Fri Nov 8 11:18:00 1996
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Date: Fri, 08 Nov 1996 08:13:40 -0800
To: TC-LIST@scholar.cc.emory.edu
From: "Dale M. Wheeler"
Subject: Re: Patristic statistics
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>Mark Arvid Johnson wrote:
>I did some more digging and found some interesting statistics of patristic
>citations. The source is Wilbur Pickering, adapted from Kurt Aland. They
>are taken from Pickering's review of Kurt Aland's article "The Text of the
>Church":
>
> Egyp Both Maj Other # Pass
>
>Marcion (160?) 23% 10% 18% 49% 94
>Irenaeus (d. 202) 16% 16.5% 16.5% 51% 181
>Clement Alex. (d. 215) 13.5% 29% 15% 42.5% 161
>Origen (d. 254) 16.5% 28% 17% 38.5% 459
>Hippolytus (d.235) 14.5% 18% 21% 46.5%
>Methodius (280?) 12.5% 31% 19% 37.5% 32
>Adamantius (d.300) 11.5% 21% 31% 36.5% 29
>Asterius (d.341) 0% 40% 50% 10% 30
>Apst. Const. (380?) 3% 33% 41% 23% 46
>Epiphanius (d.403) 11% 30% 22% 37% 114
>Chrysostom (d. 407) 2% 38% 40.5% 19.5% 915
>Severian (d.408) 3% 37% 30% 30% 91
>Theod. Mops. (d. 428) 4.5% 29% 39% 27.5% 28
>Marcus Erem. (d. 430) 5.5% 35% 35% 24.5% 37
>Hesychius (d. 450) 3.5% 37.5% 33% 26.5% 84
>Theodotus (d. 445) 3% 37.5% 37.5% 22% 16
>Theodoret (d. 466) 1% 41% 42% 16% 481
>John Damascus (d. 749) 2% 40% 40% 18% 63
>
>Obviously, something happenned in the fourth century; the question is what
>was it. Several explanations have been advanced, from an official Byzantine
>recension, to the textual effects of the Arian controversy, to wider
>collation of MSS after the Edict of Milan.
>
I've not read Pickering's article, but when I read Aland's I think I had
the same question which lies behind Pickering's reordering of the
statistics; a quick recalculation of the statistics showed a completely
different picture than the one being painted by Aland; namely, if anything
can be said about the early Fathers' quotations, its that they used a
Byz Vorlage as often as an "Alex" one (whatever that might have been).
But that raised for me two additional questions. One was that Aland was
claiming that there was a high agreement with the Alex text, but I think
what he meant was ANY READING FOUND IN ANY ALEX TEXT that wasn't found
in Byz mss. I could be wrong here, but I don't recall him making any
claification on the issue and that the presentation seemed to indicate
that the reading only had to be found in Alex mss to be called Alex.
It seems to me that was not very sound methodology.
The other thing that troubled me was that, when you look at where these
"Fathers" lived it isn't surprising that certain ones show tendencies to
one type of text as opposed to another; unless you assume--as I infer
Aland believed--that the text was basically the same everywhere in
Christian communities throughout the world and that when it changed, it
changed with relative uniformity throughout the Christian world. Thus, if
we had early Byz Fathers, they would show the same evidence of using an
"Alex" text. Aside from it being an argument from silence, the textual
variety in Egypt makes me wonder about the validity of such an assumption.
BTW, I think that such an assumption lies behind the current interest in
the "growth" theory once again (?).
I'd be interested to know what you all think about the supposed uniformity
of the text across all geographical boundaries at various stages of the
church.
Of course, with the high incident of Fathers (excluding Marcion) having
readings so far not found in any mss, one has to wonder about the validity
of the exercise at all ?? Esp., since Aland claimed they had culled out
all of the "Non-quotations" from the analysis.
***********************************************************************
Dale M. Wheeler, Th.D.
Research Professor in Biblical Languages Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan Street Portland, OR 97220
Voice: 503-251-6416 FAX:503-254-1268 E-Mail: dalemw@teleport.com
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