Subject: Re: E. C. Colwell--A Maverick?

From: "Professor L.W. Hurtado" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 16:13:20 +000

Colwell was certainly no maverick.  He was one of the foremost 
text-critics produced in N. American this century, and his sense of 
clear method puts us all in is debt. 
In the passage cited, Colwell is not attacking the work of the Alands 
in toto, but quite specifically criticizing the UBS edition as to its 
severely limited textual apparatus, criticisms echoed by many others 
also.
That the UBS edition tends to mislead is evident from the widespread 
use of it by NT students & even scholars, who often seem to have no 
real idea of its limitations and intention--as a translation base for 
translators, and never as a scholarly text for textual analysis.
As for comparing the work of Aland & Colwell, to do such is rather 
pointless and rather like children on a playground ("my old man is 
better than your old man").  To be sure, the Alands have put us all 
in their debt with the many contributions from their Muenster 
Institute.  But, to be fair, a large part of the reason for the 
Alands' success is the financial backing behind the Institute.  If 
such resources were more readily available elsewhere, who knows what 
might be done in other places!
Contra Jim West, I rather doubt that Colwell's cogent analyses will 
slip beneath the waves of history quite as readily as he thinks.
Larry Hurtado
L. W. Hurtado
University of Edinburgh,
New College
Mound Place 
Edinburgh, Scotland EH1 2LX
Phone: 0131-650-8920
Fax: 0131-650-6579
E-mail:  [email-masked]

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From: Michael Holmes <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 11:41:15 -0600 (CST)

Re bibliography for those wishing to make their own assessment of Colwell:
the place to begin may be Colwell's 1968 essay, "Hort Redivivus: A Plea and
a Program," pp. 63-83 in his volume of collected essays (_Studies in
Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament_ [NTTS 9; Leiden and
Grand Rapids: Brill and Eerdmans, 1969]). In this essay he *retracts* some
of his earlier criticism of Hort--thus one might start here rather than the
earlier essays.  Also, an essay not in his collected essays that will
interest some on this list is "External Evidence and New Testament
Criticism," in _Studies in the History and Text of the NT_, ed. Daniels and
Suggs (SD 29; U. of Utah press, 1967) 1-12.

For a sympathetic critical assessment of Colwell--as well as Aland and
Zuntz--see J. N. Birdsall's essay on "The Recent History of New Testament
Textual Criticism (from Westcott and Hort, 1881, to the present)," in ANRW
2.26.1, pp. 99-197, esp. pp. 166-175 for the three scholars just mentioned.
Birdsall treats them as "Colwell - a practical scholar theorizing," "Zuntz -
classical philology and New Testament text," and "Aland - entrepreneurial
pragmatism."

(full bibliographic details, if needed, may be found in the bibliography to
my essay--which offers its own assessment of Colwell [I suggest that his
method is patterned after Hort, while his views of the history of the text
are influenced by Zuntz and Schmidt]--in the vol. Ehrman and I edited, The
Text of the New Testament in Comtemporary Research.)

Mike Holmes