Subject: Re: Mss and Christian origins

From: "James R. Adair" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 00:18:19 -0500 (EST)

Another post on Ioudaios from Larry Hurtado caught my attention.

On Thu, 15 Feb 1996, Larry W. Hurtado wrote:

> Having occasion to read again Victor Martin's intro to his edition of the 
> Bodmer Papyrus II (P66), I was struck again by how much information there 
> is in NT mss that is relevant for larger historical purposes.  It's very 
> *hot* just now to address social & economic questions about early 
> Christianity, but in this I've seen scant awareness of the value of NT 
> mss as artefacts of early Christianity from which careful inferences 
> could be made.  For example, from the physical characteristics of P66 
> (and other early mss, esp. the pre-Constantinian ones) we can tell 
> something of the economics of mss production & use, which in turn 
> suggests things about the economic level of those for whom the ms was 
> produced.  From the nature of the scribe's hand we can tell something 
> about the kind of structure that lies behind this ms (a scriptorium?).  
> >From the many scribal errors something of the ability of this scribe, and 
> from the many corrections made something of the concern to achieve 
> accuracy, in spite of the scribe's limited abilities! 
> 	In short, we have possible inferences about economic mattters, 
> institutional developments in late second-century Christianity, and even 
> attitudes toward the NT text.  Why do are so many scholars unable to see 
> ms studies and textual criticism as good for anything beyond restoring an 
> "original" text?

This is a very important point.  One of the goals of both the tc-list and 
the electronic journal TC is to encourage the exploration of the 
relationship between textual criticism and other disciplines: theology, 
history of doctrine, social history, literary criticism, etc., etc.  The 
mss that contain the texts we study contain a wealth of information on 
many topics, if we will just take the time to look at them.  I would be 
interested to hear whether others on the list have used data from mss to 
illuminate their study of fields other than textual criticism per se.

Jimmy Adair
Manager of Information Technology Services, Scholars Press
    and
Managing Editor of TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web Site
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