Title: The Early Text of the New Testament

Editors: Charles Hill and Michael Kruger

Bibliographic info: xiv + 413 + 69

Cover: Hard with Dust-jacket

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2012

Buy it at Amazon

With thanks to the kind folk at OUP for the review copy!

Part I and Part II of this review.

The third section of this wonderful volume is on the early citation/use of New Testament writings. The first chapter in this section, chapter 14 (pp. 261-81), is from the pen of editor Charles Hill. The main thrust of his contribution is that it is too simplistic, and ultimately wrong, to take loose citations of the NT in other early Christian writings as support for a NT text different to that found in actual NT manuscripts. Neither should it be taken as support for “an erratic NT text” (262) in the second century, which only became more uniform due to a hypothetical late recension of the text. Regarding the ‘loose’ citations of the NT writings by early Christian authors (e.g. Justin), Hill says:

Literary Christians inherited, took part in, and contributed to a literary culture, Greek, Roman, and Jewish, which did not consider that the chief purpose of literary borrowing was to guarantee for the reader an exact replication of the text appropriated. (277)

In other words, these early Christian writers inherited from both the Greco-Roman and Jewish cultures a literary approach which did not necessarily treasure the exact duplication of the text being cited (he provides evidence in support of this notion by inspecting examples of citations from the larger literary environment). Hill also makes the intriguing suggestion that this literary borrowing method may in fact “offer a partial explanation” for the resemblance between the NT text used by many patristic writers and the so-called Western text – “which is often seen not as a recension but as a tendency in copying.” (281)

The next chapter (pp. 282-301) is contributed by Paul Foster and is about the text of the New Testament to be found in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. The texts he examines are (predictably) the Didache, 1 & 2 Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas, the epistles of Ignatius, and Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians. Not surprisingly, considering the dearth of NT quotes in the AF, he concludes that the loose citations of the NT text in the AF provides “no conclusive evidence for identifying the forms of the text of the NT which may have been in circulation in the second century” (300). He also makes the note that since the copies of the AF we possess date to the fourth century at the earliest, it would be “potentially naïve” to align them with a certain text type of the NT. For anyone interested in this topic, an exhaustive study of it can be found in The Reception of the New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers (ed’s Andrew Gregory and Christopher Tuckett; OUP, 2005).

Next up is Dieter Roth’s chapter on Marcion and the early NT text (pp. 302-12). This short chapter is an evaluation on what we can know about the Gospel and Pauline epistles known to Marcion. Joseph Verheyden (pp. 313-31) then takes a look at Justin’s text of the Gospels as found in First Apology 15.1-8, with the underlying question being as to whether the citation is best explained by a stylistic or compositional rationale, or whether it indicates that he had access to a different Gospel text.

Tjitze Baarda is the author of the next chapter (pp. 336-49) and is on Tatian’s Diatessaron and the Greek text of the Gospels (note that Baarda believes the Diatessaron was originally written in Greek, not Syriac). This was one of the top essays in this volume in my opinion, though it is not a simple read! He concludes by saying: “it is my conviction that it is not possible to make the Diatessaron a standard witness in any apparatus” (348), and that “one has to be very cautious in attributing the label ‘Diatessaron’ to a specific Greek (variant) reading in the apparatus, even if one might be quite certain that Tatian had read that reading or perhaps created it” (349). Though Baarda does add the caveat that the Diatessaron could be an important witness “if we possessed it in its original Greek form” (349).

Chapter 19 (pp. 350-69), my favorite in the volume, is from Stanley Porter and is on the relationship between the NT text and the apocryphal gospels. While Porter determines that the evidence of the Greek NT in the early apocryphal gospels is relatively scant, those who do use the canonical Gospels typically improved, modified, or conflated the canonical Gospels. Furthermore, the Gospel of John oftentimes is drawn upon in the apocryphal gospels too, either on its own or together with the Synoptics. The most interesting conclusion of Porter’s is that from the evidence of the apocryphal gospels we can say that “the text of the Greek New Testament was relatively well established and fixed by the time of the second and third centuries” (369). One thing I should mention about this chapter is that there is a lot of Greek text in it and Porter does use syntax terminology quite heavily (e.g. predicates, modifiers, complements, etc). Reading this essay will definitely challenge your Greek reading skills and understanding of syntax!

