Subject: Re: Collation against MT vs. TR

From: [email-masked] (Dale M. Wheeler)
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 22:45:00 -0800

You're welcome...

I actually think that we are in agreement about the nature and purpose of
what Hodges & Farstad were trying to do.  As I said, it was an "unfortunate"
accident of history that precisely the book which has the most distinctively
different textual history was also the book which Hodges chose to show the
application of stemmatics to...because it had the most complete analysis
(Hoskier, Schmidt)...because it had the most distinctively different textual
history...Whew.........  Such a situation left them in, to say the least, an
awkward position.  I think its fair to say that they both believe that if
such a stemmatic reconstruction were to be applied to the rest of the NT,
the Byz text would stand at the top of the stemma (whether that would truly
be the case is another issue altogether), thus the title--for better or
worse-- "Majority Text."  

Besides, who'd want to buy the "Stemmatically-reconstructed Text" or the
"Intra-Byzantine Stemmatic(Minority) Text"...somehow they just don't quite
have the right ring to them....  :-)

***********************************************************************
Dale M. Wheeler, Th.D.
Chair, Biblical Languages Dept                  Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan Street                               Portland, OR  97220
Voice: 503-251-6416    FAX:503-254-1268     E-Mail: [email-masked] 
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From: Elston Gunn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 1995 17:23:17 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 4 Dec 1995, Dale M. Wheeler wrote:

> I think its fair to say that they both believe that if

I still retain some doubts on this score, particularly in light of a
(currently) privately-circulated paper by Wilbur Pickering in which he
devastates what remains valid in any sort of "majority text" theory by
advocating a particular variant reading in Ac.12:25 supported by a mere 5%
of the MS base -- even though the Byzantine reading is secure (though
slightly less than the optimal 70%) with 60% support.  Pickering's
rationale for this strange situation is not stemmatics like H/F, but
merely his conclusion that the Byzantine reading as it stands does not 
square with his concepts of biblical inerrancy, and thus "must" be wrong, 
even though most scribes went for it.....If "majority text" theory keeps 
heading for minority text readings, whether stemmatically-based or on the 
basis of the theological whims of the critic, I fail to see how any 
meaningful "majority text theory" can remain.

> have the right ring to them....  :-)

Neither (in my opinion) does the term "majority text" have the right 
ring.  One reason I consider my position one of "Byzantine-priority," 
which begs no questions regarding number.

=========================================================================
                       Maurice A. Robinson, Ph.D.
            Associate Professor of Greek and New Testament
              Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
                      Wake Forest, North Carolina
                   <[email-masked]>
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