Subject: tc-list The ultimate goal of textual criticism

From: Doug Petrovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 1999 21:57:05 -0000

Wieland Wilker posed a question that is most critical to the field that we all have come
to know and love (at least I hope so, if we take the time to read through all of the posts
on our list): "If we depart from trying to reconstruct the autographs, what is the end
result?"

Ulrich Schmid's interesting reply was that "the ultimate goal of textual scholarship is
clearing up the textual history of given texts.  The proper designation of the starting
point of a textual transmission is not "autograph," but "archetype."

Unfortunately, I must beg to differ.  The ultimate goal of textual criticism, and thus
textual scholarship, cannot simply be a proper understanding of the history of the
text.  Perhaps the words of Gunther Zuntz from his monumental work, The Text of
the Epistles (p. viii), are most fitting in pinpointing the true and actual ultimate goal:
"Readings are either right or wrong.  The plain, primary purpose of criticism is to
establish the right wording.  All further conclusions depend upon this."

Certainly acquiring an accurate knowledge of the textual transmission is a legitimate
and vital goal.  However, one must distinguish between an end and a means to an
end.  Even the establishment of the wording of the autographs, though obviously all
of us can admit to our individual and collective inability to achieve 100% accuracy
in such an endeavor, is not an end.  What is the end?  How do these components
relate to one another?  Simply, a proper understanding of textual transmission, plus
the other components of internal and external evidence as applied to variant readings,
leads to the establishment of the wording of the divinely-inspired human writer (to 
whatever level of certainty can be reached for any variant).  The proper wording of
the biblical text leads to a more informed and accurate study of the text, which leads
to a proper understanding of it, which leads to the implementation of it into one's own
life, which leads to the bold and powerful proclamation of it in the churches, schools,
hospitals, parks, beaches, and other venues around the world.

Obviously not everyone who frequents our list would agree with many of the steps that
I outlined in this process.  Certainly everyone is entitled to his opinion.  However, as
an exegetical practitioner first, and a textual critic second (and thus I shall probably 
always be), there is no way of escaping the reality or importance of these latter steps.
To downgrade the importance of the inspired text to the level of mere ancient literature
is to sell short the very reason that the divine author intended it to come into existence.

To his credit, Schmid asks a good question: "Does anybody really think that one of the
versions of Romans found in GNT, NA-27, Von Soden, or Tischendorf has a chance to
go back to the version that was sent to Rome?"  Certainly the odds would be against
anyone who ventured to labor--even for a lifetime--to accomplish such a goal.  However,
does this require that any attempt at reaching this goal is altogether impossible, and 
thus ultimately vain?  Does this mean that of necessity we must give up and settle for
a lesser ultimate goal?

Schmid goes on to say that "we should concentrate our efforts to clear up the archetype
situation of the NT books, i.e. identifying, localizing, and reconstructing collections and
subcollections, instead of taking the short-cut to the desk of Paul."  The wisdom is these
words is that we cannot short-circuit the lengthy process which will lead to the closest
rendition of the autographs (yes, autographs, as in one original manuscript for each
letter/gospel/etc. as divinely superintended through the personality of the individual author,
without the occurrence of error on the part of the human writer or his amanuensis).  We
would certainly do well to clear up the matter of properly reconstructing collections and
subcollections, if that is even possible with the scant extant attestation we have to the
history of the earliest part of the of transmission process.  That would go a long way
toward greater confidence in asserting proper readings for many variants.  However, if we
mistake the means for the end, we will have missed the trees for the forest.

Doug Petrovich
ThM in New Testament
Novosibirsk Bible Seminary

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 1999 12:10:56 -0500

>establish the right wording.  All further conclusions depend upon this."

I don't think this was what Ulrich Schmid was saying. The goal of TC is,
of course, to discover an original document. But the question here -- and
it is a *very* good question -- is, "What is original?"

In the case of the Gospels and such, this clearly is the autograph; these
books circulated independently and existed in separate copies before being
combined into a corpus. There never was an archetype of the four gospels;
different people, in making up their gospel sets, would have used *different*
individual copies.

That's not true for Paul. There were, of course, some copies of the letters
individually. But they did not achieve widespread circulation until they
were collected. Some -- the fragments found in 2 Corinthians -- were so
poorly preserved that large portions of the letters have been *lost*.

It could even be argued that the individual books are not canonical. It is
only the *collection* which became part of the canon.

Now this raises two questions:

1. Can we reconstruct a pre-canonical archetype, and
2. If we can, should we?

Different answers are possible for #2. Personally, I don't think we should;
it involves us in too much speculation. (Remember, that exact step has been
taken before -- by a fellow named Marcion.)

But the point Ulrich Schmid is making is, I think, different: Even if we
*should* reconstruct the autograph, that doesn't mean we can. Personally,
I think he's right. We cannot reconstruct the autograph; the materials are
not in our possession. We can only reconstruct the archetype -- the first
*disseminated* copy, from which all copies descend. This will almost certainly
contain errors. (Look at all the primitive errors Westcott & Hort thought
they had found.) But there is nothing you can do about them, except emend
the text -- and have the rest of the scholarly community harass you about
it. :-) 

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

                        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)

---

From: James Trimm <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 Sep 1999 12:51:11 -0500

The ulitmate goal of TC is to achieve a "best text."
James Trimm
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---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 1999 13:25:43 -0500

>The ulitmate goal of TC is to achieve a "best text."

This is easy to say, but there is a lot more to it.

To avoid stepping on anyone's feet, I'll take a non-Biblical
example. Consider _Piers Plowman_. It exists in three
recensions, of different length and slightly uncertain
relationship: A, B, and C. A and B are almost certainly
by the same guy; C possibly might not be.

Which do you reconstruct? A, the earliest? B, considered
the most representative of the author's thought? Or C, the
last? *All* exist in manuscript.

The situation for the NT is not as extreme, but the problem is
real.

BTW -- the answer is, most texts of _Piers Plowman_ you see
in the bookstores represent the "B" text. 

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

---

From: Jack Kilmon <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 Sep 1999 14:40:09 -0500

"Robert B. Waltz" wrote:
> We can only reconstruct the archetype -- the first

Is the first "desseminated copy" a single book?  Lets look at this "gap"
between AMk and, let's say P45.  The Markan author writes the book...or
it may even be a private correspondence to someone...in 68 CE.  It goes
to its destination and is read to a community of mainly illiterate
believers.  Who makes the first copies?  The author or the recipient?

Does the recipient have a whole gaggle of copies made? or just two or
three?  How many times has AMk been copied before the beginning of the
second century when it appears to have been collected along with the
other
gospels and Pauline letters to form the NT.

I think for at least 40 years, AMk was copied only sporadically with
some copies of copies.  It's in the 2nd and 3rd centuries that copies
of the NT become demanded and scribal groups form to meet the need.
Now we have an assembly line as a lector reads aloud and 20 scribes
at one time write what they hear.

Is P45 an example of an archetypic copy?

Jack
-- 
______________________________________________

taybutheh d'maran yeshua masheecha am kulkon

Jack Kilmon
[email-masked]

http://www.historian.net

---

From: [email-masked] (U.B.Schmid)
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 1999 22:02:41 +0200

Doug Petrovich wrote:

[...]
> establish the right wording.  All further conclusions depend upon this."

Before we start to fight straw-men I would like to assure you that "clearing up 
the textual transmission of given texts" means by implication to get a clearer 
picture of primary and secondary readings. You can't seperate the one from the 
other. Yet, the more I learn about the discipline, the more I think we 
underestimate the historical dimension of our task. In my view we don't take 
seriously the capitalized dictum of Hort: ALL TRUSTWORTHY RESTORATION OF 
CORRUPTED TEXTS IS FOUNDED ON THE STUDY OF THEIR HISTORY - to call in another 
big-shot -, if we are going for "either right or wrong" without asking the 
question: where does the "right" reading lead us to? In my view this is the 
proper question to address in order to fully account for the historical 
dimension of textual scholarship.  

[...]
> rendition of the autographs 

Indeed. This is what I meant to say. I simply want to do justice to this lengthy 
process by being as open-minded as possible to not letting obstruct short-cut 
"autograph" appeals the quest for the *archetype* of the textual transmission.
------------------------------------------
Dr. Ulrich Schmid
[email-masked]

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 1999 15:31:13 -0500

>Is P45 an example of an archetypic copy?

Let's hope not, given that Colwell showed that P45 was rewritten. :-)

First off, let's please distinguish between gospels and Paul. The gospels
were clearly intended for publication; even if only one or two copies
were made of AMk, the hope was still that it would be disseminated.

And the Gospels *did* achieve independent circulation. P66 contained
only John. P75 contained only Luke and John. It is likely that many of
the other gospel papyri contained only one gospel.

In Paul, the situation is completely different. The documents were
for public use, yes, but had a particular destination. They weren't
intended for actual *publication.* It wasn't until they were collected
that an actual public edition seems to have been contemplated. To
the best of my knowledge, there is only *one* Pauline manuscript which
can be shown to have contained only a single book of the Pauline
corpus: P13. And that's a double special case, because P13 is a
scroll and Hebrews was a disputed book. There is no evidence that,
say, Galatians was ever published separately. (Note the term
*published.*)

Thus every manuscript of the gospels presumably goes back to a
single stopping point. (It may not be the autograph, because it
could, say, be taken from a scribe's fair copy of Mark's autograph.
But it is a stopping point consisting of Mark only.)

In Paul, in all likelihood, there is no such "single stopping point"
for each book. The common starting point is *not* the autograph of
Romans and the autograph of 1 Corinthians and the autograph of
2 Corinthians (the last of which never even actually existed). It
is the manuscript in which they were all assembled. Or, at least,
this is a reasonable assumption.

I don't know how we can "prove" this textually. But there is always
that first disseminated document. Which may or may not be the
autograph. And if it is *not* the autograph, we have no way to
move beyond it except by emendation.

Functionally, it's like (say) Beowulf. There is *one* copy.
All we can do is reconstruct that copy as best we can, and then
decide whether to emend from there. 

I get the feeling this bothers people. It shouldn't. If you think
of it from a church standpoint, you're reconstructing the work
the church canonized. It didn't canonize 2 Corinthians 8; it
canonized *Paul*. And if you look at it from a secular standpoint,
or when examining a secular book, well, you're reconstructing
an actual edition.

And the earliest known edition, be it added. If it isn't the
autograph, it's as close as you can get.

This isn't new, either. Remember, Lachmann set out to reconstruct
the fourth century text, not the original text.... 

