tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17859011.post52320049829827765..comments2024-03-28T19:21:17.654+00:00Comments on Evangelical Textual Criticism: An example of how older editions mislead us about patristic citationsP.J. Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04388225485348300613noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17859011.post-76170154785801650482019-10-05T11:48:12.914+01:002019-10-05T11:48:12.914+01:00Also, there's a problem I've seen in Augus...Also, there's a problem I've seen in Augustine, where there has been a tradition of "correcting" his citations of scripture—so it would not remotely surprise me if older editions of so contested a figure as Origen opaquely used a phrase not original to the author, complicating the exegetical task of comparison.Matthew Frosthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10232613079168523464noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17859011.post-21451452631367908332019-10-04T15:28:23.477+01:002019-10-04T15:28:23.477+01:00Thanks for this great illustration of the complexi...Thanks for this great illustration of the complexity of citing patristic quotations as textual witnesses (which doesn't only affect older editions, but modern ones too).<br /><br />I think there's more yet than you say (unless I missed it, which I may have, since the way I had to keep scrolling down on this blog post brought to my recollection the opening scene of Space Balls--and that's a good thing).<br /><br />The fact that both of these patristic quotations are instances of fathers quoting OT texts is very important. It means that they were somewhat bound by the wording of the manuscripts of those texts they were using. I would not use these cases as evidence for the level of familiarity either these fathers or scribes of their day had with the particular turns of phrase used. For that kind of evidence I would want to rely on what the fathers say when they're composing the words themselves. When they were commenting on a Greek translation of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures, they had to wrestle with idioms that were not their own.<br /><br />The fact that the only patristic examples of form of the phrase that the THGNT adopts are in two places where the fathers are quoting the OT (and that's if this is even true that this is the form they quoted, which I fully grant in light of your post, is up for debate) does support the conclusion that they were not especially comfortable with this form of the phrase. The fact that it's debatable that they even did use this form of the phrase in these two instances makes this conclusion even better supported.<br /><br />On the other hand, this raises the question of how confident we can be that there aren't other patristic uses of this phrase. Your post shows us that a TLG search isn't enough to show us whether or not a particular phrase has patristic attestation. So, just as places where the TLG gave us hits for this one form of a phrase, even though some witnesses for these passages of the fathers attest another wording, so also there may be places where the TLG did not give us hits for this phrase, because the text TLG used had another wording, but where some textual witnesses for the passages where the TLG gives another wording support the wording that we're looking for.<br /><br />In other words, additional TLG searches for the other wordings of this phrase, so that the hits that bring those up can be investigated the same way you did for those two passages, by looking at critical editions (which, alas, may not even exist), would be warranted.<br /><br />And we see how complicated the use of patristic quotations in textual criticism can be.<br /><br />Also, it wasn't the point of your post, but these same examples would serve well to illustrate the usefulness and difficulty of using patristic quotations in textual criticism of Greek versions of the OT books, and I think looking at this side of it would raise some more questions.Eric Rowehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13379106188046530722noreply@blogger.com