Tue Nov 12 10:00:28 1996

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Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1996 09:50:15 -0700
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From: "Robert B. Waltz" 
Subject: Re: Patristic statistics
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On Tue, 12 Nov 1996, "Professor L.W. Hurtado"  wrote:

>The current discussions here over Aland's "patristic statistics"
>remind me again that text critics still need to assess carefully how
>we use countings of "agreements" and what constitute "agreements".
>In my 1981 book, _Text-Critical Methodology and the Pre-Caesarean
>Text_, I tried to address the matter, building upon studies by
>Colwell and later Fee.  (See now the chapter by T. C. Geer, Jr., in
>_The Text of the NT in Contemp. Research_, ed. B. D. Ehrman, M. W.
>Holmes).
>Counting "agreements" is almost meaningless, unless (1) agreements
>are considered in the context of all relevant readings--i.e.,
>agreements as percentages of the total number of relevant
>variation-units, agreements *& disagreements*, and (2) agreements are
>assessed as to their significance (but only *after* the counting!).

WIth all of this I have to agree -- but I have to go further. One
of the saddest things about Professor Hurtado's study, from my
standpoint, is all the issues it *doesn't* address.

Hurtado established -- conclusively, to my mind -- that p45 and W
are not to be linked to the so-called "Caesarean" text. But his
method, and that of Fee, cannot address the Lake/Streeter definition
of the "Caesarean" text. Note that Streeter defined the "Caesarean"
text as those readings of Theta, family 1, family 13, 28, 565, 700,
etc. *not found in the Byzantine text.*

This definition may be problematic; I myself mentioned Colwell's
rule that a text-type consists of manuscripts, not readings. And,
of course, Streeter defined the Byzantine text as the Textus
Receptus -- a drastic error in this case. But -- however problematic
it is -- the definition has never been formally tested.

I did what I could; with my thousand-reading sample I looked at
all the texts listed above and compared not only their overall
agreements but their *non-Byzantine* agreements.

I have not finished my analysis, so I cannot give formal results.
But the results I have indicate that the "Caesarean" text is real,
or at least that the "Caesarean" manuscripts have been subjected
to a common influence. This despite the fact that, based on overall
agreements, they are all simply "Byzantine" (or at least "mixed
Byzantine").

So I agree with Hurtado that we must look at agreements and disagreements,
but we must do more. We must *assess* agreements, we must have large enough
samples to mean something -- and we should ask that people know what
statistics they are citing!

Bob Waltz
waltzmn@skypoint.com

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