Thu Feb 13 23:54:29 1997

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Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 23:54:15 -0500 (EST)
From: Maurice Robinson 
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Subject: Re: professional scribes
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On Thu, 13 Feb 1997, Michael Holmes wrote:

> The question of whether the extant textual data from Egypt is representative
> of circumstances elsewhere has been explored by E. J. Epp: "The Significance
> of the Papyri for Determining the Nature of the New Testament Text in the
> Second Century: A Dynamic View of Textual Transmission," in William L.
> Petersen, ed., _Gospel Traditions in the Second Century: Origins,
> Recensions, Text, and Transmission_ (Notre Dame and London: University of
> Notre Dame Press, 1989)71-103.
> 
> Based on his investigation of the movement and transmission of secular
> documents (including the documented rapid movement of literary documents
> between Alexandria and Oxyrhynchus), he concludes:

> "The dynamism of life in the Greco-Roman world--even in the outlying areas
> of Egypt (where most of the New Testament papyri were discovered)--permitted
> relatively easy travel and rather free transmission of letters and
> documents, so that the earliest New Testament papyri--though they have
> survived accidentally and randomly--are generally representative of the
> earliest New Testament texts used by the Christianity of the time in all
> parts of the Greco-Roman world." (p. 101)

Let it be noted that some of us consider that Epp probably extrapolates
far too much from the actual extant evidence in making that final
statement. This again is the typical argument _ex silentio_ which normally
gets railed against even by Dr. Petersen himself when presented in an
opposing scenario. 

I continue to suggest that the surviving papyri found in the sands of
Egypt are much more likely by their very provenance, textual affiliations,
and scribal/phonetic habits to reflect the state of the text _in Egypt_
far more than the state of the text anywhere else in the Roman Empire
(i.e. locations where we do _not_ have sufficient NT textual data by which
to make comparison, and from where we should _not_ presume to presuppose a
universally-applied commonalty merely on the basis of a limited regional
sample). 

_________________________________________________________________________
Maurice A. Robinson, Ph.D.           Professor of Greek and New Testament
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary     Wake Forest, North Carolina
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