Review of UBS6 in Themelios

The latest issue of Themelios is a special issue dedicated to D.A. Carson and the influential NSBT series he edited for three decades. The bulk of the issue is taken up by key authors from the series who summarize and reflect on their volumes. If you’ve never heard of the NSBT series, this would be a great way into it.

But this is not a blog about biblical theology so we’ll save that for another place. Instead, this blog post is to alert you to my review of UBS6 that is also in this issue. I am thankful to the editors who let me go a little longer than the typical Themelios review. Here’s the introduction

First published in 1966, the UBS Greek New Testament hits its 60th birthday this year. It has long been the preferred hand edition for its intended audience of translators, students, and pastors. The arrival of this new, sixth edition is a major publishing event, especially as it is accompanied by a completely new textual commentary (reviewed separately). So much has changed with this edition that it can fairly be called the most significant update to the UBS edition in fifty years (when the third edition was first linked with the Nestle-Aland). By way of review, we can highlight the salient changes under the following headings: editors, format, text, and apparatus.

And part of the conclusion: 

I expect this edition to increase the UBS’s already loyal fan base, especially among those new to the Greek New Testament. If I have an overriding concern, it is that the apparatus surrenders too much in the process so that those of us accustomed to leaning on the UBS for its extra detail will now have to go elsewhere, perhaps all the way to the ECM. But all editions have their limits, and this one is no different. It makes for an excellent hand edition, one that is well conceived and well executed, and promises to carry on the UBS legacy for many years to come—perhaps another sixty.

The only thing I would add is that I’ve now been using the UBS6 since I picked it up at SBL in November and I have really enjoyed it. I love the thinner size, the better typeface, the much cleaner page, and the simplified introduction. I would dare to say that the changes make this a true competitor to the THGNT in terms of simplicity and easy of use—especially for new students. I am myself a proponent of the NA, so I won’t be abandoning that any time soon. But I have adopted the THGNT for my first year Greek students the last few years and I am now thinking carefully about switching to this. I like that it has the visual benefits of THGNT, but with a better apparatus. Personally, I have been using UBS6 whenever I want to enjoy the simple pleasure of reading without distraction.

This same issue of Themelios also has reviews of the accompanying textual commentary by Thomas Haviland-Pabst and Kruger’s new volume on miniature codices by Ched Spellman. I will also be reviewing the commentary for JTS and have just been approved to present a combined review of UBS6 and the textual commentary at ETS this fall in Denver. If you are a glutton for reviews, come along.

Videos on Bible History from Amsterdam

Just this week, John Meade and I returned from a 2-week trip to Amsterdam to do some speaking and teaching at Tyndale Seminary in the Netherlands. We had a wonderful time there with pastors, leaders, and students and were encouraged to see the work being done there. (My only disappointment was that they had no statue of their most famous graduate, Dirk Jongkind!) If you are looking for an excellent evangelical seminary in Europe with a vision for global ministry, be sure to consider it.

The Preachers and Leaders conference we spoke at was also the occasion for the release of Scribes & Scripture in Dutch. One of the most exciting features of that for us as authors is that the Dutch version includes two new chapters by Paulus-Jan Kieviet. 

John and I with Marcel the publisher (left, middle) and Paulus-Jan (right, middle) who added two chapters.

Paulus-Jan works with Wycliffe/SIL and added chapters on the Bible in Dutch and the Bible in contemporary global translation work. We are very grateful for his contribution that will make the book much more useful for a Dutch audience.

Below are videos that John and I gave on the history of the Bible at the conference. A few of these were new ones for us. Be sure to check out all the conference videos at their YouTube channel as we were not the only speakers. 

The Quiet Renaissance in Textual Criticism

In the latest Didaktikos journal, I have a very brief article attempting to introduce fellow teachers of New Testament to some of the things happening in our discipline. To regular ETC readers, the article will probably be old news, but maybe some will be curious as to what I chose to focus on. In the same issue there is an essay by another Peter (Malik) on the value of studying manuscripts as material objects. That article is titled “Biblical Manuscripts: From a Text-Carrier to a Book Project.”

