Subject: Archtype and autograph

From: Timothy John Finney <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 14:43:48 +0800 (WST)

Zuntz points out in his _Disquisition on the Corpus Paulinum_ that every 
MS of Paul's letters is a collection. Even Hebrews is always found in a 
collection. There are some points of dissension, but in general there is 
agreement that Paul's letters and Hebrews were in circulation as a 
collection by 100 AD.

When I mentioned archtype rather than autograph in my initial post, it 
was with this in mind. No one knows what happened between the original 
composition of these writings and their collection into one corpus, but 
here is a possible scenario (the usual arguments about dating etc. aside):

1) 55 - 70 AD Paul's letters and Hebrews written and sent (copies may have 
been made for other churches, especially where the letter was addressed 
to one but instructions were given for it to be read in others).

2) Some enterprising early believer, probably while being reprimanded for 
wasting time on trifles, decided to collect Paul's writings. Who was it? 
My favourites are Timothy and Luke (Timothy because a couple of the 
collection are addressed to him; Luke because of his interest in orderly
written records), but, as with Hebrews, 'only God knows' (Origen, c. 
200). As others have pointed out, this would most practically have been 
achieved by writing to the various letters' custodian churches asking for 
copies (aside from letters already at hand).

3) Copies of letters not already at hand would be made (with varying 
accuracy, I dare say) and sent to the intrepid collector. This person 
then copied all of the letters into a single collection which is the 
archtype on which all subsequent copies of the Pauline collection are 
based. Where a copy of the collection was sent back to a church holding 
one of the originals, it could have been cross-checked.

Many implications spring from this possible scenario: 

1) The autographs are (at least) one copy distant from the archtype for all 
letters in the Pauline collection, except those that were already in the
possession of the original collector. 

2) Production of the archtype introduced another copying step.

3) Nevertheless, the collection archetype could be compared with the 
autographs whenever a copy of the collection archtype was sent to a custodian
of an autograph.

4) These primary copying steps are a possible source of the primitive 
corruptions that have been discussed by Maurice Robinson and James Adair. 

Aspects of this theory may even be testable: if certain members of the
collection have significantly less of what seem to be primitive
corruptions than would be expected from the overall average then this may
be due to those members having been copied less before incorporation into
the archtype collection. (What a shame that there are no papyri which have
the two letters to Timothy.)

On a related matter, a couple of years ago I wrote a C program that
simulates copying. It starts off with a row of zeroes, then introduces
'variants' by incrementing zeroes at random with a certain (low)
probability. There are parameters included which give the 'manuscripts'
(i.e. rows of numbers) chances of dying of old age or by violent death.

This is a funny program. Sometimes it seems to not work. That's because no
copies get made because the autograph dies or is killed before it gets
copied.  This made me think that we might have lost some autographs by
this phenomenon, but I don't think so any more because the possibility of
early collections having been made introduces a different dynamic: we
either end up with a whole collection or nothing. 

One outcome which I found interesting was that once a sample of the set of
copies produced was taken, it was quite common (depending on the
probabilities put into the program at the start) for a number besides zero
(the original 'reading') to predominate at a particular 'variation unit'. 

Modeling of early copying might produce some clues to help us in our
attempt to reconstruct the development of the New Testament text. One
phenomenon which happens in other populations is that conditions which
adversely affect a first population but favour or don't affect a second,
lead to a predomination of the varieties in the second population. On the
face of it, this could explain why the Byzantine text became dominant
after the Moslem conquest of Egypt. Whether or not the Egyptian or 
Byzantine variety is closest to the original is another question.

Tim Finney
Baptist Theological College
of Western Australia