The Future of New Testament Textual Scholarship (ed. G. V. Allen)

A new book is in the pipeline, to be published in December (or will it be available for the SBL in November?).  

The Future of New Testament Textual Scholarship: From H. C. Hoskier to the Editio Critica Maior and Beyond, edited by Garrick V. Allen (WUNT I).

Mohr-Siebeck’s description
This volume fundamentally re-examines textual approaches to the New Testament and its manuscripts in the age of digital editing and media. Using the eccentric work of Herman Charles Hoskier as a shared foundation for analysis, contributors examine the intellectual history of New Testament textual scholarship and the production of critical editions, identify many avenues for further research, and discuss the methods and protocols for producing the most recent set of editions of the New Testament: the Editio Critica Maior. Instead of comprising the minute re finement of a basically acceptable text, textual scholarship on the New Testament is a vibrant field that impinges upon New Testament Studies in unexpected and unacknowledged ways.

Contributors:
Garrick V. Allen, J. K. Elliott, Gregory Peter Fewster, Peter J. Gurry, Juan Hernández Jr., H. A. G.
Houghton, Annette Hüffmeier, Dirk Jongkind, Martin Karrer, Jennifer Wright Knust, Jan Krans, Thomas J. Kraus, Christina M. Kreinecker, Curt Niccum, D. C. Parker, Jacob Peterson, Stanley E. Porter, Catherine Smith, Jill Unkel, Klaus Wachtel, Tommy Wasserman, An-Ting Y

Approx. 540 pages
ISBN 9783161566622
cloth 145,00 €
ISBN 9783161566639
eBook PDF approx. 145,00 €

The book is the result of a wonderful conference organized by Garrick Allen (see here, here and here).

Maurice Robinson: The source of the Pericope Adulterae insertion in GA 1333

PA in GA 1333. View in NT.VMR

Maurice Robinson sends the following email which he has asked me to post here.

James Snapp happened to ask me about MS 1333, where a later scribe inserted the PA on a blank page between Luke and John (the only MS known to do so).

Since obviously the insertion was lectionary-based (the PA begins at 8.3 with the heading εκ του κατα ιω (below the designation for Pelagia, 8 Oct), this provoked a search between my continuous-text database and my lectionary PA database to see whether a source lectionary MS for the 1333 insertion might be determined.

As it turns out, the mystery of the source lectionary for the insertion into continuous-text MS 1333 appears to be solved! Although MS 1333 (11th century) is now at Saba in Jerusalem, the later PA insertion apparently was copied directly from the 12th century lectionary L-1755, now at St Catherine’s in Sinai.

This identification is established not only by their otherwise common text (which generally follows a typical lectionary line of transmission, with only minor orthographic issues), but primarily from one glaring (and problematic) reading in 8:9 — και υπο της οικειας συνειδησεως— which otherwise appears in only one other continuous-text MS (GA 1082), and that one with an extremely different text from what otherwise is shared by MS 1333 and L-1755.

Closely related to L-1755, however, is L-1804 (now at Athens, Natl. Lib., 14th century). I suspect that L-1804 either may have been copied from L-1755 or from some common lectionary archetype.

I like solving mysteries, especially when the solution was far simpler than might have been imagined!

Given that 1333 is dated 11th century and lectionary 1755 is from the 12th, Tommy Wasserman asked how this can be. Maurice’s response:

The PA insertion in 1333 was added on a totally blank page, so this was ex post facto from the original copying.

In other words, the insertion must be later than the 11th century.

For more on 1333 and the PA, see Snapp’s recent post.

Present Trends in Textual Criticism … from 1962

Harry Oliver

Having just written a very short article on developments in New Testament textual criticism, I was curious to come across an article on the same subject by Harold Oliver from 1962. He organizes his material under five headings: new materials, a new perspective (no, not on Paul), new emphases, new methods, and new editions. The timing of this article is especially interesting because Kurt Aland had already announced his plan to move the Nestle away from its majority principle but had not yet published the results. Likewise, the UBS edition had been announced but was still four years from publication.

What is most interesting to me is some of the trends that Oliver points out are ones we think of as being definitive of our era and yet, Oliver sees them as trends in his. So, for example, under his second heading, he says that “there is a new perspective in textual criticism concerning the text critic’s goal.” That shift is one from seeing the goal as merely negative (removing errors) to one that is also positive (appreciating variants in their own right).

