This is too good not to share. I do not know the context of this, but it's from an episode of the popular U.S. sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
I want to honour #AndreBraugher's contribution to New Testament scholarship by remembering the greatest NT textual criticism joke ever to air on television: pic.twitter.com/VtTT8MqYnW
— Isaac T. Soon, PhD (@isaacsoon2) December 13, 2023
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).
Here is a quote I came across today in Kirsopp Lake’s inaugural lecture at the University of Leiden. Note very carefully how Lake argues for the need for conjecture. In the context, he is explaining why he thinks Westcott and Hort failed “spectacularly” in their preference for 01 and 03.It has become more and more probable that Greek MSS. as a whole only represent one type of text and its corruptions, that the Latin Versions and Fathers represent another type, and the Syriac versions a third, while perhaps Clement of Alexandria may provide us with a fourth.From The Influence of Textual Criticism on the Exegesis of the New Testament (1904), pp. 5-7
It is between these texts, and not between individual MSS., that we shall have in the last resort to judge, so that the situation which we must face is that we have to deal with a number of local texts, that no two localities used quite the same text, that no locality has yet been shown to have used a text which is demonstrably better than its rivals, and that no one of these local texts is represented in an uncorrupt form by any single MS.
The effect on the method of the textual critic is enormous. He has no longer the right to suggest that he can immediately edit the original text. He must go back and edit first the local texts. In the case of each locality he has the evidence of the versions used in the local church and of the writers who used them, but it is not very large, and in no case is without traces of corruption. Therefore, the student of these local texts is reduced to the level of the critic of classical texts. In the face of suspected corruption he has the right to use conjectural emendation. It used to be said that the classical student often needed to make use of conjectural emendation, because he had so few and so poor authorities for the text of his authors, but that the biblical student had no such need, because the MSS. of the New Testament were so numerous and so good that primitive corruption was almost unknown. The argument was reasonable, but when we recognize that in reality the text of the Gospels has not much better attestation than have some classical texts, the whole case is altered and the textual critic must be conceded the right of as free emendation in the Gospels as in the Classics. Granted this freedom it will perhaps be possible some day to reconstruct the texts which were in use at the close of the second century in Africa, in Alexandria, in the East, and perhaps elsewhere. None of these have been yet reconstructed : all that we can say is that each as compared with any of the others presents a definite series of interpolations and a definite series of omissions.
I would like to draw our readers' attention to a fine resource for Greek palaeography and codicology: Pyle which aims to
(1) collect scattered resources from various individuals and institutions; and (2) aims to promote interaction among scholars,
students and all other persons interested in ancient and medieval Greek
manuscript books, providing a place to share knowledge, ideas, projects
and news.
