Subject: H-F apparatus and Soden

From: Mike Arcieri <[email-masked]>
Date: 06 Jan 97 10:43:05 EST

>The thing that struck me--its been a while and I didn't do 
>the whole of the NT (its been so long that I don't even 
>remember which portion I did), so don't take this as gospel--
>was that the H&F choice for the M text matched the M reading
>in NA every single time. The reason that struck me was, as
>others have noted, the original collation was done on the 
>basis of von Soden and I had heard all of these terrible 
>things about von Soden's errors. Yet the comparison to the
>M reading in NA matched everytime...I came to the 
>(tentative !!!!!) conclusion that von Soden (and his 
>students) must not have done all that bad of a job after
>all. I asked Zane Hodges about that and he referred me to 
>an article on that issue (J.R.Royse, "Von Soden's 
>Accuracy," JTS 30/1 [Apr, 1979]:166-71). I'm not 
>claiming that either Royse or von Soden is accurate; just
>thought a bit of historical trivia might be found interesting
>in the midst of the discussion...

***********************************************************************
Dale M. Wheeler, Th.D.

Dr. Wheeler, 

To compliment Dr. Robinson's personal verification of Soden's
accuracy/inaccuracy, 
did you ever receive a copy of Pickering's 2 papers put out by the Majtxt
Society on "The Reliability of von Soden and H-F"?? This was based on the
_complete collations_ of all MSS (on microfilm) available at Aland's Institute
and pub in the Text und Textwert der Griechischen Handschriften des Neuen
Testaments series. Aland presented evidence on select variants in the Catholic
epistles, Pauline epistles, Acts etc. Pickering compared the HF "M" variants
with Aland and found that in the overwhelming number of cases, HF was 100%
correct in what was the M reading. Not only that, but even their evaluation of M
(gothic M, bold M and Mpt) was correct. This means of course that von Soden's
evaluation of the K was largely correct too. Hence von Soden _can_ be trusted
and deserves to be given more benefit of doubt than has been done so far.

I cannot provide details now, but if you (or any fellow TC-LISTer) want some
just let me know and I'll send up some relevant stats.

Mike A.