Mon Jan 27 23:06:07 1997

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Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 12:00:58 +0800 (WST)
From: Timothy John Finney 
To: tc-list@scholar.cc.emory.edu
Subject: The most likely original reading
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I have realised that point 2 of what I suggested as a probabilistic 
method for establishing the original text (i.e. what is most likely 
to have been written in the thing from which the mss we now have 
descended) was in error:

> Here it is: 1) If there is no variation of a word in any ms, then that is
> original. 2) If there is variation, then the certainty of any particular
> reading is inversely proportional to the extent to which it can be
> demonstrated to give rise to the others.

It should have read, 2) if there is variation, then the certainty of any
particular reading is directly proportional to the extent to which it can
be demonstrated to give rise to the others. 

The interesting thing is that Bob Waltz and Maurice Robinson both seem to
have known what I meant and replied accordingly, possibly without
realising that what was written was incorrect. 

Yesterday I had the embarrassing experience of laughing at a joke that a 
friend told me even though he told it wrong:

Why _didn't_ the bigamist cross the road? Because he didn't want to see 
the other side.

Another friend said that she didn't get it, so we told her to ask her
husband to explain it. Imagine how foolish I felt when the first friend
realised that it should have been Why didn't the bigot cross the road? 

Then my other friend asked me why I laughed the first time. Um ah...

Well, it was partly because he was a friend and partly because his jokes 
are usually funny. So my response was conditioned by what had gone 
before. There is something there for us who try to unravel what the 
scribes have consciously and unconsciously done to the text.

On art and science in textual criticism, I would just like to add this by 
Zuntz (_Text of the Epistles_, 13):


The convergence of arguments drawn from the distribution of the evidence,
the dependence of one reading upon the other, the known habits and typical
faults of scribes, the characteristic proclivities of interpolators, the
development of the language, the stylistic peculiarities of the writer,
the context of the passage in question -- these, and still other, factors
combined can yield a certainty which is no whit inferior to that of the
conclusions drawn from a Euclidean axiom. 


Best regards,

Tim Finney

finney@central.murdoch.edu.au
Baptist Theological College
and Murdoch University
Perth, W. Australia

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