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

---

From: "Gregory J. Woodhouse" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 1999 14:14:53 -0700 (PDT)

It seems to me that the basic issue is that textual criticism can only
answer relative questions (reading A is to be preferred to reading B), but
questions about the nature of autographs or archetypes are at least framed
in absolute terms (reading X is the best/original/most ancient reading).
This takes us back to the question of whether we would be able to
recognize an autograph if we had it. It seems to me that, at best, we
would be able to say it is the best version of the text available to us,
but that is all. Of course, there is the criterion of stability: to what
extent does further research additional manuscript finds, etc. lead us to
revise a give reading? Thus, I can imagine a kind of a convergence
criterion, but there is no a priori reason to suspect that readings will
converge to a common archetype in anything like a gradual fashion, so we
are left with relative weightings, after all.

---
Gregory Woodhouse
[email-masked]    /    http://www.wnetc.com/home.html
"A faith which destroys reason destroys itself and the humanity of man."
--Paul Tillich

---

From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 1999 15:59:45 -0700

> the other gospel papyri contained only one gospel.

Since both are codices and somewhat fragmentary, I'm not sure we 
can say with absolute confidence that these gospels are all the 
actual codices ever contained.  True, it is possible that some 
manuscripts only contained one or two gospels; the question then 
becomes "why?"

> say, Galatians was ever published separately. (Note the term

I don't see how this has anything to do with the question.  What 
you're actually saying is that the paulines in fact did have 
autographs.  Also, the last part of Colossians indicates that Paul 
intended his letters to be circulated at least somewhat, which 
sounds an awful lot like "publication" of a sort to me.  If the 
commentaries are correct that Ephesians was a cyclical letter, 
surely Paul would have assumed the churches to whom it was 
circulated would have made copies and likely disseminated them.  
That also sounds a lot like publication.  It would appear then, that 
the matter is not nearly as cut-and-dried as Bob wants to make it.

> this is a reasonable assumption.

How is it reasonable?  The fact that the letters were ultimately 
assembled has nothing to do with the question of autographs, at 
least not as far as I can see.  The goal of TC is still to discover 
exactly what was in those autographs, so I'm not sure I see the 
point here.

> move beyond it except by emendation.

But there may be a difference between a first disseminated 
document and an autograph.  Suppose Paul sent 1 Corinthians to 
its recipients with the goal of its ultimately being read by other 
people and churches as well.  Someone in that church takes it and 
makes a copy to send to the Christians in the next town, but to 
save space or whatever he uses nomina sacra where Paul had 
spelled things out.  Is this the first disseminated document, or is 
the letter as it came from Paul?  I would argue for the latter, and 
include the former in the textual history of the letter.  I don't see 
how we can look at it any other way.

> or when examining a secular book, well, you're reconstructing

Again, I don't see the point.  The church canonized a certain 
corpus of letters it determined to be from Paul, but that has little or 
nothing to do with the quest for the autographs as he originally sent 
them out.  (Incidentally, the form-critical stuff about 2 Corinthians is 
open to fierce and heated debate, but it's secondary and I won't 
pursue it.)  Reconstructing an edition is well and good if that's what 
you want to do, but the goal of TC is still supposed to be the text of 
the autograph as it came from the author's hand.

> autograph, it's as close as you can get.

How do you know?  If the earliest known edition is what was 
canonized in the fourth century and we have some copies that are 
earlier than that, then it would seem that we have a fairly good 
chance, at least in places, of getting at least 2 centuries closer to 
the autograph than the earliest known edition.  I really don't see the 
logic here.

> the fourth century text, not the original text.... 

That was Lachmann's problem, not mine.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"Ich veranlassenarbeitenworken mein Mojo."

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Sep 1999 19:02:29 -0500

On 9/5/99, Dave Washburn wrote:

>actual codices ever contained.

Actually, we can in some instances. If a manuscript is a single-quire
codex, we know pretty well how long it is. That's how we calculate,
e.g., that P46 could not have contained the Pastoral Epistles.

Now that calculation may be off, since the scribe could have
mis-estimated slightly the number of sheets needed to transcribe
a copy of Paul. But a scribe could hardly mis-estimate so badly
as to want papyrus for four gospels, but only pull the number
of sheets for one gospel. :-)

And at least some of the gospel papyri are single-quire codices.
(I'd have to look up which ones, but there are some.) So they
can only have contained so many gospels.

>True, it is possible that some 

Presumably the cost of writing. But of course we don't know.

But it is also noteworthy that there are lots of papyri of John
and almost none, save P45, of Mark. This is secondary evidence
that the papyri were mostly one-or two-gospel editions. And it
hints at the reason: John was treasured more than Mark (the
situation is less clear for Matthew and Luke, which are
well-enough represented that there may have been as many
copies as there were of John).

>the matter is not nearly as cut-and-dried as Bob wants to make it.

You're right that it wasn't cut and dried. But I would maintain
that there is a fundamental difference between the Paulines and
the Gospels. The Paulines were, without exception, addressed to
a particular situation. The gospels were intended for public
education.

Now I'm sure neither Paul nor the gospel writers intended their
works for canonization. But they still had different purposes,
and the purposes affected their history.

The case of Ephesians, it seems to me, is not relevant. If it
is indeed to be part of a publication, then it's part of a publication;
fine; that's the first step in the process. But then it's
not by Paul. :-)

>exactly what was in those autographs, so I'm not sure I see the 

Create a stemma. I draw one below (for illustration purposes only,
I hasten to add. But the comments which follow apply for *any*
stemma).

       A
       |
       B
       |
       C
       |
-------------
|   |   |   |
D   E   F   G

Assume, for the sake of the argument, that all extant copies are derived
from D, E, F, G (and any number of sisters you care to name). Assume, of
course, that A, B, and C are destroyed. In that case, the earliest
manuscript you can access *directly* is C, the parent of the four
sisters. The process from C to B to A is entirely hypothetical. You
can only proceed from C, the archetype of all surviving manuscripts,
to A *by means of emendation*. You cannot, in fact, prove whether A
and C are distinct! The tree *stops at C*.

This is a simple fact of criticism; there isn't a thing we can do
about it.

This means that, *if* the equivalent of C is an edition, such as
a collected edition of Paul, then all we can reconstruct is that
edition. We may wish to go beyond it, but we *cannot*.

Now it is, of course, possible to question whether, in the case
of Paul, the original Pauline edition is "C," or if there is access
to the individual letters before this. I do not believe this
question can be answered. But since it cannot be answered, we
must allow the possibility it is so. And, in fact, I think it
more likely than not.

[ ... ]

>them out.

That's exactly the point! The church canonized what it had (a collection
of letters). It did not canonize the autographs, which it did not
have.

It should also be noted (just to save time down below) that canonization
was not a sudden process; canonicity *evolved*. You refer to the
"earliest know edition... canonized in the fourth century." This is
*not* what I was referring to. By the fourth century, of course,
everyone agreed on the canon. But the collected edition of Paul
was probably in existence by 100 C.E., and all of the books save
Hebrews and perhaps the Pastorals were canonized by 150 C.E. at
the latest.

This is all incredibly obvious to me. Obviously I'm not explaining
it well. Wish I knew what to say.... 

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked] (U.B.Schmid)
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 1999 16:12:18 +0200

[...]
> exactly what was in those autographs, so I'm not sure I see the 

The fact that the Pauline letters were "ultimately assembled" simply is 
no quantite negligeable, for it strongly pre-determines the way in which we are 
able to approach the question of autographs. It may even irreversebly obscure 
the reconstruction of the autograph(s) of, e.g., the Corinthian correspondence. 
Suppose Paul not only sent the individual letters, of which at least one letter 
is missing among the extant two letters to the Corinthians, but he also issued 
the first collection of his letters consisting of, e.g., Gal 1.2. Cor Rom. In 
such a scenario Paul were not only the writer of the individual letters but also 
the editor of the first collection. He could have deliberately chosen not to 
include all of the Corinthian letters or, more likely, purposly redacted the 
correspondence into two larger letters. In any case, we would be confronted with 
two possible autographs - those of the actual correspondence and the autograph 
of the collection. It is conceivable that we might be able to reconstruct the 
latter but not the former. 
Don't think it would be unlikely that Paul himself edited the first collection 
of (some of) his letters. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing 
towards that assumption (cf. the work of David Trobisch) 

[Bob Waltz]
> > move beyond it except by emendation.

[Dave Washburn]
> spelled things out. 

Put into historical perspective your scenario is highly unlikely. The nomina 
sacra system has hardly any chance to go back to a single-NT-book-copy. Quite to 
the contrary, it is, next to the codex format, an editorial feature that was 
most likely developed, let alone consistently applied, on the level of 
collections.   

[Bob Waltz]
> > the fourth century text, not the original text.... 

[Dave Washburn]
> That was Lachmann's problem, not mine.

I strongly recommend you read Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff's *Geschichte 
der Philologie*, in: _Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft_ (edd. A Gercke, 
E. Norden), vol. 1, 3rd ed. (Berlin 1927), pp. 58-59 on Lachmann. Wilamowitz has 
some harsh words about Lachmann, accusing him of lack of historical foundation 
for his judgments (on the Ilias in this case). 
It really is ironic, Lachmann who was bold enough to utter historically 
problematic judgments nevertheless was reluctant enough to go beyond 
reconstructing the NT text of the fourth century. Guess, why. Well, in his days 
no manuscripts from earlier times have been available. Yet, in this case 
Wilamowitz is puzzled that Lachmann didn't make use of the countless earlier 
church father citations. Anyhow, even including all the citations and the papyri 
from around 200 onwards, nowadays available, we only get back to the end of the 
second century for substantial parts of the NT (Gospels, Acts, and Paul). This 
is, no doubt, a tremendous achievement. But it's still more than a hundred years 
from the autographs of the letters of Paul. Today, Lachmann may have ventured to 
reconstruct the NT text of around 200 CE. But, as self-entitled textual scholars 
of the Christian Bible, we know of course that those trained philologists are 
crazy, especially the dead ones.

---

From: TOMMY MARKANZIA REKLAM HB <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 1999 21:07:30 +0000

I´ve been following this discussion and would like to throw in a few
points from my point of view (the amateur´s).

U.B.Schmid wrote:

> Today, Lachmann may have ventured to

If we only applied external criteria in TC I think we would have to
agree with the cautious Lachmann (and Schmid?) but do we not also use
*internal criteria* where we consider e.g. an author´s style, grammar,
vocabulary, theology, rethorical patterns etc. If we apply this method
we ask questions like "what did the author likely write" (in the
original autograph?). Bob Waltz gives us a nice illustration (A-B-C...)
and I think I have understood what he was trying to convey, but it seems
to me that the method we use in TC is in itself an attempt to reach
beyond C even if we do not have access to A and B. 

Tommy Wasserman
Swedish student

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 1999 14:57:33 -0500

>beyond C even if we do not have access to A and B. 