In support, he cites an article from Donald M. Riddle from 1936: “The legitimate task of textual criticism is not limited to the recovery of approximately the original form of the documents, to the establishment of the ‘best’ text, nor to the ‘elimination of spurious readings.’ It must be recognized that every significant variant records a religious experience which brought it into being. This means that there are no ‘spurious readings’; the various forms of the text are sources for the study of the history of Christianity.” This is some 30 years before Epp’s work on Acts and 60 years before Ehrman’s Orthodox Corruption.

The whole article is worth reading for the perspective it provides on the current discipline. It’s also interesting that Oliver’s author bio says, “Mr. Oliver’s Th.M. thesis, ‘Helps for Readers’ in Greek New Testament Manuscripts, won the 1955 prize of the Christian Research Foundation. His doctoral dissertation was entitled, The Text of the Four Gospels as Quoted in the ‘Moralia’ of Basil the Great.” He was also part of the IGNTP and was dismissed from Southeastern as a result of his “Bultmann phase.”

 Let me end with Oliver’s closing paragraph:

The appearance on the scene of other disciplines such as Form- and source-criticism, as well as biblical theology, has served to remind textual critics that while theirs is potentially a truth-speaking discipline, it cannot speak the whole truth, nor can the whole truth be spoken apart from its witness. The modern textual critic realizes that the recovery of the original text and the reconstruction of the history of its transmission are important goals, but they do not eclipse the greater search for the original meaning and the demand which ancient Christian texts make upon modern folk. In the total perspective textual criticism is “lower criticism,” not because it is inferior, but because it is the foundation upon which all genuine and productive “higher criticism” must be built.

The article is Harold H. Oliver, “Present Trends in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament,” Journal of Bible and Religion 30.4 (1962): 308–20. 

Paragraph Break at Greek Esther 2:5?

In a comment to a previous post, Peter Head noted the presence of reading aids on a page of the Esther part of Ra 967. I have now looked at the available digital images for Esther, and it is clear that these marks do break the text into various sense units. Sometimes they mark what might be equivalent to a comma (e.g. see image below after βενεαμιν) or period (e.g. see image below after αστιν) and at other times, perhaps, they mark a break between paragraphs. It's the latter issue I want to present here and ask for your input.

Sinaiticus at Esther 2:5

This appears to be a standard example of ΚΑΙ in ekthesis to indicate a paragraph break between verse 4 and verse 5. The previous line is left half empty with punctuation indicating a break. The same ekthesis is in B at the same place.

Rahlfs's Text at Esther 2:5

Rahlfs's Edition followed suit by creating a paragraph break between verse 4 and verse 5

Ra 967 f. 40r at Esther 2:5

Here we see the reading aid marking a sense division between verse 4 and verse 5 in the 2/3C papyrus MS, albeit lacking the οὕτως. 

Gӧttingen Esther at 2:5

Ra 967 exercised some influence on the editor of Esther in terms of the layout for the text, for now there is no paragraph break between verse 4 and verse 5, only a period dividing them. But, if I'm reading matters correctly, the reading aid in Ra 967 could have provided a clue to the editor that there may have been a larger sense division in Ra 967, since the scribe of that MS did not use ekthesis or other means for marking paragraphs. Rather he used the same reading aid that he used for all other sense divisions in the text.

It does appear that the 4C scribe of S followed his exemplar by indicating a paragraph break in the text between verse 4 and 5. Did he interpret a reading aid as in 967 as marking a paragraph break here? Or did he invent the paragraph break? Can we know one way or the other? What do you think?

Tregelles’s Mustard Seed

In his delightful book American Greek Testaments: A Critical Bibliography of the Greek New Testament as Published in America, Isaac Hall has this to say about the importance of S. P. Tregelles:

The University Presses of Oxford and Cambridge have issued many a work of which the English nation is justly proud, and for which the Christian world is grateful; but since the noble edition of Mill, no work of either press has done more to bring back from Germany to England her former pre-eminence in New Testament critical study [than WH’s]. In the greatest contribution to that end hitherto, not to say the greatest work of this nature in England for a century and a half, the University Presses had scarcely any share. That was the work of Dr. Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, accomplished in the face of the wealth and power that mostly clung to blind tradition; in toil almost single-handed, in privation, and later with the disadvantage of failing eyes, under far too much misappreciation, perverse opposition, and even obloquy — until his mustard seed had grown to a great herb in which the fowls of the air might build their nests. But had Tregelles lived to see the present day, no man would more heartily have rejoiced than he, to see this cap-stone put by Westcott and Hort upon his building. The present state of things in England bears testimony, indeed, to Tregelles’s labors, but it bears equal testimony to the numbers that, conspicuously or humbly, have entered into those labors. It belongs to all human progress that “one soweth and another reapeth;” and in this instance, surely, there is abundant cause that “ he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together.” (p. 58)