Anniversaries

Dave Black dbo notes that we are not far from the five hundredth anniversaries of the Complutensian Polyglot (NT printed 1514; but not published until maybe 1521 or 22) and Erasmus' first edition (Novum Instrumentum, 1516).

Larry Hurtado is working on a project with SBL/BYU/Freer (mentioned here) to mark the centenary of the purchase of the Freer manuscripts in Washington (Freer site & byu page). Scheduled for SBL 2006.

Closer to home we have Mill's edition of the GNT published in 1707 (also the year of his death, exhausted after 30 years of work on the book). Someone in Oxford should really organise a conference to mark this.

I am waiting until 2013 to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of S.P. Tregelles with a series of books and conferences (well, maybe a nice dinner).

What other anniversaries are coming up in the next ten years or so?

Summer School in Manuscript Studies

Some of you may be interested in this announcement of a Summer School in Manuscript Studies (June 20-26, 2006):

The annual Summer School in Manuscript Studies, formerly called the Palaeography Summer School, is a week-long series of intensive day- or half-day classes in Palaeography and Diplomatic given by experts in their respective fields from a wide range of institutions. Subject areas include introductory palaeography, electronic resources for manuscript studies, Anglo-Saxon and Medieval manuscripts, Latin palaeography, German palaeography, Papal diplomatic, illuminated manuscripts and Medieval musical notation.

The Summer School is hosted by the Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies with the co-operation of the British Library, the Calligraphy and Lettering Arts Society, the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House Library, the Warburg Institute, , University College and King's College London. For this year's summer school visit the Summer School webpages.

Update: If you would be more interested in a summer school in biblical manuscript studies, then check the comments.

Unique variants per manuscript page

In a recent message to Wieland Willker’s textual criticism list (here), Daniel Wallace estimates the number of pages of extant Greek NT manuscript at 2.5 million.

In a Kenneth W. Clark memorial lecture of 1997, Bart Ehrman (here) says:

‘No one knows for sure how many differences there are among our surviving witnesses, simply because no one has yet been able to count them all. The best estimates put the number at around 300,000, but perhaps it’s better to put this figure in comparative terms. There are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the NT.’

What is the basis of Ehrman’s calculation? There is no further reference.

If Wallace’s and Ehrman’s estimations are both correct then it strikes me that the overall rate of unique variants per manuscript page is incredibly low. This is only just above one unique variant per 10 ‘pages’ (which I presume in Wallace’s original context, i.e. of photography, means either a single side or the facing sides of an open codex). Obviously the rate of unique variants per page is not the same as the rate of errors since the same error could occur independently in two manuscripts and then only count as one unique variant. Nevertheless, I still find the ratio rather low. Has Ehrman been too conservative?

Westcott and Hort as Manuscript Scholars

In his interesting but rather unsatisfactory book, A History of the Synoptic Problem: The Canon, the Text, the Composition, and the Interpretation of the Gospels (Doubleday, 1999), David Laird Dungan misjudges the contribution of textual criticism to the synoptic problem in a number of different ways. He also makes several extraordinarily incorrect statements about Westcott and Hort. I’d like to focus here on his assertion of ‘the fact that neither Westcott nor Hort ever personally examined a single ancient manuscript. Working entirely from previous editions (e.g. Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf), where the task of comparison had been done for them, Westcott-Hort’s contribution came in the application of a systematic approach to the mass of data others had collected.’ (p. 295).

Dungan here misunderstands and exaggerates the rather misleading if not equally incorrect statement in the Aland’s description of Westcott and Hort’s method (‘neither Westcott nor Hort ever actually collated a single manuscript but worked completely from published material, i.e. critical editions (viz., Tischendorf)’ (Aland & Aland, The Text of the New Testament, p. 18).