In secular textual criticism, this is of course true. Scholars are
always emending the text. The number of proposed emendations to a
work like _Beowulf_ may number in the thousands.

However, there is a general distaste in New Testament circles for
emendation. (There are exceptions; Michael Holmes, e.g., write
of the need for emendation in the recent collection edited by
Ehrman and Holmes). In theory, I even agree with this. The problem
is deciding *where* to emend.

In general, emendation is used to correct "obvious" errors. There
are few such obvious errors in the New Testament text. Chances are
that any obvious emendations have already been proposed -- by the
scribes who produced our current manuscripts!

I guess the point is this: Many, many scholars have attempted to
move back past the most recent common ancestor. They have done this
by means of emendation. But such emendations have, almost universally,
been rejected. The UBS text, for instance, includes only one
conjectural reading (and *it* has some slight Latin support). And even
that has been condemned.

I don't claim to know the answer. I just think we need to be
cautious in what we set out to do....

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

---

From: Jack Kilmon <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Sep 1999 15:08:14 -0500

> beyond C even if we do not have access to A and B.

There is one immutable fact.  TC can only work with the the evidence it
has, in this case the available surviving texts.  The earliest texts
that
are significant enough to determine the best readings of the previous
generation makes 200 CE the "papyrus curtain" and unless, or until, 
a 2nd century Christian library is discovered, to go beyond the
papyrus curtain requires speculations too frought with guesswork to
be comfortable to TC as a science...or an art.  The autograph cannot
be a goal of TC and I am not sure that "archetype" is a valid term.
The "earliest best reading" is all we can hope for on the evidence
we have.

Jack

Jack Kilmon
[email-masked]

http://www.historian.net

---

From: TOMMY MARKANZIA REKLAM HB <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 1999 16:50:19 +0000

> The "earliest best reading" is all we can hope for on the evidence

Yes Jack, I realize that we choose among the readings of the surviving
manuscripts (emendations thus unusual in NT-TC).

But in this discussion I´ve heard the argument that: "we wouldn´t
recognize an autograph if we saw one", and I suppose this is too big a
generalization, even in regard to the Pauline corpus.  

Now if an autograph of a Pauline letter/epistle turned up, wouldn´t we
recognize its provenance in regard to both external and internal
factors, namely its *age*, inherent concistency in composition,
theology, style etc, (Paul can be said to have created a new literary
genre with his writing!). 

I understand that we would face a difficulty if e.g. Paul himself or a
later person edited together material from single letters and later
"published" an official collection (what then would be the autograph),
but I´m not yet convinced that this was case. I think the churches Paul
wrote to, valued his letters very highly, and read them in their
services and that Paul himself expected them to be shared with other
neighbouring churches, from the start (Col 4:16). Just a thought:
Couldn´t the Corinthian church that once had possession of the very
autographs, serve as safeguarding the Pauline "Corinthian" tradition as
time went on? 

However, I agree with -Bob was it?- that it was Paul that was canonized
by the church, not a single Pauline letter and even if a letter like 2
Cor should be a "patchwork" of Pauline material (perhaps edited by Paul
himself?), *I* regard it as apostolic and part of the Holy Scripture,
recognized as such by the church. 

Tommy Wasserman
Swedish student

---

From: Jack Kilmon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 1999 11:08:40 -0500

> generalization, even in regard to the Pauline corpus.

Using the Corinthian correspondence as an example, what would we
look for to suggest a text, if newly discovered, could be an "autograph?"
When the Pauline corpus was collected (around the turn of the 2nd century?),
I am assuming that Church scribes (in Ephesus?) wrote to the various churches

asking for copies of the letters they had in their possession.  Internal
evidence
suggests that three of the four Pauline epistles to the Corinthians had
already
deteriorated to fragments and were composited.  I expect it would be unlikely

that the Presbyter of one of these correspondence churches would send
the collectors their precious originals, hence the text, or fragments of our
hypothetical autograph would be expected to be found in Corinth and
palaeographically assigned to the mid 1st century.

> genre with his writing!).

Certainly if we found a copy of Romans in Rome, squirreled away in
a catacomb, and in a first century hand, everyone would be excited
about the possibility that it was the autograph...but we could never
be sure.  Of course, as long as we are dreaming the ultimate TC dream,
a small library of additional texts in the same provenance would be
telling.  Hey! It's nice to dream, isn't it?

> autographs, serve as safeguarding the Pauline "Corinthian" tradition as

As mentioned above, I think this is exactly what happened but, unfortunately,

papyri do not hold up well over time in the northern Mediterranean climes.

A more realistic hope would be for 1st generation copies as P52 may
be...but I would expect these also to be very rare and only fragments.

Setting aside the "TC-dream" of a DSS-like discovery of Christian
documents, our "papyrus curtain" is still 150 years away from the
autographs.

> recognized as such by the church.

I guess that brings up a point, probably outside of the topic of TC, as
to whether a "patchwork" of 3 epistles into one can be considered
"canon."  In a very real sense, Paul did not write 2 Cor as a whole.

Jack

--
Great savings on high speed
wireless or hardwire T-1s,
DS-3, Web design and hosting.

Jack Kilmon
Account Executive
IJNT
713-462-4222

http://www.ijnt.net

---

From: TOMMY MARKANZIA REKLAM HB <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Sep 1999 22:44:19 +0000

Regarding the discussed composition of 2 Cor here is an interesting
quotation from S.J. Hafemann´s article "Corinthians, Letters to the" in
Dictionary of Paul and His Letters. IVP 1993, p. 177, regarding 2
Corinthians:

"The growing consensus is that chapters 1-9 are in fact a unified
composition written after Paul´s encounter with Titus (cf. 2 Cor
7:5-13). Chapters 10-13 are then taken as a subsequent work which was
written after a fresh outbreak of trouble in Corinth and appended to the
previous section at some time early on in the history of these
traditions, since there is no text-critical evidence that chapters 10-13
ever circulated independently of chapters 1-9 (see, e.g., the
commentaries by Martin and Furnish)."

The commentaries refered to is R.P. Martin, 2 Corinthians (WBC 40; Waco;
Word, 1986); V.P. Furnish, II Corinthians (AB 32; Garden City, NY:
Doubleday 1984).

Tommy Wasserman
student of theology at
Örebro Missionsskola in Örebro, Sweden

---

From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 13:18:35 -0700

> e.g., that P46 could not have contained the Pastoral Epistles.

How about multiple-quire codices?  And how can we tell?

> of sheets for one gospel. :-)

Agreed, but could it be that he pulled the number of sheets for one 
gospel in each quire and built a codex of four (or more) quires?

> can only have contained so many gospels.

Again, I do wonder how we can tell.

> copies as there were of John).

Or it could just be an accident of preservation.

> a particular situation. The gospels were intended for public

A particular situation or audience, yes.  But isn't the same true of 
the gospels?  Weren't they intended for particular types of 
audiences, e.g. Matthew geared toward Jewish readers etc.?

> and the purposes affected their history.

I have to disagree.  I think Paul had a fair idea that his letters would 
be passed around, published if you will, and we know that by the 
time 2 Peter was written they were dubbed "scriptures."  But Paul 
often mentions his authority as an apostle, speaks of things that 
he has decreed to be done "in all the churches" and similar 
phrases, so I find it hard to accept that he didn't intend his letters 
for a wider audience or as ways for various churches to establish 
what was or wasn't appropriate for their faith and practice.

> fine; that's the first step in the process. But then it's

That's a flying leap, or at least it seems so to me.  At the very least 
it's circular reasoning.  Why shouldn't it be by Paul if it was 
intended for publication as a cyclical letter to a region of churches? 
Ditto for Galatians which is addressed to several churches.  You're 
setting up a false test here: if it was intended to be published, it 
can't be by Paul.  Why?  Because Paul's letters weren't intended 
for publication.  But there's no really solid basis for either assertion.

> I hasten to add. But the comments which follow apply for *any*

This is an extremely despairing attitude, and I can't accept it.  Of 
course we don't have A or B, but that doesn't mean we can't use 
other means, such as the internal evidence somebody already 
mentioned (and no, Bob, "internal evidence" does NOT mean 
resorting to emendation, as you well know!) and comparison of the 
stemmas etc. and all the rest of the work that is normally done in 
TC.  The methods at our disposal give us at least a 98% chance of 
determining the reading of A with a very high degree of probability.  
If you're looking for absolute certainty, then once again I think 
you're setting up an impossible criterion for TC.  But absolute 
certainty isn't necessary if we can get probability that high.

> edition. We may wish to go beyond it, but we *cannot*.

Not so.  If this is true, then why bother?  TC becomes nothing but 
academic exercise, and life is too short for that.

> must allow the possibility it is so. And, in fact, I think it

Too many pronouns.  What is more likely than not?

> of letters). It did not canonize the autographs, which it did not

But my point is that canonization has nothing to do with the quest 
in TC to determine the readings of the autographs.

[snip]
Dave Washburn

---

From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 13:24:36 -0700

Ulrich wrote:
> the editor of the first collection. 

Considering what we know of the historical details of Paul's life, I 
find this unlikely unless he had an amanuensis make two copies of 
each letter and kept one for himself, later to be published.  But I 
see no evidence of that, either.

He could have deliberately chosen not to 
> towards that assumption (cf. the work of David Trobisch) 

You'll excuse me if I find said evidence lacking.

> most likely developed, let alone consistently applied, on the level of 

I was using the nomina sacra as an example, Ulrich.  Nothing 
more.  My point is that the first disseminated copy might have had 
such alterations.

> crazy, especially the dead ones.    

I don't recall saying such a thing.  My point was that Lachmann 
had his view and I have mine.  As you point out, we have moved 
beyond the manuscript evidence that he had.  That doesn't mean 
he was crazy, it just means we can get much further back than he 
felt he could.  Westcott and Hort did the same thing, and were of 
the opinion that they could get back to the autographs even before 
the papyri came to light.  Lachmann had an opinion, but that's all it 
was.  That's all I said.

Dave Washburn

---

From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 13:31:54 -0700

> look for to suggest a text, if newly discovered, could be an "autograph?"

Throughout this and other threads we've seen this assertion about 
*finding* an autograph.  But it strikes me as a bit of a smokescreen 
when it comes to the goal of TC.  Sure, maybe we couldn't know 
for sure if a newly-discovered ms was an autograph, but so what?  
Comparison of documents, internal evidence and all the rest enable 
us to determine the readings of the autographs with a great degree 
of certainty.  Jack mentioned that the "papyrus curtain" is some 
150 years after the autograph, as if that's a long time.  It's not.  In 
comparison with many, many other works, it's mighty close.  I tend 
to think we have every reason to be hopeful that we can recover the 
original text of the various parts of the NT; we certainly have 
enough material to work from.

