Subject: Majority Text?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 11:31:31 -0500

Forgive me, please, if I say something that has already been said in this
forum; I am new here online!
I have noticed a great deal of discussion concerning the so called "Majority
Text".  It seems that there is a resurgence of those who would have us
believe that manuscripts should be counted, and not weighed.  This seems
rather unfortunate.  When I was a student, not that many years ago, we were
taught that manuscripts should be weighed, and not counted, simply because an
error in an early manuscript could be and often was repeated in its
descendents.  If Codex D, for instance, has an incorrect reading at say Mark
16, and those scribes who copied from it kept it close by, then that error
would be passed on to all of its descendents.  Thus, you might have 300
manuscripts with an error and 1 much closer to the original without that
error- yet if those manuscripts were counted the error would win!

My question to the majority text adherents then is, what do you do with this
excellent dictum- "manuscripts should be weighed, and not counted?"

Thanks for any response,

D. Jim West
Petros TN

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From: [email-masked] (Vincent Broman)
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 96 08:52:14 PST

> excellent dictum- "manuscripts should be weighed, and not counted?"

With no attempt to speak for Z Hodges, I would say to that dictum:
Right on!  But, the unspoken added assumption seems to be that the
witnesses to the Alpha text type are all descended from one late source,
perhaps the conjectural NT edition of Lucian.  This is an essential
part of Hort's argument that the Syrian witnesses should get near-zero weight,
and it has been shown false.  Studies by Lake and others show that
the earliest Alpha text type witnesses are much less unified than
the text type becomes later on, the "Imperial Byzantine text" being
a gradual development.  With the exception of the known genealogy of
the Ka sub-text-type, the early Alphas are not direct descendents
of each other or close relations.

Vincent Broman             Email: [email-masked]                    =   o     
2224 33d St.               Phone: +1 619 284 3775                  =  _ /- _   
San Diego, CA  92104-5605  Starship: 32d42m22s N 117d14m13s W     =  (_)> (_)

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From: "Stephen C Carlson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 11:04:48 -0500 (EST)

Vincent Broman wrote:
>Right on!

Reading the introduction to Hodges & Farstad's "The Greek New Testament
According to the Majority" and considering their stemmatic reconstructions
of the Pericope Adultera and Revelation, I would say these majority text
adherents also believe that mss should be weighed and not counted.

Stephen Carlson
-- 
Stephen C. Carlson, George Mason University School of Law, Patent Track, 4LE
[email-masked]              : Poetry speaks of aspirations, and songs
http://osf1.gmu.edu/~scarlso1/     : chant the words.  -- Shujing 2.35

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From: Maurice Robinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 23:34:21 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 13 Feb 1996 [email-masked] wrote:

> rather unfortunate.  

This is a very good question, and also serves to exemplify why I 
personally do not favor the term "majority text," since it seems 
automatically to prejudice the issue and to make all those who happen to 
favor the Byzantine Textform mere "nose-counters" (as Fee put it).  

I do not doubt that certain of those in my previously-listed categories
1-3 (i.e. the KJV-Only defenders) have made specific claims toward
"number" and "majority" as the primary factors, but even these groups
readily abandon such a concept once the majority of MSS no longer support
their favored KJV or TR-underlying-the-KJV position.

I know of no one within the "proper" majority text realm (my categories 4
and 5) who holds to a mere "count the MSS and may the most numerous win"
philosophy.  Hodges and Farstad clearly abandon "number" as a primary 
factor in the book of Revelation, based upon their stemmatic analysis 
(with which conclusions I differ), and they openly state that, should 
sufficient data become available for the entire NT, they would follow the 
same procedure of stemmatic analysis, which definitely leads to results 
that "number" would not.  

Wilbur Pickering's view is also quite different, in that he personally 
happens to favor a small Byzantine sub-group (von Soden's Kr) throughout 
most of the NT, comprised of no more than about 200 MSS as opposed to the 
vast majority.  (Both H/F and myself differ from Pickering on this point).

My own position happens to follow basically Von Soden's Kx group (which is
numerically the largest), but not in a quest for "number"; rather in
support of reconstructing the basic Byzantine Textform (rejecting the K1
and Ka groups which others thought might be archetypical).  As I 
mentioned in an earlier post, like Scrivener I would be content to ignore 
all MSS beyond the 10th century (which = about 80% of all known MSS) and 
work from the documents preceding that point (which does not 
significantly alter the resultant Byzantine Textform).

