New Book: Can We Recover the Original Text of the New Testament?

Released last week is a new book edited by Abidan Shah and Dave Black called Can We Recover the Original Text of the New Testament?. It includes all the papers given last year at Abidan’s church conference (more on that here and here). 

Notably, the contributors all answer yes to the book’s title but disagree on how best to identify the original text. In this way, the book serves as a kind of update to Dave Black’s 2002 book Rethinking New Testament Textual Criticism, a book I cut my methodological teeth on. A huge thanks to Abidan and Dave for editing this and especially to Abidan and his staff for spearheading the conference.

Here is the publisher’s description:

In recent decades, the traditional definition of the original text of the New Testament (NT) has shifted from seeking one singular text to seeking a number of texts. Instead of one “authorial” text, now it is claimed that it could be one of several different texts based on their locations in the history of transmission: preauthorial, authorial, canonical, and postcanonical. These distinctions were first listed by Eldon Epp in his article “The Multivalence of the Term ‘Original Text’ in New Testament Textual Criticism” as “predecessor,” “autographic,” “canonical,” and “interpretive” text-forms. It is apparent that with such changing definitions of the original text of the NT, text-critics are ambivalent regarding reaching the traditional goal of NT textual criticism. Instead, attention is now given towards hypothesizing regarding the emergence of the variant readings. Furthermore, any attempt towards utilizing text-critical principles to reach the original text is looked upon as being out of date and pointless. All such shifting definitions of the original text and the ensuing claims have far-reaching consequences for biblical faith and praxis. 

In this work, three different scholars will present their methodologies for retrieving the original text of the NT. No matter how each of the presenters evaluates the text-critical evidence, it is obvious that they all believe in the inerrancy and retrievability of the NT text.

Table of contents:

Ehrman’s Definition of Textual Criticism

Following our discussion of that Dan Wallace quote about not being overly skeptical about identifying the original text of the NT, here’s a recent series Bart Ehrman has started about textual criticism on his blog. The first post introduces the subject. I draw attention to it because two things stood out to me: (1) his definition, which is quite traditional, and (2) his overall confidence in identifying the original text.

First, his definition:

Textual criticism is the technical and highly specialized discipline that works to reconstruct the original text and to figure out how, when, where, and why it got changed.

Then, his confidence, with his emphasis:

Scholars who engage in this work are not as a rule insanely pessimistic about the possibilities of getting back to a pretty close approximation of the original text in most cases. That is to say – some people reading my books have not picked up on this enough – there are good reasons for thinking that most of the time we can get back to a fair approximation of what ancient authors wrote, even if there are places (sometimes many places) (and sometimes many very important places) where there are real grounds for doubt.

We could probably reflect on why not everyone has picked up on this enough from his books, but let’s let that go for now. I suspect Bart and I would disagree a bit on how many “very important” places where variation affects the NT text (I don’t think Mark 1:1, for instance changes Mark’s Christology in any way), but that’s a matter of degree, it seems. We probably also still disagree on whether these uncertainties are defeaters for inspiration and inerrancy and that’s a significant disagreement. But it’s nice to highlight agreement with Bart on this blog when we can so that’s what this post is for.

The Goal(s) of New Testament Textual Criticism

Recently, my co-blogger Peter Gurry participated in a conversation on the topic of how Christians should approach textual criticism and textual variation in manuscripts in a podcast hosted by Josh Gibbs (here and here).

In the wake of the debate between the participants, Jeff Riddle, a reformed baptist pastor in Virginia and proponent of the Textus Receptus, appeals on his blog (here) to my recent book (with Jennifer Knust) To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story (Princeton, 2019) as proof of David C. Parker’s great influence on the discipline in recent years, and more particular, “the postmodern shift that has taken place in contemporary text criticism and the abandonment of any certainty with respect to the reconstruction of the autograph.”

It is true that the focus of our book is not on the initial text of the pericope adulterae (to reconstruct the text of this story), although we do touch on that matter. Neither is the focus on the initial text of John, although we make very clear our opinion that the pericope adulterae is not a part of the initial text of John and why, where and how we think it entered John at a later stage. The authenticity of the pericope adulterae, on the other hand, was the focus of a symposium at SEBTS a few years ago, where I actually met Jeff Riddle in the audience (conference volume here).

In To Cast the First Stone, however, we are interested in how the pericope adulterae traveled in the history of transmission as we explain in the first chapter:

Our interpretation therefore begins not with the search for an original or initial text but with the available textual objects, each of which tells its own story, and with the readings of these distinctive objects by the communities that produced and interpreted them. (p. 46)

The point I would like to clarify in this blogpost – which I also had to clarify in the review session of the book at the SBL in Denver 2018 in conversation with Bart Ehrman – was that I think it is a big mistake to think that one perspective, or goal of textual criticism must exclude the other. For me it is not an “either-or” but rather it is a “both-and.” I am interested in both the initial text and the whole history of the text. I pointed out that my other recent book, the introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, co-written with Peter Gurry in 2017, is very focused on the initial text, as we explain the new method used for the Novum Testamentum Graecum Editio Critica Maior (and in extension future Nestle-Aland editions) to reconstruct the critical text of the Greek New Testament.