Dave Washburn

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 17:50:27 -0500

Bits and pieces of a reply....

On 9/9/99, Dave Washburn wrote:

[ ... ]

>How about multiple-quire codices?  And how can we tell?

Not sure what the question is. In the case of a multi-quire codex,
of course, we can't tell what the original may have contained. But
*if* a codex is single-quire, we can tell how long it was, and
therefore how much it could have contained, even if we have only
a single leaf (cf. P5).

>gospel in each quire and built a codex of four (or more) quires?

Conceivable, but strange. It means that the scribe has to guess
how long *each gospel* will be. The likely result is either blank
leaves or extra short quires or both. Lousy way to run a scriptorium.

Also, if the books are in separate quires, you can't prove one
way or the other whether they were intended to go together. They
could have been assembled later. The one thing you know is that
they weren't designed to be bound together.

>Again, I do wonder how we can tell.

What is the question? How we tell if they're single-quire codices?
You look at the fold. Either there is one quire or there are multiple
quires.

>Or it could just be an accident of preservation.

This cannot be disproved, of course. However, looking at the list at the
back of the Aland introduction shows:

22 papyri of John
18 papyri of Matthew
 8 papyri of Luke
 3 papyri of Mark (one of them, of course, being P45)

(That's not absolutely current, but the ratio probably hasn't changed
much.)

A ratio of better than 7:1 in favour of John over Mark is pretty
extreme. Mark takes 59 pages in NA27; John is 73 pages. Therefore
the expected ratio, under the hypothesis that all codices are actually
four-gospel manuscripts, is 1.23. Your deviation from the expected
magnitude is a factor of six! (5.9, to be precise). I don't buy
it.

[ ... ]

>for publication.  But there's no really solid basis for either assertion.

The part you're leaving out is that Ephesians is so clearly a hack
of Colossians. If that weren't the case, then I'd concede the
possibility of a leap. But Ephesians, if by Paul, *has to* have been
written at the same time as Colossians. So Paul is publishing a
collection. Why, then, not send *that* to the Colossians?

I'll admit this is a form-critical point -- but so is claiming
Ephesians as a cover letter. As far as the church was concerned,
it was simply a Pauline letter. The whole point should be left
behind.

[ ... ]

>This is an extremely despairing attitude, and I can't accept it.

What's despairing about it? I'm attempting to reconstruct an
actual document. I'd rather have a good reconstruction of
the archetype than a bad reconstruction of a hypothetical
autograph. :-)

The fact that we want something doesn't make it possible.
Otherwise, I'd be seeking to textually reconstruct world
peace. :-)

>Of 
>resorting to emendation, as you well know!)

And as you ought to know, internal evidence can only work with
extant readings.

Let's take a hypothetical case, say from Ephesians. Suppose,
for the sake of the argument, that Ephesians 1:1 was actually
addressed to (say) Smyrna. Then A would have read "to the saints
in Smyrna."

Now B comes along and either deletes that phrase or changes it to
"Ephesians."

C copies that, and so on down the line.

The reading of A is gone. It does not exist in *any* extant copy.
None. Therefore internal evidence cannot operate on it. It's not
an option. The only way to get it back is emendation.

I repeat my claim: Since *all* extant readings are derived from
C, any reading found in A or B but not in C can only be recovered
by emendation.

[ ... ]

>academic exercise, and life is too short for that.

In other words, if you can't have *the* original Bible, you don't
want anything? By analogy, if a book contains a single typographical
error, it's worthless.

In practice, what you are doing is the same as what I am doing.
I simply label it "the earliest attainable text," while you want
it to be the autograph. I can't see any shame in stopping with
what I can reliably reconstruct.

>Too many pronouns.  What is more likely than not?

Oops. I think it more likely than not that the archetype of the
surviving Pauline canon (or, more correctly, of the nine Pauline
letters to churches; Hebrews and the Pastorals are another issue)
is an anthology of Pauline letters.

>in TC to determine the readings of the autographs.

Even when the autograph is *not* something accepted by the church?
Suppose you could, by some means, reconstruct one of the letters
which contributed to 2 Corinthians? Or the Ending of Mark? Or
the letter to the Laodiceans? What do you do then?

It seems to me that that way lies madness. All of these are interesting,
but the "true" ending of Mark (if there is one) is not something the
church ever canonized. Are you going to canonize it? If you can canonize
that, what is to stop you from canonizing anything else, from
"3 Corinthians" to the Diatessaron to "Chariots of the Gods"?

The church accepted 2 Corinthians in its present form, composite though
it apparently is. It accepted Mark in (some form or other). :-)
Is it not worth accepting the document the church meant to canonize,
and reconstructing that? 

Bob Waltz
[email-masked]

"The one thing we learn from history --
   is that no one ever learns from history."

---

From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 17:34:23 -0700

Bits and pieces of a reply to a reply...
> therefore how much it could have contained, even if we have only

I wonder if we're operating on different definitions of "quire"...

> leaves or extra short quires or both. Lousy way to run a scriptorium.

Or overlap of a gospel from one quire to another...

> they weren't designed to be bound together.

And we know this how?

> You look at the fold. Either there is one quire or there are multiple

Expand on this, please.  The definition I know of "quire" is a set of 
folded sheets that are put together inside one another (the 
"standard" definition that I've seen is 24 sheets).  I get the feeling 
you're describing a single sheet of vellum/papyrus/whatever...

> magnitude is a factor of six! (5.9, to be precise). I don't buy

The ratio of John to Mark, sure.  But Matthew isn't far behind.  
Here's an idea: we know from some mss such as D that at least 
some copies had the gospels in the order Matthew, John, Mark, 
Luke (don't hold me to the order of the last 2, I'm going from 
spontaneous memory).  It could be that the back pages started 
falling off first, accounting for the lesser preservation of Mark.  I'm 
not saying that's what happened, but it shows that there are 
several scenarios in which these stats could easily be due to an 
accident of preservation.  OTOH, I don't have a problem with the 
idea that John was the most popular gospel.

> of Colossians. 

"Clearly"?  I've seen suggestions of just the opposite.  That's the 
joy of form criticism: it can produce just about any result one wants.

If that weren't the case, then I'd concede the
> written at the same time as Colossians. 

They're both considered prison epistles, so I don't see why this is 
so significant unless by "same time" you mean "within a day or 
two of each other."  That's not necessarily the case, nor does it 
need to be.

So Paul is publishing a
> collection. Why, then, not send *that* to the Colossians?

Whoa, another leap.  A collection?  Not necessarily.  A number of 
things on his mind that he feels like telling to two different 
churches.  You don't give Paul enough credit, and rely far too 
heavily on form criticism.

> Ephesians as a cover letter. 

Who said anything about a cover letter?  You pulled that out of the 
air, Bob.  I never said, to my knowledge nobody did, that it was a 
cover letter.  The common suggestion, which may or may not be 
accurate, is that it was a cyclical letter to several churches around 
the region of Ephesus.  How does one jump from that to a "cover 
letter"?

As far as the church was concerned,
> it was simply a Pauline letter. The whole point should be left

And I agree it's a Pauline letter.  Whether it was cyclical or not, 
whether the words "in Ephesus" are original or not, and all the rest. 
The point is, if in fact it was a cyclical letter, then Paul wrote it with 
the intention of having it circulated, or published, at least in a 
limited sense.  You said a while back that he never intended for 
them to be published.  I'm saying that Ephesians, as well as the 
last chapter of Colossians and the fact that Galatians is addressed 
to more than one church, indicate that this is not correct.

> the archetype than a bad reconstruction of a hypothetical

Part of the despair is the idea that only one copy was made of A.  
Another part is the assumption that the original readings of A didn't 
survive.  I don't think either point is legitimate.

> And as you ought to know, internal evidence can only work with

Yep.  And most reputable text critics that I know of maintain that 
virtually all, if not indeed all, of the original readings are present in 
the extant readings.  I agree.

> an option. The only way to get it back is emendation.

But this is only accurate if B is the only copy ever made of A.  I 
really doubt that's the case.  A letter from Paul himself would have 
been quite a prize, and you can bet that it was copied many times, 
not just one.  This would be particularly true of a multiple-
addressee letter like Galatians; do we really suppose that a 
messenger took the letter to church X and read it to them, then 
moved on to church Y without giving X a chance to copy it?  "I don't 
think so, Tim."  The stemma above assumes ONLY one copy of A. 
Not only unlikely, but I find it frankly inconceivable.

> C, any reading found in A or B but not in C can only be recovered

Again, this claim only holds if B was the only copy ever made of A. 
If B' made another copy, the stemma just gained another huge leg, 
unless you assum that B, B', B'' and everybody else made the very 
same copying error at various and sundry times in the lifetime of A. 
Again, I just don't think it holds water.

> want anything? By analogy, if a book contains a single typographical

The analogy breaks down at once, of course, unless one views the 
NT as just another book (which I don't).  I also didn't say that I 
"don't want anything" if I can't have the original, I said that if the 
original is as unrecoverable as you say, for me there's no point.  I'll 
use my best guess and forget TC.  But I don't think it is 
unrecoverable, so I'll keep looking.

> what I can reliably reconstruct.

And just how reliable is that?  And how do you know?  If we really 
want to push this to its logical conclusion, the first one we could 
"reliably" reconstruct, because copies would have been consistent 
and not subject to copyists' errors, is Gutenberg's Latin version.  
Before printing we have a plethora of variants (after printing too, but 
considerably less and much easier to recreate a stemma from a 
single press), so we can't really construct anything truly reliable 
from, say, the time of Jerome.  It all depends on one's definition of 
"reliable."

> is an anthology of Pauline letters.

Do you mean you think Paul himself created such an anthology?  
I'm still not clear.

> Even when the autograph is *not* something accepted by the church?

This is so hypothetical as to be pointless to continue discussing.

> the letter to the Laodiceans? What do you do then?

We've gotten out of the realm of TC here, so I'm not going to bother.

> "3 Corinthians" to the Diatessaron to "Chariots of the Gods"?

I don't think the true ending of Mark has survived.  I don't know why 
that should be, but that's where I end up.  However, canonization is 
a very separate issue from TC.  If such an ending were to be found 
and verified (God only knows how) by TC, then the question of 
canonization would come up.  But it would be a separate issue.

> Is it not worth accepting the document the church meant to canonize,

I don't buy the patchwork view of 2 Corinthians, as you may have 
gathered by now, and from what I read in the journals and the book 
reviews the idea is losing steam.  IMO form criticism has been 
weighed in the balances and found lacking, and frankly should have 
no overlap at all with TC.  The goal of TC should be to reconstruct 
as accurately as possible the original (autograph, if you will) form of 
a document, be it a NT letter, the Iliad or the Denver phone book 
from 1982.  You think the earliest form of the NT we can 
reconstruct with any confidence is that which was canonized 
(when?  At which point in the canonization process do you place 
this earliest recoverable form?); I disagree, I have no reason not to 
think that with the evidence we have, internal and external, we can 
do better than that and recover virtually all of the original NT.  So be 
it.  You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Dave Washburn

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 21:48:54 -0500

Some yet smaller fleas....

