Subject: Vinton Dearing

From: "James R. Adair" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 1996 01:25:06 -0500 (EST)

What is the opinion among text critics about the work of Vinton Dearing?  
For those who don't know who he is, Dearing wrote a couple of books on 
textual criticism (not necessarily of the biblical text): Manual of 
Textual Analysis (Berkeley: UC Press, 1959); Principles and Practice of 
Textual Analysis (Berkeley: UC Press, 1974).  He advocated using computer 
algorithms to reconstruct stemmata of "states of the text."  He then 
offered guidelines for determining the top of the tree his algorithm 
generated, that is, the archetype.  He did a presentation at an SBL 
NT Textual Criticism several years ago, before I was participating in 
such things.  I was impressed with his method, but it seemed more suited 
for bodies of text that had maybe only a couple of dozen "states of the 
text" extant (like classical texts) than for NT textual criticism, with 
its thousands of different witnesses.

Jimmy Adair
Manager of Information Technology Services, Scholars Press
    and
Managing Editor of TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web Site
---------------> http://scholar.cc.emory.edu <-----------------

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From: Maurice Robinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 1996 20:36:39 -0500 (EST)

> What is the opinion among text critics about the work of Vinton Dearing?  

Dearing is still around, and has published a couple more articles that I 
have seen.  His theory looks impressive, but I have found few who think 
it workable or valid on the grand scale.

_________________________________________________________________________
Maurice A. Robinson, Ph.D.           Assoc. Prof./Greek and New Testament
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary     Wake Forest, North Carolina
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