Where the Priority Lies in Byzantine Priority

Last Saturday was the textual criticism conference at Clearview Church with myself, Maurice Robinson, Dave Black, and Abidan Shah. You can read Dave’s recap here. I can add my thanks to our hosts for taking such good care of us and to my fellow speakers for sharing with us. 

I was grateful for the opportunity to explain why I’m a reasoned eclectic in a forum like this. I haven’t ever done that and it was a good exercise. What made it especially fun is that none of the other presenters agreed with my position! (Although, by my definition, Dave Black’s Sturzian approach is still a form of reasoned eclecticism; he just has a different approach to external evidence than mine but that’s for another day.) This meant that I not only got to hear how others perceived my view, but I also got to hear their reaction to my perception of their view. That is always a helpful diagnostic and, in this case, I learned something from Maurice that I want to explain here.

The speakers. Photo from Dave Black

In my talk, I argued that the Byzantine Priority view could accurately be called Byzantine Exclusivism since there is never a place where the Byzantine prioritist thinks that the clear majority of manuscripts is flat wrong and the minority is right (e.g.). Even where the majority is split, their choice will always be within the split, never outside it. It is this consistent preference for one group of manuscripts over all others (where they disagree, of course) that sets it apart from all forms of eclecticism—reasoned or thoroughgoing or even Sturzian. This is where the clarification came in.

In his presentation, which followed mine, Maurice pointed out that the priority in “Byzantine Priority” does not mean the Byzantine reading gets priority at each point of variation, but rather that the Byzantine textform existed prior to the other textforms. This may seem like a trivial distinction, but I think it is important for two reasons.

First, it is a reminder that the Byzantine Priority position, as held by Maurice, is based fundamentally on a view of the text’s history not on some preconceived preference for pet readings. What that means is that, if the method is right, it’s right because of its view of history. If it’s wrong—as I think it is—it’s wrong for the same reason. I happen to think this is what all methods share in common, actually. But it was helpful to see it afresh.

Second, I think this should mean that there is no reason, in principle, why a Byzantine prioritist should be unwilling to reject Byzantine readings. The fact that this textform is earliest does not logically entail that it is always right anymore than thinking the Alexandrian text is earliest requires one to think it is always right. 

Now, I say it should mean this because in practice, as I noted, Byzantine prioritists are unwilling to accept any reading that is in the clear minority against the Byzantine majority. So, we are back to the question of whether or not it is really a method of prioritization or of exclusivism. I would be happy to be educated further on this and would love to hear from any Byzantine prioritists who think the Byzantine textform is sometimes wrong even when it’s unified (in which case they would be akin to James Snapp’s view).

One final observation, this experience was a fresh reminder of the danger of misinterpreting other people’s views because we have unwittingly filtered them in some way through our own starting assumptions. In my case, I was hearing the term “priority” through the lenses of my own reasoned eclecticism. What I heard was something like “the Byzantine reading is always prior at every place of variation” when what is meant is “the Byzantine textform is historically prior to the other text forms.” The first does follow from the second, but the order is important. I should have been more careful.

And for anyone wondering, Maurice and I had a grand time together. We have sparred many times over these things at various conferences, over meals, and even at his Smokey Mountain chalet. I always appreciate our conversations and leave them thankful for his sharp mind and his careful work.

The All-or-Nothing Problem with Byzantine Priority

The most noteworthy feature of the Byzantine priority position to me is not that it seriously values the Byzantine text (I think that’s generally good); it’s that it always prefers a Byzantine text. It’s that “always” that I’ve never been able to fully stomach. I find it incredible that the text found in any one manuscript or subset of manuscripts is always right.

This is for reasons both logical (could one scribe or series of them really get it right every time?) and empirical (I haven’t actually found a manuscript or group that always convinces me it’s right).