(If that doesn't mean anything, don't ask....)

[ ... ]

>From what's said below, we are. You're operating, it seems, based
on a more or less modern definition.

A quire is *any* number of leaves folded over. Now most uncials
used a standard quire of (as I recall) four sheets, or sixteen pages.
This means that K/018, for instance, of 288 pages (according to
KL1), would have 18 quires.

A large enough manuscript -- such as a full Bible -- had to consist
of multiple quires. But for smaller segments, such as a single
gospel, or even the larger epistles of Paul as found in P46, it
was possible to create a single-quire codex -- dozens of sheets folded
one over the other. The result was rather ugly, and it meant that
you had to guess exactly how many leaves you needed, but it could
be done.

P46 is a single-quire codex, originally of 104 leaves (we know this
because 52/53 is the middle). This means that, even though we're missing
the first few pages, we know exactly how many pages P46 was originally
intended to contain. From this, we can calculate, e.g., that it did
not have room for the Pastoral Epistles. (If it contained the Pastorals,
they would have had to be in an appendix.)

There are other single-quire codices, though the only ones I am *certain*
of off the top of my head are P5 and P75 (I remember those because
Comfort tried to use their page count to prove that neither papyrus
contained John 21).

[ ... ]

>Or overlap of a gospel from one quire to another...

But that's the point. P75 is a quire of 36 sheets. Now go ahead,
get 36 pieces of paper and fold them together. It's a very messy
result -- and it was worse with papyrus, which is thicker and
stiffer than modern paper. If you're going to assemble a
multi-quire codex, you aren't going to use 36-sheet quires.
You'll use four sheets, or at most five or six.

Is this proof? No. But the odds are pretty slight that our two
most extensive single-quire codices (P46 and P75) are *both*
partial volumes....

> > they weren't designed to be bound together.

Covered above.

[ ... ]

>idea that John was the most popular gospel.

We may have passed each other in the night, here. I understood your
claim to be that the church always used the four gospels together
in single volumes. The whole point of my argument was simply that
the gospels did *not* always exist together, and could (and did)
have highly distinct textual histories. The latter is implied
by the former, and the former is implied by the ratio of mss
of John to Mark among the papyri.

[ ... ]

The next part is about form criticism, and I'm going to omit it as
we've both said that we thing form critics are quite capable of
spinning hallucinations. :-) Just want to comment on one thing,
though it's not relevant to the main topic....

[ ... ]

>joy of form criticism: it can produce just about any result one wants.

As an editor, I can't let this pass. Ephesians is based on Colossians.
Why? Because Ephesians is such a lousy piece of writing. Ephesians
1 consists of only two sentences! It's a hack trying to bloat up
Colossians. Clearly there is dependence (if not literary, then they
are written in the same setting). But the styles are distinctly
different (and Ephesians is much the worse). One has to be taken
from the other. Since the difference, where they are parallel,
is clearly bloat (I know bloat when I see it :-), Ephesians
has to be secondary.

[ ... ]

>survive.  I don't think either point is legitimate.

No one said that only one copy was made of A. (Though I think that
possible in some cases.) The claim is simply that all later copies
passed through a single manuscript.

Of course this may not be true. Probably isn't, in at least some
cases. But it probably *is* in others. Suppose, for the sake of
the argument, that Paul kept a copy of his letters. (I don't think
this is a given; to make a copy of 1 Corinthians would take a fair
bit of time and parchment.) Why would he ever make a copy of his
copy? It just sits there and dies out.

And, unless one assumes Providential Preservation or something equally
silly, why would you ever assume that all the original readings survived?
Just because we have a lot of variants?

For that matter, suppose there were an error in the original. Suppose
Tertius wrote PAULOUS instead of PAULOS at the beginning of Romans.
All the copyists knew it was a spelling error, and changed it. Reasonable
on its face -- but it means that they don't agree with the autograph! 

[ ... ]

>the extant readings.  I agree.

So do I. I suspect that at least 99% of the original text is preserved
in the extant copies.

So what? It's the 1% that matters, not the 99%. There is no variation
of any significance at all in 90% of the text; that just means it's
beyond out province.

[ ... ]

>Again, I just don't think it holds water.

Well, we've made progress. You'll concede, *if* the stemma has
a constriction down to one copy, that we cannot reconstruct past
that copy.

The question is, do we ever reach that point of one manuscript
(the archetype)?

The answer is, we don't know. That's the fact of the matter.
You are making an assumption: That the stream always gets
wider.

I simply can't be comfortable with that assumption, because
there is no evidence either way. None. It is simply not
possible to tell A from C; they are the same.

So I, with the courage of scientific conviction, claim only
to be reconstructing C. :-)

>NT as just another book (which I don't).

Ignoring matters of faith -- which should not come into play in TC --
how does the transmission of the NT differ from the Iliad or Beowulf
or any other manuscript copy? I'm not saying the NT is like any
other book. (For one thing, it isn't a single book; it's a collection. :-)
But I can't see how its *history*, as opposed to its *contents*,
are qualitatively different from other texts.

[ ... ]

>And just how reliable is that?  And how do you know?

Frankly, I *don't* know. For all I can *prove*, Marcion's canon is
right and the rest of what we see is all interpolation.

What I know is, it's more reliable than any attempt to reconstruct
something based on non-extant materials. :-)

Frankly, I find this whole discussion scary, because it implies such
an unscientific approach to the problem. Too many assumptions! I
could, in point of fact, be wrong at every stage. The Alexandrian
and "Western" texts could, e.g., derive from different copies of
the autographs. But any such reconstruction relies on assumptions
where we have no data and need not make assumptions.

Remember that my caution is general, not specific. There probably
were multiple first-generation copies in existence of most books,
and most of those copies left at least some trace in the tradition.
But there need be only one exception....

[ ... ]

>Do you mean you think Paul himself created such an anthology?  

This is a form-critical thing again. Personally, I don't. But I also
don't think it makes that much difference, and would be open to
counter-evidence.

At this point I'm going to give up for the night; I'm completely
stymied as to why this is not so obvious.... 

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

---

From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 22:43:08 -0700

> KL1), would have 18 quires.

4 sheets is what I couldn't remember.  I got the impression you 
were calling a quire a single sheet or something similar.  Never 
mind.

[snippity]
> of John to Mark among the papyri.

I never implied such a thing, and wouldn't.  I'm not sure where that 
idea came from, but let's put it to rest.  My point had to do with the 
question of whether Paul intended any of his letters for publication.

[snippity]
> is clearly bloat (I know bloat when I see it :-), Ephesians

It's also clear that you're using 20th century standards to judge a 
first century work, so there's not much I can say to that.  On such 
a note, I'll let it drop.

[snappity]
> cases. But it probably *is* in others. 

I don't see what basis there is for saying it probably is in others, 
unless one chooses simply to appeal to the law of averages.  But 
since Paul's letters were considered something very special 
practically from the moment they were first received, I doubt the 
law of averages comes into play here.  I think you're 
underestimating how excited the early church was about getting 
correspondence from Paul.

Suppose, for the sake of
> copy? It just sits there and dies out.

Why would he?  How about followers by the dozens coming to him 
and saying "This is going on, what did you tell the Corinthians?"  
Paul pulls out his letter and says "It's all here, my secretary will 
make a copy for you."  Once again, I think you're underestimating 
these people's devotion to Paul.  I'm not saying Paul did make 
copies, in fact I doubt it.  But it's virtually certain that his recipients 
would have wanted copies by the cart-load, and would have made 
as many as they reasonably could.  I don't see a single instance, 
in Paul or in the gospels, of a stemma going back only to a single 
copy of the autograph as your diagram suggests.

> Just because we have a lot of variants?

Partly, and partly because of the plethora of evidence we have to 
work from.  I'm more than a little mystified here, because this is 
stuff that is in virtually every beginning book on textual criticism.  
I'm not sure what's going on here.

> on its face -- but it means that they don't agree with the autograph! 

Error, or variant spelling?  There's a difference.  What about 
itacisms?  Are they errors, or are they simple spelling differences, 
like the difference between American "honor" and British "honour"?  
A spelling variation does not constitute an error, and the word is 
most likely the same.  This seems like grasping at straws.

> of any significance at all in 90% of the text; that just means it's

I assume you meant "our province..."  I agree it's the 1% that 
occupies the text critic's time, but I also maintain - with most 
critics, I suspect - that the vast amount of evidence more than 
likely contains the original readings in there somewhere, and that 
emendation is not necessary.

You keep appealing to Beowulf; how about the Apostolic Fathers?  
The surviving copies we have of them are pathetic compared to 
what we have of the NT, and both Lightfoot and K. Lake resorted to 
emendation rather often in their editions of the Greek text because 
the material they had to work with was so scant.  This is not the 
case for the NT, and emendation becomes virtually unnecessary.
 
> You are making an assumption: That the stream always gets

It has to.  If each church in Galatia makes a copy of the letter to 
them and takes it back to their town, the stream just reached 
Mississippi size, because each copy is going to be propagated 
locally.  Pickering claimed that the reading in the majority of 
manuscripts was most likely to be original, based on a stemmatic 
reconstruction and mathematical probability.  I don't buy it, 
because a fire in the library at Alexandria could throw the whole 
scene off.  But it certainly wouldn't pinch the stream down to a 
single trickle.

> to be reconstructing C. :-)

And I, with equal scientific conviction, claim to be reconstructing A. 
As I said, you pays your money and you takes your choice.  Both 
have a certain claim to scientific viability.

> are qualitatively different from other texts.

Oh come on, Bob.  The Iliad and Beowulf weren't revered the way 
the NT was from earliest times.  That reverence is going to affect 
transmission history, obviously.  Why do you suppose we have so 
many more manuscripts of it than we do of those other works?

> something based on non-extant materials. :-)

But I maintain that's exactly what you're trying to do.  You don't 
know if the text that Marcion canonized, or that Nicea canonized, 
or that anybody else canonized, is the same as the text that has 
been unearthed primarily in Egypt, and there's no solid 
documentary evidence to tell us exactly what those texts looked 
like.  So your footing is as precarious as everyone else's.

