Complete Online Schedule for Oxford Patristics Studies Conference

Today, the Oxford Patristics Conference's global schedule was published online here. It is a massive schedule, but the online version is easily searchable by Title, Author, Presenter, etc.

I'm looking forward to attending and participating in this conference for the first time to hear and learn about all the good work of my fellow colleagues.

Is Textual Criticism Theologically Safe?

Why do so many Evangelicals study textual criticism? (Besides because it’s the best.) Here’s one answer that I have come across several times now:

“Lower” textual criticism, as it is called, is often regarded as a pedantic prerequisite to “higher” historical-literary scholarship. Indeed, many believing Christian scholars choose New Testament textual criticism as their milieu just because it is blessedly boring and does not threaten their religious beliefs. But as the Johannine comma reminds us, it is the lower criticism, rather than its more glamorous younger sibling, that shows the biblical text to be contingent and thus subject to history. In other words, it is textual criticism that first humanized the word of God. —Raphael Magarik (source)

Speaking for myself, the theological cause-and-effect actually worked the other direction. The need for textual criticism itself posed a certain threat to my faith early on and that partly pushed me to pursue the field. The more I studied it, the less it posed a problem for me theologically. Before long, of course, the shear joy of textual criticism won me over! But I certainly didn’t set out in this field because I felt it was less threatening. Quite the opposite.

Update (8/20/19): I’m reminded today of one prominent place that discusses this. It is in Eldon Epp’s famous article on the multivalence of the term “original text.” He writes in the conclusion:

Nor (for those who choose to work within a theological framework) is textual criticism a “safe” discipline—a phrase I have heard for four decades—that can be practiced without challenge to theological convictions or without risk to faith commitments or truth assertions. I doubt that it ever was “safe”—at least for any who have thought through the implications of our myriad variation units, with their innumerable competing readings and conceptions, as well as the theological motivations that are evident in so many. But if it has been a “safe” discipline, it is safe no more. (p. 280)

More on Erasmus and Codex Montfortianus

Matthew in Montfortianus (per Wikipedia)

Last week I posted about the myth that Codex Montfortianus (GA 61) was made-to-order in response to a challenge by Erasmus to include it if even a single Greek manuscript could be found that had it. However, our excellent ETC commenters noted that, while it is true that Erasmus did not throw down such a gauntlet, it may still be true the Codex Montfortianus was made in response to his omission of the Comma Johanneum in his first two editions. Others, such as Tregelles, have indeed thought so.

In response, I quoted the opinion of Grantley McDonald, whose recent book on the Comma is extremely well executed (see my review).

Given the incomplete evidence, it is impossible to know why the scribe of Montfortianus altered his Greek text in so many places to conform to the Latin Vulgate. At several points throughout the manuscript, this scribe added variant readings from Erasmus’ 1516 New Testament in the margins. These variant readings are written in a slightly different ink and with different pens from that used for the body text, which may suggest that they were added later, perhaps days, perhaps years. It is clear that the scribe had access to Erasmus’ 1516 edition before relinquishing possession of the manuscript. It is less certain whether he copied it in direct reaction to Erasmus’ work. (pp. 32–33)

He goes on to cite Tregelles’s opinion. But McDonald thinks Tregelles is too confident since we might expect more readings in it that support Lee’s criticisms of Erasmus’ edition if it really was made to order.

Yesterday, however, I realized that in the thesis version of McDonald’s work, he seems a little more confident than in the published version that it was made for Erasmus. Here is what he says there, at the beginning of a detailed section on Montfortianius that is not included in the published book:

Further evidence allows us to date the manuscript quite firmly to the early sixteenth century. An examination of the textual variants in Codex Montfortianus has revealed that it was copied largely from manuscripts written in the second half of the fifteenth century, most of which were only gathered in one place after 1502; these data provide a terminus post quem for the copying of Montfortianus. It seems that Montfortianus also contains readings taken from Erasmus’ 1516 New Testament. The notion that Montfortianus was copied specifically to strong-arm Erasmus into including the comma—a suspicion hitherto based on nothing more than circumstantial evidence—thus becomes more plausible. (p. 315)

In the published version, he is less confident, but still open to the suggestion, writing, in a section not in his thesis:

Until the manuscript can be dated more precisely than the current estimate (c. 1500–1520), it is difficult to know for certain whether the scribe intended to influence Erasmus’ editorial choices. But that a recent Greek manuscript containing the comma—one of only two in the world—should have appeared in the homeland of Erasmus’ critic Lee, and should have been presented to Erasmus at the moment when it might make a difference, can certainly be described as a remarkable coincidence. (p. 33)

For my take, it still seems like a bit much to copy an entire NT manuscript just to influence Erasmus on one verse. But I certainly can’t say that this couldn’t have been part of the motivation. We may never know, but I thought I should give a bit more of McDonald’s own view given his expertise.