Chapter 20 (pp. 370-92) is written by D. Jeffrey Bingham and Billy R. Todd, Jr. This contribution is a dense study on Irenaeus’s text of the Gospels in Adversus haereses. While Porter’s essay may have had a decent amount of Greek text in it, this one is completely laden with pages (!) of tables and statistics. If I blindly picked this book up and opened it to a page in this chapter, I would think I had opened up a critical edition of the Greek NT. There are entire pages listing the passages to be found in Adversus haereses from Matthew, Luke, and John, together with a whole bunch of textual variants and the manuscript evidence for each of them. This is accompanied by pages of tables displaying statistical analysis of the relationship between Irenaeus and the various text types (Alexandrian, Byzantine, Caesarean, and Western) of the Gospels. All I can say is thank the heavens for the concluding summary!

The final chapter (393-413) in this volume is Carl Cosaert’s essay on Gospel citations in Clement of Alexandria. This is similar to the previous essay in that it too contains lots of statistical tables, though this chapter is only meant to be a brief summary of the findings in Cosaert’s fuller study on this topic which is found in the monograph series The New Testament in the Greek Fathers (called The Text of the Gospels in Clement of Alexandria; SBL, 2008) One of his more interesting conclusions is that “Clement’s text was not monolithic” (413). For while Clement “shares his highest levels of agreement with other Alexandrian fathers” (412), his Gospel citations do not evince the dominance of a sole text type. Instead, Clement demonstrates the existence of two major textual streams during his time: the Alexandrian and Western (with a few Byzantine readings thrown in for good measure).

The book closes with the standard fare: a bibliography and indices of biblical citations, Greek manuscripts, and subjects. This volume is undoubtedly going to be a key reference work on the text of the NT in early Christianity for some time, but it is quite expensive at $150 (so I am very grateful to OUP for the gratuitous review copy)! I wouldn’t recommend anyone to spend that much money on a book, well at least not on a new book – if it was signed first edition of some old book, then sure! Perhaps a relatively inexpensive paperback copy will be released in a year or so, but until then I recommend that you pester your seminary/university library to purchase a copy of it!

Title: The Early Text of the New Testament

Editors: Charles Hill and Michael Kruger

Bibliographic info: xiv + 413 + 69

Cover: Hard with Dust-jacket

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2012

Buy it at Amazon

With thanks to the kind folk at OUP for the review copy!

Part I of this review.

The second section of The Early Text of the New Testament consists of nine chapters, eight of which is devoted to an examination of the early textual tradition of a book or section of the Greek New Testament, achieved by examining the extant papyri. The following are the chapters in this section along with their respective authors:

5. The Early Text of Matthew – Tommy Wasserman (pp. 83-107)
6. The Early Text of Mark – Peter Head (pp. 108-120)
7. The Early Text of Luke – Juan Hernández (pp. 121-139)
8. The Early Text of John – Juan Chapa (pp. 140-156)
9. The Early Text of Acts – Christopher Tuckett (pp. 157-174)
10. The Early Text of Paul and Hebrews – James Royse (pp. 175-203)
11. The Early Text of The Catholic Epistles – J. K. Elliott (pp. 204-224)
12. The Early Text of Revelation – Tobias Nicklas (pp. 225-238)
13. Where Two or Three are Gathered Together: Evaluating Agreements between Two or More Early Versions – Peter Williams (pp. 239-258)

I will not enter into a summary of each and every chapter. In regards to chapters 5 through 12, I will point out that the authors do not necessarily approach the task at hand with the same methods. For instance, J.K. Elliot’s contribution on the Catholic Epistles (CE) is able to make use of the Editio Critica Maior (which has been completed for the CE). He compares the reconstructed text of the CE found in the ECM to that of the text of the CE in the extant papyri, noting when each manuscript has readings that are for or against the text of the ECM. The other contributors can not do this (for the obvious reason that the ECM is only complete for the CE). For others, the difference in method is simply due, in part at least, to the differing nature of the manuscript available for the author to examine, e.g. Peter Head’s chapter on the Gospel of Mark doesn’t really have many papyri it can make good use of.

