Subject: Re: Antiquity

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 5 Apr 1997 22:12:19 -7000

> >First, it's not logical.
> 
> Uh huh.
> (you see, I have given up offering substance as I have yet to hear any
> substance opposing the fact that the antiquity of a document is of the
> utmost importance)

Several have, but you appear to have set the question up in such a 
way that no amount of evidence can suffice for you.

> >  I can't see the sun today because of a 
> >snowstorm, but the fact that it's not visible cannot be adduced as 
> >evidence that it doesn't exist.  By this kind of "logic" we end up 
> >saying that, because we don't have the autographs, there's no 
> >evidence they ever existed.  That's just plain silly.
> >
> 
> The sun is there whether you see it or not.  But if you do not see it- you
> do not see it.  We have no autographs. Period.

This is not a reply to my analogy.  The autographs existed, whether 
we now have them or not.  But because I can't see the sun, I have to 
use other criteria to establish its existence, composition, etc.  So 
it is with TC: we have to use other criteria, among them the canons 
of internal and external evidence, to establish the nature of the 
autographs.  I can't just arbitrarily pick the highest cloud I can 
see and say "This one is most like the sun because it's the closest 
to it," which is what you're doing with manuscripts.

> >Second and more important, this approach renders any kind of 
> >meaningful scientific historical investigation impossible. 
> 
> Not at all.  It simply bases investigation in what we do have- not in what
> someone hypothetically reconstructs.

Wrong.  If all we have is a haphazard array (and a mighty small one, 
at that) of randomly-preserved fragments, but are told that those are 
ALL we can base our investigation on, then true science is not 
possible.  How many people have ever seen an electron?  Nobody has.  
They are "what someone hypothetically reconstructs."  The reason we 
all accept their existence is because the hypothesis fits the 
observable facts.  That's how science works.  And given the 
unpredictable and capricious nature of (pre-9th century) manuscript 
preservation, we MUST have some sort of scientific method to help us 
or we end up looking like ostriches.

> > If we 
> >don't have Julius Caesar's perforated body we have no evidence that 
> >he was murdered, or that he ever existed.
> 
> You are right- we dont have his body.  Why then would anyone argue that we
> do?  ANd yet some text critics are arguing that we have good textual
> evidence from the 8th century while at the same time they discount the
> earliest manuscript evidence and make age of text merely one criteria among
> others.

Your extension of the analogy doesn't work because you misunderstood 
it.  My point was, we have historical evidence (writings) to 
substantiate both his existence and his death.  Saying that we have 
good textual evidence from the 8th century is the result of sound 
historical investigation.  It is nothing akin to saying we have 
Caesar's body.  What we have are good records of its rise and fall; 
it's the same with 8th century (and other) textual evidence.  By your 
approach, we can't really know anything about Caesar's death unless 
we either (a) have his body or (b) have a note from his own hand that 
reads "My buddies just ran me through!"  The methodology just doesn't 
work, and as I said, it eliminates any meaningful historical 
investigation for lack of "hard evidence."

> >  If we can't do historical 
> >study without your so-called "hard evidence" then in the main we 
> >can't do history at all.  TC is, after all, a branch of historical 
> >study.  None of us was there for the events, so we have to examine 
> >the history using the most scientific tools and methods available.  
> >Those tools and methods are constantly being re-evaluated and refined 
> >to make them more scientific and reliable.  Your approach takes them 
> >all away and sends us back to the principle of blind faith.
> 
> NO!  It is blind faith I am opposing; that is why I am suggesting (!) that
> of all the criteria, antiquity should be held in great importance (and yet
> still no one has bothered to discuss this central issue; this crux).

Because all you've done is say it, you haven't given any sound 
scientific reasons why.  Plenty of respondents have pointed out that 
the most ancient manuscripts can be and sometimes are much more 
flawed than later ones, and I have yet to see you answer that.  The 
reason text critics hold antiquity as merely one criterion among many 
is because that's what it is.

> >It's like this: the most ancient mss we have were preserved quite by 
> >accident, the luck of the draw as I said before.  If we insist that 
> >these have to be the most reliable because they're the oldest, it's a 
> >little like tossing the dice, watching them come up with, say, 4, and 
> >declaring "because this is the number that came up on the dice on 
> >this particular toss, 4 must be the perfect number and we must all 
> >base our lives on it."  It just doesn't work, and doesn't take into 
> >account the fact that the dice will ultimately be thrown again and 
> >come up with a different number.
> >
> 
> Ya lost me on this one!   :)

Read my previous post about it and Maurice's response.  The "most 
ancient" witnesses we have may or may not be a true sampling of the 
text at that period in time; because of the paucity of such 
witnesses, we can't know.  Hence, even when we don't have two 
witnesses of equal age (as you have described elsewhere), we still 
have to have other balancing criteria for deciding among readings.  
Age is simply not enough.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur/home.html
"You're so open-minded that your brain leaked out."
                                 -Steve Taylor