Fri Nov 8 12:18:32 1996

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Date: Fri, 8 Nov 1996 12:12:23 -0700
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From: "Robert B. Waltz" 
Subject: Re: Patristic statistics
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On Fri, 08 Nov 1996, "Dale M. Wheeler"  wrote, in part:

>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.

If what Wheeler says is true, this is indeed bad methodology.

It was Colwell who pointed out that a text-type is a collection of
*manuscripts*, not a collection of readings. We can only call a
reading "Alexandrian" if it is the clear reading of those manuscripts
and only of those manuscripts!

>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.

This will depend strongly on one's definition of text-types. I'll give
my examples from Paul, since I know it best. Most people would say that
the Alexandrian text consists of p46 Aleph A B C 33 etc.

However, Zuntz felt, and I agree, that p46-B and Aleph-A-C-33 are
*separate* text-types. Moreover, *both* were found in Egypt in the
fourth century (since B, Aleph, and at least some Coptic texts come
from that period). Egypt also had at least two distinct texts in
the third century: the p46/B text and the Origenic text (similar to
family 1739).

This phenomenon seems to carry across into other parts of the corpus as
well -- e.g. in Acts we have both Alexandrian and "Western" papyri; in
the Catholic Epistles we see p72 and Origen. In other words, not only
was the text not homogeneous *across* boundaries in the third century,
it was not homogenous *within* boundaries.

>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.

Again, agreed. Good methodology should focus on a particular set of
*readings*, not on whatever passages the father offers data for.
This study seems very badly controlled.

Although, as Robinson pointed out, we really need to see the articles
to know exactly what is being claimed.

Bob Waltz
waltzmn@skypoint.com

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