Another issue I should mention is that there is no consistent way in which the authors refer to the papyri in terms of categories; most (all?) of the authors use categories (strict, free, normal) that relate how close the manuscript is to the (reconstructed) original text (i.e. the text found in the Nestle-Aland edition), but some also use the text-type categories (Alexandrian, Western, Caesarean, Byzantine), while others do not. If I recall correctly, most of these chapters included tables of the papyri, though there was a few (maybe just one or two) that did not, and among those that did there was a little bit of variation on the details in the table. Additionally, there are other differences in the contributions in this section: some of the authors have more of a focus on what the manuscripts say in regards to specific textual variants, some lay emphasis on the use of nomina sacra in the manuscript, etc. None of this should be taken as a criticism of this section; it’s just a heads up in case a potential buyer/reader thought that each chapter would use the same method, format, details, etc.

I do feel, though, that the general aim of this section (i.e. providing a window on the early textual tradition of the NT by focusing on the papryi evidence) may only cement into place, for the (layman, novice, or armchair textual critic) reader, that the papyri are some sort of magical witness to the early text. Though I guess this notion is actually mitigated by the chapters themselves, as they do effectively note that not all papyri are made equal; they do not all really deserve the attention that is pushed upon them simply by virtue of being written on papyrus and having palaeographers dating them to a (relatively) early date. Take for instance P72, consisting of a full witness to the text of 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Jude. Sure, it is our earliest witness to these texts, but the text in P72 isn’t exactly the most useful when it comes to determining the original/earliest text (due to scribe being very careless and possessing an obvious theological tendency in what he wrote down, e.g., see his reading of theos christos in the well-known textual variant in Jude 5).

I will briefly comment on the last chapter in this section, by Peter Williams, as it is different to the others in that it deals with the witness of the earliest versions of the NT, specifically in how it is not such a clear and simple task at determining the underlying vorlage of a Syriac manuscript of the NT (he focuses upon the Syro-witnesses to Mark and Luke 24). The following is a snippet from his concluding thoughts: “It appears that often citation of versions in the textual apparatus without due consideration of their translation technique gives the misleading impression that the support for a particular variant is much stronger than it really is” (258).

All of these chapters are obviously a great read if you are into textual criticism and are no doubt an invaluable resource if you are an active researcher in this field. I will get the third and final part of this review up in a day or two (hopefully).

Title: The Early Text of the New Testament

Editors: Charles Hill and Michael Kruger

Bibliographic info: xiv + 413 + 69

Cover: Hard with Dust-jacket

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2012

Buy it at Amazon

With thanks to the kind folk at OUP for the review copy!

This wonderful book is a collection of essays by various contributors concerning the early textual transmission of the New Testament text. The book is divided into three sections:

• Part I. The Textual and Scribal Culture of Early Christianity
• Part II. The Manuscript Tradition
• Part III. Early Citation and Use of the New Testament Writings.

The first section is comprised of four chapters which have an overarching theme of discussing the culture in which the Greek text of the New Testament was originally written, with an emphasis on book production, the scribal process and scribal habits. The first chapter (pp. 23-36), by Harry Gamble, contains information concerning the Roman book trade, including aspects such as how books were published and disseminated in those days. It’s actually pretty easy to not stop and think about how the book trade would have been quite different than it is to today due to various factors present back then (e.g. mass illiteracy, book production methods, etc). This chapter was actually quite a fascinating read, especially for a bibliophile such as myself.

The second chapter (pp. 37-48), by Scott Charlesworth, aims to show, through an examination of the early NT papyri, the presence of “catholicity” in early Christianity through the use of standard-sized gospel codices and the use of nomina sacra in copies of NT texts. Charlesworth believes that these two factors are indicators that “there was consensus and collaboration between early Christian groups” (39) and are “indicative of an interconnected ‘catholic’ church in the second half of the second century” (41). Charlesworth also thinks that this indication of catholicity cuts against the Bauer thesis outlined in his classic work Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christianity (Fortress, 1971). This is due to two reasons: (1) non-canonical gospel papyri (Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Mary) do not exhibit these indicators of catholicity; and (2) the non-canonical gospels are infrequently cited and preserved compared to the canonical gospels.