In the case of the empirical reasons, I primarily have in mind internal evidence, evidence that I don’t see how a Byzantine prioritist can use consistently. I’ve written about this before and today I want to look at another example of the same problem. Here is the text of 1 John 4.19 in the RP2005 edition of the Byzantine text and in NA28:

• RP2005: Ἡμεῖς ἀγαπῶμεν αὐτόν, ὅτι αὐτὸς πρῶτος ἠγάπησεν ἡμᾶς. 
• NA28: ἡμεῖς ἀγαπῶμεν, ὅτι αὐτὸς πρῶτος ἠγάπησεν ἡμᾶς

The only difference is the minor one of the direct object of the verb ἀγαπῶμεν (RP2005 note no differences within the Byz tradition itself). Now, how would someone who thinks the original reading is always found in the Byzantine manuscripts explain the omission of αὐτόν here? The simple answer is homoioteleuton. The -ν ending led some scribes to omit αὐτόν by accident and the scribes of the Byzantine manuscripts preserved the longer form faithfully for us.

The problem with this explanation arises when we consider the other readings at this point. Here is the data from the ECM:

1. omit 02. 03. 5. 6. 323. 424C. 623. 945. 1241. 1243. 1739. 1852. 1881. 2464. L:V. K:S. G:A1. Sl:E 
2. αυτον 044. 88. 94. 104. 181. 254. 307. 321. 398. 453. 459. 467. 720. 915. 918. 1523. 1524.1678. 1836. 1838. 1844. 1846. 1875. 2186. 2298. 2492. 2544. 2818. Byz [424*]. G:G-D. Sl:ChMSiS 
3. τον θεον 01. 048. 33. 61. 81. 206. 218. 326. 378. 429. 436. 442. 522. 614. 621. 630. 642. 808. 876. 1067. 1127. 1292. 1359. 1409. 1448. 1490. 1505. 1563. 1611. 1718. 1735. 1799. 1831. 1832. 1837. 1890. 2138. 2147. 2200. 2243. 2344. 2374. 2412. 2541. 2652. 2805. L:T. K:BV^V. S:PH. A. Ä
4. τον κυριον 629
5. lacunose P9. P74. 04. 025. 0245. 0296. L60. L590. L596. L1126. Pr

Since all three of the longer readings end in ν, how does a Byzantine prioritist decide which of them is original? He might reason, easily enough, that readings three and four are natural expansions of the simple pronoun αυτον. And so I would agree. The problem, however, is in giving a convincing reason why that same argument doesn’t also apply to reading two. If scribes wanted to make the implicit explicit here as all must agree they did (why else would we have these particular variants here?), then why shouldn’t reading two be rejected for that very reason? I can’t see a way around this except to accept reading one as the best explanation for the origin of the other three readings. (Side note: this is why using a small apparatus can be misleading.)

This, it seems, exposes a flaw in the Byzantine priority scheme. If it cannot use the same internal argument consistently within the same variation, what grounds does it have for claiming that “transmissional considerations coupled with internal principles point to the Byzantine Textform as a leading force in the history of transmission” (RP2005, p. 564)? Here it seems that internal considerations point away from it. It’s true that John’s writings usually have a direct object with ἀγαπάω (though cf. 1 Jn 3.14b; 4.8, 20), but that could also be a further argument for preferring the shorter reading as the harder one.

I confess I would find the Byzantine Priority position more consistent if it said that “transmission considerations” (i.e., external evidence) is decisive and that internal evidence is only needed secondarily for large splits in the Byzantine witnesses. At that point, we would still have to discuss the logical objection I mentioned, but that would be a post for another day. As it is, the internal evidence is a key reason why I find any all-or-nothing approach to the Byzantine text (or any other text) unconvincing. As Tommy et al. have put it: “no single manuscript, manuscript family, or larger group of manuscripts (a text type) can be accepted uncritically as representing the original version of a biblical passage or book...” (Dictionary of the Bible and Ancient Media, p. 414).

Yes, Byzantine manuscripts are very good overall. But that doesn’t mean they’re always right.