If you’ve not heard of Didaktikos, that’s because it’s a very new journal, put out by the makers of Logos Bible software. It’s devoted to theological education and the articles are all short and to the point—something I very much appreciate now as a busy teacher myself. Best of all, they send the journal out free to theological educators and they encourage contributors to share them for free as well.

Here’s the link: “A Quiet Renaissance in Textual Criticism,” Didaktikos: Journal of Theological Education 2.3 (2018): 40–42.

A New Approach to Textual Criticism – A Book that Will Keep You Awake

It is now possible to order my and Peter Gurry’s introduction to the CBGM from the SBL website or from Amazon.

Authors: Tommy Wasserman and Peter J. Gurry
ISBN: 9781628371994
Price: $19.95
Binding: Paperback (hardcover $34.95 here)
Publication Date: November October 2017
Pages: 164

Below is information from the publisher. Note in particular Peter Head’s endorsement, “It kept me awake almost the whole way through.”

Description

An essential introduction for scholars and students of New Testament Greek
With the publication of the widely used twenty-eighth edition of Nestle-Aland’s Novum Testamentum Graece and the fifth edition of the United Bible Society Greek New Testament, a computer-assisted method known as the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) was used for the first time to determine the most valuable witnesses and establish the initial text. This book offers the first full-length, student-friendly introduction to this important new method. After setting out the method’s history, separate chapters clarify its key concepts such as genealogical coherence, textual flow diagrams, and the global stemma. Examples from across the New Testament are used to show how the method works in practice. The result is an essential introduction that will be of interest to students, translators, commentators, and anyone else who studies the Greek New Testament.

Features

• A clear explanation of how and why the text of the Greek New Testament is changing
• Step-by-step guidance on how to use the CBGM in textual criticism
• Diagrams, illustrations, and glossary of key terms

Authors

Tommy Wasserman is Professor of Biblical Studies at Ansgar Teologiske Høgskole, Kristiansand, Norway. He is secretary of the International Greek New Testament Project, serves on the board of the Centre for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, and has started projects on manuscript transcription and manuscript forgeries for the Museum of the Bible. He is Associate Editor of TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism. Wasserman has authored and edited several books including The Epistle of Jude: Its Text and Transmission (2006) and Studies in Isaiah: History, Theology and Reception (2017).

Peter J. Gurry is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Phoenix Seminary. He has worked with the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts and the Museum of the Bible to both preserve and publish New Testament manuscripts.
This is Resources for Biblical Study 80. Download a printable standing order sheet to see other available volumes in the series and to give to your librarian to set up a standing order.

View the hardcover edition of this title.

Praise for A New Approach to Textual Criticism

“This book is essential reading for everyone who wants to understand how contemporary research is changing our understanding of the text of the New Testament or the significance of this new method for all textual scholarship. It is a clear and perceptive explanation of the methodology behind the new editions of the Nestle-Aland and the United Bible Societies Greek New Testaments, as well as the major edition on which they are based. With a historical overview and suggestions for further reading, it contains a step-by-step guide and examples that shed new light on such difficult passages as the first verse of Mark’s Gospel. The authors, who have practiced the methodology and studied it in detail, are ideally placed to offer this simple but thought-provoking guide.”
David Parker
Professor of Digital Philology and Director of the Institute for the Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE)
University of Birmingham

“Wasserman and Gurry have together written an extremely useful book. They introduce and explain in detail the history and inner workings of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, a method that has become extremely important to the textual criticism of the Greek New Testament through its foundational role in determining the Initial text for the Editio Critica Maior and, in consequence, the printed text in the current (28th) and future (projected) editions of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. All students of the Greek New Testament … are in their debt for writing such a helpful and informed account. It kept me awake almost the whole way through.”
Peter M. Head
New Testament Tutor
Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford

“A New Approach to Textual Criticism is a clear introduction to a complex method, the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method. It reflects the transition of textual criticism into the digital age, by showing a new path to deal with the multiplicity of the New Testament manuscripts, leaving behind the categorization of text-types.”
Claire Clivaz
Head of Digital Enhanced Learning
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Lausanne

“For anybody who cares about the text of the New Testament, there will be few books published in biblical studies over the next decade that will be more important than this one. Tommy Wasserman and Peter Gurry describe some of the tectonic shifts that are currently occurring in the way that New Testament text critics are reconstructing the earliest recoverable form of the Greek text of the New Testament. With great care and clarity, the authors explain the intricacies of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method in ways that both scholars and nonspecialists can readily understand. For anybody who wishes to know how the text of latest printed scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament has been determined and why it differs from earlier editions, this is the book to read.”
Paul Foster
Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity
School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh

“This book will be of great service in helping scholars and serious students of the New Testament to grasp what the CBGM is. To this point it has largely been a “black box” for many.The explanations are clear, and the examples will be particularly helpful in showing what the CBGM offers and how to make use of the online access to it.”
Larry W. Hurtado, PhD, FRSE
Emeritus Professor of New Testament Language, Literature and Theology
University of Edinburgh

In addition to the endorsements so far published on the SBL website, we have received this one from Dan Wallace:

“Writing an introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method for the uninitiated must be akin to trying to teach the Amish how to drive a Ferrari. CBGM is a complex method that Wasserman and Gurry have simplified with a rather humane writing style, but this does not mean that those who have minimal exposure to this method will jump at the chance to understand it. They should, and Wasserman and Gurry are the right guides to gently bring them into the realm of 21st century NT textual criticism. This book is a welcome addition to the library of anyone (not just the neophyte) who wants to understand this arcane, yet foundational, discipline that has grown in intricacies and subtleties in recent years.”
Daniel B. Wallace
Executive Director
Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts

New Website for the International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP)

A brand new website of the International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP) was launched this morning – the web address is the same www.igntp.org.

The complete redesign was done by no other than our talented co-blogger Peter Gurry who is not only a textcritic but also a professional web designer.

The old website has served since 2007, receiving thousands of visits from across the world, according to Hugh Houghton, the IGNTP officer who maintains the website on a regular basis.

Text Critical Papers at BNTC 2015

The Annual Meeting of the British New Testament Society (BNTC) is being held this year at the University of Edinburgh from 3–5 September and there are a number of text critical papers on offer. There are enough, in fact, to make you wonder why there isn’t a dedicated textual criticism section.

Edinburgh always looks like this, right? (photo credit)

I’ve heard that BNTC is much more personable than the circus that can be SBL, so I’m looking forward to attending this year. Perhaps I’ll report on some of these paper if I get a chance. Here’s what’s on offer:

Theological Orthography, Numerical Symbolism, and “Numeri Sacri” in Early New Testament Manuscripts

Zachary Cole (University of Edinburgh)

Abstract: Although much scholarly attention has focused on the Christian scribal practice of the nomina sacra, the reverential abbreviation of divine names, this study explores an analogous phenomenon within early NT manuscripts with respect to theologically significant numbers. In the same way that sacred names could be distinguished by abbreviation, Greek numbers could be and were written in two distinct forms (as longhand words or alphabetic numerals). The aim of this study is to identify patterns and/or examples that suggest numerical symbols ever served a theological, devotional, or mystical function comparable to the nomina sacra. For instance, were alphabetic numerals ever reserved by copyists for special referents? Do any numerical symbols bear a special visual significance over against the longhand words? Recent studies have shown that numerals were indeed used in such ways in Christian documentary papyri from Egypt, especially in private correspondence between churches (such as the cryptic use of 99 to be mean “amen”), but no similar investigation of Christian literary texts has been conducted.
Several examples of possible “numeri sacri” in manuscripts such as P45, P75, and Codex Sinaiticus are examined with support from external testimony of numerological exegesis (patristic and documentary), suggesting that the term “numeri sacri” might be a helpful category. While a handful of numbers might qualify as such, it will be shown that they were never developed into a coherent scribal system in the way that the divine names were. This allows a remarkable comparison between early Christian conceptions of divine names/titles and theologically significant numbers, at least as they were represented in early scribal conventions.