It is certainly true that Westcott & Hort depended on the work of other scholars, but this does not preclude first-hand examination of manuscripts (easily documented in e.g. Hort’s comments on his own claim that F, a codex located in his own college library, was a copy of G in ‘On the End of the Epistle to the Romans’ in Journal of Philology III(1871), 51-80, here in a note at pp. 67-68, Codex F was (and still is) located in Trinity College Cambridge), nor was the work dependent on editions. The primary resources were published collations and complete texts and facsimiles (as is detailed in the chart on p. 15 of their Introduction; although without notes), a number of which were in Hort’s personal library as can be demonstrated in the catalogue of Hort’s library (Catalogue of the Valuable Library of Books Cambridge: John Swan & Son, 1893). Further confirmation, if such is needed (!) of Hort’s interest in the actual manuscript resources can be found in his published letters. At an early stage of planning for the edition Hort wrote to J. Ellerton: ‘Lachmann and Tischendorf will supply rich materials, but not nearly enough’ (19.4.1853); he later enthusiastically discussed Tregelles work on Zacynthius: ‘It is inferior to B, but scarcely, if at all, inferior to C and L’ (letter to J.B. Lightfoot 18.2.1859) and indeed finished the editorial work for Tregelles edition of the Greek New Testament with its very complete apparatus (for these letters (see A.F. Hort, Life and Letters of Fenton John Anthony Hort (London: Macmillan & Co., 1896; 2 vols); I.250 and I.404 - the unpublished letters further document Hort’s interest in particular manuscripts, not least in visits to foreign libraries while on vacation).

Hort’s intimate knowledge of the important manuscript witnesses is demonstrated in his spectacular observation about the exemplar of Ephraimi Rescriptus in Revelation: ‘In the MS of the Apocalypse from which C was taken some leaves had been displaced, and the scribe of C did not discover the displacement. It thus becomes easy to compute that each leaf of the exemplar contained only about as much as 10 lines of the text of the present edition; so that this one book must have made up nearly 120 small leaves of parchment, and accordingly formed a volume either to itself or without considerable additions.’ Westcott & Hort, Introduction, 268.

As far as I can tell there is no evidence that Hort (or Westcott) ever travelled to Paris to see this manuscript; but a moment’s thought (or a look at the fuller discussion of this displacement in H.H. Oliver, ‘A Textual Transposition in Codex C (Ephraemi Syri Rescriptus)’ JBL 76(1957), pp. 233-236) reveals something of the detailed work on the manuscript witnesses that underlies this brief comment.

Are writers supposed to know what they are talking about or not?

Up-date

Maurice Robinson offered more published evidence for Hort’s acquaintance with manuscripts in a comment, which I have (with his permission) added here:

For the record, regarding Hort and collation of MSS, cf. Scrivener, Plain Introduction, 2nd ed (1874), 432:

“So far as it appears from their Preface [circulated privately to members of the ERV Committee], the editors [W-H] have not made any great additions of their own to the mass of collated materials for the revision of the sacred text. Those which exist ready at hand have been verified as far as possible, and the whole mass of evidence, both documentary and internal, has been thoroughly and deliberately weighed by them, separately and in conference, with an amount of care and diligence that have been hitherto unexampled.”

Within the same volume, Scrivener speaks regarding Hort’s direct examination of MS 339 while in Turin:

“Found by Mr Hort to contain John, Luke (with Titus of Bostra’s commentary), Matthew, hoc ordine” (p. 68).

“Mr Hort informs me that on examining this copy he found it written in three several and minute hands” (p. 200n1).

As to the Apocalypse in MS 339: “Much like Cod B [046] and other common-place copies, as Mr Hort reports, who collated five chapters in 1864, and sent his papers to Tregelles” (p. 248).

Regarding MS 133 of Acts [Gtreg.-Al. 611]: “Mr Hort noticed good readings in the Catholic Epistles” (p. 231).

Regarding a Vulgate MS (B. x. 5)at Trinity College, Cambridge, containing 1Co-1Thess, “readings [were] sent by the Rev. F. J. A. Hort to Tregelles” (p. 314)

So Hort, at least, was to some extent engaged in direct manuscript examination and collation.

[End of Maurice Robinson’s comment]

Update 2 (PJG, Nov 2016)

Here is the relevant section from the privately-circulated preface mentioned above by Scrivener. (Sorry about the rough images.)

Update 3 (PJG, Oct. 20, 2020)

One wonders if the Alands got their opinion from Kenyon who has a very similar statement on p. 251 of his Handbook: “Westcott and Hort did not themselves collate or edit manuscripts, but devoted themselves to the study of the materials collected by others, and to the elaboration of a theory of the history of the early transmission of the New Testament text, which might serve as a guide to the discovery of the true text among the multitude of divergent witnesses that have come down to us.”

