Subject: Re: getting Real

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 5 Apr 1997 15:28:14 -7000

> The purpose of Text criticism is to establish the reading most likely to
> have been original.
> If you could tell me how that is to be done without taking into account the
> oldest manuscripts of a document I would be grateful.  

I believe that we and those who have gone before us have spent a 
couple of centuries doing just that.  And nobody is saying not to 
take into account the oldest manuscripts.  That wouldn't be good 
science.  However, it's also not good science to blindly follow one 
small pocket of evidence because it happens to embody the "oldest 
manuscripts of a document."

> As to getting real, it seems to me that a realistic approach to textual
> criticism lies in hard evidence and not in fanciful hypothetical
> reconstructions.

Once again you redefine terms.  There's the science of textual 
criticism's definition of "hard evidence," and then there's Jim 
West's definition.  I'll go with the former, thank you.

> The DSS Psalms is a millenium older than Leningrad; but we are urged to
> ignore it because it would cause us to re-evaluate our standard "book of
> Psalms".  So which approach is more unreal- the one which maintains that
> "older is better" or the one that attaches itself to a present form of the
> text in spite of a more ancient form and trys to reconstruct from the
> present to the past?

The DSS Psalms is one among many.  The fact that it's old doesn't 
alter the fact that it's contrary to every other piece of evidence, 
betrays anachronistic tendencies, stands by itself even among its 
brethren in the DSS corpus, and contains an unusually high number of 
nonsense readings.  "Older is better" is not a valid criterion.  It's 
a gross attempt at oversimplification that flies in the face of the 
evidence gathered since the earliest days of TC.  IOW, it's unreal.

> As to the purpose of this forum- I believe it is the open exchange of ideas
> and not the mere gainsaying of ideas which a particular author finds
> discomfiting for (apparently) dogmatic reasons.

Cop-out.  I didn't gainsay anything based on dogmatic reasons and you 
know it.  What I said was, the comments about the age of a document 
as reflected by the age of the manuscripts of it has no real bearing 
on textual criticism.  It lies more in the purview of form or 
rhetorical criticism and really tells us little or nothing about the 
establishment of or history of the text as transmitted from the 
autographs.  This forum is for "the open exchange of ideas" related 
specifically to textual criticism.  I merely pointed out that the 
statements made are not, in the final analysis, germane to textual 
criticism.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur/home.html
There will be times when we disagree, but that's
good because disagreement leads to thinking, and 
when you think you'll realize I'm right. ;-)

---

From: Jim West <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 Apr 1997 21:11:11 -0500 (EST)

At 01:37 AM 4/6/97 +0200, you wrote:

>Jim, this may be _your_ purpose. But confronted with the complexity of 
>the evidence (and this complexity is the source of the debates we're in) 
>many scholars would, at least for one or two generations - try to attain 
>more modest goals. Like for example : making the history of the text, 
>gathering documentation, solving one or another specific question.
>I appreciate your "most likely" though, and I think that is quite to the 
>point. The evidence is so complex, the documentation is so immense, and 
>so many hundreds of mss have not yet been read... In the present state of 
>the art, nobody can be too dogmatic about what the "original text" (if 
>there ever was such a thing) should have been.

Jean,

We are 100% in agreement here!

Jim

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Jim West, ThD
Adjunct Professor of Bible, Quartz Hill School of Theology
[email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked] (Dr. E. Habas)
Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 19:09:36 +0300 (IDT)

>The purpose of Text criticism is to establish the reading most likely to
....

>Psalms".
....

Does one really *have* to assume there *was* (say, in the first or second
century CE) a "standard 'book of Psalms'"? Actually, it would seem that
there were more than a single version of several biblical works in
circulation at least until the 120's CE. Some of the later Jewish works
are, likewise, compilations which cannot (and probably should not) be
traced to a single "authorized" book, or: "correct text", or:"original
text", of which all other variants are a mere corruption (or forgery), but
present a much more complex phenomenon.

Effie