Using the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) to Detect Scribal Habits in the Book of James

Peter Gurry (University of Cambridge)

Abstract: The proper consideration of the types of errors scribes make has been a longstanding aspect of New Testament textual criticism. Designated “transcriptional evidence” by F. J. A. Hort, such evidence is generally taught as a key part of internal evidence. Since the pioneering work of E. C. Colwell and followed recently by James R. Royse and others, the study of such scribal habits has been steadily advanced by careful attention to so-called “singular readings,” that is, readings unique to a single manuscript. One of the conclusions of such study has been a proposed reversal of the principle lectio brevior potior (prefer the shorter reading) since such singular readings show that early scribes tended to omit text more often than they added it. But the use of singular readings has not gone without criticism. In particular, questions have been raised about how representative singular readings are of a scribe’s work and, more importantly, of the tendencies of the textual tradition at large. More recently, the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) has been suggested as an appropriate corrective to the use of singular readings for understanding scribal practices because it identifies possible ancestors for each textual witness. But no concerted effort to apply the CBGM in this way has yet appeared. After offering a short summary of prior research, this study will apply the CBGM to the book of James using the data from the Editio Critica Maior to see what it reveals about the habits of scribes during the first millennium of transmission. The results will be compared with previous conclusions gained from the study of singular readings. In conclusion, I offer some thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of each method and their implications for the canons of internal criticism.

The Greek Text of Revelation and the Editio Critica Maior

Garrick V. Allen (University of St Andrews)
Darius Müller (Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal/Bethel)

Abstract: The Institut für Septuaginta und biblische Textforschung at the Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal/Bethel is currently in the process of constructing a new Greek critical edition of the book of Revelation, with the hope that the edition will be available in 2023. The main text of the new edition and a condensed version of its apparatus will eventually become the text printed in the Nestle-Aland edition. This paper serves as a progress report, describing the various stages of the project, demystifying the process of editing an edition, and presenting an overview of the manuscript tradition of Revelation and its various text types. Additionally, we highlight the importance of this long-term project for numerous areas of critical concern in Apocalypse studies, including textual history, exegesis and interpretation, reception history, Byzantine art history, and scribal practices. The Editio Critica Maior project is an almost exclusively German enterprise and we hope to raise awareness of continental Apocalypse research in the Anglophone world.

The Chester Beatty Papyrus of Revelation and its Egyptian Friend: Preliminary Remarks on the Affinities of P47 and the Sahidic

Peter Malik (University of Cambridge)

Abstract: In his seminal work on the textual history of Revelation, Josef Schmid focused primarily on the Greek witnesses, amongst which he identified four distinct textual groupings: A C, P47 ℵ, Andreas and Koine. Versional support was cited only sporadically, and only to the extent it appeared in then available critical editions. Even so, Schmid remarked that, among other witnesses, the P47 ℵ group is followed by both Coptic versions. This relationship, however, has never been analysed or even confirmed. Recent research into P47 has identified various peculiar agreements with the Sahidic version, agreements which necessitated further investigation. The present paper aims to outline basic methodological issues as well as preliminary results of such investigation.

Report from the Digital Collation Conference in Münster

The following is a report from Peter Gurry who attended the Research Summit on Collation of Ancient and Medieval Texts in Münster on 3-4 October.

* * *

A few weeks ago I attended the Research Summit on Collation of Ancient and Medieval Texts in Münster, Germany and I thought I would offer a brief summary of some of the papers. The conference was designed to introduce textual scholars to the ins and outs of electronic collation in general and CollateX in particular. The first day was primarily focused on papers from invited speakers and the second day was set up to be more hands-on with CollateX. Readers of this blog will be interested to know that versions of Collate have been used for the Editio Critica Maior (ECM) since 1 John (published in 2003).

