Subject: Re: The "Alexandrian" Text

From: [email-masked] (Robert B. Waltz)
Date: Tue, 28 May 96 18:42 CDT

I was going to see how this discussion developed, but I guess I need to
clarify something.

First, off, note that I was not saying that B and Aleph *did not*
belong to the same text-type. I was simply saying that we must
not *assume* that. Now on to the message I was responding to.

On Tue, 28 May 1996, "Larry W. Hurtado" <[email-masked]>

>A quick response to Robert Walz.  First, as Colwell pointed out some time
>ago, the relationship of mss has to be examined *book by book*, in some
>cases, even chapter by chapter.

I would say rather that we must be *prepared to* examine them book by
book or chapter by chapter. Manuscripts that clearly need this include
L, W, Delta, Psi, 579, etc. -- all marked by block mixture or (in the
case of L and probably 579) a much heavier degree of correction in the
earlier books than in the latter.

You'll note that, in my table of manuscript statistics, I cited
several manuscripts only for particular books.

But for manuscripts that do not show such mixture, we can do overall
comparisons. What's more, for such manuscripts, overall comparison
is *more* accurate because it allows us to examine more readings.

Besides, would anyone want to have seen all the results for every
individual books?

>Aleph & B do *not* of course agree at a
>constant level across the NT, for example. As Fee showed, there is even
>marked variation in their agreement within the Gospel of John.

True. But not relevant to the thesis. If Aleph is "Western" in the
early part of John (a fact which I alluded to), that has no effect on
the question of whether there is an "Aleph-text" or not.

>This
>"block mixture" of mss is more frequent than might be imagined, but only
>careful collation practices & methods can detect it.

I question this. I think most changes in textual complexion are the
result of correctors being more or less diligent. Take, for instance,
L. In the first part of Matthew it is mostly Byzantine. Does this mean
that part of L was copied from a Byzantine manuscript and the rest
from an Alexandrian? I think not. Far more likely that the ancestor
of L was heavily and carefully corrected in Matthew and much more
sporadically corrected elsewhere.

Since I'm a mathematician, I'm going to hit you all with statistics.
Taking Wisse's CPM evaluation of 1385 gospel manuscripts, we find
335, or 24%, displaying mixture. However -- and this is a *big*
however -- only *nine* manuscripts (W Xi Psi 157 565 700 884 1342
2542), or less than one percent, show a *significant* shift in
affiliation (from Alexandrian to Byzantine, for instance). 25 other
manuscripts (e.g. C Theta 1071) are "mixed," and so *might* contain
block mixture. The rest of the manuscripts show no major change in
textual complexion; they either show shifts within the Byzantine
tradition or no shift at all.

>	So, the varying level of agreement of Aleph & B is not a basis
>for posing (only?) two text-types.

I may be dense, but I fail to see what that has to do with my argument.
I am simply stating that the two *are* different. The question is,
do they belonf to the same text-type? Or, more correctly, do the texts of
family B and family Aleph (which are *not* the same as the texts of
B and Aleph, any more than the text of family 13 is identical to 13)
belong to the same family.

>	Second, discussion of "text-types" raises the question of what we
>mean.  Here I recommend *strongly* Epp's essay on "The Significance of
>the Papyri . . . A Dynamic View of Textual Transmission," in the Epp/Fee
>volume, _Studies in the Theory & Method of NT Textual Criticism_ (pp.
>274ff.).

What do you think started me thinking along these lines? :-)

I am not entirely fond of Epp's "trajectory" analogy. But as someone who
has spent most of his life dealing with evolutionary processes (folk
music, "genetic" type phenomena, even computer programming), I firmly
believe in a dynamic view of textual history.

B and Aleph represent stages in the evolution of the text. If they
belong to the same text-type, then their texts continued to interact
until a time very close to their copying. If not, then there is a
point much further back at which they divided. Which really happened?
To date, no one has offered an answer.

>	Third, Epp's famous "Interlude" essay did not assert no
>significant steps had been made, but rather that in the realm of *textual
>theory*, esp. in our grasp of the major history of the text, we had made
>surprisingly little agreed-upon progress.  Epp refers to Aland's work, to
>Zuntz's justly important work on the epistles, etc.

This is exactly what I said. In the twentieth century, we have gathered
vast amounts of data. Zuntz gave us a major breakthrough in the textual
theory of Paul (though his results do not seem to have gotten through
to the UBS committee). Duplacy, if I understand the results in
Vaganay/Amphoux, has laid the groundwork for similar progress in the
Catholics.

But in the gospels, we have the CPM and nothing more. We're still
talking about "Western" and "Alexandrian" texts, and the "Alexandrian"
text is the same as it was in Hort's day.

I don't say Hort was wrong. I don't know. He may have been absolutely
right. I just think we need to examine the matter, not take it as --
ahem! -- gospel.

Bob Waltz
[email-masked]