The following post is from Paolo Trovato who has been a welcome contributor to the comments the last few months. It can be good to have an outside perspective sometimes and that is what Paolo gives us. For those who need an introduction to his work, see my interview
here and
here.
Dear all,
Even though I don’t belong to your community, I am really interested in your posts and comments. One of the aspects that strikes me is the following position, which seems to be a very popular position in Greek NT studies: We have so many MSS that at least one of them must preserve the original reading of any passage of NT.
I only quote two different but clear examples of similar statements
PG: “it is assumed that manuscripts to which we don’t have access contained original readings. But if we don’t have access to them, how do we know they had original readings? From the argument as stated, we don’t. We need other evidence.”
MAR: “there is a reason to postulate a greater likelihood of the original reading being present in our existing MSS, and that indeed is the quantity of extant data that has been preserved — particularly in contrast to the extremely limited number of works of Latin antiquity (or even Greek classical antiquity) that virtually force conjecture by their paucity.
To put it statistically: even assuming, say, that 60% of all Greek NT MSS that ever existed have been lost, the odds remain extremely favorable that the remaining MSS would preserve in relative proportion the same readings that might have appeared in those now-lost documents; if so, then there is no good reason to postulate much if any supposed “loss” of original readings as matters now stand.”
(Both quotations are drawn from
a very interesting post of last January.)
I have probably already bored some of you with my partial attempts of applying to the textual criticism of Greek NT some standard approaches of genealogical textual scholars of Classical and Romance literature. For those who are still interested in a comparison with different textual schools and methodologies I will try, very briefly, to explain why, in my opinion, these positions don’t seem very likely.
- The message of the Gospels was so new, moving and fascinating that it created very soon a strong interest (i.e. a strong demand of copies), but also persecution, theological opposition among the faithful, different degrees of standardization etc.
- There is a gap of centuries between the lost original(s) and the lost first copies of the Gospels and the few oldest extant witnesses
- Every act of copying produces fresh innovations., mostly but not always insignificant. No witness is a Xerox copy of its exemplar. In the domain of classic and Romance transmissions, four or five major, significant innovations every 10 pages seem a realistic rate for the progressive entropy of the textual transmission of any not too short text. So, a copy of 4th rank should feature 4 or 5 × 4 (= 20 or 25) significant innovations every 10 pages.
- In the first decades of printed books (1470–1530), every time we happen to know the runs of a book and we look for its extant copies, we find a loss rate of about 85% or 90%. I suspect that, the value T(ime) being higher for Greek NT MSS, their loss rate must be higher than that of the printed books of the Renaissance.
- Let’s suppose that after the original(s) of NT, there existed 3 copies of 1st rank, 9 copies of 2nd rank, 27 copies of 3rd rank, 81 copies of 4th, 243 copies of 5th rank, 729 copies of 6th rank, that is, a complete tree of 1,092 copies. (I will stop here for the sake of simplicity, even if I imagine that the complete tree, that is, ALL the MSS of Greek NT that ever existed were probably no less than 20,000). If we assume an optimistic random loss rate of 90%, the extant MSS should be 98 out of 1,092.
Even without introducing other factors (the obsolescence of materials, the old fashion layout etc.), mere math suggests that most of the extant MSS must belong to ranks 5 and 6 (972 out of 1,092 MSS). It is probable that only one or no MS of ranks 1 and 2 (12 MSS) could survive to a rate loss of 90%. But even if a couple from these ranks was preserved nowadays, they should present 4 to 10 major innovations every 10 pages. No need to say that most of the surviving MSS must belong to rank 6 and that, as a rule, they should be marred by a good number of innovations.
Therefore, I would say that, at least in a few passages, not even my colleagues devoted to textual criticism of the Greek NT, can feel completely freed from the awkward problem of conjectural emendation.
(By the way, Dante’s
Commedia, which I have been studying for 15 years, is transmitted by 600 extant MSS plus 200 fragments. Notwithstanding the fact that the oldest extant witnesses are only 15 years later than the completion of the work, a few passages do exist in which emendation is really necessary).