> an unscientific approach to the problem. Too many assumptions! I

Excuse me, but we're both assuming.  Unscientific?  Show me an 
approach that can claim to be purely scientific.  It can't be done, 
because everybody - you, me, Bruce Metzger, Zane Hodges - 
everybody starts with some assumptions.  You're assuming a 
particular stemmatic history, based on what I have no idea.  I'm 
assuming a multi-stream propagation of the works in question, long 
before they were gathered into a single volume.  One is just as big 
an assumption as the other.  You're assuming there's some point 
at which canonization took place and that canonization involved a 
particular form of the text that you think you can recover.  I'm 
assuming that a combination of external and internal evidence can 
take me back beyond that.  It's easy to label someone else's views 
unscientific, but in the end we all fall into that category, like it or 
not.

> where we have no data and need not make assumptions.

"Need not make assumptions" is itself an assumption, Bob.  
You're assuming that the point where you want to stop is as far as 
we need to go.  But I've seen no evidence as to why that should be 
so, hence it's an assumption on your part.

> Remember that my caution is general, not specific. There 
probably > were multiple first-generation copies in existence of 
most books, > and most of those copies left at least some trace in 
the tradition. > But there need be only one exception....  

But what's the likelihood that there was?  I estimate the odds at 
slim and none.

[snappity]
Dave Washburn

---

From: [email-masked] (U.B.Schmid)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 13:26:36 +0200

[...]
> see no evidence of that, either.

What do we know of the historical details of Paul's life that makes it 
unthinkable or unlikely that Paul himself edited a selection of his 
correspondence?
In my view, it is reasonably settled that Paul actually used an amanuensis when 
writing some of his letters (cf. Tertius in Rom 16:22; the "autograph" of Paul 
in 1. Cor 16:21; Gal 6:11; 2 Thess 3:17; Col 4:18 makes it clear that Paul did 
not write the body of the letter with his own hands).
That Paul retained a copy of the letters he wrote is of course never explicitely 
stated. It is however more likely that he did than the reverse:
a) It is generally speaking good practise to retain a copy of letters with 
broadly speaking non-private intention, in antiquity (cf. Cicero, Pliny, 
Cyprian, et alii) as well as today. The reason to retain copies is of course not 
a priori to facilitate later publication but reference purposes.
b) The very nature of most of Paul's letters conveys an official "apostolic" 
character; "co-authors" (Sosthenes, Thimothy, etc.) certainly trancendent any 
notion of privacy.
c) Moreover, the exchange of letters with the Corinthian community seems to 
imply that the various parties kept copies of the letters they wrote, because 
Paul refers to written documents of his own as well as the Corinthian community 
(e.g., 1 Cor 5:9; 7:1; etc.). 

[...]
> You'll excuse me if I find said evidence lacking.

a) There is evidence from antiquity that letter writers published collections of 
(some of) their letters (again Cicero and Cyprian, among others).
b) Paul was able to perform such a task, because, in all likelyhood, he retained 
copies of the letters he sent (see above).
c) What are the biblia and membranai mentioned in 2 Tim 4:13?  We don't have 
information about the individual items (possible candidates are OT books, the 
letters Paul recieved from "his" communities and collaborators, copies of his 
own letters). The least one can say, I think, is that there must have been books 
and parchments among the personal belongings of Paul which have been carried 
around and considered to be very important. 
I may restate my initial question:
What do we know of the historical details of Paul's life that makes it 
unthinkable or unlikely that Paul himself edited a selection of his 
correspondence?

Again, you may want to check 
David Trobisch, Die Entstehung der Paulusbriefsammlung. Studien zu den Anfaengen 
christlicher Publizistik, Freiburg (Schweiz)-Goettingen 1989 (NTOA 10).
David Trobisch, Paul's Letter Collection: Tracing the Origins, Minneapolis 1994.

---

From: "DC PARKER" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 13:00:38 GMT

Ulrich wrote

> David Trobisch, Paul's Letter Collection: Tracing the Origins, Minneapolis 1994.

There is a version of Chapter 1 of this book at

http://www.religion-online.org/cgi-
bin/relsearchd.dll?action=showitem&id=15

By the way, I was pleased to see that a discussion which began as 
"The Living Text" became "The ultimate goal of textual criticism"

David Parker

DR DC PARKER
READER IN NEW TESTAMENT TEXTUAL CRITICISM AND PALAEOGRAPHY
DEPT OF THEOLOGY
UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
TEL. 0121-414 3613
FAX  0121-414 6866
E-MAIL D.C.PARKER@.BHAM.AC.UK

---

From: "Professor L.W. Hurtado" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 13:39:20 +000

On the production & distribution of letters (Paul's and others) and 
other literary matters in early Christian circles, in addition to the 
work by Trobisch see now Harry Y. Gamble, _Books and Readers 
in the Early Church_ (Yale Univ Press, 1995).

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]

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 08:30:01 -0500

This should be my last time through this. I did have a thought last
night, though, just to give folks something to ponder....

I am not the only person on this list with scientific training, but
I *do* have scientific training. And my goal is to bring a scientific
approach to TC.

This brings up an interesting observation: In our two most recent
major arguments (this one, and the one on the degree of certainty
in the UBS text), I have been the most cautious person on the entire
list.

And another point: Unlike TC, which is basically theoretical, the
scientific method *works*. It proves its value every time you
turn on your computer (which couldn't exist without solid state
physics), connect to the Internet (field theory), drink a glass
of clean, safe water (several areas, mostly biological).

I'm not saying that TC can become a branch of the sciences. But it
should take every lesson it can from them....

>correspondence from Paul.

I'm mis-speaking here. First, I am only claiming that probably there
is *something* in the New Testament tradition which has gone through
a narrow textual stream. And second, I claim that your assumption
is just that: An *assumption*. It may be accurate. That doesn't
make it justifiable.

>copy of the autograph as your diagram suggests.

Then try it the other way: Paul writes a letter to Corinth, keeps a
copy, and makes copies *of that copy*. Corinth loses the letter. Paul's
*copy* then becomes the source of all later copies.

Whichever way you do this, you are making assumptions.

Note that the above is not an assumption. I don't *believe* either
of my scenarios. I simply present them as possibilities. You cannot
prove either one to be false; you can merely say you disbelieve it.
I disbelieve it, too. But until I can prove it false, I *must* allow
for its possibility.

>I'm not sure what's going on here.

The multitude of materials means nothing.

Have you ever studied a geometric progression? Suppose that each
manuscript is copied twice in its life, and it lives 20 years.
Let's assume that all began life in the year 100. So how many
copies would there be in, say, the year 1000? That is 900 years,
18 generations. Two to the eighteenth power is 260,000 extant
copies.

Now let's suppose that the stemma started two generations later,
in 140. Now that produces 65,000 copies in the year 1000.

We have fewer than 2000 copies from before the year 1000.

2000 is a trivial fraction of either number. It doesn't matter
if it's 65,000 or 260,000 or billions of copies. You cannot
argue from large number of copies to the depth of the stemma.

[ ... ]

>emendation is not necessary.

It may be the opinion of most critics, but it's not universal.
Michael Holmes, who is on this list, writes "That there is considerably
less need for emendation of the NT text than that of comparable
documents is indeed true, but we must not confuse less need with no
need." (Michael W. Holmes, "Reasoned Eclecticism in New Testament
Textual Criticism," in Ehrman & Holmes, _The Text of the New Testament
in Contemporary Research_, page 348.

Now I disagree with Holmes, in a way; I don't think emendation a
useful activity. I don't think we can go past the archetype. But
I agree fully with the implication that there are readings where
the original text is lost in the tradition.

>case for the NT, and emendation becomes virtually unnecessary.

I'm not sure how strong "virtually unnecessary" is, but I might
go along. Westcott & Hort, for instance, detected only about
sixty "primitive error" candidates -- as opposed to hundreds
in Beowulf, which is much shorter. (I appeal to Beowulf because
I happen to have a critical edition of that. :-)

But if there is need for even *one* such emendation, then my
basic point is proved.

[ ... ]

>scene off.  But it certainly wouldn't pinch the stream down to a 

Agreed -- from the third century on. Or even from the middle of
the second century. But you are making assumptions about the very
early history of the text -- its first few years.

Consider: Every one of Paul's letters was situational. In some
cases (Corinthians, Galatians), the churches were in effective
rebellion against him. For all we *know* (as opposed to what we
suspect), they could have burned his letters.

We cannot possibly reconstruct the early history of any of the
letters.

>have a certain claim to scientific viability.

Your claim is obviously made with conviction. It's not made with
scientific conviction. You are insisting on too many things.

Again, I don't say that you are *wrong* in any of your beliefs.
I say you can't prove them. Appealing to the majority of critics
is not proof. :-)

[ ... ]

>many more manuscripts of it than we do of those other works?

Actually, we *don't* have that many more manuscripts of the NT
than we do of the Iliad. We have something like 700 Iliad manuscripts,
including hundreds of papyri. Given that we know next to nothing about
most of our NT manuscripts, *in practice* we have no more NT manuscripts
than Iliad manuscripts. In fact, we have more Iliad manuscripts than
we have texts of the Apocalypse.

And the Iliad was scripture to the Greeks.

I don't see your claim that reverence would affect transmission
history, except to produce more copies. Scribes would still make
the same mistakes, and throw out old copies.

 [ ... ]

>like.  So your footing is as precarious as everyone else's.

I thought that was what I said. Only difference is, I freely admit
I'm on precarious ground. :-)

And here I will stop. I've given every argument I can think of so
far.

I guess there is only one thing that this debate absolutely
*proves*: That people believe what they want to believe. But
we knew that.... :-) 

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

---

From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 07:36:40 -0700

> night, though, just to give folks something to ponder....

My last time as well.

> I *do* have scientific training. And my goal is to bring a scientific

Are you the only one?  Every major textual critic I know of has 
made every effort to do the very same thing.  Again, it's easy to 
write off different views as unscientific, but I don't think it's 
legitimate.

[snip]
> *copy* then becomes the source of all later copies.

Bob, you're still assuming only ONE copy, and even though you 
say you aren't, look at the above paragraph.  You talk about my 
assumptions, but you have just as many.  That's my point.

[snip]
> But if there is need for even *one* such emendation, then my

I don't think so.  It's a major leap from one necessary emendation 
to the idea that a text centuries from the autograph is the best we 
can reconstruct.  One emendation in a work the size of the New 
Testament suggests just the opposite: as Hoskier (I think it was) 
said, "We have not got a bad text."

[snip]
> scientific conviction. You are insisting on too many things.

Uh-uh, I can't let that go by.  Yours is not the only scientific view, 
Bob, and it's built on at least as many insistences as mine is.  
This is little more than guilt by definition, and it cuts both ways.

> I say you can't prove them. Appealing to the majority of critics

As if that's the only thing I appealed to?  I'm glad this thread is 
dying out, because I really don't like what you're doing with some of 
my words.

