Wed Mar 20 00:57:31 1996

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From: "James R. Adair" 
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Subject: Mt 6:13
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On Tue, 19 Mar 1996, Maurice Robinson wrote (speaking of the first three 
Christian centuries):

> The church during this period was a persecuted minority, and the
> opportunities for free exchange of documents and more formal methods of
> reproduction were not common.  It thus should not surprise anyone to find
> that during the period when the church was NOT state-sponsored, deviations
> were common, and the text was altered in many ways, creating the early
> Western variants, as well as other corruptions.  I suspect that even the
> creation of the Alexandrian texttype reflects an Egyptian localized attempt
> to purge out such corruptions, during the first third of the second
> century, but even this attempt did not "restore" the autograph text, nor
> end the uncontrolled corruption. 
> 
> Only after the legitimization of Christianity under Constantine would a 
> new Pax Romana allow free communication and exchange of MSS between 
> churches. Once this occurred, cross-comparison and correction would tend 
> to weed out not only the corrupt elements of individual MSS, but also 
> would slowly tend to eradicate the particular "local" nature of various 
> texts, slowly but inexorably moving back toward the overarching common 
> text from which all of the extant MSS had derived.  

Why would the text tend toward the archetype and not toward some other
heretofore (perhaps) unknown text?  We know that oral traditions change
over time (e.g., different forms of the Enuma Elish epic); why shouldn't
written traditions do the same?  For example, the stories in Chronicles
that parallel those in Samuel and Kings are quite similar, but not nearly
identical, even when the Chronicler was clearly using a written source. 
Changes from "Yahweh" to "Elohim" are numerous, for example, as are
substitutions of synonyms.  The later OT versions (e.g., V, P) tend to
reflect a Vorlage similar to the proto-MT, not because it was the
"original," but because it had become the standard text.  The Odes, which
circulated in the LXX but were culled from both OT and NT texts, are close
to, but not identical with, the Majority Text (as far as I can tell from a
brief perusal) in the NT portions.  

All these facts suggest to me that _unity_ of reading among a majority of
mss does not imply _originality_ of reading.  The fact that _none_ of the
earliest NT mss reflects a distinctly Byzantine text suggests to me that
the later Byzantine consensus is lately arrived at, just as the Masoretic
Text is not identical (nor nearly identical) to the "original" OT text
(leaving aside questions of what "original" means when speaking of these
texts).  Maurice has mentioned a paper he is working on that explains the
disappearance of the earliest Byzantine witnesses.  I will definitely be
interested to read it. 

> > Those who see the Alexandrian text-type as 
> > generally superior are often accused (and not entirely unjustly, in my 
> > opinion) of twisting their arguments to make the Alexandrian reading 
> > appear to be original.  The same charge can be made against the Byzantine 
> > priority approach, unless, as I say, examples of "original" non-Byzantine 
> > readings can be produced.
> 
> Why should this be a requirement, if the hypothesis under consideration 
> is the originality of the Byzantine Textform as a whole?  What you 
> suggest is an alternative hypothesis which requires non-Byzantine 
> readings to make up the final text, i.e., another form of eclectic 
> methodology.  

This is precisely what I was trying to establish: that the position in 
question starts from the assumption, not of the general superiority of the 
Byzantine text, but of the _originality_ of that text-type.  This is 
different from an assumption of general Alexandrian superiority, which 
many (not all) eclectics make.  Arguments in favor of specific Byzantine 
readings, though often quite clever (and undoubtedly sometimes correct!), 
are not the bases for textual decisions, but are the consequences of 
readings predetermined by the external evidence.  Of course, it can be 
argued that the Byzantine tradition was chosen in the first place because 
it contained superior readings (as many argue of the Alexandrian text), 
but it does not follow that just because some, or many, Byzantine 
readings are judged to be original that _all_ are.

To look at another example, the ending of the Lord's Prayer in Mt 6:13 
("for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.  Amen.") 
is present in the Majority Text, including several uncials, and many 
early versions.  However, it definitely looks like an early addition, 
probably from a liturgical setting (thus the "amen").  How does the 
Byzantine priority view evaluate this reading?

Jimmy Adair
Manager of Information Technology Services, Scholars Press
    and
Managing Editor of TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web Site
---------------> http://scholar.cc.emory.edu <-----------------

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