Another implication of scribal features in early NT manuscripts is found in the third chapter (pp. 49-62) which is from Larry Hurtado. Drawing upon the study of William A. Johnson ‘Toward a Sociology of Reading in Classical Antiquity’ (AJP 121; 2000; 593-627), Hurtado seeks to offer up a “complementary (but much more modest) pilot-study of the reading of literary texts in worship gatherings of Christian circles of the first three centuries” (52). Hurtado looks at the “conscious and deliberate” preference for the codex book-form amongst early Christians. Noting this, he says:

Early Christians cannot have been unconscious that their preferred book-form was out of step with the larger book culture of the time. Indeed, the evidence suggests a particularly deliberate effort to move away from the bookroll for copies of texts that were intended to function in their assemblies as scripture, as part of their ritual culture, as texts that were associated closely with their gathered worship settings. (56)

Hurtado also discusses various orthographical conventions in the early Christian manuscripts, such as diaeresis and “punctuation marking sense-units”. He then goes on to elucidate the social effects of these various features, saying that it demonstrates a deliberate turn away “from the elitist format of high-quality literary manuscripts” (59), and that this indicates “these Christian manuscripts appear to be intended to enable a greater range of Christians to serve in the public reading of texts in Christian gatherings” (59).

Hurtado goes on to mention the nomina sacra  and the staurogram, saying that these “represent efforts to mark early Christian manuscripts visually as Christian. These scribal devices were not utilitarian in purpose … They originated and developed as visual expressions of Christian piety” (61-62). In summary, this chapter was quite the interesting discussion concerning manuscripts and the sociology of early Christianity. Note, Hurtado also discusses this subject in his book The Earliest Christian Artifacts (Eerdmans 2006).

The fourth chapter (pp. 63-80), and final one in the first section, is from Michael Kruger and is about the attitudes that Christians took towards the scribal process of reproducing their sacred texts. Kruger says that:

One area that has been largely overlooked is the attitude toward the text that is actually expressed by Christians in the earliest literary sources, that is, statements about how they would have viewed their sacred writings, how they would have understood the transmission and preservation of these texts, and how they would have responded to changes or alterations in the text. (63)

Kruger breaks this down into early testimony regarding the scriptural status of NT texts (e.g. 2 Pet. 3.16), and early testimony regarding the reproduction and preservation of NT texts. He ends this chapter with a brief survey of early Christian attitudes toward the reproduction of the texts they held to be Scripture. In order to account fully for the complexity of the historical data, Kruger contends that the historian must allow the explicit testimony of early church leaders to inform the reconstruction of their actual practice in handling those texts.

Read Part II of this review.

Title: The Textual History of the Greek New Testament – Changing Views in Contemporary Research

Editors: Klaus Watchel and Michael Holmes

Bibliographic info: viii +226

Cover: Hard

Publisher: Brill, 2012

Buy it at Amazon

With thanks to the kind folk at Brill for the review copy!

This volume is framed by an introduction by both editors and a conclusion by Watchel, between which is found eight essays that are the proceedings from a two day colloquium held in August 2008 at Münster on issues in contemporary New Testament textual criticism.

The first contribution is from D.C. Parker and is titled, Is “Living Text” Compatible with “Initial Text”? Editing the Gospel of John. Building off of his monograph The Living Text of the Gospels (CUP, 1997), in which he contended that the body of textual variation in the Gospels should be seen as a process of interpretation of the Gospel tradition (i.e. the living text), Parker discusses how, since its publication, he has worked on an editorial team for a critical edition of the Gospel of John. This has led him to address the question of the relationship between theories concerning the textual history of the Gospels, as well as whether his use of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) in his work on John to arrive at an “initial text” (Ausgangstext) is compatible with his notion of a “living text”. Note that the initial text is not the authorial text, but is the text from which one can trace the readings in the extant manuscript tradition (i.e. the text from which readings in extant manuscripts are genealogically descended). Parker winds up concluding that “a point on which The Living Text and the initial text are totally agreed, namely, the impossibility of the attempt to recover a single original text” (21).

This conclusion is, in a way, what the next essay, Original Text and Textual History by Holger Strutwolf, argues against. Strutwolf disagrees with this notion, held by Parker and others, that the quest for the original authorial text of the Greek NT is problematic and unattainable. This chaper is an attempt to answer the question of whether the quest for the original text is obsolete or not. In order to arrive at an answer, Strutwolf draws upon two well-known examples: the Lukan Lord’s prayer (Lk. 11.2-3) and the Matthean version of Jesus’ logion on the goodness of God (Mt. 19.17), both of which were quite fascinating to read. His conclusion is that the “initial text” as arrived at by means of the CBGM (and as found in the Editio Critica Maior), which would maybe be the text in the early- to mid-second century, could very well be the original authorial text, unless there is “evidence which suggests a radical break in the textual transmission between the author’s text and the initial text of our tradition” (41).

