Subject: Theories of textual transmission / Alexandrian text / etc.

From: [email-masked] (William L. Petersen)
Date: Tue, 11 Jun 1996 18:13:15 -0400

As I have watched the various posts on these two subjects float by over the
last week or so, I have been struck by one point.  It leads me to ask the
following question:

Why, in all these discussions, have NONE of the earliest witnesses to the NT
text been mentioned?  Are they without relevance to the issue of how the
text originated and was then transmitted?  Are they of no significance when
discussing the "Alexandrian" or "Byzantine" or other families?

By "earliest witnesses" I mean, of course, the extensive second-century
citations which we possess:  Justin, Tertullian, Ignatius, the Didache, etc.
Even the early third century citations in Clement of Alexandria, Origen,
etc., are very important for the light they shed on both the text itself and
how early "academic" Christians handled it.

Quite frankly, I don't understand why one would choose to busy one's self
with 4th cent. through 12th cent. evidence, while at the same time totally
ignoring the 2nd through 3rd. cent. evidence.  Please enlighten me.

--Petersen, Penn State Univ.

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From: Vincent Broman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Jun 96 16:10:54 PDT

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[email-masked] asked:
> text been mentioned? ...
> ignoring the 2nd through 3rd. cent. evidence.

I think the 2d-3d cent. evidence is well-trod ground that we are all taking
for granted.  It is useful, but substantially biased as a sample, and
it doesn't solve the problem of explaining the history of the text.

Imagine someone saying:
  All the second century witnesses that we can classify are more-or-less
  "Western", and the Alexandrian type of text doesn't appear till the
  early third century, marking the latter text as obviously late and a mere
  derivative of the earlier forms attested by Tertullian et al.
You would expostulate:
  But wait! that doesn't explain where p66/p75 come from! There must
  have been proto-Alexandrian MSS in the 2d century, they just haven't
  been preserved.

There is a similar mystery about the origins of the Byzantine tradition.
Hort had an explanation for it, but that explanation has been abandoned.
Others have talked vaguely about scribal processes evolving it gradually,
but there still is this fish in the chowder:
Where did A/W/Chrysostom/Gothic come from?  The evidence seems to
say that they descend from pre-4th century ancestors somewhere between
Greece and Palestine of which no physical traces survive.

How that could happen is interesting to discuss.

Vincent Broman             Email: [email-masked]                    =   o     
2224 33d St.               Phone: +1 619 284 3775                  =  _ /- _   
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___ PGP protected mail preferred.  For public key finger [email-masked] ___

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From: Maurice Robinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Jun 1996 23:12:05 -0400 (EDT)

> how early "academic" Christians handled it.
 
I think Petersen does ask a significant question, and those within the 
eclectic field will have to explain their non-reliance upon the early 
papyri and patristic evidence on a different basis than will I.  

I find most of the patristic evidence from the second century either 
too limited in scope or simply inadequate; certainly not definitive 
(the quotation of Mk.10 in Clem.Alex's "Who is the Rich Man that will be 
saved?" is a case in point -- a direct quote, but so corrupted that it is 
hard to believe any MS read the same as Clement gives, even within the 
worst of the western tradition).  Similarly, writers like Irenaeus 
indiscriminately quote the same passage in varying forms, at times 
agreeing with one or another texttype, but not definitively.  

The fathers in most cases were limited as to MSS within their own local
text situation; add to that their constant allusion or quoting from
(faulty) memory, and the reliability of their text tends to drop off
dramatically.  Nevertheless, much of the text in their quotes agrees with
that held in common by all texttypes, and in that regard they are
valuable.  Also, much of their text agrees with joint
Alexandrian-Byzantine or Western-Byzantine readings, and in that regard
they are themselves highly Byzantine.  Where they deviate in places where
variant readings occur, at least in such cases they offer evidence that
the reading was early, and that it was known in that Father's location. 
More than that, I doubt should be claimed. 

The early papyri have all been preserved in Egypt, and even though some of
them may not have had an Egyptian provenance, I suspect most of them did.
Their text is not consistent, and most present a jumbled mixture of
predominantly western and Alexandrian type readings, with some
distinctively Byzantine readings thrown in.  They do not have a default
text which is easily accessible by merely stripping away individual
accretions; yet, if such were attempted, their resultant text would end up
more Byzantine than either Alexandrian or Western, due to the jointly-held
Alexandrian-Byzantine and Western-Byzantine readings which appear in them. 
A significant contingent of Alexandrian readings still would remain, 
however, after the purely western corruptions were stripped, which would 
be in keeping with the locale in which they were found.

Neither I nor the eclectic critics (save some lip-service from Kurt Aland)
seem to put much weight on the papyri or early fathers in general, due to
their basic reflection of what Colwell termed the "uncontrolled popular
text" era.  Among the eclectics, only P66 and P75 appear to have major
significance in the gospels, but not so much as to override B or Aleph. 

> ignoring the 2nd through 3rd. cent. evidence.  Please enlighten me.

My own theory of transmission follows Hort's "initial presumption", which
works backward from what we know (our extant evidence), and assumes
(rightly, given a "normal" transmissional history) that what appears in a
vast majority of extant documents reflects that which in any previous
copying generation would also reflect a vast majority of earlier
documents. 

The task is to explain simply and logically where all the Byzantine
predecessors disappeared to, and this is precisely why certain portions of
the discussion have been focusing on the shift from the trickle of
uncials between the 6th-9th centuries turning into an explosion of
minuscules beginning in the 9th century.  If Lake is correct (as I have
assumed in this discussion) that the uncial predecessors of the 9th and
10th century minuscules were destroyed once a good minuscule copy was
made, then the only logical assumption has to be that those numerous lost
uncials of the 6th-9th century period were predominately (90%+) Byzantine. 

Take that back a few generational steps further, and one will quickly see
that -- barring Hort's formal recension which produced the Byzantine text
-- there is no easy way to presume that the portion of extant early
evidence we today possess is necessarily representative of what once must
have been the situation.  The fallacy is in presuming that what exists on
a century-by-century basis is supposedly "typical", when in fact this
merely begs the question. 

Once this line of reasoning has been instituted, then the early evidence
from the 2nd-4th centuries can be evaluated from a better perspective, and
one will see that, despite all the idiosyncracies of the fathers or the
mixture in the early papyri, there still remains a basic core or common
consensus text which permeates them all, once the aberrations are
stripped, and that common text (even in the fathers) remains heavily
Byzantine. 

I of course cherish few hopes that Petersen or other modern eclectics will
agree, but I believe that all this can be demonstrated from within the
critical editions of the papyri published by Muenster or the IGNTP, as
well as from the critical editions of the fathers.  One must, however,
proceed on the assumption that readings which are jointly Alexandrian and
Byzantine or jointly Western and Byzantine should properly be called
"Byzantine", and that such readings reflect places where either the
Alexandrian or the Western texts simply did not happen to differ.  Note
that it is _not_ the matter of the so-called "distinctive" Byzantine
readings which are the key here, but merely readings which are common to
the entire Byzantine Textform. 

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