The Problem of P38 and the ‘Western’ Text in Acts

In his published dissertation, Eldon Epp was interested in theological tendencies in Acts. In particular, he was interested in theological tendencies in the “Western” text. (From here on, I’ll forgo the quotation marks because they get tedious.) His method, however, was to study one particular witness of the Western text, namely, Codex Bezae.

The problem for Epp is that Codex Bezae could not be treated as a simple proxy for the earlier Western text. The reason is that Bezae sometimes reflected various accretions to the Western text. In order to address the problem, he compared Bezae “with those witnesses which, along with D, are recognized as the best ‘Western’ evidence” (p. 28). In this way, Epp could confirm where Bezae was or wasn’t likely preserving the earlier Western text-type.

Setting aside for a moment the risk of circularity here, I want to point out a serious problem with one of Epp’s key control manuscripts, namely, P38.

In discussing the proper use of D as a witness to the Western text, Epp cites P38 as a key reference point for determining whether a reading in D is, in fact, Western. He writes:

If P38, because of its earlier date, is ipso facto assumed more accurately to preserve the early “Western” text, then a comparison of D with this papyrus shows, as H. A. Sanders concluded, that “D is a very imperfect source for the ‘Western’, or second-century, text’. Granting this, however, it must also be emphasized that D and P38 show such a degree of agreement over against the B-text that the papyrus can be used, at the same time, to show that ‘the D text existed in Egypt shortly after A.D. 300’; A. C. Clark could call P38 ‘a text almost identical with that of D’. Codex Bezae, then, at many points is an imperfect witness to the ‘Western’ text, and yet on this account it does not lose its leading place among those witnesses.

Later, Epp cites D, P38, and the Harklean Syriac margin as “the outstanding ‘Western’ sources for Acts” and they form, with the (then) recently discovered Coptic G67 as an “élite group” (p. 31). Epp cites Clark approvingly that P38 has a text “almost identical with D” and Epp says this agreement is especially prominent “over against the B-text.”

The problem is that this isn’t the case when one compares these manuscripts in more detail. Here are the results from the recently-released ECM for Acts:

	P38	03/B	05/D
P38	—	69.4% (43/62)	59.0% (36/61)
03/B	69.4% (43/62)	—	68.4% (3,514/5,140)
05/D	59.0% (36/61)	68.4% (3,514/5,140)	—

P38 is, of course, fragmentary, containing only Acts 18.27–19.6, 19.12–16. This means that there is far less text to compare with B and D. But the problem for Epp’s Western text should be obvious. Far from P38 showing strong agreement with D “over against the B-text,” P38 actually agrees more with B than with D! And yet, Epp says that P38 is a member of the “élite group” of Western witnesses.

Now, perhaps Epp would argue that these texts shouldn’t be compared in all these places in our effort to identify the Western text. But until we can agree what variant points should be used and why, we cannot agree on whether or not P38 should assigned to the same text-type as D. If it should not be, then it obviously cannot be used to confirm that D’s readings are early Western readings and Epp’s thesis will need some revision.

Perhaps the issue of definition will move toward some resolution at this year’s SBL meeting in the ECM sessions. We shall see. But those in attendance will certainly want to read the ECM’s article (which I haven’t seen yet) on the Western text along with Epp’s recent, data-filled argument in NovT for its existence there.

ETC Interview with Paolo Trovato: Part 1

It’s a pleasure for me to introduce our next interviewee in our ETC interviews series. Today I am speaking with Paolo Trovato who is a professor at the Università degli Studi di Ferrara in Italy. Prof. Trovato is best known for his work on Italian philology and particularly his work on Dante. He publishes widely on range of topics. I first encountered his work through his wonderful book on Lachmann’s method (reviewed here). That book has just been released in a revised edition and that provided a good opportunity for an interview. Enjoy!

Textual criticism is not typically a popular pursuit in my experience. What led you to it in your own work? How did you come to it?

