Thu Jan 23 12:34:14 1997

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From: Bart Ehrman 
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Subject: Re: Post-modern textual criticism
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> Give it a try, Bart. What *is* a text? Suggestions without * * are
> particularly welcome. 

   OK, I'll give it a try, but you're really tying my hands by ruling my
asterisks out of court; and I want to have the rights to provisional
claims, since I'm extremely rushed right now, don't have time for this,
and should instead be trying to find my desk, which, by all reports, is
somewhere in my office.  

   But off the top of my head, I guess I think a "written" text (is this
what you wanted?) is a concatenation of symbols on a page that is socially
constructed to convey meaning.  How am I doing?  (I think, by the way,
that any conceivable concatenation of symbols is in fact able to be
construed as meaningful)

   (I'd love to hear alternative constructions, by the way)

> 
> >And the questino of whether scribes who reconstructed the
> >text were doing something different from what we all do every time we read
> >a text strikes me as particularly germane. 
> 
> There is at least one difference at first sight. Reading a text includes
> some interest in the interplay of signs, while copying can be done by
> mechanically drawing horizontal and vertical lines in exactly the same
> way as they were found in a source copy. 
> 
   Now see, by forsaking asterisks you've limited yourself.  I'd say that
"copying *can* be done" this way.  And it probably *is* (sorry) done that
way by scribes who can't read the language they are transcribing (I
suppose Codex Theta could be an example?), and possibly by scribes who
"space out" in the course of their labors.  But then again, a lot of us
space out when we read, with the letters making some kind of presentation
to our eyes but not to our heads, so I'm not sure the processes are all
that different.  

   I guess maybe one difference could be that scribes _are_ (how's that?)
able to reproduce exactly what they inherit in their exemplars, whereas
readers, I would maintain, can never reproduce exactly the meanings either
of the author or of any other readers.

> Ulrich Schmid, Muenster
> 
-- Bart Ehrman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
   

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