Wed Jun 5 19:28:31 1996
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From: Maurice Robinson
To: tc-list@scholar.cc.emory.edu
Subject: Re: "Alexandrian" Text
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[Responding to both Waltz and Schmid on a pertinent point]:
On Wed, 5 Jun 1996, Robert B. Waltz wrote:
On Wed, 05 Jun 96, schmiul@uni-muenster.de (Ulrich Schmid) wrote:
[Waltz:]
> But I also think that, in *most* cases, it *is* the degree of Byzantine
> influence that separates family or "tight" tribe members.
Even though we have a semantic difference over the term "influence"
(which I would here term "alignment percentage" or something similar),
I think Bob is correct on this point
[Schmid:]
>>But, does this imply that a full blown
>>Byzantine text in its actual state of appearance existed for the General
>>epistles prior to around 500 AD to serve as deus ex machina for our influence
>>theories? At least there is NO manuscript evidence to a full blown Byzantine
>>text prior to the 9th century.
[Waltz:]
> Agreed -- although Byzantine manuscripts appear in large numbers in that
> century (K, L, 049, assorted minuscules). That would seem to imply that the
> text is at least somewhat older than that century.
I also would differ with Schmid on this point, along with Westcott and
Hort, who were quite willing to admit a generally developed ("full-blown"
probably is a question-begging term) Byzantine text from at least AD 350
onward. The new claims stemming from the Alands' Text of the NT volume
(and picked up on by Wallace) regarding the Byzantine as "developed"
and/or the "majority text" only beginning with the 9th century is simply
revisionist history, held hitherto by no one. I will at the very least
side with Westcott and Hort on this point; and Waltz is also clearly
correct that 9th century Byzantine uncials certainly imply a much earlier
existence of the "developed" Byzantine Textform, which in no way
contradicts Westcott and Hort's own thesis on this point.
[Waltz:]
> The fact that Byzantine influence seems to appear everywhere, or
> almost everywhere, does not mean that we can assume it is always so.
Maybe not; but a prior question is WHY does the Byzantine influence tend
to appear almost everywhere, and what are the causes of this permeating
influence? I still doubt that modern eclecticism has a sufficiently
valid transmissional history which will account for this phenomenon.
[Waltz:]
> In general the Byzantine text is conservative; there are relatively few
> readings of the text that are not found in some group of non-Byzantine
> witnesses. Sturz has argued this, and this conclusion (alone among those
> he offers) I accept.
Another interesting point, which can be taken in two primary ways: either
the Byzantine Textform is a composite, pieced together from scattered
readings found in various texttypes or other minority groupings, by some
unknown method (since mere "conflation" will not account for all the
Byzantine readings, nor even a large percentage of them); or the presence
of Byzantine readings in nearly every other texttype or smaller group of
MSS implies an extremely strong Byzantine "influence", which is quite
difficult to explain without either imposing an official promulgation of
that text or an official revision which produced that text -- unless of
course, such Byzantine concurrence in non-Byzantine MSS and texttypes is
actually a result of preservation of the autograph text itself (which
latter I would naturally maintain).
_________________________________________________________________________
Maurice A. Robinson, Ph.D. Assoc. Prof./Greek and New Testament
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary Wake Forest, North Carolina
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