Fri Feb 16 23:37:04 1996
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Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 23:34:21 -0500 (EST)
From: Maurice Robinson
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Subject: Re: Majority Text?
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On Tue, 13 Feb 1996 HuldrychZ@aol.com wrote:
> I have noticed a great deal of discussion concerning the so called "Majority
> Text". It seems that there is a resurgence of those who would have us
> believe that manuscripts should be counted, and not weighed. This seems
> rather unfortunate.
This is a very good question, and also serves to exemplify why I
personally do not favor the term "majority text," since it seems
automatically to prejudice the issue and to make all those who happen to
favor the Byzantine Textform mere "nose-counters" (as Fee put it).
I do not doubt that certain of those in my previously-listed categories
1-3 (i.e. the KJV-Only defenders) have made specific claims toward
"number" and "majority" as the primary factors, but even these groups
readily abandon such a concept once the majority of MSS no longer support
their favored KJV or TR-underlying-the-KJV position.
I know of no one within the "proper" majority text realm (my categories 4
and 5) who holds to a mere "count the MSS and may the most numerous win"
philosophy. Hodges and Farstad clearly abandon "number" as a primary
factor in the book of Revelation, based upon their stemmatic analysis
(with which conclusions I differ), and they openly state that, should
sufficient data become available for the entire NT, they would follow the
same procedure of stemmatic analysis, which definitely leads to results
that "number" would not.
Wilbur Pickering's view is also quite different, in that he personally
happens to favor a small Byzantine sub-group (von Soden's Kr) throughout
most of the NT, comprised of no more than about 200 MSS as opposed to the
vast majority. (Both H/F and myself differ from Pickering on this point).
My own position happens to follow basically Von Soden's Kx group (which is
numerically the largest), but not in a quest for "number"; rather in
support of reconstructing the basic Byzantine Textform (rejecting the K1
and Ka groups which others thought might be archetypical). As I
mentioned in an earlier post, like Scrivener I would be content to ignore
all MSS beyond the 10th century (which = about 80% of all known MSS) and
work from the documents preceding that point (which does not
significantly alter the resultant Byzantine Textform).
Unlike H/F and Pickering, who are content with calling their position
"majority text" -- which term they adopted simply because they wrongly
thought people would "understand it better" -- I prefer to call my own
position "Byzantine priority", with the intent being to restore the
"Byzantine Textform" -- yet even my own publisher balked and required the
title of my edition to read "Byzantine/Majority Textform" because he
thought more people would "understand" the concept that way.
> When I was a student, not that many years ago, we were
> taught that manuscripts should be weighed, and not counted, simply because an
> error in an early manuscript could be and often was repeated in its
> descendents. If Codex D, for instance, has an incorrect reading at say Mark
> 16, and those scribes who copied from it kept it close by, then that error
> would be passed on to all of its descendents. Thus, you might have 300
> manuscripts with an error and 1 much closer to the original without that
> error- yet if those manuscripts were counted the error would win!
Indeed, for those within the "majority text" spectrum, the view remains
that MSS should be weighed and not counted. The "seven notes of truth"
espoused by Burgon specifically relate to this point. Number might be one
criteria of weight, but even the great St.John of Chichester (i.e.,
Burgon) pointed out that "number" cannot stand when the other six notes of
truth stand against it (the other notes of truth are Antiquity, Variety,
Continuity, Respectability of Witnesses, Context, and Internal
Reasonableness, which, as anyone who reads Burgon will see -- contra Fee
-- are NOT merely part of "seven different ways of saying that number
wins.").
A key problem is in determining the criteria for weighing MSS. Your own
example given above basically replaces the single criterion of number
with another single criterion, Antiquity. This also is question-begging
to a degree, and was used significantly by Westcott and Hort in their
"genealogical" argument.
Hypothetically, one can presume that the closer to the source, the more
pure the stream. But Colwell and other recent critics have demonstrated
that Scrivener was correct in urging that, paradoxical as it may seem, the
closer one moves to the first century, the more corruptions appear in the
MSS and papyri. This causes most critics, including myself, to speak of
the "uncontrolled popular text of the second century" due to their lack
of commonly-shared variants.
The papyri themselves argue against your genealogical scenario: the
multitude of readings found in those papyri were in fact NOT perpetuated
into the third, fourth, fifth or later centuries in any great number.
Rather than Codex D (5th century), use P45 (3rd century) as an example,
and see how few of its variant readings persist.
The hypothesis admittedly SOUNDS good and logical: if a scribe makes an
error which remains "sensible", the error will be recopied into the next
exemplar, and the "sensible" errors of the next exemplar will go into the
next one, ad infinitum. Thus, the later the MS, the greater the mass of
errors. However, this is not what the evidence points to, but (as can be
determined from the data of the MSS themselves as well as from what is
known historically), copied MSS were soon compared and corrected against
either the original exemplar (usually by the scribe himself or herself),
or by a "diorthotes" who usually would read against a different exemplar
(which provided a greater degree of security for the text).
Corrections were made in the MS copy itself, usually in-between the lines,
but in the margins where necessary. Later copies made from a corrected MS
would in most cases follow the corrected text rather than risk repeating
the errors already seen to be corrected. By this means the genealogical
perpetuation of false readings would be kept to a minimum, and the
evidence of the MSS all the way from the papyri through the late Byzantine
era reflects this.
> My question to the majority text adherents then is, what do you do with this
> excellent dictum- "manuscripts should be weighed, and not counted?"
We agree wholeheartedly, but, as intimated above, true "weighing" of MSS
has rarely been performed. By this I mean a careful examination of the
scribal habits demonstrated in every MS utilized in constructing an
edition of the text, and including or excluding its testimony when a
variant is typical of what its known scribal habits demonstrate.
For example, using Colwell's study of P45, P66, and P75, one can easily
see that omissions of one or two letters in MSS where the scribe copied
syllable by syllable carry little or no weight in such MSS, whereas those
same type omissions may be of great weight where a scribe obviously copied
by whole words or phrases. Conversely, the omission of whole words or
phrases in MSS where the scribes made such blunders frequently should
similarly be discounted in those MSS, but not in the ones where such an
error was not prevalent.
The only problem is that this type of classification and categorization
of MSS and their scribes' habits has not been done on the large scale,
and, even in those cases where it has been done, little or no use has
been made of it in a textual apparatus or in the utilization of such MSS
in constructing a resultant text.
So definitely -- "MSS should be weighed and not counted," but weight
involves more than mere platitudes about early date and presumed
freedom from error and/or originality on that basis alone. "Number" in
any case should still remain a factor (and it does within the "majority
text" camp), but it most clearly is not the only factor, nor should it be
the primary factor.
=========================================================================
Maurice A. Robinson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Greek and New Testament
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Wake Forest, North Carolina
=========================================================================
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