the presence or absence of this article is a place of variation between the NA28 and the Byzantine textform. While this is striking for the sheer number of places in which a tiny alteration was made, there are other alterations (on which I intend to publish in due course) that are much more significant in scope.
ReplyDelete//The fascinating thing about this is that it doesn't, contrary to what has often been asserted, affect only the "lemmas" but also the "snippets" of text repeated throughout the discussion and even, as here, the discussion itself.//
DeleteIt seems from this remark that you are taking it as an established fact that the comment you discussed ("“And he does not say ‘of God,’...") is not genuine. In the OP you seemed to treat it as more of an open question. Do I read you right here? And if so, what are your reasons for rejecting its genuineness?
I would definitely consider the originality of the comment an open question. However, for my purposes at this point, it doesn’t really matter which of the two versions of the text one regards as original and which one regards as derivative. Whether the text was altered through addition or deletion, there was still an alteration made to the commentary in order to adjust it to an alteration made in the text of Romans being commented on. I wouldn’t, perhaps, be willing to state this quite this confidently on the basis of this variation unit alone, but there are many more like it.
DeleteGood point.
DeleteAre the other examples of variants in the commentary also matters of the inclusion or exclusion of a comment like this?
Several of them yes. There is also a much more astonishing case that I'll save for a future article/post.
DeleteThank you for this research, Peter. It is fundamental to an understanding of how the text developed. I am firmly of the belief that nothing is new under the sun, and a corollary example in modern times of this willingness to make intentional changes to a text is the posthumous release of private correspondence, in which scandalous passages are softened or even omitted during the process of editing them for publication. In another example, the original text of a written response from General McAuliffe to General von Luttwitz during the Battle of the Bulge is in doubt: was it really "Nuts!" or something more along the lines of the Army translator's "Du kannst zum Teufel gehen?" A lot rides on the reputation of the General for having a clean mouth. And the text of Joyce's Ulysses was so corrupted by editors that reproducing it as written has proved to be an almost insurmountable task, with some two dozen competing editions of the still-extant original manuscript having made it into print.
ReplyDeleteThe willingness to make intentional changes to texts is of course a constant factor in textual transmission. However, texts are changed for many reasons and I think it would be a mistake to lump the avoidance of scandal in with the sorts of changes I’m discussing here. While editing out offensive theological statements certainly occurred in the broader transmission of patristic texts, it does not seem to have been a factor in the textual transformations that occurred in the transmission of the Romans Homilies
ReplyDeleteI made the comparison because these are also changes intended to deceive the reader as to the nature of the original text; adding material to cover for the change to a different lemma text. To soften the blow, as it were, and make the author seem to fall in line with current standards.
DeleteHi Peter,
ReplyDeleteGlad you are working on this. Just some comments:
PJM4: “… it seems sometimes to be forgotten that the task of “proper evaluation” is incomplete without a careful investigation of the manuscript transmission of the work in which a given patristic citation is located.”
PJM4: “…In order to properly evaluate patristic citations, it is not enough to determine from a printed edition that a citation is actually a citation—one must also go behind the edition to consider the stability of the manuscript tradition that underlies it.”
MS: I wish you all the best with that :) I guess the choice is either pick a few verses of biblical text or a few manuscripts. It hurts my soul to think of doing all of the manuscripts for an entire patristic work, for any amount of biblical text, let alone the corpus. Origen was entirely too large to a PhD thesis. I imagine JChrys is similar?
PJM4: “…As a point of comparison, the Textus Receptus and the NA28, normally considered to be at opposite ends of the textual spectrum, differ from each other only eighteen times in the entirety of Romans 8”
MS: I don't think this is surprising. Though I only worked in Origen, he agreed with the joint reading of NA28/TR most of the time. Can you clarify what you mean by "opposite ends"? Have you come across any split readings of JChrys where the earliest reading is likely "mixed"? And how would ou go about deciding that?
Cool work. Best of luck in the future. You are in good hands at ITSEE.
Many thanks,
Matthew Steinfeld
Sorry for the delayed response!
Delete“MS: I wish you all the best with that :) I guess the choice is either pick a few verses of biblical text or a few manuscripts. It hurts my soul to think of doing all of the manuscripts for an entire patristic work, for any amount of biblical text, let alone the corpus. Origen was entirely too large to a PhD thesis. I imagine JChrys is similar?”
PJM: My actual PhD project is a critical edition of Chrysostom’s Romans Homilies. As of today, I have full image sets of all extant and cataloged manuscripts of the work (excluding extracts and derivatives) dating to the 15th century and prior. There are a total of 38 of these, though of course not all of them are fully complete. The work as a whole is slightly longer than the NT. In the forthcoming paper, I’ll provide a full collation of all of these mss, both for the lemma text of Romans 8:33–35 and also for each of the repetitions of any portion of these verses in the work as a whole. One of my long range goals is to utilize the experience of producing an edition of a patristic text to refine the methodology used for patristic citations in general. Better understanding the way Chrysostom’s text was updated will also help us understand the transformations that took place in the text of Romans itself.
“MS: I don't think this is surprising. Though I only worked in Origen, he agreed with the joint reading of NA28/TR most of the time. Can you clarify what you mean by "opposite ends"? Have you come across any split readings of JChrys where the earliest reading is likely "mixed"? And how would you go about deciding that?”
My primary point here isn’t about textual affiliation, but rather about methodology. If, for instance, the next edition of the THGNT decided to cite the NA28 as a textual witness (not something I’m recommending!), there would rightly be an uproar if they took the text of Erasmus as a “close enough” representative of the work of the good folks at Münster. Yet, for the text of Romans 8, such a procedure would result in *significantly* greater accuracy then the methodology currently being used for citations of Chrysostom in the ECM, let alone the UBS.
Thanks for taking the time to read and give thoughtful feedback!