Subject: tc-list Herman Hoskier

From: "Michael S. Olszta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 14:51:45 -0500

Hello,

I was wondering if anything like Herman Hoskier's work on the book of
Revelation has been done.  Hoskier collated every known Greek manuscript
of the Apocalypse up to 1918? (I think that's about right).  This to me
seems the correct approach to textual criticism, i.e., the collation of
all extant documents including manuscripts, versions, patristic
quotations, and lectionaries.  Why someone as intelligent as Kurt Aland
would simply discard thousands of manuscripts because they originate
later than 900A.D. seems absolutely ludicrous.  To simply throw out
9/10ths of the evidence as being worthless because it doesn't fit in
with what John William Burgon calls "the dream" of Westcott and Hort is
absurd.  The recension theory(ies) need to be proven if they are to be
accepted and if they are going to be proven, then the scholars ought to
put their money where their mouths are and do to all the books of the
New Testament what Hoskier did for the Apocalypse.  Perhaps I am wrong
and there are some scholars out there who in fact are doing what Hoskier
did, but I have to doubt it.  If complete collations have been done on
any book of the New Testament, I would be interested in knowing where
the results might be found.

Michael Olszta

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From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 14:22:21 -0600

>the results might be found.

There are two very practical problems with this:

1. Doing the collations
2. Publishing the collations

Although #1 is now theoretically possible, due to the collections
at Munster, it is a very time-consuming process (to properly collate
even one manuscript takes dozens or hundreds of hours). The people
aren't available.

#2 is even worse. Can you imagine trying to publish the information
on 4000 gospel manuscripts and lectionaries in one volume? The sheer
bulk of the IGNTP volumes on Luke (which contain much less than 1/10 of
that amount of data) should demonstrate the near-impossibility of
the concept. Remember that to make this data available in one place
requires that it be collated, edited, typeset, proofread, etc. It's
all very well to say "Hoskier did it" -- but he did it for the
shortest of the four major sections of the NT, and the one with
the fewest manuscripts and versions -- and he did it many decades
ago, when the number of manuscripts was smaller.

The approach taken by most modern editions -- of taking representative
manuscripts and collating them in detail -- is much better, as long
as we know which manuscripts to choose. And here there are at least
two important tools: The Thousand Readings (Text und Textwert) of
Kurt Aland and the work of Wisse et al on the Claremont Profile
Method. I have severe reservations about both methods -- but both
are adequate to identify Byzantine manuscripts, and (in the case of
the CPM) even to find subgroups within the Byzantine tradition.
But at least both are (nearly) comprehensive; they survey in excess
of 80% of the known manuscripts. These (very different) sampling
methods make it possible to represent (almost) the whole tradition
with a much smaller and more manageable set of manuscripts. This
is the approach followed by the IGNTP, and I believe also in the
Munster edition of the Catholic Epistles.

Compromise is never fun. But it's better to go with a representative
set of manuscripts than not to publish anything at all. :-)

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

Want more loudmouthed opinions about textual criticism?
Try my web page: http://www.skypoint.com/~waltzmn
(A site inspired by the Encyclopedia of NT Textual Criticism)

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From: [email-masked] (James J. Cate)
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 13:56:41 -0600

>the results might be found.

Hoskier *only* had to work through 260 mss (usually with about 10
lacunose) in 404 verses of text and still wound up with 600+ pages of
work (not to mention the first volume of the work which commented on the
findings according to mss groupings). BTW, it was 1929 when his work was
published. In light of the embarrassment of riches of having 5400+ Greek
NT mss, working with the earlier mss seems to be the only logistical
option for the time being. How can someone such as Aland who devoted an
entire life to the meticulous, laborious analysis of hundreds and
hundreds of mss be ridiculed for emphasizing the earlier ones?

Jeff Cate, Ph.D.
Assoc. Prof. of Christian Studies
California Baptist College

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From: Bart Ehrman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 15:47:29 -0500 (EST)

I should point out that Aland did not simply discard all manuscripts
that dated after the year 900 CE.  The methods used by the Institut for
determining which manuscripts are the most useful can be found in the
intro by Aland and Aland, _Text of the NT_, and in the article by Barbara
Aland and Klaus Wachtel on the "Greek Minuscule MSS of the NT" in the
volume Mike Holmes and I edited, _The NT in Contemporary Research: Essays
on the Status Quaestionis" (and in several other publications from the
Institut).

   I myself am not completely comfortable with the methods used by the
Institut (for reasons I spell out in an article called "A Case of Textual
Circularity: The Alands on the Classification of NT MSS" _Biblical_ 70
[1989] 377-88); but I think it goes much too far to say that they simply
discard late manuscripts without bothering to consider them (since in fact
they don't do this at all!). 

-- Bart D. Ehrman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill