Tue Mar 26 01:11:50 1996

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From: Timothy John Finney 
To: tc-list@scholar.cc.emory.edu
Subject: Thiede's redating, James Adair's discussion points, etc.
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I thought that I would throw in my two bob's worth. (Etymology: Two bob is
an Australian colloquiallism for two shillings which was the pre-decimal
(pre-1966) twenty cents.)

Dr Wachtel of the INTF at Muenster wrote an article (which appeared in one
of last year's issues of ZPE) replying to Carsten Thiede's redating of
P64/67. It is written in German. In short, he doesn't agree. He and 
Stuart Pickering would have more experience in these matters than Carsten 
Thiede, I would say.

Concerning James Adair's discussion points:

On Vinton Dearing: He was working on the pre-1000 AD text, as preserved in
the MSS we have. He is a classical scholar with other interests besides,
and it seems that these have now forced him to drop his work on the NT. He
was using Apple II computers to try to work out the stemma. The only
comment I have heard about this work is from Dr G.P Farthing who is not
connected to the Internet (may he be so soon). I hope that it will not be
inappropriate to repeat what he said in a note to me accompanying an
offprint of his AIBI4 article 'Detailed Textual Stemmata by means of
Probability Theory' which I had requested from him:

'One of the things that has surprised me at the two AIBI conferences I 
attended is the shortage of people working on the New Testament and most 
particularly in the area of stemmata. The only recent work seems to be [by]
Vinton Dearing. My opinion, by the way, is that Dearing's method does not 
work.'

I am sure that this comment is made with due deference to Prof. Dearing. 
It is a professional opinion based on Dr Farthing's own research which
includes a thesis 'Numerical Methods of Demonstrating the Relationships of
Greek New Testament Manuscripts', Birmingham, England, 1990. Now he is
working on a program which applies his probabilistic approach to
discovering stemmata. He uses a quite simple model which gives some
surprising results. Dr Farthing is not the only one addressing questions
about stemmata. There is also the article (in German) by Dr Mink of the
INTF that appeared in New Testament Studies in 1993 (I think).

Now to my final point. There is, and always has been, plenty 
of speculation about what might have happened to give us the text we now 
have. What I would like to know is how much do we really know. We seem to 
say and think the same things over and over again without really 
being sure of the assumptions made by those who first said them.

What evidence is there that NT MSS were checked?
What evidence is there that they were produced in Scriptoria?
What evidence is there that they were produced by dictation?

A comment appended to one MS saying that it was compared with an ancient 
one at Caesarea only applies to that MS, not all.

Therefore, I would like New Testament textual criticism to take stock of
the evidence which it has and to launch into speculation from there,
rather than speculating from speculation. The evidence we have is, in the
main, the MSS themselves. There are also the findings that might come from
research in areas such as history, statistics and psychology that would
enable us to answer some key questions to help model the development of
the text: 

How often was a copy made and why?
How long was it likely to last?
Which ones were likely to survive catastrophe?
Which words were likely to be changed and why?
Which words were NOT likely to be changed and why?
How many MSS were made, and what proportion survived?
How many copies distant is any particular surviving MS from any other, 
and from the archtype?

Please, if your answer to these questions are speculative, make that
clear. But if you can dig up something that someone living in 200 AD said
about copying practice, or if you discover that a particular type of error
is far more likely to be made based on human copying tendencies, or if you
can work out a (fairly) mathematically rigorous way to count how many MSS
were made, these are the kinds of knowledge that could help us answer a
fundamental question: Is it likely that we can reconstruct the archtype
from the MSS we now have? 

Just a quick thought on questions 2 and 3: having looked at Sinaiticus and
Alexandrinus side by side -- 1500 or 1600 years old, it seems that age is
not so great a factor in (parchment) MS loss as is catastrophe. From the
look of them they could go on for another 1000 years, catastrophes aside.
Nevertheless, a first step to answering the likelihood of survival
question is to plot the number of known MSS versus their estimated ages
and work out how probability of survival varies with age. That might even
give us a way of estimating how many MSS have ever been made. Any
statisticians out there? 


Tim Finney 
Baptist Theological College
of Western Australia

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