The Bible vs the scriptures

I mentioned some time ago in my review of Misquoting Jesus that I thought Ehrman was using the word ‘Bible’ in multiple senses: to refer to individual copies of works given by divine inspiration, and to refer to the non-material entity, the Word of God, to which Christians often ascribe complete inspiration and truthfulness. The point of my distinction is that educated Christians down the ages (Jerome, Calvin) seem to have made a distinction between the copy in front of them (which might be in error) and the communication they held to come from God, which they did not see as in error.

It has been occurring to me that the confusion in Ehrman (and many others) arises from a disjunction between the language used in creeds and in popular Christian discourse.

I’ve been looking through Joel R. Beeke and Sinclair B. Ferguson, eds, Reformed Confessions Harmonized (Baker, 1999) which lays out synoptically various reformed confessions. The word that is completely absent in treatments of scripture is of course ‘Bible’. The same is true for the 39 Articles (see articles 6 and 7). The phrases that tend to be used are ‘the Word of God’, ‘the Scriptures’, ‘Holy Scripture’ (capitalization varies and I haven’t checked early mss or edns of these creeds).

I suspect that more recent creeds (e.g. UCCF, InterVarsity, Campus Crusade) tend to use the word ‘Bible’ more prominently, though the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy uses the word ‘Bible’ less than ‘Scripture(s)’. I’d be interested in knowing whether a shift has indeed taken place and, if so, when and why it took place.

I am tending to think that the word ‘Bible’, though advantageous in some settings, too readily focuses those considering doctrines of scripture on particular material manifestations of the word of God. Would anything significant be lost if we focused our discussions about doctrine and textual criticism on the terms ‘scripture(s)’ and ‘Word of God’ and reserved the term ‘Bible’ exclusively for material entities?

Bill Combs on divine preservation

After the recent discussions on divine preservation of scripture arising from the interview with Dan Wallace I decided to ask Bill Combs of Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary to give us a summary of his thoughts on divine preservation of scripture. Bill had earlier written a substantial article on this subject, in particular interacting with views of preservation presented by TR and KJV people (for article see here). I’ve asked for a presentation of his views without significant reference to such folk, and I hope that it can be discussed exclusively with reference to more serious positions.

Here are Bill’s words:

I would affirm there is a doctrine of preservation of Scripture, taught by Scripture itself, possibility directly, but certainly indirectly. I would distinguish between belief in a doctrine of preservation and, simply, belief in preservation. Most would agree that the Bible has been substantially preserved to our day because of the actual historical evidence. Those who argue for a doctrine of preservation also believe that the historical evidence demonstrates the preservation of Scripture, but add that preservation is a theological necessity—Scripture must be preserved because Scripture itself promises its own preservation. Evangelicals have, I believe, commonly affirmed belief in a doctrine of preservation.

Many ancient writings have been preserved because God is in control of the universe (my Calvinism). Any ancient document that is extant today owes its present existence to God’s preservation. So we can say that all the works of ancient authors in existence today have been “providentially preserved.” “Providential” means preservation is by secondary causation, through ordinary human means, rather than by God’s direct, miraculous intervention. The preservation of Scripture is not different in method from any other ancient book God has determined to preserve. Both Scripture and non- inspired works have been preserved providentially by secondary causation, by essentially ordinary human means. But we could also say that Origen’s Hexapla has providentially not been preserved. The doctrine of preservation of the Scriptures affirms, however, that the preservation of Scripture was always assured even though God carried out his will to preserve the Scriptures primarily through the actions of human wills.

A number of verses are commonly used to support the doctrine of preservation, including Ps 12:6-7; 119:89, 152, 160; Isa 40:8; Matt 5:17-18; 24:35; John 10:35; and 1 Pet 1:23-25. In my article on this subject, I examined these verses (see here). I concluded that some verses (e.g., Ps 12:6-7; 119:89) are not applicable to the doctrine of preservation. It is possible that Ps 119:152 and Ps 119:160 may offer a more direct promise, but, admittedly, the case is not rock solid. Isa 40:8 and Matt 24:35 offer more indirect support to the doctrine, while Matt 5:18 and John 10:35 strongly imply a doctrine of preservation with their emphasis on the continuing authority of Scripture.