As a final note, any aspiring PhDs out there should note not only the quality of the content of McDonald’s thesis but also its typography and formatting. Something to aspire to.

Montoro: The Instability of Chrysostom’s Romans Text

The following is a guest post from Peter Montoro who is currently a doctoral student at the University of Birmingham. It gives a sample of his important paper at the Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament earlier this year, which was, in turn, based on his BD dissertation for the University of London. An expanded version of this material will be published in the proceedings of the Colloquium. —Peter G.

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The particular value of patristic citations, as opposed to versions and continuous text manuscripts of the New Testament, is, as Gordon Fee put it, “[W]hen properly evaluated...the Church Fathers have the potential of offering datable and geographically certain evidence.”¹

As has now been well established, recovering usable citations from patristic witnesses poses a number of methodological challenges. Yet while much progress has been made on many fronts, it seems sometimes to be forgotten that the task of “proper evaluation” is incomplete without a careful investigation of the manuscript transmission of the work in which a given patristic citation is located.

Saba 20, Folio 145r

It needs to be more clearly recognized, in practice as well as in theory, that the usability of patristic citations is directly dependent upon their stability within the manuscript tradition of the work from which they derive.

Though a father may have used two different forms of a text at two different times, even in the same work, it is rather difficult to use two different forms at the same time. When a single citation in a single location is itself an instance of variation, that citation is not “stable,” in the sense that I am using the term, and this therefore precludes it—until and unless the priority of one of these textual forms has been clearly and decisively demonstrated—from being utilized as the “datable and geographically certain evidence” that patristic citations are intended to provide.

For this study, I examined those portions of Chrysostom’s Romans Homilies that contain his exegesis of Romans 8 (found in homilies 13–15 using Migne’s numbering), in seven of the eight extant and catalogued manuscripts of the work that date to the tenth century or earlier, as well as two additional eleventh century manuscripts and six editions of the printed Greek text. (The published version of my work will include full data from all extant manuscripts dating to the fifteenth century and earlier.)

Chrysostom’s citation of Rom 8:33–35 provides a clear and striking illustration of the results of the analysis of this dataset as a whole and is what I want to focus on in this post. A PDF containing brief info on each of the manuscripts and editions used, as well as a full collation of the initial citations of 8:33–35 in these manuscripts and editions is available here.

Within the eight manuscripts examined, there are no less than five significant variation units in which two or more manuscripts differ from the others. All five of these non-singular variants are also found in the manuscript tradition of the book of Romans itself. In other words, the variants in the manuscript tradition of the Romans Homilies largely offer a selection of the very same variants that are present in the manuscript tradition of Romans itself. This is the case, not only for individual variants, but also for the particular combination of variants found in each of the two manuscript clusters found in the early manuscripts of the Romans Homilies.

The fifth of these variants, found in 8:35, is particularly interesting. After ἀπὸ τῆς ἀγάπης τοῦ, one cluster of manuscripts reads θεοῦ, while the other cluster reads χριστοῦ, followed by the significant comment, Καὶ οὐκ εἶπε· τοῦ θεοῦ· οὕτως ἀδιάφορον αὐτῷ, καὶ χριστὸν καὶ θεὸν ὀνομάζειν (“And he does not say ‘of God,’ so indifferent is it to him whether he mentions the Name of Christ or of God”).² Phrases such as the Καὶ οὐκ εἶπε(ν)... found in all printed editions at this point, have traditionally been considered the “gold standard” for textual stability in patristic citation. Indeed, Tischendorf thought this phrase so significant that he included the entirety of it in his textual apparatus for this verse.

Yet upon examination of the manuscript tradition of the Romans Homilies, not only is this phrase absent in a significant number of early manuscripts, but also the reading which it is clearly intended to support is itself a point of variation, rendering this traditional “gold standard” for textual stability a rather shaky foundation on which to build one’s text-critical house.

In order to properly evaluate patristic citations, it is not enough to determine from a printed edition that a citation is actually a citation—one must also go behind the edition to consider the stability of the manuscript tradition that underlies it. In the case of Chrysostom’s Romans Homilies, an initial survey of the manuscript tradition demonstrates significant textual instability, raising serious questions about the usability of any of the currently available printed editions of this work as a basis for citations of the form of the text used by Chrysostom in the late fourth century. Given that Chrysostom’s Homilies on Acts—for which similar textual instability has been demonstrated—served as the source for more than a quarter of the entire apparatus of patristic citations in the recent ECM of Acts, the answers that we give to these questions will have a significant impact on the shape of future critical editions of the New Testament.

