Wed Dec 6 14:22:08 1995
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Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 11:19:43 -0800
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From: dalemw@teleport.com (Dale M. Wheeler)
Subject: Re: Collation against MT vs. TR
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> Isn't that the point? H&F believe in an omnipotent God who has
providentially
>preserved the text and that conviction has led them to try proving the
"Majority
>text" position with their stemma, etc.
I'm not trying to defend H&F or their theory here, but this again is another
misconception about their view. There are those who start from providential
preservation of the text, but H&F do not. The real issue in interacting
with their work is whether they are correctly using stemmatics and whether
their stemmatic reconstructions are valid, nothing more and nothing less.
At the heart of Hodges' criticism of the way "stemmatics" is done nowadays
in NT TC is that the maxim used is "community of agreement implies community
of origin." But normally the maxim is "community of error implies community
of origin." The latter is more difficult for most of us to track since the
"blemishes" of the papyrii and uncials are not readily visible in the NA
footnotes (even less so in UBS). I note as an aside that this is a standard
argument presented by Eclectics, Equal Prioritists (Sturz), and Byz
prioritists against current textual theory and practice, based on the
observations of Zuntz, Colwell, etc. Whether it is a valid concern is again
difficult to tell since (electronic ??) copies of the earliest texts are
still not easily available for side by side comparisons at each point of the
text to see the nature of their errors.
>Likewise, Pickering's belief of
>inerrancy leads him to pick and chose a text that supports his beliefs.
I'm not sure that Pickering should be lumped in with H&F anymore either. He
has, as far as I can tell, rejected the stemmatic argument. I was under the
impression that he had moved closer to Maurice's position...but maybe not.
At any rate, while I think that he would still agree (??) with H&F on much
philosophically, I don't think his conclusions can be used to define or
understand their position. I must admit that I'm not totally current on all
the moving around, but I think this is fairly accurate. Maurice, I'm sure,
would know.
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Dale M. Wheeler, Th.D.
Chair, Biblical Languages Dept Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan Street Portland, OR 97220
Voice: 503-251-6416 FAX:503-254-1268 E-Mail: dalemw@teleport.com
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