The first presentation was from Caroline Macé of the Universität Frankfurt who spoke about her experience editing Gregory of Nazianzus. She spoke about the choice between collating and transcribing and suggested that the right choice depends on the purpose of the edition being made. For Gregory, she had around 140 manuscripts and decided that transcribing these would have been too much work with too little benefit. Her own preference, in fact, would be to have automated transcriptions from digital collations rather than automated collations from digital transcriptions.

Next up was Peter Robinson whose pioneering work as a student at Oxford in the 1980s led to the first version of Collate (history here). Robinson spoke about misconceptions of digital collation, the main one being the belief that the computer does all the work. In actual fact, Robinson wrote Collate only after becoming dissatisfied with other collation software because he felt it was too mechanical; he wanted something that required editorial input during the collation process itself. He went on to argue that the purpose of a digital collation should not simply be to record differences but to use those differences to understand the relationships of witnesses. Like the CBGM, Robinson wants to use all textual variants for genealogy rather than just a selection. The use of complete collations is what led to a revision in previous genealogies in the recent electronic edition of Dante’s Commedia. 

The third presentation was offered by Klaus Wachtel and David Parker about their use of Collate for the ECM. For John’s Gospel, the team in Birmingham has incorporated Collate into their own editing software (mentioned here) which allows them to move from transcriptions, to regularization of spelling, to construction of the apparatus, all in one place. It was impressive. In all, Parker said that the new software has made constructing the apparatus faster and more accurate. If my notes are right, he said it took them about 6 months to construct a full apparatus for the Greek witnesses of John.

Barbara Bordalejo presented next on the praxis of collation and gave some fun examples of how hard but also important it can be to electronically encode the complexities encountered in a manuscript. She showed examples of the change in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence including the change discovered in 2010 from “our fellow subjects” to “our fellow citizens”—a small change that makes a big difference! (But given my current home I shall say no more about that.) At the end of her talk there was a brief but lively back-and-forth over whether an expunction dot should be marked in a transcription as a “deletion” or as “marked for deletion” in order to distinguish it from the ways other scribes in the same manuscript deleted text.

The final talk was offered by Ronald Dekker, one of the programmers behind CollateX, who talked about some of the principles behind the software’s collation algorithms. The hardest part, as any human collator knows, is deciding how to segment the texts for comparison; the actual comparison is the easy part. Peter Robinson told us at one point that only about 1–2 percent of his original code was actually for comparing the texts; most of the rest was used to identify which parts of each text to compare with each other (a process known as “alignment”). Dekker illustrated the complexity of programming these decisions by showing that two witnesses with 100 segments (or “tokens”) could potentially produce as many as 10,201 possible points of disagreement (or “nodes”).

Unfortunately I had to catch a train the next morning so I wasn’t able to attend the second day of the conference. But the first day provided a good sense of where digital collation is and how it is being used. And as always, it was good to meet and talk with scholars editing a variety of other texts. The only real disappointment for me was learning that the location had originally been set for Iceland. I guess there’s always next time.

Finally, my thanks to Joris van Zundert and Klaus Wachtel for all their behind the scenes work in organizing the conference for us.

Greek Palaeography in Oxford

This is a guest post by Peter Gurry who just came home from the fifth Summer School of Greek Palaeography in Oxford:

* * *

Last week was the fifth Summer School of Greek Palaeography hosted by Lincoln College in Oxford. This year’s program was run by Georgi Parpulov and a small cadre of other instructors.

The program ran for five days and concluded with a review exam on Saturday morning. The students were organized into groups of nine with each group led by a seasoned palaeographer. The majority of time was devoted to deciphering various Greek hands starting with Codex Bezae and quickly jumping to manuscripts from the 8th–15th century (so almost all minuscules). My own group spent time with about 30 manuscripts and I assume most of the other groups were the same. The focus was decidedly on matters of palaeography and codicology, so there was very little translation.

