Sung: How Kurt Aland Got Two Votes on the UBS Committee

The following is an email sent to me by Felix Sung and shared here with his permission. I have confirmed the gist of this second-hand account with another student of Dr. Bob Lyon. I would be happy to have others add any firsthand knowledge.

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I read with interest your Aug 4, 2016 post on Kurt Aland’s opposition to voting in the ECM and the comments on the apparent inconsistency between his stated opposition to voting and his membership on the UBS editorial committee. I think I can shed a little light, albeit second hand, on the backstory.

I was a M.Div. (academic track) student at Asbury Theological Seminary from 1985–1988, during which I took five or six courses (several of which were independent studies) in NT TC with Robert W. Lyon [MA (Princeton) in NT TC under Metzger; Ph.D. (St. Andrews) in NT TC under Matthew Black (Diss. A Re-examination of Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, 1958)].

Dr. Lyon—Bob, as he insisted we call him—served as Recording Secretary for the UBS Committee from 1957–1961 and claimed to have been present for the negotiations that led to a “gentlemen’s agreement” (Bob’s phrase) that resulted in UBS and NA printing the identical text.

The story, as Bob recounted it, is that during the runup to publication of UBS 1, Metzger and Black got wind of a rumor that Kurt Aland—without having informed either Nida or the Committee—was preparing a new edition of NA that he planned to publish after the UBS was published, but which would reflect his critical judgments alone, without regard to whether or not those judgments agreed with those of the Committee.

When confronted by Metzger and Black, Aland admitted that that was indeed the case, at which point Metzger and Black demanded that the NA text be identical to the UBS text, believing (probably rightly) that, since the NA text, with its fuller critical apparatus, was at the time—and in many circles still is—considered the “scholarly” text, it would reflect negatively on their competence if the NA text differed from the UBS text, i.e., Aland would be saying, in effect, “Here’s what the UBS text should have been, except I was outvoted by those other incompetent boobs.”

Aland refused.

Metzger and Black went to Eugene Nida (American Bible Society’s Executive Secretary for Translations, who organized and oversaw the workings of the UBS Committee, “who also took part in Committee discussions, especially those relating to major decisions of policy and method,” Preface to UBS 1) and threatened to resign from the Committee.

Nida, who to this point knew nothing of Aland’s plan, and seeing years of work, planning, and tremendous expense about to go up in flames, put the screws to Aland and got him to agree to publish a text identical to that of the UBS … but not before Aland had extracted his “pound of flesh”—Matthew Black’s expression, according to Bob, for the concession Nida made to get Aland’s agreement. That is, Nida agreed that Aland’s view would be printed in the body of the text whenever the Committee deadlocked on which variant represented the “original” or “best” reading. In effect, Nida gave Aland two votes in those instances, meaning that whenever the Committee was evenly divided on a reading or split 3–2 with Aland in the minority, Aland’s view ended up in the text, because he could use his second vote to break the tie or force a deadlock. (This naturally raises the question of whether or not the other Committee members ever “ganged up” against Aland to ensure that one of his pet readings didn’t make it into the text.)

Incidentally, Bob—whom Metzger arranged to have fill in for him at Princeton while Metzger was on sabbatical in 1964 to work on the Textual Commentary—speculated that the phrasing “Some members … others” and the “A majority of the Committee … a minority …” in the Textual Commentaries was Metzger’s way of indicating the places where Aland exercised his second vote to prevail against the simple majority of the Committee.

The Textual Optimism of the UBS4

The grading system for variants in the UBS editions is probably its most distinctive feature. These ratings rank from A to D and indicate the relative level of certainty the editors felt in their decision (A being the most confident). I suspect this system has been a help to many translators over the years. For myself, the system is a rare and welcome peek behind the editorial curtain to one of our most important (and bestselling?) editions.

Over time, however, there is a noticeable and well-documented shift in these ratings without any additional explanation or justification. For example, the reading of Eph 5.22 is given a C in the UBS3 and a B in UBS4, but the textual commentary for this decision remains word-for-word the same. Kent Clarke called this “textual optimism” and his work on this is well worth consulting. (See the helpful summary from Mark Ward here.)

What I didn’t realize until today is that several of the editors owned up to this “textual optimism” and wrote about it even before the UBS4 was in print. Kurt and Barbara Aland say as much in their Text of the New Testament. On p. 45, they write about the UBS3 that “The only question is whether the editors have not been too cautious in applying the classifications, so that a B should often be replaced by an A, a C by a B, and a D by a C (a thorough reexamination has led to a revision of these for the fourth edition of GNT).” It does lead one to wonder how much responsibility for the increased textual optimism is the responsibility of the Alands.

Kurt Aland against Voting in the ECM

This is from Aland’s 1970 article “Novi Testamenti Graeci Editio Maior Critica: Der gegenwärtige Stand der Arbeit an einer neuen grossen kritischen Ausgabe des Neuen Testamentes,” NTS 16 (1970): 163–77 which layed out the rationale for the ECM:

It is one of the editors—K. Aland—who is responsible for the editing of this text. Of course, all major issues will be advised by the circle of editors and co-editors. But it seemed impossible to determine the text in a voting system by majority decision. This is indeed fashionable [modern] (and in the hand editions of the Bible Societies even understandable), but such a procedure contradicts not only all philological principles but it also leads in all experiences to an average text. (p. 166)

If I have my chronology right, this was written when Aland was already part of the UBS committee. Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain what makes the difference between a hand-edition and a major critical edition such that a committee is good for one and not the other. It seems a bit inconsistent.

Aland (second from right) with the UBS committee.

Video of the Opening of the Bible Museum in Münster

I found this in an old draft post which I never posted. In addition to the general interest, it contains a very full and frank interview with Kurt Aland which is worth listening to.

What does CBGM actually stand for?

Last Monday, when Peter Head, Peter Gurry, and yours truly were having a good old conversation with the Münster folk deep in the heart of the Institute itself, we were playing around with the CBGM as a universal method for the past and present. I claimed that the true CBGM is practiced at Tyndale House, since a correct interpretation of the abbreviation yields ‘Coffee Based Greek Method’.

Not to be outdone, our German colleagues retorted that the CBGM as the Coherence Based Genealogical Method had already an earlier incarnation in the days of Kurt Aland himself when the approach was pretty much the ‘Cigar Based Genealogical Method’. There are even rumours that the smoke detectors in the strictly non-smoking building were adjusted to tolerate Kurt Aland’s persistent flaunting of the rules. Wonderful!