[snip]
> *proves*: That people believe what they want to believe. But

This also cuts both ways, claims to (apparently the only) scientific 
validity notwithstanding.  And I'm done, as well.

Dave Washburn

---

From: "Dave Washburn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 10:02:10 -0700

> unthinkable or unlikely that Paul himself edited a selection of his 

Mainly, most of the time he was rather busy.  The prison epistles 
may be another matter, but many of the others seem to have been 
written during his journeys, and much of the time during those he 
was fleeing for his life.

> not write the body of the letter with his own hands).

Agreed, but not much help in guessing whether he kept copies for 
himself.

> a priori to facilitate later publication but reference purposes.

How many of these authors wrote on the run?  I'm not saying Paul 
didn't keep copies, merely that in at least some cases he may not 
have had time to make, much less gather and transport, such 
copies of his letters.

> character; "co-authors" (Sosthenes, Thimothy, etc.) certainly trancendent any 

I don't recall saying anything about privacy.  Where did that come 
from?  I'm the one who's been arguing that at least some of his 
letters were intended for publication, at least in a limited sense.

> (e.g., 1 Cor 5:9; 7:1; etc.). 

And he could just as easily have been quoting from memory, since 
memorization in his day (especially as a Pharises) was quite a 
different matter than it is today.

> copies of the letters he sent (see above).

Already discussed above.

> around and considered to be very important. 

I find it interesting that you at least implicitly accept Pauline 
authorship of 2 Timothy (as do I), but I'll let that pass.  First, it 
doesn't say "books and parchments," it says "books, and 
especially parchments."  Would he call his own letters "books"?  
What is special about the parchments?  I tend to think they were 
probably OT books (Septuagint-based?) and perhaps some literary 
works of the type that he cited on Mars Hill and in Titus.  I don't 
see anything in that statement that hints that copies of his own 
letters were among the things he asked for.  As well, we know that 
by the writing of 2 Peter his letters were called "scriptures," which 
suggests very, very early publication.  Again, this is what I have 
been saying all along.

I'm prepared to let this drop now.

Dave Washburn

---

From: TOMMY MARKANZIA REKLAM HB <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 22:45:58 +0000

Robert B. Waltz wrote:

> Consider: Every one of Paul's letters was situational. In >some cases (Corinthians, Galatians), the churches were in 
>effective rebellion against him. For all we *know* (as 
>opposed to what we suspect), they could have burned his 
>letters. We cannot possibly reconstruct the early history
>of any of the letters.

I think, speaking of science, that all scholars working with TC, should
also take seriously the study of church history, which may shed light on
the textual transmission. Regarding the Galatians, may I quote from K.
Aland in his "The Text of the New Testament", p 48:

"Each of the churches having one or more letters from the apostle would
not only preserve them carefully, reading them when they were assembled
for worship, but would also exchange copies of their letters with
neighbouring churches. This is *the only possible explanation* for the
preservation of the Galatian letter, since the church(es) addressed in
it *did not survive for long*. In Col 4:16 we read..." (my **)

Dave Washburn wrote in part

>But this is only accurate if B is the only copy ever made 
>of A.  I really doubt that's the case.  A letter from Paul >himself would have been quite a prize, and you can bet that >it was copied many times, not just one.  This would be 
>particularly true of a multiple- addressee letter like 
>Galatians; do we really suppose that a messenger took the 
>letter to church X and read it to them, then 
>moved on to church Y without giving X a chance to copy it?  >"I don't think so, Tim."  The stemma above assumes ONLY one >copy of A. Not only unlikely, but I find it frankly 
>inconceivable.

Not only did the messenger give church Y the chance to copy it, if
church Y happened to have another letter, he would certainly copy that
letter. A mutual practice that I think reflect the practice of the
Pauline period. So collections would start with small collections, and
then grow throughout the years, but these small collections I suppose
would safeguard the tradition (as I mentioned in a previous posting),
when the larger collections were in circulation, am I right?

Cautious, yes, and optimistic!

Tommy Wasserman
Swedish student of theology at
Örebro Missionsskola

---

From: [email-masked] (U.B.Schmid)
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 22:43:05 +0200

> was fleeing for his life.

Come on. This is a Sunday school image: busy Paul, touring all day and all 
night, the super-evangelist just dropping by, the turn-or-burn-preacher always 
on the run. He was neither conquering the Wild-West nor fighting Red Indians. 
Have you ever happened to read or even compile a chronology of the life and 
journeys of Paul? He spent more than a year in Corinth, more than two years in 
Ephesus, and some time in prison (Epesus?, Rome). Plenty of time to do the job. 

[...]
> How many of these authors wrote on the run?  

Cyprian, of course, had to go underground during the persecution in 249-50. Yet 
he kept writing dozens of letters during that time. Pliny, while Roman *legatus 
Augusti* of Pontus/Bithynia, toured his province roughly a year and wrote more 
than 70 letters to the emperor within that period of time. 

[...]
> from?  

Dave, if you go back and read carefully my points a) and b), you will find that 
"privacy" is opposed to "'official' apostolic character" which corresponds with 
the "broadly speaking non-private intention" of letters, thereby invoking some 
sort of form-critical designation for letters that are not just written and 
sent, but kept with the author for reference purposes. Is it so hard to follow 
my points?

> different matter than it is today.

Pharises memorized holy texts and holy traditions just as you may have 
memorized, among others, Pauline texts. But it's utterly naive to assume 
Pharises just memorized everything, let alone their own letters.

[..]
> authorship of 2 Timothy (as do I), but I'll let that pass.  

Don't let it pass! I didn't even implicitly accept Pauline authorship of 2 Tim.
I accept the information conveyed in 2 Tim 4:13 about books and parchments among 
the belongings of Paul regardless of who wrote 2 Tim. 
Either I'm unable to express myself properly or you are unable to understand 
(the same thing with "privacy" above). In any case, it seems worthless to me 
pursuing that discussion.

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 20:19:45 -0500

On 9/10/99, TOMMY MARKANZIA REKLAM HB wrote:

>the textual transmission.

This is widely conceded. The obvious example being the case of the
Byzantine text. Why is it predominant? Because, of all the great
centers of early Christendom, *only Byzantium* was still Christian
and Greek after the Arab conquests. (Rome, of course, was also
still Christian, but it was dependent on Latin texts.)

>Regarding the Galatians, may I quote from K.

This, of course, is simply pontificating by the Alands. We don't know this.
It is perfectly possible, and highly reasonable, but by no means certain.
Paul might have kept a copy. If Paul didn't, his secretary might have.
Or -- who knows -- highway robbers might have taken it from the messenger
and carried it to some other church where it was preserved. (That last
is ridiculous, but I defy you to *prove* it false.)

"The only possible explanation" is usually a code phrase for "This is
what I think even though there is absolutely no evidence." :-) 

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked] (U.B.Schmid)
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 13:16:50 +0200

TOMMY MARKANZIA REKLAM HB wrote:
> Robert B. Waltz wrote:
>
> > Consider: Every one of Paul's letters was situational. In >some cases
>  (Corinthians, Galatians), the churches were in 

Quite seriously, I tend to ignore the constant appeal to taking seriously the 
study of church history in TC, for what follows usually is a "canonized" 
*version* of church history without bothering to built a real case. 
The example taken from the Aland's book has so many intrinsic problems that I 
won't discuss it, safe for one point: The German 2nd edition of the book (1989, 
p. 57) reads: "...Nur so ist es zu erklären, daß uns der Galaterbrief erhalten 
ist. Denn die Gemeinde(n), an die er gerichtet war, ist (sind) *offensichtlich* 
[= apparently] bald danach zugrundegegangen." That version expresses more 
caution (see "offensichtlich") than the English version, and rightly so, even 
more caution is necessary in my view. 
Even granted the Aland's case, I have to say it's just *one* "possible 
explanation for the preservation of the Galatian letter", by no means the "only" 
one. 

> >of A.  I really doubt that's the case.  A letter from Paul >himself would
>  have been quite a prize, and you can bet that >it was copied many times, not
>  just one.  This would be 
> >moved on to church Y without giving X a chance to copy it?  >"I don't think
>  so, Tim."  The stemma above assumes ONLY one >copy of A. Not only unlikely,
>  but I find it frankly 
> >inconceivable.
>

How would smaller collections safeguard the tradition when larger collections 
were out? In a sense that there are a lot of back-ups "out there", that may 
individuals (or individual communities) prevent from doing harm to the 
tradition? Well, it simply didn't work. Consider, e.g., the textual history of 
the letter to the Romans, especially with respect to the concluding doxology. 
Whatever version you favour as being *the* "original" version, considerable 
parts of the textual tradition deviate, presenting a huge variety of forms. You 
may say: 'I'm happy that among the many versions the original version survived. 
It's enough to support my point.' Well, if you are inclined to put it that way, 
I would like you to carefully select your original version, for the dominant 
contemporary version (Rom 1:1-16:23, without 16:24 and 16:25-27) isn't found in 
a single Greek NT manuscript, i.e. it's reconstructed by means of *emendation*. 

You want to consult Kurt Aland, Der Schluß und die ursprüngliche Gestalt des 
Römerbriefes; in: idem, Neutestamentliche Entwürfe, 1972, 284sq., and you will 
find that Aland's "original" version of Romans is not found in a single 
manuscript. 
------------------------------------------
Dr. Ulrich Schmid
[email-masked]

---

From: TOMMY MARKANZIA REKLAM HB <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 19:11:40 +0000

U.B.Schmid wrote:
> 
>How would smaller collections safeguard the tradition when >larger collections were out? In a sense that there are a 
>lot of back-ups "out there", that may individuals (or 
>individual communities) prevent from doing harm to the 
>tradition?

My main point here is that it is very likely that copies were made of
single letters very early and that this fact increases the probability
that in all our available manuscripts we have the original readings
(what Paul and his friends really wrote). And additionaly we have
well-reasoned and cautious scholars like yourself, that will work with
the reconstruction of the text. That´s why I am optimistic.

Bob wrote in part:
>Or -- who knows -- highway robbers might have taken it from >the messenger and carried it to some other church where it >was preserved. (That last is ridiculous, but I defy you to >*prove* it false.) 

Okey Bob, You have convinced me. Hypothetically speaking, the Pauline
corpus might be mere pseudigraphs written by a martian (Christian, of
course) :-)

But since You appealed to science, I think we can agree that there are
bad and better hypotheses respectively and my starting-point (which
cannot be proved, but I believe, corroborated) is that, what the
NT-authors once wrote is "out there" in the manuscript that have
survived.

Thank You for this discussion, with my limited knowledge I don´t think I
can pursue it further (for now). Therefore I´d like to change topic and
ask You scholars in Europe, on this list, if there is a possibility for
me to come and participate in a course on Textual Criticism at Your
university for a limited time? I´m on my third year (theology) now, and
intend to work the rest of my career, with biblical languages,
NT-exegesis and related...

