Subject: Re: Collation against MT vs. TR

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 2 Dec 1995 02:04:56 -0500

In a message dated 95-12-01 10:36:23 EST, [email-masked] (Mark O'Brien)
writes:

>After Dan Wallace published his article advocating the use of the MT as
>the best collating base,

  At first I thought MT meant Masoretic Text, since we've been discussing
various names for Scriptures.  Boy was I confused!  Evidently you were
talking about the NT Majority Text (?)

  Tim Staker
  [email-masked]

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From: [email-masked] (Mark O'Brien)
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 95 10:35:55 CST

Original message sent on Sat, Dec 2  1:04 AM by [email-masked] :

>In a message dated 95-12-01 10:36:23 EST, [email-masked] 
>(Mark O'Brien) writes:

>talking about the NT Majority Text (?)

Errr...  sorry about that, Tim!  You are absolutely correct, of course.
One does tend to get a little buried in some of these acronyms after a
while, but I'll be a little more careful in future.  Thanks for pointing
this out.

Regards,

Mark O'Brien
Dallas Seminary

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From: [email-masked] (Mark O'Brien)
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 95 13:30:10 CST

Original message sent on Fri, Dec 1  5:56 PM by [email-masked]
(Maurice Robinson) :

> 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. 

Although I understand the amount of work required to make this
switch (which may not be quite so horrific if a computerized method
of transforming the collation data were developed), this argument 
seems problematic.  It seems almost akin to saying that it's not worth
buying a much newer, faster computer because of the pain involved
in transferring all the data, even though the benefits to such a move
are obvious.  I know we need to be somewhat pragmatic, but can we
afford to ignore such theoretical refinements in the discipline?

> 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.   

I agree wholeheartedly with you here.  When H/F move away from
just presenting the majority evidence (or when they have no choice
because of the "split" nature of the data), they not only undermine, at
points, their Majority Text theory, but they make the MT possibly
difficult to use for collation purposes.  I guess that one advantage is
that there is now a "generally" majority text edition we can work
against, but I appreciate your concerns here about it perhaps not being
"genuinely" majority text.

Thanks for the input,

Mark O'Brien
Dallas Theological Seminary