Subject: Collation against MT vs. TR

From: [email-masked] (Mark O'Brien)
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 95 09:19:13 CST

After Dan Wallace published his article advocating the use of the MT as
the best collating base, I'm curious to know how many of you have 
switched to using the MT in this way, and how many of you have 
stuck to the TR.  I'm more interested in knowing why you have stuck to
the TR as a collating base, especially in the light of Wallace's comments
on the advantages of using the "most inferior text" (as he terms it)
as your collating base, especially for the purposes of quantitative
analysis. 

Regards,

Mark O'Brien
Grad. student, NT
Dallas Theological Seminary
----
"We were put on earth to accomplish a certain number of things.  Right now, I'm
so far behind, I will never die!"

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From: Bart Ehrman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 1995 12:28:03 -0500 (EST)

In reply to Mark O'Brien's important question, I can say that I for one
am convinced that Wallace is right (that there are real advantages to
collating against the MT rather than the TR), BUT, that we should
nonetheless not begin doing so.  If we were to begin our discipline again,
from scratch, this would clearly be the way to go.  The difficulty is that
we have *so many* collations already made and available against the TR,
that if we were now to shift to the MT, these older collations would be of
little use to us.  We would have to look at *two* sets of data (the
original collation and a collation of the TR against the MT) to make any
use of them.  As the pay-off is not all that significant in the long run
anyway, I'm firmly of the opinion that we should continue using TR, simply
for the sake of convenience and to avoid unneeded and unnecessary delays
in doing what needs to be done -- collecting all the textual data at our
disposal.  (Once these materials are all entered on computer data bases,
of course, the original collation base is completely immaterial). 

-- Bart D. Ehrman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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From: Maurice Robinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 1995 23:56:17 -0500 (EST)

On Fri, 1 Dec 1995, Bart Ehrman wrote:

> I for one
> little use to us.  

> I'm firmly of the opinion that we should continue using TR, simply
> disposal.  

Even as a pro-Byzantine supporter, I also concur with Bart Ehrman on 
this.  In an ideal world, in which the early TR editions had in fact been 
100% identical with the Byzantine/Majority Textform, and all collations 
made since the earliest days had been against that base, there would be 
no problem in utilizing a Byzantine Text collation base.  However, since 
the ideal was never realized, and the TR against which almost all 
collations have been made over the past two centuries differs from the 
Byzantine Textform approximately 1800 times, it is now far too late to 
attempt to move to a theoretically superior collation base. 

The other problem with Wallace's proposal is in the intention to utilize 
the Hodges/Farstad Majority text edition as that superior base.  Although 
the H/F text is basically a reasonable "majority" edition from Matthew 
through Jude, the text of the Pericope Adultera and the entire book of 
Revelation in the H/F edition do NOT reflect a majority text.   

The Pericope Adultera in fact has NO "majority text" which could be used
as the sole collation base, since the three main groups (Von Soden's m5,
m6, and m7 each have between 29% and 31% numerical support).  H/F simply
chose to follow the m6 group there, based upon their own stemmatic 
assumptions (which are questionable), and there is no reason to suppose 
that minority group in any way significantly superior as a collation base 
for the Pericope Adultera than the minority TR text.

In Revelation, the situation is even worse, since H/F utilized a 
stemmatic rather than a "majority" approach to construct their text of 
that book (using Hoskier's collation data), but their favored textual 
group (Ma) ends up being a group possessing only 19% support among the 
MSS of the Apocalypse, and this certainly would not aid matters if used 
as a collation base.  My own edition of the hypothetical "Byzantine" text 
of Revelation (following Colwell's 70% texttype-specific cutoff limit) 
still does not resolve the problems where the Andreas and Q texts of 
Revelation (the two separate components of the Byzantine text of that 
book) are nearly equally divided.  At that point my own decisions were 
made on the basis of internal evidence; but this then leaves a text 
which, though more "majority" throughout than H/F, nevertheless still is 
"minority" in possibly as many as 100-200 places within that book, and 
still unsuitable as a collation base.

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