The third contribution is David Trobisch’s The Need to Discern Distinctive Editions of the New Testament in the Manuscript Tradition. This brief essay (running in at five pages) puts forth the case that a critical edition of a NT text must include information regarding “the title of the book and the titles of the individual writings, about the collection units, about nontextual features such as the nomina sacra and codex form” (48). For those unaware, Trobisch has authored a slim volume on the development of the NT canon called The First Edition of the New Testament (OUP, 2000), which discusses the importance of the previously mentioned features in the case for an early final redaction of the NT.

The next chapter, Conceptualizing “Scribal” Performances: Reader’s Notes, by Ulrich Schmid, is about deliberate attempts by editors to improve the text through writing notes in the margins. These marginal additions, however, were not always meant to be editorial corrections but may have simply been notes serving other functions (e.g. pointing to a parallel passage elsewhere). In some cases these marginal notes may have ultimately found there way into the main text due to a later scribe using that manuscript as an exemplar and assuming the marginal notes were editorial corrections meant to be integrated into future copies of the manuscript. Schmid provides two main examples of this in Lk. 17.14 in P75 and Mt. 27.49 as found in several witnesses including 01 (Sinaiticus) and 03 (Vaticanus).

Michael Holmes provides the content of the next chapter, Working with an Open Textual Tradition: Challenges in Theory and Practice. After beginning with a discussion on the definition of terms (Holmes prefers “open” and “closed” as opposed to the possibly pejorative “contaminated” and affirmative counterpart “pure”), Holmes provides examples of how mixture occurs in the process of textual transmission. The different ways in which mixture can occur is why Holmes views the local-genealogical method as critical to NT textual criticism; for it deals with each variation unit on its own terms, providing stemmata of readings/variants, as opposed to simply creating a stemma of all manuscripts. This is where the usefulness of the CBGM comes into play, for it relates the local stemmata of variants to a global one of witnesses.

The next contribution is from Eldon J. Epp and is called Traditional “Canons” of New Testament Textual Criticism: Their Value, Validity, and Viability—or Lack Thereof. After giving a thorough history of the emergence of external and internal criteria in New Testament textual criticism, as well as a brief overview on the terminology used in such discussions (of which Epp prefers using “criterion” instead of other options like “canon” or “rule”), Epp then discusses the strengths and weaknesses of sixteen internal and external criteria. The discussion on the eighth criterion, which deals with the longer/longest and shorter/shortest reading in a variant, is quite detailed, bringing out the complexity of what ostensibly seems to be a simple criterion. It’s not as easy as just saying that scribes moved in only one direction, as they didn’t, thus each example that attempts to utilize this criterion needs to be adjudicated on a case by case basis. This chapter almost left me with the impression that this criterion should be basically jettisoned from the repertoire of text-critical criteria/canons (and I had a similar feeling with the Atticism criterion).

Epp finishes his essay by providing his own definition of New Testament textual criticism, a definition which I found myself quietly saying an affirmative ‘Yes!” to, as his mentioning of it as “both science and art” and how it provides a window on early Christianity really resonates with why I enjoy studying NT textual criticism. I will reproduce his definition below:

New Testament textual criticism, employing aspects of both science and art, studies the transmission of the New Testament text and the manuscripts that facilitate its transmission, with the unitary goal of establishing the earliest attainable text (which serves as a baseline) and, at the same time, of assessing the textual variants that emerge from the baseline text so as to hear the narratives of early Christian thought and life that inhere in the array of meaningful variants. (127)

Next up is J.K. Elliott’s chapter, What Should Be in an Apparatus Criticus? Desiderata to Support a Thoroughgoing Eclectic Approach to Textual Criticism. This brief contribution by Elliott, who is himself a practitioner of thoroughgoing eclecticism, contains his case for why a critical apparatus should have a wide range of sources. Though it is not the quantity of witnesses in an apparatus that is the issue, it is more so having a wide range of types of variants, including even those “overlooked as ‘merely’ orthographical.”