Unlike H/F and Pickering, who are content with calling their position
"majority text" -- which term they adopted simply because they wrongly
thought people would "understand it better" -- I prefer to call my own
position "Byzantine priority", with the intent being to restore the
"Byzantine Textform" -- yet even my own publisher balked and required the
title of my edition to read "Byzantine/Majority Textform" because he
thought more people would "understand" the concept that way. 

> When I was a student, not that many years ago, we were

Indeed, for those within the "majority text" spectrum, the view remains
that MSS should be weighed and not counted.  The "seven notes of truth" 
espoused by Burgon specifically relate to this point.  Number might be one
criteria of weight, but even the great St.John of Chichester (i.e.,
Burgon) pointed out that "number" cannot stand when the other six notes of
truth stand against it (the other notes of truth are Antiquity, Variety,
Continuity, Respectability of Witnesses, Context, and Internal
Reasonableness, which, as anyone who reads Burgon will see -- contra Fee
-- are NOT merely part of "seven different ways of saying that number
wins."). 

A key problem is in determining the criteria for weighing MSS.  Your own 
example given above basically replaces the single criterion of number 
with another single criterion, Antiquity.  This also is question-begging 
to a degree, and was used significantly by Westcott and Hort in their 
"genealogical" argument.  

Hypothetically, one can presume that the closer to the source, the more
pure the stream.  But Colwell and other recent critics have demonstrated
that Scrivener was correct in urging that, paradoxical as it may seem, the
closer one moves to the first century, the more corruptions appear in the
MSS and papyri.  This causes most critics, including myself, to speak of
the "uncontrolled popular text of the second century"  due to their lack
of commonly-shared variants. 

The papyri themselves argue against your genealogical scenario: the
multitude of readings found in those papyri were in fact NOT perpetuated
into the third, fourth, fifth or later centuries in any great number. 
Rather than Codex D (5th century), use P45 (3rd century) as an example,
and see how few of its variant readings persist. 

The hypothesis admittedly SOUNDS good and logical: if a scribe makes an 
error which remains "sensible", the error will be recopied into the next 
exemplar, and the "sensible" errors of the next exemplar will go into the 
next one, ad infinitum.  Thus, the later the MS, the greater the mass of 
errors.  However, this is not what the evidence points to, but (as can be 
determined from the data of the MSS themselves as well as from what is 
known historically), copied MSS were soon compared and corrected against 
either the original exemplar (usually by the scribe himself or herself), 
or by a "diorthotes" who usually would read against a different exemplar 
(which provided a greater degree of security for the text).  

Corrections were made in the MS copy itself, usually in-between the lines,
but in the margins where necessary.  Later copies made from a corrected MS
would in most cases follow the corrected text rather than risk repeating
the errors already seen to be corrected.  By this means the genealogical
perpetuation of false readings would be kept to a minimum, and the
evidence of the MSS all the way from the papyri through the late Byzantine
era reflects this. 

> excellent dictum- "manuscripts should be weighed, and not counted?"

We agree wholeheartedly, but, as intimated above, true "weighing" of MSS
has rarely been performed.  By this I mean a careful examination of the 
scribal habits demonstrated in every MS utilized in constructing an 
edition of the text, and including or excluding its testimony when a 
variant is typical of what its known scribal habits demonstrate.  

For example, using Colwell's study of P45, P66, and P75, one can easily
see that omissions of one or two letters in MSS where the scribe copied
syllable by syllable carry little or no weight in such MSS, whereas those
same type omissions may be of great weight where a scribe obviously copied
by whole words or phrases.  Conversely, the omission of whole words or
phrases in MSS where the scribes made such blunders frequently should
similarly be discounted in those MSS, but not in the ones where such an
error was not prevalent. 

The only problem is that this type of classification and categorization 
of MSS and their scribes' habits has not been done on the large scale, 
and, even in those cases where it has been done, little or no use has 
been made of it in a textual apparatus or in the utilization of such MSS 
in constructing a resultant text.  

So definitely -- "MSS should be weighed and not counted,"  but weight 
involves more than mere platitudes about early date and presumed 
freedom from error and/or originality on that basis alone.  "Number" in 
any case should still remain a factor (and it does within the "majority 
text" camp), but it most clearly is not the only factor, nor should it be 
the primary factor.

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