The argument for preservation from the continuing authority of Scripture contends that since the Scriptures are authoritative, an authority that comes from their inspiration (2 Tim 3:16), the Scriptures can have no continuing authority unless they are preserved. Genuine Christianity is not possible apart from a dependable form of the Word of God, and all people are responsible to be Christians. The purposes for Scripture, to teach, reprove, correct, and train (2 Tim 3:16) cannot be fulfilled unless Scripture is preserved. This is where Matt 5:17–18 and John 10:35 tie into the doctrine of preservation since both passages teach a continuing authority for Scripture. But the same can be said for numerous texts that command the believer’s obedience. If these texts are essential to the believer’s sanctification, and they are, they must have been preserved.

Another argument for a doctrine of preservation comes from the principle that preservation is a natural corollary of inspiration. To say that there is a corollary between inspiration and preservation does not reveal anything about the exact nature of that preservation. It is perfectly reasonable to assert a corollary between inspiration and preservation without asserting that preservation be in every way equal to inspiration—for example, that inerrant inspiration demands inerrant preservation. Basically, the corollary suggests that there is no real purpose or value in inspiring a document that is not preserved. What, we might ask, would be the purpose of producing an authoritative record (inspiration) and letting it perish? Why, for instance, let Paul write an inspired letter to the Romans and then have it perish on the way to Rome? Of course, that did not happen, but could it have happened? If one denies a corollary between inspiration and preservation, Paul’s letter could have perished before it got to Rome.The purpose of inspiration was to produce graphe (2 Tim 3:16), a written record, a deposit of divine truth for the readers, not the writer. Without preservation the purpose of inspiration would be invalidated. Since it was clearly God’s intention that Paul’s inspired letter to the Romans be read by the Romans—it could not have perished—there must have been a divine work of preservation at work for at least a few weeks or months until the letter was received by the Romans. This suggests that there is some degree of correlation between inspiration and preservation. And the letter to the Romans was not meant just for the Romans. No Scripture was intended for only the original recipient—“For whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction…” (Rom 15:4). Similarly, Paul says, “Now these things happened to them as an example, and they were written for our instruction…” (1 Cor 10:11). If the OT Scriptures (“these things”) were “written,” that is, inspired for the purpose of instructing future believers (“our instruction”), that purpose for the inspired writings demands their preservation. It is important to make clear that none of these Scripture texts and arguments tell us how God would preserve his Word, only that he would preserve it. We are told neither the method nor the extent of this preservation. It is an indisputable fact, proven by the manuscript and versional evidence, that God has not perfectly preserved the Scriptures throughout their long history of transmission. God has preserved his Word to this day, but because of the means he has chosen to use to accomplish this preservation—providentially, through secondary causation—the words of the autographs have not been inerrantly preserved. Instead, God has chosen to allow for variations to occur—variants within the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek copies of the autographs. God has providentially provided all these copies in order to preserve the Scriptures. So it is proper to say that preservation has taken place in the totality of manuscripts. Because God chose this method of preservation, it was not possible to provide a perfectly pure text with no variations. This level of purity is sufficient for God’s purposes.

The evidence from manuscripts and versions suggests that, while not perfect, the Scriptures have been preserved in an essentially pure form such that we can rightfully affirm that the essential message of Scripture has not been lost or corrupted. We are justified, then, in referring to our reliable manuscripts and versions as the Word of God because they are tethered to the autographs and are sufficient representatives of them.

What does the doctrine of preservation mean for textual criticism? Since preservation is by secondary causation, through ordinary human means, only by careful examination of the preserved documents can the most accurate form of the text of Scripture be identified and ultimately preserved. The science (and art?) of textual criticism is thus essential. Textual criticism therefore becomes one of the ordinary human means God in his providence uses to preserve his Word. The doctrine of the preservation of Scripture correlates with the doctrine of Scripture’s inspiration—there was an original inerrant text of the canonical Scriptures to be preserved. Therefore, the goal of textual criticism should be the recovery of that inspired text to the degree the documents will permit. The doctrine of preservation does not, however, provide any basis for choosing between, for example, the Byzantine and Alexandrian text types since both preserve the essential message of Scripture. I am not sure how much more the doctrine of preservation impacts the actual practice of textual criticism except to say that I would think conjectural emendation would normally be avoided, certainly kept to a minimum.