Subject: Re: Jn 9.37

From: "Harold P. Scanlin" <[email-masked]>
Date: 13 Apr 96 16:27:41 EDT

>From my personal experience working for UBS I may be able to shed some light on
the background of the Jn 9:38 issue.

I agree that, from a general text-critical perspective, this could be considered
a trivial variant.  But the original purpose of  UBS/GNT was to present the
evidence for textual variants that may affect translation, as evidenced by
existing translations or by translational-exegetical consideratoins likely to be
encountered in the translation process.

It could be argued, with some justification, that UBS/GNT1 strayed beyond these
guidelines.  I believe the committee felt (I wasn't around then) that there was
an interim need to include some variants that may not have been important to the
translator's task but were of general text-critical importance.  The evidence
was offered here since NA 26 had not yet been published.

In prepartion for GNT4, and with the availability of NA26 which was much fuller
than earlier hand-editions, it was decided to rigorously apply the basic
principles of GNT1.  Accordingly, I was asked to go through about a dozen major
Bible translation, Protestant and Roman Catholic, in several Indo-European
languages, to see what text-critical decisions the translators made.  This
information helped in the selection of the 270+ items that were added.  The
items which were dropped were considered translationally trivial, and the
student now has avialable NA26-27.

In the case of Jn 9:38, this variant enters into the translation of both NAB and
JB.  (I don't have NAB2 and NJB at hand to see if these revisions have made any
changes here.)  In practical terms, then, a translation team working on an
interconfessional translation and comparing their work with several major Roman
Catholic translations will encounter this variant and will benefit from the
display of evidence provided in GNT4.  The {B} rating provides the translators
with a way to measure the degree of conficence of the GNT editors and will
probably, thought not inevitably, lead the translators to follow the text and
not the variant.

Harold P. Scanlin
Consultant on Scholarly Editons and Helps
United Bible Societies
1865 Broadway
NY, NY 10023