I can’t even begin to imagine how huge of a volume an edition of a NT text would be if it contained all the variants found in the Greek manuscript tradition (including lectionaries), other versional traditions, patristic citations, citations in the apocryphal NT (e.g. Gospel of Thomas), the apostolic fathers, as well as other pertinent information such as the scribal habits of particular manuscripts. As Elliott notes, though, this project would be better suited to the electronic age than to paper reproduction:

Electronic publishing is ideally suited to collecting and displaying an increasing number of manuscripts and other witnesses and an infinite number of variants in an ongoing and developing way, as more collations are made and more sources are scoured. Scholars’ greed can be satisfied electronically. (129)

The armchair textual-critic in me salivates at the idea of an “infinite number of variants” being available at my fingertips. For now, however, I will have to remain satisfied with the detailed apparatuses that are available right now, namely, the Nestle-Aland 27^th edition of the Greek NT which contains a good starting point (with the 28^th edition coming out in December I believe), and the Editio Critica Maior (ECM), a critical edition of the first 1000 years of the Greek NT tradition which, so far, is comprised of four volumes containing the Catholic Epistles (and which I am a proud and lucky owner of). There is also the Vetus Latina project (a thorough display of Latin patristic citations of the NT, some of which apparently may support readings predating Jerome’s Latin Vulgate), and the International Greek New Testament Project which has completed work on the Gospel of Luke and is currently working on the Gospel of John (I think I remember Parker saying that the IGNTP is essentially picking up the ECM franchise for the Gospel of John).

Gerd Mink then provides what is, in my opinion, the best contribution to this volume. It also happens to be, by far, the longest essay at 75(!) pages. Additionally, considering that I had to read through it three times in order to fully understand it (and I’m sure a lot of it is still out of my grasp), it also receives the title of most challenging to read. This essay is called Contamination, Coherence, and Coincidence in Textual Transmission: The Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) as a Complement and Corrective to Existing Approaches.

The CBGM  is used by the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung (INTF; The Institute for New Testament Textual Research) in their effort to produce the ECM. In a nutshell, the CBGM derives genealogical relationships between witnesses from attempting to assess genealogical relationships between their variants and, if possible, to construct a local stemma of the variants within a global stemma of witnesses. As Mink puts it: “Therefore, local stemmata of variants are the elements on which a global hypothesis about the genealogy of their witnesses can be based” (151).

My favorite feature in Mink’s essay is the awesome case study of the CBGM using the variant in Jude 15. In the Greek manuscript tradition this verse contains the reading of πασαν ψυχην (in P72, 01, and 1852) and the alternate reading of παντας τους ασεβεις [αυτων] in the rest of the manuscripts. Mink concludes that, by using the CBGM, there is “good reason to accept” the variant reading πασαν ψυχην as the initial text. This is actually the opposite conclusion to a couple of relatively recent studies done on this textual variant, as I believe that both Tommy Wasserman (in his published doctoral dissertation The Epistle of Jude: Its Text and Transmission) and Timo Flink (in a 2007 Filologia NeoTestamentaria article) both prefer the reading παντας τους ασεβεις. Nevertheless, I think that Mink has done a great job in this case study, and throughout the entire essay, of showing that coherence can be employed in order to make better, and perhaps more objective, use of the extant manuscripts.

All in all, this volume is a very valuable contribution to understanding the current status quaestionis of NT textual criticism, particularly in regards to how the ECM and the CBGM is altering the landscape. The edition I received for review was the hardback version published by Brill. It is somewhat expensive with a RRP of $135 (though it is ~$70 through secondary sellers on Amazon). Thankfully, though, the Society of Biblical Literature has published its own softcover version which goes for ~$30. Hooray for the Brill-SBL partnership!

Title: Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament

Series: Text and Canon of the New Testament

Editor: Daniel Wallace

Bibliographical Info: 266 + 17 (indices)

Cover: Soft

Publisher: Kregel, 2011

Purchase it at Amazon

With thanks to Kregel for the gratuitous review copy.

Read Part I here.

Chapter 4 contains Adam Messer’s contribution to this volume with an essay titled, Patristic Theology and Recension in Matthew 24.36 – An Evaluation of Ehrman’s Text-Critical Methodology. This chapter is similar to the previous one in that it approaches a NT textual variant with the purpose of investigating the charge that passages in the NT were deliberately changed for theological reasons. The variant found in Matt 24.36 is whether, when discussing the parousia, Matthew recorded Jesus’ caveat that the Son doesn’t know the day and hour (ουδε ο υιος).

