Dormandy: Jesus and the Victory of Manuscripts? A Wrightian Analogy Unpacked

The following is a guest post from Dr. Michael Dormandy who is a Senior Scientist at the Institute for Biblical Studies and Historical Theology, University of Innsbruck, Austria and was mentioned on the blog recently for his forthcoming dissertation on pandects. —Ed.

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I recently came across the following striking passage in one of N. T. Wright’s more recent academic books:

Just as the massive nineteenth-century advances in discovering and collating early manuscripts led to major revisions of the text of the New Testament (resisted in some quarters, partly on the grounds that if God had wanted us to have this new text he would have given it to us a lot sooner), so the major twentieth-century advances in our knowledge of the ancient Jewish world, of which the discovery of the Qumran scrolls is just one example, have opened up new possibilities and insights which systematic theology has barely noticed but cannot afford, in my view, to resist or discount. (History and Eschatology, p. 119)

The analogy comes in the context of an argument for the theological relevance of empirical historical research into Jesus and the New Testament. If we really believe that God has entered our world as the human being Jesus, a Jewish carpenter-turned-Rabbi, then we should be able to learn a lot about God by studying in detail the historical evidence for the first-century world(s) in which he lived. Similarly, if we really believe God has spoken through the letters of another human being, the first-century Jewish man, Paul, then the same conclusion follows. If we don’t believe we can understand Jesus and Paul better by studying their cultural and historical context, we have in effect stopped believing they were normal human beings. This methodology has fueled Wright’s ground-breaking work for decades.

A similar conviction drives confessional Protestant textual-critics. If we really believe that God has particularly spoken through human literary works, written in the first-century but without surviving autographs, we should be able to learn a lot about God through studying our earliest and best evidence for the text of those works. It is no secret however that Wright’s work has been controversial, not least in those evangelical circles which have enthusiastically accepted the results of modern textual criticism. Wright appears in the passage quoted to hint that there is an inconsistency here. If modern manuscript discoveries can be allowed to alter the traditional text, they should also be allowed to alter its traditional interpretation.

We must not, of course, assume too great an analogy. Just because the last 150 years have seen us discover both many interesting manuscript sources for late second-temple Judaism and many early and important NT manuscripts, this does not mean that new readings and ideas built on these discoveries are equally persuasive. It is a striking historical coincidence that hordes of manuscripts were discovered both at Oxyrhynchus and at Qumran within a century of each other, but that does not mean both hordes are equally significant. However, for those who reject Wright’s theological conclusions, while still treasuring their modern critical editions of the NT, his challenge has bite. We are willing to allow new manuscript discoveries to influence the text of the Bibles we read. If we are consistent, we should be open to the possibility that new discoveries about the context of the NT could give new insights into what those Bibles mean.

New Book: Building a Book of Books

My thanks to Michael Dormandy to alerting me that the published version of his Cambridge thesis will soon be out as vol. 54 in the ANTF series from de Gruyter.

Building a Book of Books: Textual Characteristics of the Early Greek Majuscule Pandects 

Michael Dormandy

This book analyses how the early Greek whole-Bible manuscripts (pandects) change and preserve the text. Dormandy refutes the method based on singular readings and so investigates all the ways in which each pandect differs from the initial text, both changes introduced by its own scribe and by the scribes of earlier manuscripts. He surveys sample chapters in John, Romans, Revelation, Sirach and Judges (including discussing the “new finds” of Sinaiticus). Dormandy’s observations of Codex Ephraemi challenge accepted transcriptions. Dormandy argues that Sinaiticus and Vaticanus may plausibly have been made in response to commissions by Constantine and Constans. Dormandy concludes that generally, across all the Biblical books considered, the pandects preserve the initial text well. Transcriptional and linguistic variations are more common than harmonisations or changes of content. The more precise profiles of each manuscript vary between Biblical books. The pandects thus create bibliographic unity from textual diversity. This shows their significance in the history of the Christian Bible: they reflect in bibliographic form the hermeneutical move to consider all the books of the Christian Bible as one corpus.

Some of you may remember Michael's 2018 article in TC on the question of canon and codex. Congrats to Dr. Dormandy!

Evidence of Canon Formation from Work-Combinations in NT Manuscripts?

Questions over the history of the formation of the New Testament canon continue to occupy researchers. While Dan Brown continues to promote the popular view that the Council of Nicaea or similar council determined the canon of scripture (see my post here on the history of this myth), scholarship has not submitted to such reductionism. Instead, scholars continue to study canon lists, early Christian citations, manuscript contents, and other kinds of testimonia such as early Christian statements on their own biblical theory in order to assess the historical formation of the canon. Given the state of research on these questions, a recent article in TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism by Michael Dormandy entitled, “How the Books Became the Bible The Evidence for Canon Formation from Work-Combinations in Manuscripts,” is a welcomed addition to the growing body of literature.