Thu Jan 23 11:22:28 1997

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From: "Professor L.W. Hurtado" 
Organization: Divinity Faculty
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Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 16:17:17 +000
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Subject: Re: textual criticism
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As the change in subject heading indicates, I seek (with Bart, I 
think) to turn back to textual criticism (yup, there I am being 
directive ["control" freak that I allegedly am] again).
If Bart wants to label as "modernist" anyone who thinks there are 
such things as texts with relations to authors as well as readers, 
and that not all readings are equally valid, then we can't stop him, 
can we (nor should we, except by force of reason).  But I would have 
thought these sorts of ideas, for holding which I must plead guilty, 
were much too old to be thought "modernist".  But I digress.

The actions of scribes do seem to have overlapped those of readers, 
though not always and not one-to-one.  When a scribe mis-spells a 
word but it's clear enough what the word is, and that the word is 
what likely lay in the exemplar, this is a bit different from a 
scribe making a deliberate alteration in the interests of 
"clarifying" a passage or removing embarrassing statements or such.  
In such cases, in fact, we may have a scribe quite clearly reading 
the meaning of his exemplar and not liking what he reads, and/or 
worrying what others might make of the reading.
This is different still from a reader understanding a text so poorly 
that he/she seriously misconstrues it (e.g., as in allegations of 
"caricature" which we've all had experience of on this list in recent 
exchanges).  Unless, I suppose, one were able to establish that a 
reader has *deliberately* mis-represented the meaning of a text, in 
which case we are able to (1) establish a "ocrrect" meaning, and (2) 
establish the intention of a reader.
So, I'm not entirely convinced that literary-critical theories of 
reading/interpretation (even if accepted as valid and accurate for 
that activity) are fully adequate for the text-critical questions of 
how texts have been copied.
Larry Hurtado
 
L. W. Hurtado
University of Edinburgh,
New College
Mound Place 
Edinburgh, Scotland EH1 2LX
Phone: 0131-650-8920
Fax: 0131-650-6579
E-mail:  L.Hurtado@ed.ac.uk

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