Messer provides an examination of the theological motivations that might have caused the omission of the phrase from Matthew, as well as the Patristic evidence for this variant. It was quite interesting to see the excuses that some of the church fathers came up with in order to reconcile how Jesus could say that he didn’t know the day nor hour of his return with the belief that Jesus is God. It reminds me of how many people today come up with some creative explanations to reconcile parts of the Bible which contradict each other.

In chapter 5 Tim Ricchuiti provides us an essay title, Tracking Thomas: A Text-Critical Look at the Transmission of the Gospel of Thomas. Ricchuiti uses the canons of textual criticism to examine the differences between the Coptic and Greek versions of various logia of the Gospel of Thomas. The purpose of such an exercise? By comparing the Greek fragments to the Coptic text, Ricchuiti is aiming to to assess the merit of the Greek fragments against the Coptic text. He concludes that, inter alia, “scholars are on fairly solid ground when it comes to the assumption that the Greek represents an earlier strain of Thomas.” (226)

Brian Wright contributes the essay for chapter 6, Jesus as ΘΕΟΣ – A Textual Examination. Wright examines the seven verses in the New Testament which may very well call Jesus  “θεος” (John 1.1, 1.18, 20.28, Acts 20.28, Gal 2.20, Heb 1.8, and 2 Pet 1.1). Wright concludes that the three Johannine passages, Heb 1.8, and 2 Pet 1.1, do refer to Jesus as θεος, whereas Acts 20.28 and Gal 2.20 do not.

I believe that the point behind this essay was to show that despite the fact that many of the passages in the NT which call Jesus θεος have either grammatical problems or textual variants, it is still clear that the NT unambiguously refers to Jesus as θεος. While I wouldn’t disagree with this, it doesn’t take it far enough. I mean, having decided that the NT calls Jesus θεος, the question naturally arises as to what exactly this meant for the author of the text (as one can not just simply assume it means what mainstream Christianity thinks it means).

In general I don’t have many criticisms of this book. All of the essays were  thoroughly researched and exhaustively footnoted. It was kind of annoying, though, to see a few verses examined multiple times throughout the book (e.g. an examination of Matt 24.36 is found in three of the six essays). Also, seeing as one of the themes of the book was whether any important Christian doctrines are altered by NT variants, it would have been interesting to see Heb 2.9 tackled in this regard, i.e. what would be the theological implications of the reading “choris theou“? Is it easily reconcilable in a Trinitarian framework?

Despite these criticisms, I thought this book was great from a text-critical perspective and I am interested to see what other volumes this new series from Kregel brings forth.

Title: Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament

Series: Text and Canon of the New Testament

Editor: Daniel Wallace

Bibliographical Info: 266 + 17 (indices)

Cover: Soft

Publisher: Kregel, 2011

Purchase it at Amazon

With thanks to Kregel for the gratuitous review copy.

This book is the inaugural volume of the Text and Canon of the New Testament series published by Kregel, a series which is set on tackling the thorny questions of textual and canonical criticism that arise in New Testament studies, e.g., were the NT books genuinely written by their ascribed authors? Do the books of the NT contradict one another historically and theologically? And so forth. This present volume examines a foundational issue for NT studies, which is whether we can recover the original autographic text or whether this claim is nothing but a pipe-dream. This book contains six essays which approach this question from various angles.

Chapter 1 contains the essay, Lost in Transmission: How Badly Did the Scribes Corrupt the New Testament?, is by the editor of this volume, Daniel Wallace. This chapter is directly aimed at the works of Bart Ehrman. Wallace begins by noting his perplexity regarding Ehrman’s most popular work, Misquoting Jesus, which if read one way is not controversial, but if read another way then it directly contradicts the scholarly publications that Ehrman has published.

Wallace sets out three questions to answer in this chapter:

1. What is the number of the textual variants.
2. What is the nature of the textual variants.
3. What theological issues are at stake.

On the first question, Wallace mentions the usual arguments against Ehrman’s presentation of the data, e.g., the connection between the number of manuscripts and the number of variants. In other words, the more manuscripts one possesses of a text, then the more scribal errors there will be. That is the nature of the beast. If one possessed only a mere handful of manuscripts of a text, then sure there would be fewer variants, but then one could just complain that the paucity of manuscripts means we can not be certain about the original text. Interestingly, Wallace also compares the transmissional history of the NT to the Qur’an and notes that what Erhman says about the NT is more accurately representative of the Qur’an.

