Fri Oct 25 17:33:44 1996

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Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 16:28:54 -0700
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From: "Robert B. Waltz" 
Subject: Re: E. C. Colwell--A Maverick?
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On Fri, 25 Oct 1996, "L. Mark Bruffey"  wrote:

>Hello Scholars!
>
>I am reading a collection of essays by E.C. Colwell.  In many ways he
>seems to have been a maverick; for instance he sharply critized Aland
>and the UBS text (>>Studies in methodology . . .<<, Brill, 1969, p.
>153):
>
>	"The egregious example of the misleading nature of . . . narrowly
>	restricted editions is the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament.
>	Yet this is the edition that Aland refers to as a 'model'!"
>
>I would like your comments on the strengths and weaknesses of his
>propositions, and I would also like your ideas as to what factors may
>have influenced his thinking.

IMHO, E.C. Colwell was the greatest textual scholar of the mid-Twentieth
century. His essays on methodology should be the basis for all subsequent
work.

He did leave several important legacies, e.g. he finally demolished the
practice of comparing manuscripts based on divergences from the TR.
He also was one of the driving forces behind the Claremont Profile
Method (though in fact his methods were much more capable than the CPM).

It's a sad fact that the one major error he made -- his 70% definition
of a text-type -- is his most-quoted statement.

As for his criticism of the UBS text -- I would have to agree with it.
UBS doesn't list enough variants, and does not offer the tools to
analyse them. It collates many manuscripts, but not all of them are
important (and the changes from UBS3 to UBS4 were not all of the
best). It cites the Byzantine text under the symbol "Byz," but most
of the time it accepts the TR as "Byz," making no effort to check
this (and not citing enough Byzantine manuscripts to let us decide
for ourselves).

And, last but not least, the scholars who edited the text did not --
at least as a group -- have a theory of the text to justify their
decisions.

The above is, of course, my opinion. But I would say that, even today,
textual criticism still has a lot to do to catch up with Colwell. So
I guess that makes him a maverick.

Bob Waltz
waltzmn@skypoint.com

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