Nigel Wilson giving hands-on instruction at Christ Church library.

The late mornings were spent at either Christ Church library or the Bodleian examining manuscripts of roughly the same time period as in our reading groups. We got to examine a number of Psalters and Gospel books but the highlight was seeing a book of patristic excerpts presented to Queen Mary I (“Bloody Mary”) that had been commissioned by the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. At something like 2.5 feet tall by 2 feet wide, I was told it was the largest Greek book in the Bodleian’s collection.

Georgi Parpulov explaining codices in the Christ Church library.

The evenings were given to lectures from Nigel Wilson (Oxford), Hugh Houghton (University of Birmingham), Ilse de Vos (King’s College London), and Elisabeth Jeffreys (Oxford).

Nigel Wilson opened the series with a lecture on “The Rewards of Palaeography.” The main reward, he said, was filling in some lacuna in our present knowledge by finding previously unknown texts such as the sermons of Origen found a few years ago or the Archimedes Palimpsest, by finding an older copy of a known text, or of correcting the work of previous scholars.

On Tuesday, Hugh Houghton gave an energetic talk on “Digital Editing and the Greek New Testament” that was meant to introduce the work being done on the Editio Critica Maior. He gave a brief overview of the CBGM and noted its role in helping establish the “earliest attainable text” (his term). He also gave us quick demos of the software currently being used at Birmingham to collate MSS and to construct variation units from those collations. If I heard correctly, the collation software is already implemented on the NT.VMR website, but this was the first I’ve seen of the additional software that they are using to demarcate variation units. One interesting feature I noted was that the software displays a warning message whenever the editor combines variants into a variation unit in such a way that it misrepresents one of the witnesses in that particular unit. It all looked quite impressive in the demo and I’m eager to know more about how it works. I was also interested to learn from Houghton that there are already plans to build a fresh version of the CBGM software at Birmingham as well. It will be worth watching to see what innovations such a project might produce; might we finally see a version that will allow others to construct their own local stemmata? Whether or not we can hope for such a development, there is clearly a very fruitful collaboration happening between text critics and computer scientists at Birmingham and we can all hope that continues. In all, I think Houghton did a great job presenting some of the developments happening in our discipline to text critics working on other texts. I left with the feeling that now is an exciting time to be working in this field.

On Thursday night, Ilse de Vos spoke to us on “Dealing with an Abundant Textual Tradition,” a talk which introduced us to her editorial work on the Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem. This collection of 137 questions and answers about Christianity is extant in some 250 witnesses in Greek, Latin, Church Slavonic, Arabic, and several other languages. What caught my attention was how helpful she has found phylogenetic methods to be especially in tracing the textual transmission of the Quaestiones. Although she hasn’t been able to root her phylogenetic tree yet, she has been able to identify a number of different manuscript groupings and even to connect some of these groups to various translations. For her this has raised the question of whether her critical edition should focus on reconstructing the original Greek text of the Quaestiones or should instead focus on the Greek text from which some of the more interesting translations were made.

A Psalter

The final lecture was given on Thursday evening by Elisabeth Jeffreys on “Editorial Problems in Byzantine Homilies.” Jeffreys is currently working on an edition of the homilies of James of Kokkinobaphos which exists in two remarkably similar copies, often agreeing with each other even at the level of punctuation. It struck me as a good example of the kind of skill Byzantine scribes could achieve.

The week gave me a much greater respect for the discipline of palaeography and a much better sense of how such work is conducted. Particularly with the Byzantine period where so many dated manuscripts are extant, I can see little reason for skepticism about the dates offered by those who specialize in this discipline. All-in-all it was a great week and I would highly recommend that those interested in textual criticism take part the next time around. Many thanks to Georgi Parpulov and the other instructors for putting on such a valuable course.