When I was a university student in the seventies, I wanted to became a literary critic and I thought that textual criticism was quite boring stuff. Aging, I went sick with all the silly hypotheses that we continuously utter and read about texts of the past and I decided that the most useful thing I could do for the sake of my studies was to repair the damages of the textual transmission or at least try to do so.

Reviews of Lin’s Erotic Life of Manuscripts

Sometime in the spring while my head was still in boxes, BBR published my review of Yii-Jan Lin’s provocatively titled book The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological Sciences (Oxford, 2016). I must say that I did not expect to like the book when I first picked it up but the more I read the more it grew on me. There were still some problems and some... weirdness (cyborgs, anyone?), but overall I found it a helpful exercise to step back and consider the conceptual metaphors we use in the discipline. Lin admits up front that she is an outsider and occasionally it shows. But, on the whole, her outsider perspective was more benefit than liability. 

Here is my conclusion:

In the end, what is most enduring and helpful about Lin’s book is not its particular conclusions (will any be taken with her “cyborg” textual model?), but its method of interrogating past practitioners to see how their categories of thought have shaped their work. In that the work succeeds admirably and should generate a good deal more self-awareness on the part of textual scholars.

Read the rest here. For another review, see Hugh Houghton’s in BMCR.

Dániel Kiss on Uncertainty in Textual Criticism

Its [textual criticism] reputation for arbitrariness can probably be ascribed to the fact that
having grown up in a late stage of the age of printing, we are used to carefully edited texts, and textual corruption strikes us not only as unfamiliar, but also as uncanny and somehow fundamentally wrong. But a doubt that affects the reconstruction of a passage in Catullus is no different in kind from one that affects how the same passage should be interpreted, nor from one that might affect Roman economic history in the late Republic. If textual criticism is difficult at times, that is not because it is arbitrary, nor because textual critics are incompetent, but because centuries of textual corruption have resulted in problems for some of which there is no easy solution. Faced with such difficulties, one can only make progress by strenuous and open-minded research.

—Dániel Kiss from What Catullus Wrote, p. vii–viii.

Textual Criticism as Rhetoric

From Richard Tarrant’s new book Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism (reviewed in BMCR here):

To classify textual criticism as a form of rhetoric is a way of highlighting the fact that its arguments depend on persuasion rather than demonstration. Textual critics cannot prove that their choices are correct; the most they can hope to do is lead their readers to believe that those choices are the best available ones.

Facts do, of course, play an important part of textual criticism. But in the end the facts cannot yield a definitive answer, only a relative probability, which is where the critic needs to employ rhetorical argument.

This point is not, of course, unique to textual criticism. All study of the past, certainly the ancient past, trades in probabilities and textual criticism is nothing if not a historical endeavor. So long as we are okay with probabilities, there is little here to really fuss about. Where the debate can be had is about just how probable any of our particular text critical judgments are. That, however, takes us beyond mere rhetoric since some judgments are better than others. Still, I take Tarrant’s quote as a welcome reminder that judgment is always involved.

For more along the same lines, see Gary Taylor, “The Rhetoric of Textual Criticism,” Text 4 (1988): 39–57.

A Similarity between Reasoned Eclecticism & Byzantine Priority

Here’s something that two otherwise competing methods of New Testament textual criticism agree on, at least according to their two main proponents. Both reasoned eclecticism and the Byzantine priority position have in common that external evidence should be considered prior to internal evidence.

A helpful little book.

Here’s Mike Holmes:

To put the matter more briefly and abstractly, it is by means of external evidence that we identify the oldest surviving reading(s), which we then further evaluate by means of internal considerations.

Here’s Maurice Robinson:

In this system, final judgment on readings requires the strong application of internal evidence after an initial evaluation of the external data has been made.

I would be interested to know if Mike thinks this priority is fundamental to reasoned eclecticism. I wouldn’t think so since a consideration of transcriptional probabilities may influence the weight one gives to a manuscript’s text, a weight which subsequently informs which readings deserve further evaluation on internal grounds. There is, obviously, a circularity here, but a “fruitful” one as some have described it rather than a viscious one.