In discussing the variant of 616 in Revelation for the number of the beast, Wallace humorously notes that:

This textual variant does not change any cardinal belief of Christians, but, if original, it would send about seven tons of dispensational literature to the flames! (43)

Amen to that!

This essay finishes with up a mention of seven meaningful and viable variants in the NT, with a particular focus on Matt 24.36 (“nor the Son”) which is Ehrman’s  “prime example of Orthodox Corruption”.

Having read quite a few books by Ehrman, I think there is an easily recognizable difference between Bart Ehrman the scholar and Bart Ehrman the populist writer; the former is responsible for such works as The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture and The New Testament: An Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, whereas the latter is responsible for such works as  Misquoting Jesus and Jesus, Interrupted.

I’ve said before that I consider Orthodox Corruption to be an important book for anyone interested in early Christianity to read. Even Ehrman’s populist works can be useful as, for example, Misquoting Jesus contains quite a good introduction to NT textual criticism. Irrespective of this, Ehrman seemingly gives a different presentation and interpretation of the data in his populist works than he does in his scholarly works.  In Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman paints the picture that the original text of the NT is inaccessible to us and that we just cannot know what the original manuscripts said. But then in Orthodox Corruption, Ehrman conveys the opposite because he needs to be able to show what the original text said (and what it was changed to), in order to demonstrate the thesis of this book (i.e. that textual changes occurred due to theologically motivated scribes).

Chapter 2 contains an essay by Philip Miller titled, The Least Orthodox Reading is to be Preferred: A New-Canon for New Testament Textual Criticism? Like the last essay, this one is also directly aimed at the works of Bart Ehrman. Miller believes that an unstated, but implicit, canon exists in Ehrman’s text-critical methodology. This canon is, as the chapter title bears out, that when confronted with a textual variant, the reading which appears to be in-sync with “orthodoxy” is to be regarded as a possible alteration to the more “unorthodox” reading.

Miller begins by showing that the reality of theologically motivated textual alterations is nothing new to the field of textual criticism. This is followed by a look at Ehrman’s book, The Orthodox Corruption of the Scripture, which lays out his view as to the nature and scope of scribes deliberately altering the text to make it more patently orthodox. While I agree that deliberate textual alteration of the NT writings occurred on occasion, I disagree that it was some sort of large-scale programmatic phenomenon as Ehrman seemingly envisages it.

Miller then examines how Ehrman deals with some textual variants by looking at Ehrman’s methodology in light of the internal and external evidence. The main variants that Miller investigates are Matt 24.36, John 1.18, and Heb 2.9 (strangely enough, I actually tentatively agree with Ehrman on all three of these variants). Miller also lists another dozen or so variants that feature prominently in Orthodox Corruption, compares Ehrman’s conclusions to those of the NA/UBS text, and draws the conclusion that:

Ehrman’s application of the canon of unorthodoxy not only estranges him from the widely accepted NA27/UBS4 text but also fails to prove his thesis. … For Ehrman, it appears that the least orthodox reading is to be preferred and that this presupposed canon often results in textual decisions that are at odds with the mainstream reconstruction of the text. (83-4)

Miller then lists four criterion that needs to be proved before the canon of unorthodoxy can be demonstrated as valid. This is then followed with a five point critique of the canon of unorthodoxy. All in all, I think this essay does a good job at showing that Bart Ehrman, despite his protests to the contrary, is using the canon of orthodoxy (and in the process is effectively presupposing his conclusions by doing so).

Chapter 3, by Matthew Morgan, contains the essay The Legacy of a Letter: Sabellianism or Scribal Blunder in John 1.1c? Morgan discusses the reading of found John 1:1c that is found in two eight-century manuscripts – 019 and 032-S  – which both contain the reading και ο θεος ην ο λογος (the variant being the presence of the article before theos). Morgan says that,

If correct, this reading threatens the assertion that evangelical doctrine is unaffected by any variant. (92)

What follows is a brief look at the rise of Sabellianism, the reaction of “orthodox” church fathers against it, and an assessment on the historical viability that there was a Sabellian influence on the textual transmission of the NT. The meat of the chapter is next up. Here Morgan examines the scribal habits to be found in the two codices which possess the extra definite article – Regius (019, L) and Freerianus (032-S, W^s). He also provides a grammatical analysis of the variant using Colwell’s rule, and concludes that “the notion that the article with θεος supports an earlier Sabellian reading is an unsightly myth.” (124)

To be continued in Part II..