I have had to repeat this point over and over again, because there are clearly scholars who are “either-or”-oriented on both sides and want to play out their perspective against the other. There are those who stick to their reconstructed or received text and pay less attention to textual variants (they are of binary character, to use Eldon Epp’s language, either in or out), and, conversely, there are scholars disinterested in the classic goal of textual criticism – to reconstruct an initial (or original) text – and this is true for textual criticism in general. With a renewed focus on material culture, ancient media studies, New Philology and Digital Humanities we have seen a resurgence of interest in manuscripts (texts and paratexts), scribes and textual variants (as “windows”into the social history of Christianity), etc., but I would like to see this as a broadening of the field where different perspectives can be mutually fruitful.

I am now delighted to see that the current issue of Early Christianity is devoted to “New Testament Textual Criticism: The State of the Question.” In the opening article, “New Testament Textual Criticism in 2020: A (Selective) Survey of the Status Questionis,” nestor and co-blogger Michael W. Holmes, describes the field, incidentally by focusing on two recent publications, the Editio Critica Maior of Acts and To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story.

I want to conclude this blogpost by citing from Holmes’ fourth section, a discussion of the scope or goal(s) of New Testament textual criticism, where he eloquently expresses what I am trying to convey:

The “debate” about whether New Testament textual criticism has a single goal or multiple goals – in effect, a conversation between those who tend to lose interest in variants once they prove to be secondary, and those who view the “afterlives” of (at least some) secondary readings as a worthy topic of research – is unlikely to reach a definitive conclusion, largely because it involves a matter of opinion rather than fact. Furthermore, the conversation goes astray to the extent that it frames the debate as an “either-or” question. To be sure, determining the form of the earliest text(s) to which we have access will usually carry some degree of diachronic or logical priority in that it provides a point of reference from which to discern and assess later developments in the history of the text. At the same time, the study of the variant forms of texts that influenced and shaped the individuals and communities that read and valued these texts is no less worthy of investigation; indeed, as Knust and Wasserman demonstrate, sometimes the variant forms had far more impact than the earlier form(s). That the study of the variant forms may at some point seem more wirkungsgeschichtlich than text-critical does not change the fact that both creation and reception are important aspects of the life of a text, and equally worthy of study. The decision to focus on one, the other, or both is a matter of personal preference: those who wish to focus on a single goal, per the tradition, are free to do so, as are those who prefer to define the matter more broadly. (p. 13–14)

What goes around comes around

Sometimes we need to know the history of our discipline better. In his brief bio of Kirsopp Lake in the Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters, J. K. Elliott writes,

The link between textual criticism and interpretation was one already made by Lake as early as 1904 with his study The Influence of Textual Criticism on the Exegesis of the New Testament. This was based on the inaugural lecture he gave on January 27, 1904, at the University of Leiden, and it shows how he made that theme pivotal for this professorial appointment. It has taken nearly a century for his general thesis that textual variants must be used as an invaluable source for our study of the history of the church to bear fruit in a determined way. B. D. Ehrman, following Lake’s example, published The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture in 1993... That book was justifiably well reviewed, but for many readers it was as if such opinions were new. Lake had already been preaching some ninety years earlier that text critics had a duty to do more than establish a supposed original text. According to Lake, exegetes must expound the meaning not only of one printed text but also of the ecclesiastical Bible in use at different times, and to see textual variants as a window on the exegesis of the church. To do that, they need to keep a close eye on the critical apparatus (pp. 637–638).

Here is a taste of Lake on this point:

In the first place, he will need to expound the meaning, not of Westcott and Hort’s text, but of the ecclesiastical Bibles in use at different times; for I take it that to explain what a passage in the Gospels ought philologically to mean, or what it probably did mean originally, is only the beginning of exegesis: we need to know what the early Church thought it meant and how it altered its wording in order to emphasize its meaning (pp. 11–12).

Publication and Textual Criticism

1st-2nd cent. inkwell (credit)

M.D.C. Larsen, ‘Accidental Publication, Unfinished Texts and the Traditional Goals of New Testament Textual Criticism’ JSNT 39 (2017), 362–387.

Abstract:  Notions of ‘authorship’, ‘publication’ and ‘final text’ are often mentioned in traditional textual criticism, but less frequently discussed in detail. The projects of source and redaction criticism end and textual criticism begins based on when scholars imagine a text was finished. Yet modern notions of publication, textuality and authorship, which are largely shaped by the printing press, are often anachronistically applied to the ancient world. Exploring evidence from Plato to 4 Ezra to Tertullian and Augustine, I take up the question of when a text was considered ‘final’ by reconsidering what counted as publication in the ancient world. Once the assumption of textual finalization is set aside, the tools traditionally associated with textual, source and redaction criticism become unhelpful. While textual critics have noted the practical impossibilities of arriving at the ‘original text’, I demonstrate the conceptual roadblocks to imagining an ‘original’ and ‘final’ text in the ancient world.

