Subject: Re: Patristic statistics

From: "Professor L.W. Hurtado" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1996 11:41:13 +000

The current discussions here over Aland's "patristic statistics" 
remind me again that text critics still need to assess carefully how 
we use countings of "agreements" and what constitute "agreements".  
In my 1981 book, _Text-Critical Methodology and the Pre-Caesarean 
Text_, I tried to address the matter, building upon studies by 
Colwell and later Fee.  (See now the chapter by T. C. Geer, Jr., in 
_The Text of the NT in Contemp. Research_, ed. B. D. Ehrman, M. W. 
Holmes).
Counting "agreements" is almost meaningless, unless (1) agreements 
are considered in the context of all relevant readings--i.e., 
agreements as percentages of the total number of relevant 
variation-units, agreements *& disagreements*, and (2) agreements are 
assessed as to their significance (but only *after* the counting!).
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: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1996 09:50:15 -0700

>assessed as to their significance (but only *after* the counting!).

WIth all of this I have to agree -- but I have to go further. One
of the saddest things about Professor Hurtado's study, from my
standpoint, is all the issues it *doesn't* address.

Hurtado established -- conclusively, to my mind -- that p45 and W
are not to be linked to the so-called "Caesarean" text. But his
method, and that of Fee, cannot address the Lake/Streeter definition
of the "Caesarean" text. Note that Streeter defined the "Caesarean"
text as those readings of Theta, family 1, family 13, 28, 565, 700,
etc. *not found in the Byzantine text.*

This definition may be problematic; I myself mentioned Colwell's
rule that a text-type consists of manuscripts, not readings. And,
of course, Streeter defined the Byzantine text as the Textus
Receptus -- a drastic error in this case. But -- however problematic
it is -- the definition has never been formally tested.

I did what I could; with my thousand-reading sample I looked at
all the texts listed above and compared not only their overall
agreements but their *non-Byzantine* agreements.

I have not finished my analysis, so I cannot give formal results.
But the results I have indicate that the "Caesarean" text is real,
or at least that the "Caesarean" manuscripts have been subjected
to a common influence. This despite the fact that, based on overall
agreements, they are all simply "Byzantine" (or at least "mixed
Byzantine").

So I agree with Hurtado that we must look at agreements and disagreements,
but we must do more. We must *assess* agreements, we must have large enough
samples to mean something -- and we should ask that people know what
statistics they are citing!

Bob Waltz
[email-masked]