It is important to note that I am not by any means asserting that these printed editions never give us access to the text of Chrysostom—indeed, in most cases they probably do. Yet this is to say very little indeed. The text of Romans is itself sufficiently stable that the same claim could be made, with equal validity, for almost any purely Greek (excluding the bilinguals, which present special challenges) manuscript or edition of the text of Romans, however far removed from Chrysostom.

As a point of comparison, the Textus Receptus and the NA28, normally considered to be at opposite ends of the textual spectrum, differ from each other only eighteen times in the entirety of Romans 8, four of which variations are merely orthographical. In this same chapter, there are no less than twenty­-two differences between the Romans text found in the two textual clusters of Chrysostom’s Romans Homilies, a number that only includes those instances where all three manuscripts identified as belonging to the one manuscript cluster differ from all five of the manuscripts that belong to the other.

In other words, there is actually more variation between the various manuscript clusters of Chrysostom’s Romans Homilies than there is between the Textus Receptus and the NA28. Until and unless the priority and originality of one of these clusters has been decisively established, no citation from this work, no matter how apparently secure in the printed text, ought to be considered as providing “datable and geographically certain evidence.”

Notes

1. Gordon D. Fee and Roderic L. Mullen, “The Use of the Greek Fathers for New Testament Textual Criticism,” in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis, ed. by Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 351–352. ↩
2. The translation is taken from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers edition of the Romans Homilies. ↩

New Media Affects Old Media

I saw the following tweet this week and it provoked my thinking about how very old media forms can be affected by far newer ones. In this case, the quotation marks and the apostrophe in this stone engraving have been affected by—of all things—the typewriter.

The Bible is the primary textbook in every class at Southwestern Seminary. How many verses have you spotted around campus? #SWBTS pic.twitter.com/QcnRTHO8Bb

— Southwestern Seminary (@SWBTS) July 24, 2019

These straight, vertical quotation marks, known as dumb quotes, did not exist before the invention of the typewriter. Before that, quotation marks and apostrophes were curved and terminated, usually, in a ball. But typewriters needed to conserve space and so the four keys required to produce single and double quotation marks got reduced to two by making the opening and closing marks the same (“” went to ""). This was then followed when the first fonts were designed for personal computers. Only as computer typography advanced were typefaces designed with proper marks. But by then, QWERTY keyboards were already set and no one dared make a keyboard with two keys where one had been. (Another casualty of the typewriter was the en dash as distinct from the hyphen and the minus. These all three got reduced to the hyphen-minus that’s on our modern keyboard.)

Today, well made software automatically converts dumb quotes into proper quotation marks. But some of our most used software, like email and most operating systems, does not. Blogger, for example, does not. So I use a browser plugin that converts them before publication.

No doubt, the type for this stone engraving was first rendered on a computer and only then carved, for perpetuity, into stone. No stone mason from a previous generation would have even known to carve quotes as vertical lines. And so it offers a lasting illustration of how new media affects old—sometimes very old—forms of media.

Putting to Rest an Old Canard about Erasmus

Among text critics, it’s fairly well known that no Greek manuscript was ever produced to order for Erasmus that included the long form of 1 John 5.7. But given that the story is still found in the standard textbook and that it works as such a great illustration, it continues to be perpetuated among students of the New Testament. Here is the text of Metzger-Ehrman (p. 146):

In an unguarded moment, Erasmus may have promised that he would insert the Comma Johanneum, as it is called, in future editions if a single Greek manuscript could be found that contained the passage. At length, such a copy was found—or was made to order! As it now appears, the Greek manuscript had probably been written in Oxford about 1520 by a Franciscan friar named Froy (or Roy), who took the disputed words from the Latin Vulgate. 

Thankfully, Metzger and Ehrman do cite the work of Henk J. de Jonge who found no such promise from Erasmus but did find a text that seems to have been misread as such. The story of the Comma from the time of the printing press is now told in a remarkably detailed account by one of de Jonge’s students. It’s worth thinking about why this particular canard appeals to us so much. Why are we so easily taken by it? In any case, here is a letter from de Jonge to Michael Maynard on the matter:
From Michael Maynard, A History of the Debate over 1 John 5,7–8: A Tracing of the Longevity of the Comma Johanneum, with Evalutations of Arguments Against Its Authenticity. Tempe, AZ: Comma Publications, 1995.