Subject: Re: your mail

From: DC PARKER <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 10:09:14 GMT

On Tuesday 4 June Robert Waltz wrote that 'our knowledge of local 
texts, especially in the western half of the Roman empire, is very 
slight'.  As a matter of fact, palaeography helps us much further than 
this.  If, for example, you look at the introduction to the Supplement of 
Lowe's _Codices Latini Antiquiores_, you will find an excellent 
discussion of the distinctive hands of North Africa (surely the origin of 
Bobbiensis (k).  There is a discussion of Cavallo's _Maiuscola 
biblica_ of a hand which he believes to be distinctive of the Nitrian 
Desert (p. 87f).  There are plenty of other examples.

The present location of MSS is not necessarily of any use - 
provenance may tell us nothing about origin - nor should the Vatican 
collection be treated as more significant in this regard.  Devreesse's 
_Les Manuscrits grecs de l'Italie meridionale_ is another example of 
palaeography providing grounds for identifying local texts, and 
illustrates the growth of collections such as the Vatican's.

The whole discussion on this theme stirs up in me a thought on one 
point.  It is being assumed (I suggest) that local texts had acquired all 
their own characteristics from the very beginning of their existence, 
and that therefore all members of the group must be, as it were, fully 
paid up members.  This is not at all how I think of them.  Rather, each 
text slowly acquired its peculiar properties over a sequence of 
transmissions.  Rather than Athene springing fully armed from Zeus' 
head, they evolved like the distinctive species which Darwin found in 
different places.  Or perhaps one might conceive of them as the 
various dialects in which a language is spoken.  Thus, an early 
member of a type (or whatever you want to call it} will show some 
characteristics of its descendants, but will also share characteristics 
with members of other groups which its descendants will not retain.  
We must remember here what a tiny proportion of the members of 
any one group are available to us, even in part, as a consequence of 
which it is generally impossible to trace these developments in 
detail.
DC PARKER
DEPT OF THEOLOGY
UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
TEL. 0121-414 3613
FAX  0121-414 6866
E-MAIL [email-masked]

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From: Maurice Robinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 11:43:16 -0400 (EDT)

> which it is generally impossible to trace these developments in 

I fully concur with Parker on this point; it reflects well my own 
transmissional presuppositions regarding local texts.

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