Mon Mar 25 00:43:43 1996
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From: "James R. Adair"
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Subject: history of transmission
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I'd like to break the discussion that began with Mt 6:13 into three
separate topics. In this post, I want to focus on the problem of the
history of transmission of the text.
On Thu, 21 Mar 1996, Maurice Robinson wrote:
> But why would the text tend toward the archetype? For the simple reason
> that, regardless of texttype, the archetype IS preserved in over 90% of
> the text of virtually all MSS. Textual criticism is always recognized as
> dealing with a minority of the textbase. In the minority of text which
> possesses variant readings the known practice of scribes WAS to compare
> against both the exemplar and to have second readers and other exemplars
> compared against the copy. Only if a second textual tradition had as much
> support as a first textual tradition would the likelihood of moving away
> from the autograph be increased; so long as the main text dominated in the
> proportion of ca.80% to 20%, the tendency through the very normal scribal
> processes of cross-comparison and correction would be to move the minority
> text inexorably toward the majority.
> MSS).
> ...
> By the OT analogy, unity of reading does at least reflect the Massoretic
> "originality" of the text, if not the autograph. But the Massoretes are
> recognized as a dislocating factor in the history of transmission of the
> OT text, just as Jerome is a dislocating factor in the history of the
> Latin NT text. Had there been a Byzantine recension as Hort postulated,
> the resultant dislocation in the history of transmission of the NT would
> call the Byzantine textual unity into question. Without such a revision
> taking place, that same unity goes back instead to a presumption of
> autograph originality. This is no more than Hort's initial presumption
> (which he spent most of his introduction attempting to refute, and that
> primarily by arguing for a formal Byzantine recension). Hort stated in
> his Introduction, p.45:
>
> "A theoretical presumption indeed remains that a majority of extant
> documents is more likely to represent a majority of ancestral documents
> at each stage of transmission than vice versa."
>
> Barring a major dislocation in the history of transmission, Hort's
> statement remains valid, and it is this Hortian principle upon which the
> current Byzantine-priority position is anchored.
Checking mss against one another may very well lead to a text that
approaches the original text in many ways, hence the 90% agreement
between Byzantine & Alexandrian mss. However, I don't see any good
reason to suspect that anything approaching 100% agreement would result.
Here's some of my reasoning.
(1) Maurice believes that one particular subset of the Byzantine mss has
preserved the original text of the NT. However, he looks at the 9th-10th
century Majority text, not the 15th century MT. As he has mentioned
before, there are some readings which actually are the majority readings
in the 15th century which were not a few centuries earlier. Why is
that? Apparently because scribes didn't check the right mss when making
their corrections, or maybe the mss weren't available to them, or maybe
there were other factors (e.g., influence of the Vulgate) that led them
to perpetuate certain secondary readings. Since it is clearly
demonstrable that this happened late in the transmission process, when
Christianity was the dominant religion in most areas where the texts were
copied, why shouldn't we believe that the same sort of thing happened in
the first few centuries of transmission (1st-3rd centuries), when
conditions weren't as favorable to cross-checking other mss?
(2) Mss cross-checking may indeed help weed out secondary readings (but
might it not also introduce secondary readings in some cases?). However,
what evidence do we have that scribes in the earliest centuries of the
transmission of the NT text checked other mss? If some did, does that
imply that the process was widespread? It seems likely that the first
several ms generations of most (or all) NT books were copied from a
single exemplar, without cross-checking other mss. This is part of the
reason for the "wild" early mss described by the Alands and others. Were
multiple copies of the original documents made in all cases? If so, did
those copies contribute to the existing ms tradition? This line of
questioning raises the spectre of Westcott & Hort's "primitive
corruptions." Does the Byzantine priority theory rule out the
possibility of such primitive corruptions, and if so, on what basis?
(3) That scribes were intent only in transmitting the received text, and
not in amplifying, clarifying, or "correcting" it (from their own memory
or doctrinal perspective, not from another ms) is a supposition that
doesn't seem supported by the facts. We know that some scribes did in
fact supplement their texts (e.g., the addition in Mk 16:14 in W). Bart
Ehrman has given many examples of what he believes to be "orthodox
corruptions." It is also clear that some scribes harmonized one passage
with another, especially in the gospels (or, from the Byzaninte priority
perspective, scribes omitted material found in other gospels?). When
translations are considered alongside Greek mss, the evidence is
increased that some scribes, especially (but not exclusively) early ones,
altered their text as they transmitted it (this doesn't even consider
accidental changes to the text). While many of these changes would be
eliminated by the cross-checking process, would all of them be?
(4) Finally, there is the issue of the "dislocating factor" in the
history of transmission. In the case of the Hebrew OT text, the
desctruction of the temple was one important dislocating factor. In the
case of the LXX, the influence of Origen's Hexapla, which introduced a
Greek text much closer to the MT, was a dislocating factor. Maurice has
noted that Jerome's Vulgate was a dislocating factor in the transmission
of the Latin text (many OL mss contain numerous Vulgate readings). Was
there a dislocating factor in the history of the Greek NT text, one that
would irrevocably alter the course of the transmission of the text? I
can think of several possibilities: (a) the persecutions of Decian and
Diocletian, which destroyed numerous NT mss; (b) the Muslim revolution,
which swept over Egypt and Palestine, virtually eliminating Egyptian
texts, hence the Alexandrian text-type (of course, the Alexandrian text
was already limited in influence, but why?--see c & d); (c) the shift in
the seat of the Roman government from Rome to Constantinople (Byzantium),
home of the Byzantine text--Rome did retain (or gain) religious
ascendancy, but the text in Rome was transmitted in Latin, primarily in
the form of the Vulgate, which, though close to the Byzantine text-type,
is not by any means synonymous with it; (d) the ecumenical councils of
Nicea and Chalcedon (among others) might have led to the suppression of
questionable readings or to orthodox "improvements" to the text. Any or
all of these might have been dislocating factors in the history of the
transmission of the NT text.
Jimmy Adair
Manager of Information Technology Services, Scholars Press
and
Managing Editor of TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web Site
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