Subject: Re: Textual Criticism Theories

From: Jim West <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 07:21:24 -0400 (EDT)

At 04:03 AM 10/24/96 +0000, you wrote:

>And let's not speak about Arabic, Ethiopian, medieval Dutch, English,
>Catalan, Soghdian, Persian, medieval Hebrew, etc... Though I work directly
>on the versions (and maybe not enough on the Greek, as my master C. Amphoux
>told me), I like the edition of Merk, who gives more versional and
>diatessaric evidence. Also, for the latin side, it gives the vulgate text
>with old latin variants. Though my exemplar dates from 1944, I do not feel
>that it has been superseeded.

The simplest explanation as to why these minor translations have no
influence on TC is simply because they are minor.  They do not, in reality,
help us to reconstruct the Greek text of the NT or the Hebrew text of the OT
(unless someone is going to argue that the NT was originally written in KJ
english!).

The only use versions like these have is to compare with one another- being
translations of translations, etc., they do not take us any closer to the
Greek text.

When a version does seem to have an "older" reading it is, somewhere, based
on a Greek manuscript.

Thus it does not behhove us to waste years of study on "medieval dutch" and
its contribution to NT TC when we ought to spend our time with the greek mss.

Jim

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Jim West, ThD
Professor of Biblical Languages
Petros TN

---

From: Nichael Cramer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 08:24:22 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 24 Oct 1996, Jim West wrote:
> >Catalan, Soghdian, Persian, medieval Hebrew, etc... 
> [...]
> Greek text.  [...]

Indeed, the standard argument for not considering most of the versional 
data is, is it not, that many of these later versions were themselves 
based on versional or later Greek textual traditions.  (For example many 
of the versions mentioned were in fact translations from the Vulgate!)

As such, as "children" of already well attested earlier versions and text 
types, these later version provide no new or rather _independent_ 
witnesses to the original underlying Greek text.

Clearly there are some versions that provide useful information (in a 
text critical sense); one obvious example is the Syriac.  But the 
inclusion of many/most of the later versional data would seem to be 
indistinguishable from the traditional Majority Text argument of simply 
"counting the available manuscripts".

N

---

From: "James R. Adair" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 15:45:10 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 24 Oct 1996, Jim West wrote:

> .....

Paul Maas (and many others) argued that the goal of textual criticism was 
to reconstruct the original text.  However, it seems to me that 
reconstructing the original text (a problematic concept in many cases) is 
only one of several goals that textual critics can have.  Tracing the 
history of the development of the text is another possible goal, one in 
which the "minor" versions can take on major importance.  Another 
possible goal would be to document the text used in a particular region 
or by a particular group of people.  Yet another goal would study the 
interplay between theological disputes and the biblical text.  It would 
even be interesting to study one particular manuscript to see if it could 
shed any light on the practices or beliefs of the community that used it. 
I'm sure there are other possibilities as well.  Maybe it's time to 
broaden the scope of the text-critical task.

Jimmy Adair
Manager of Information Technology Services, Scholars Press
    and
Managing Editor of TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web Site
---------------> http://scholar.cc.emory.edu <-----------------