In this article Larsen discusses examples of “textual unfinishedness” and accidental publication in antiquity in order to further complexify (or from his apparent perspective, rule out of court completely) the notion of the original or initial (published) text (especially in dialogue with Michael Holmes). Examples from a variety of ancient sources suggest to Larsen that accidental publication (i.e. publication of unfinished notes or the like) was ‘common’ (p. 372), ‘fairly common and widespread’ (p 372). He also discusses revisions and multiple versions of literary works, suggesting that for such texts a ‘living text’ model is better than ‘a final and fixed book’ model for discussing its textual development. This has, for Larsen, implications for New Testament textual criticism:

‘The prevalence of accidental publication, stolen texts and author variants simultaneously identifies and destabilizes one of the foundational assumptions of traditional textual criticism: without the assumption of a text existing in a final form, the boundaries between text, form and redaction criticism fall apart. Ancient writing practices and the prevalence of textual fluidity invite us to rethink some foundational categories and ideas of the discipline.’ (p. 376)

An obvious example, for Larsen, is the gospel attributed to Mark, which could be thought of as ‘unfinished textual raw material’ – ‘an open and unfinished gospel tradition’ (p. 378). (Larsen notes for further evidence and discussion his forthcoming book Before the Book: The Earliest Gospels (New York: Oxford University Press), which is presumably related to his 2017 Yale doctorate). Broadly he doesn’t think that the conceptualisation of publication is a useful category for discussing ‘the traditionary processes of revising a fluid text’ (pp. 379–380). The gospels, in particular, ‘are not the kind of texts that had originals’ (p. 379). Publication, for Larsen ‘was only notional and so existed only as a social construct’ (p. 376 – I’m not sure what this means).

I found it an interesting article. I wasn’t convinced that the evidence discussed showed ‘the prevalence of textual fluidity’ (as opposed to some form of publication, since even the authors he discusses presume the appropriateness of the distinction). I’m certainly not convinced that that gospels ‘are not the kind of texts that had originals’ – I don’t see the point in opposing one extreme caricature – ‘a single authoritative original text’ with a caricature at the other extreme; nor do I think we should conceptualise all the canonical gospels in the same way (which is another way of saying I look forward to hearing the argument of his book at some point). I do think it is helpful to think about the way that different genres functioned in antiquity, and I do wonder about the prevalence of epistolary notions (where a single original text is assumed by the genre) in our broader conceptualisations of how the New Testament text functions (this is not raised by Larsen, except to disagree with it briefly). Anyway, plenty to discuss.

Of Works and Artifacts, or Why You Can Touch up the Sistine Chapel but not Codex Sinaiticus

Workers restore the scene “original sin”
in the Sistine Chapel (photo credit)

What makes it wrong to alter a great manuscript but not a great painting? I think many of us instinctively know there’s a difference but would not be able to articulate what it is. The best answer I’ve found rests on the difference between the nature of a literary work and a painting. The difference is important because it has implications for how we think about recovering literary works from the past. G. Thomas Tanselle explains:

The painting exists at a single location, and one has nowhere else to go to find the work except that one place.... In contrast, a piece of paper with a text of a poem written on it does not constitute a work of literature, and therefore any alterations one makes in the manuscript do not automatically alter the work. If one cleans a dirty spot on a manuscript and reveals a word not legible before, the word is unquestionably a part of the text of the document, but it is not necessarily a part of the literary work nor, for that matter, is any other word in the document, for the work can only be reconstituted through the application of critical judgment to each element of every surviving text (even if there is only one, and it is the only one there has ever been). Similarly, if one touches up a manuscript by writing over an indistinct word or by marking out a word and entering another, one is certainly altering the document, but one does not thereby change the work. Such alteration of documents is regarded, by all who revere historical evidence, as a scandalous activity; but the equivalent alteration of paintings, frescoes, and sculptures is frequently advocated by responsible scholars, deeply committed to the recovery of the past. The ethics of altering artifacts shifts in the second situation because the work and the artifact inhabit the same body, and the work is considered more important. (A Rationale of Textual Criticism, pp. 27-28)

My favorite question that gets at the heart of the matter is the one asked by Paul Eggert: “If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where is Hamlet?” (Securing the Past, p. 215). We could just as well ask, “If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where is the Bible?” It seems to me that textual criticism of the Bible is an attempt to answer the latter question.

Definitions of Textual Criticism

Nick Norelli provides a listing of various quotes about the purpose of textual criticism (though part of some debate as to whether or not TC seeks to identify the inerrant originals).