New Book in the Pipeline: Liturgy and the Living Text of the New Testament

Image from the colloquium by
Ian Nelson Mills (can you see me?).

Another new book on New Testament textual criticism is in the making: Liturgy and the Living Text of the New Testament: Papers from the Tenth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament edited by H. A. G. Houghton, Text and Studies 3.16 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2018).

Publisher’s description:

The textual history of the New Testament is a dynamic tradition, reflecting differing readings, interpretations and uses of its canonical writings. Twenty years after the publication of D.C. Parker’s celebrated volume The Living Text of the Gospels, the papers in this collection provide further insight into the lives of the New Testament text. One especially important focus for the New Testament as “living text” is its use in Christian worship: individual chapters examine the importance of liturgical manuscripts in Coptic and Greek traditions, alongside consideration of broader themes related to the lectionary text. Several famous biblical passages are the subject of extended treatment, including the Pericope de Adultera, Jesus’ teaching on the Temple in Mark, and the Lukan genealogy. The contributions represent original research by an international range of scholars, first presented at the Tenth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament.

I am very pleased to have received proofs a few days ago of my chapter which will open the volume, “Was There and Alexandrian Recension of the Living Text of the Gospels?,” in which I interact with Parker’s Living Text as well as the question of an Alexandrian textual recension, an issue that has received some attention after Brent Nongbri’s recent redating of Papyrus 75.

A few other blogposts related to the topic of my article here, here and here 

Here you can read all about the wonderful colloquium organized by Hugh Houghton who is also the editor of the volume.

Hurtado on The Early Text of the New Testament

Larry Hurtado has had time to work his way through the 21 contributions of C.E. Hill & M.J. Kruger (eds), The Early Text of the New Testament (Oxford: OUP, 2012), and concludes his positive review:

This volume (though expensive!) is now probably the most up to date analysis of earliest evidence about the state and transmission of NT writings in the second century CE.  Given the limitations of our evidence, scholars are required to make the best inferences they can.  This volume provides essential resources in doing so, and largely shows that we can with some confidence posit that the NT writings, essentially as we know them, were copied for both ecclesial and private reading.

 At the SBL, two other scholars told me in passing that they were reviewing the book, one of which were Brice Jones, and the other one I cannot remember.

Speaking of the early text of the NT, one issue that I have described as controversial is whether the text of Codex Vaticanus – the single manuscript which is probably closest to the text of NA28 (96% similarity in the Catholic Letters) – goes back to a recension or rather reflects a strict transmission.

In Eldon Epp's “The Twentieth-Century Interlude in New Testament Textual Criticism,” in Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism (ed. E. J. Epp and G. D. Fee; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 103, he noted that with the publication of P75, the issue of whether the “Neutral” (or Alexandrian) text or text type is the result of a recension or of a strict transmission was not resolved, but pushed back into the second century.

Now that I read through Eldon Epp's new chapter on "Textual Clusters: Their Past and Future" in the second edition of The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research. Essays on the Status Questionis, 544, I note a small, but important shift:

That finding [of P75] was sufficient to render invalid any view of B as a mid-fourth century recension; rather, the B-text cluster had been moved back in time a century and a half and strongly solidified. Also, the long history of NT textual recensions, in the technical sense, clearly had been terminated.

Now I heard that Brent Nongbri has just proposed (at the SBL in Chicago) that P75 might be dated to the fifth century(!), so perhaps the recension issue will see a revival. On the other hand, there are many other papyri attesting to a strict text (á la Alands), and, as Epp puts it (p. 553), "the B-cluster is supported also by third- and fourth-century pastristic sources, and with impressive secondary Greek and versional members," so I don't know.

Update: I might have misunderstood Nongbri's proposal; it might have been the fourth century. We will have to wait for the publication.