This is not unlike a suggestion made—to bring thoroughgoing eclecticism into the discussion—by J. K. Elliott. He says,

To be really thorough I suggest that we do our textual criticism eclectically without bowing to preconceived theories about the alleged superiority of certain witnesses. Then, having done our work, I suggest that we review the behavior of individual witnesses—in effect, rate them. Those that fall below a certain level of accuracy would in the future be regarded with some suspicion. 

Oddly, he then says that “I cannot claim that that is an overriding interest or concern of thoroughgoing eclecticism” which seems to undermine his suggestion.

Sources

• Michael W. Holmes, “The Case for Reasoned Eclecticism,” in Rethinking New Testament Textual Criticism, ed. David Alan Black (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002), p. 78.
• Maurice A. Robinson, “Appendix: The Case for Byzantine Priority,” in The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform, ed. Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont (Southborough, MA: Chilton, 2005), p. 545.
• J. K. Elliott, “The Case for Thoroughgoing Eclecticism,” in Rethinking New Testament Textual Criticism, ed. David Alan Black (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002), p. 123.

Of Works and Artifacts, or Why You Can Touch up the Sistine Chapel but not Codex Sinaiticus

Workers restore the scene “original sin”
in the Sistine Chapel (photo credit)

What makes it wrong to alter a great manuscript but not a great painting? I think many of us instinctively know there’s a difference but would not be able to articulate what it is. The best answer I’ve found rests on the difference between the nature of a literary work and a painting. The difference is important because it has implications for how we think about recovering literary works from the past. G. Thomas Tanselle explains:

The painting exists at a single location, and one has nowhere else to go to find the work except that one place.... In contrast, a piece of paper with a text of a poem written on it does not constitute a work of literature, and therefore any alterations one makes in the manuscript do not automatically alter the work. If one cleans a dirty spot on a manuscript and reveals a word not legible before, the word is unquestionably a part of the text of the document, but it is not necessarily a part of the literary work nor, for that matter, is any other word in the document, for the work can only be reconstituted through the application of critical judgment to each element of every surviving text (even if there is only one, and it is the only one there has ever been). Similarly, if one touches up a manuscript by writing over an indistinct word or by marking out a word and entering another, one is certainly altering the document, but one does not thereby change the work. Such alteration of documents is regarded, by all who revere historical evidence, as a scandalous activity; but the equivalent alteration of paintings, frescoes, and sculptures is frequently advocated by responsible scholars, deeply committed to the recovery of the past. The ethics of altering artifacts shifts in the second situation because the work and the artifact inhabit the same body, and the work is considered more important. (A Rationale of Textual Criticism, pp. 27-28)

My favorite question that gets at the heart of the matter is the one asked by Paul Eggert: “If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where is Hamlet?” (Securing the Past, p. 215). We could just as well ask, “If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where is the Bible?” It seems to me that textual criticism of the Bible is an attempt to answer the latter question.

Poll: What’s the Goal of Textual Criticism?

“Original text”?

Not long ago I read the entry on New Testament textual criticism in a very good dictionary that claimed that the goal of textual criticism has shifted so that today the quest for the “original text” has been displaced by a quest for the “initial text.” The article left the impression that this was now a settled matter.

When I read this it struck me as an exaggeration. True, the most widely-used edition (Nestle-Aland) has shifted its stated aim to the initial text, but have any other editions or editors shifted with it? I wondered.

So I asked several editors who have edited or are editing a Greek New Testament (all reasoned eclectics for what it’s worth) and the answer back was basically no. They’ve aimed their editions at the earliest attainable text, a text which they thought was substantially identical to the original (no scare quotes).

But I’m curious what readers of the blog think. Hence the poll: What is your preferred term for the goal of textual criticism? Vote below and then define (and defend) your preferred term in the comments. We’ll see if there’s any substantial shift afoot among the blog readers. (Note: the question is not whether you think such a goal is always attainable.)

What is the goal of textual criticism?