Mon Jan 20 18:02:05 1997
From owner-tc-list Mon Jan 20 18:02:05 1997
Return-Path:
Received: by scholar.cc.emory.edu (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4)
id SAA10397; Mon, 20 Jan 1997 18:01:07 -0500
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 16:56:39 -0600 (CST)
Message-Id: <199701202256.QAA00724@homer.bethel.edu>
X-Sender: holmic@mailhost.bethel.edu
X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.2
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
To: tc-list@scholar.cc.emory.edu
From: Michael Holmes
Subject: Re: Original Text and Limits of TC
Sender: owner-tc-list@scholar.cc.emory.edu
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: tc-list@scholar.cc.emory.edu
content-length: 3722
Re the ongoing thread about the meaning of an "autograph" and the goals or
objectives of TC, etc.: in view of what I wrote (in a deliberately
polemical and provocative style) in my essay in the Metzger festschrift Bart
Ehrman and I edited (see The Text of The NT in Contemporary Research, pp.
353-354), I am glad to see discussion of just what it is we are trying to
recover as textual critics. Permit me to toss out two opinions on points
that have arisen lately.
1) Literary criticism and textual criticism are inescapably inter-related.
To be sure, the MSS provide, in a very concrete way, data (or, to use
Waltz's term, FACTS), but facts do not exist in a vacuum, and their
interpretation certainly does not. That is, *all* interpretation takes
place within some kind of theoretical framework, and in the case of textual
criticism, that interpretative framework is "often" (I should probably
insert a stronger term) influenced or provided by aspects of literary
criticism. This is esp. the case when we begin to discuss what it is that
we have reconstructed by means of TC. E.g, suppose that there is a
concensus that all surviving copies of a document are descended from X.
What we then choose to call X--autograph? archetype? edited edition of
earlier documents?--is sharply affected by literary-critical kinds of
decisions and judgments. Tov (whom I was glad to see referenced in the
early stages of this thread) has brought this out clearly with regard to the
OT; his work has, as some have noticed, implications for NT work. The
current thread is a good start in developing them, but only a start.
Moreover, textual critics have tended to be rather naive/silent/unaware/???
regarding the philisophical underpinings or implications of how they
conceive of what it is they are trying to recover. See further my essay,
p. 353 note83.
(Yes, the interaction between lit criticism and TC is certainly a
two-way street. More than a few literary theories collapse in the face of
the historical realia of surviving MSS. But that is not the point at the
moment, and I leave it aside).
2) Textual criticism is not limited to what now survives in the form of ink
on writing material. Paul Maas laid out clearly the four aspects of TC:
recensio, selectio, examinatio, and divinatio. The first is an
investigative and taxonomic process that examines surviving MSS in order to
discover (a) a surviving witness that is the source of all others, (b) a
reconstructable archetype, or (c) a split tradition consisting of two or
more MSS or archetypes. If (a) or (b), one proceeds directly to examinatio;
if (c), to selectio--choosing between competing variants--and then to
examinatio, the testing of the earliest recoverable stage of the tradition
for soundness. If defects are detected in the earliest recoverable stage of
the tradition, then one proceeds to divinatio, i.e., emendation. This last
stage--which on methodological grounds is an essential ppart of the
text-critical process--no longer involves what survives in ink on writing
material, but has to do with the thoughts and ideas of the author (once
again, literary criticism comes into play in the practice of TC). E.g., to
give just a single example, take 1 Cor 6:5, "to judge between his brother"
(cf. Zuntz, Text of the Epistles, p. 15) Is there someone who wishes to
defend the view that Paul wrote/dictated precisely this, rather than "to
judge between a brother and his brother"?
(I can almost hear the noise as the guns are being brought to bear
on the suggestion that emendation has role to play in NT TC. Please, before
anyone starts blasting, please read the relevant parts of my essay, 347-349,
first?)
Mike Holmes
Back