Tommy Wasserman
Swedish student at
Örebro Missionsskola

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 13:24:27 -0500

>corpus might be mere pseudigraphs written by a martian (Christian, of

No, no, no. There are no sentient Martian. The planet doesn't support
life.

Of course, the *real* truth is that the Pauline letters were written
by exiled inhabitants of the second planet of Barnard's Star. :-)
(The chances of inhabitants of Alpha Centauri is slight; if present
theories of star formation are correct, a star such as Alpha
Centauri won't have planets.)

>NT-authors once wrote is "out there" in the manuscript that have

This is not the best way to express this. Hypothesis are not bad or
good; they fit the facts or they don't. In the absence of facts,
we can't say much about how good our hypothesis are. And facts about
the second half of the first century are almost totally non-existant.

Of course one can say that a hypothesis doesn't fit the facts of
the Roman period (that criticism could be levelled, e.g., at my
highway robbery theory), but we really can't say much about the
behavior of the church in that period, because we just don't *know*. 

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

---

From: "Maurice A. Robinson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 11:56:47 EDT

On Fri, 10 Sep 1999 20:19:45 -0500 "Robert B. Waltz"
<[email-masked]> writes:

>The obvious example being the case of the

Bob, are you saying that by the time of the Arab Conquest the Byzantine
Textform had achieved virtually exclusive dominance in the Eastern empire
in the regions outside of Egypt and Palestine and was thus more than the
merely "local" text which otherwise existed in those latter regions?  

Seems that to achieve such a dominance, this textform would have had to
precede the Arab conquest by centuries in a widespread, generally
dominant, and relatively unified and stable form, since an upstart
localized text created over time by a slow "process" would have had
serious difficulty gaining such an overwhelming dominance and overtaking
that held by the various non-Byzantine texts which (supposedly) had
previously held utter dominance not only over their local regions, but
equally over that same Eastern portion of the empire prior to the
development of the Byzantine Textform. 

So are you claiming an extensive formal existence and pre-existing
dominance of the Byzantine Textform for centuries in the Eastern Empire
outside of the regions of Egypt and Palestine from a very early time?  If
so, how interesting....

But somehow I doubt this is what you intend.   :-)

==============================================
Maurice A. Robinson
Professor of NT and Greek
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Wake Forest, North Carolina

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 12:18:34 -0500

>merely "local" text which otherwise existed in those latter regions?  

I did make one small mis-statement here, which you've blown all out
of proportion. :-)

Instead of "Arab conquests," I should have said "Arab and Turkish
conquests."

Let's distinguish two points here: The later history of the text
and the original text. The argument I offer says nothing about
the original text; it could (as far as this argument is concerned)
be effectively identical to the Byzantine text or completely different.
All we need to assume is that, from the time of the Arab conquests,
the Byzantine text was the text of Byzantium.

Christianity had a variety of important early centers: Alexandria,
Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, perhaps Jerusalem. Rome adopted
the Latin Bible. Alexandria was conquered by the Arabs, and turned to
the Coptic versions anyway. Jerusalem was conquered by the Arabs.
Antioch held out until Manzikert in 1071, but it did fall to the
Turks, and was damaged by earthquakes. Thus, by the beginning of
the twelfth century (i.e. *before* the bulk of our manuscripts
were written), the only major Christian center still in Greek
hands was Byzantium and its environs -- mostly in Greece, though
of course it also held a small part of Asia.

That is, in my book, a pretty small region -- small enough that
it could have its own "local" text.

I repeat, this tells us nothing about the original text. All it
says is that the local text of Byzantium, *whatever* its nature,
could for historical reasons be expected to be dominant in the
tradition.

Of course manuscripts continued to be preserved, and even copied,
in other areas -- but many old copies would have been destroyed,
and new copies would be fewer (not so much because Christians were
fewer in the conquered areas -- they weren't. But they were much,
much poorer, and couldn't afford as many copies). 

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

---

From: "Maurice A. Robinson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 15:26:20 EDT

>I did make one small mis-statement here, which you've blown all out

But thank you for the open door. :-)

>the original text

Agreed; neither did mine.

>Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, perhaps Jerusalem. 

[etc. etc. -- all granted]

>Thus, by the beginning of

The twelfth century is an irrelevant date as regards what I was
discussing, which was the impact of the initial Arab conquest during the
8th and subsequent centuries in basically eliminating or at least
removing from dominance the Alexandrian and (possibly) Caesarean
texttypes at a time long before century 12.

>it could have its own "local" text.

Again, granting the "local text" theory regarding Byzantium, are you also
saying that the Alexandrian, Western, and perhaps the Caesarean texts
were similarly "local" and did _not_ hold more than a regional dominance
from ancient times?

>the local text of Byzantium, *whatever* its nature,

But if the Byzantine were only a local minority text with no real
dominance, and if another texttype or texttypes had been previously
dominant in the Eastern Empire up to the point of the Arab Conquest, how
under the normally slow process of transmissional growth and acceptance
could such a localized minority text from Constantinople and environs
rapidly grow to a position of utter dominance and bypass the normally
slow process of transmissional growth? Of course if the other texttypes
were minority and localized rather than dominant, the Byzantine dominance
becomes easier to explain.

>much poorer, and couldn't afford as many copies). 

Certainly St. Catherine's monastery at Sinai and even the Jerusalem Saba
monasteries managed to survive the Arab conquest with a large number of
MSS intact. Even granting that most MSS contained therein are late, how
come most of their preserved MSS are Byzantine rather than Alexandrian or
Caesarean if the exigencies of the Arab (and/or Turkish) conquests
basically cut them off from the contact they previously had enjoyed
within the entire Eastern Empire?

Just asking a few questions....

---

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 20:38:02 -0500

On 9/20/99, Maurice A. Robinson wrote:

[ ...Lots of nice agreement, not that that helps any :-)... ]

>discussing,

And I'll admit that I've forgotten my own point. :-)

>which was the impact of the initial Arab conquest during the

Agreed. So what are we arguing about? :-)

>were similarly "local" and did _not_ hold more than a regional dominance

Yes. Or, at least, I see no reason to think otherwise. (I'm not going
to go out too far on a limb here. :-)

>becomes easier to explain.

I'm missing something here. I never said that *any* text-type was
dominant at an early date.

But I maintain that, *if* all areas had a local text (and the assumption
is that they would, even though different areas might have local texts
that were practically identical), and if all but one of those areas
were wiped out, we would expect that local text to become dominant.

Thus, one would expect the local text-type of Byzantium to be the
dominant one in later centuries. Doesn't matter what its earlier
history was.

One could even make an Old Testament analogy. Prior to the Flood,
most people were not descended from Noah. After it, if one believes
the Biblical account, they all were descended from Noah. Doesn't
mean Noah was the first man, just the first man to survive. Archetype,
not autograph. :-)

>within the entire Eastern Empire?

The following example refers specifically to Sinai, but it could
be anywhere....

This is where data on manuscript origins would be really interesting.
However, I believe that you are making an unwitting assumption here.
The assumption being that most manuscripts were copied from old
exemplars. The evidence seems to indicate, if anything, the contrary.
So suppose someone showed up from Constantinople (not impossible by
any means, even *after* the Arab conquest; immigration controls are
a modern invention) with a nice fancy new manuscript of the Kx
recension, in this beautiful minuscule script, with accents and
breathings and spaces between words and Eusebian apparatus and all
that great stuff. And your alternative is to copy from something
like Sinaiticus, and try to add the accents yourself, and figure
out what all those correctors wrote. Which do you pick?

Unless you're an early version of Hort, you're likely to pick the
Kx manuscript. So texts of this type could easily become widespread
*even in a place where the Byzantine text wasn't originally dominant.*

Now this is just a hypothetical; I don't know what happened. But
one can't argue from Byzantine manuscripts (and not all recent
manuscripts at Sinai are Byzantine!) that the Byzntine text was
dominant there.

For that matter -- where and when was Sinai founded? I will admit
that I don't know. But I doubt it was founded from Alexandria. That's
not based on textual theories; it's based on the fact that Egyptian
monks tended to go into the desert, not to Sinai, to meditate.
Sinai seems, from what little I know, to have been a Byzantine
foundation.... 

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

---

From: "Mr. Gary S. Dykes" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 22:26:50 -0700

M. Robinsion wrote:

Mr. Dykes replies:
    First greetings dear sir, I am honored to correspond mit you, as I have
studied much of your earlier materials and respect your insights.

St. Catherines, built under Justinian's reign and St. Saba both were
normally under Byzantine control. Even when the Latins controlled Jerusalem
(circa 12th and again in the 13th centuries as Outremer kingdom) St. Saba
maintained it Greek "orthodox" status and produced Greek minuscules,
distinct from the Latin MSS produced in the Latin Church of the Holy
Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Both also display differing archetypes (by both
means the Latin Outremer, and the St. Saba materials).

However, as you note, both monasteries were shepharded by the Byzantine
authorities and the theological position of the "board of trustees" in
Constantinople. Hence MOST MSS which remain are very close to the standard
Byzantine Ecclesiastical Recension, as I refer to it. But interestingly, and
the point of my response, is that there are a number of MSS which are not of
the standard Byzantine text-type from these monasteries. Many of these
minuscules have only (and I am referring to the minuscules as opposed to the
uncials) been scanned for certain readings, according to some profile,
Munster uses one which uses a few hundred variants for the NT text, and they
then base their text-type evaluation on this brief survey, and they do
indicate that it is often tentative.

But further analysis will uncover more MSS with Syro-Latin readings, and
other independent readings. For example 1874 (from Jerusalem, or even St.
Cartherines) is clearly Egyptian (or Alexandrine) in its text-type. Its
sister MS, 1875 is also clearly of the Egyptian text-type, but  made in
Calabria. In fact a number of the Jerusalem MSS have a Calabrian connection,
according to my preliminary research in the text of I Corinthians. Note I
said "preliminary", but the evidence is growing.

MS 1319 also produced in Jerusalem (or Jerusalem controlled monasteries) has
an interesting text-type. Other examples can be shown.

So, yes, most minuscules in both the St. Catherines and Jersusalem-area
monasteries are of the Byzantine text-type, but numerous ones differ. This
is typical for provincial ateliers, as most had not the facilities which
Constantinople had, and most still had old uncials (and papyri?) lying about
in them, useful as possible exemplars. Being provincial (and often separated
from Byzantine oversight from Constantinople) they had a bit more freedom in
forming their copies, as they were at some distance from the "board of
trustees" in Constantinople.  Much more research is needed before final
definitive results can be given, but I have made a start as have some
others. Part of the preparation is being able to recognize the clues which
the scripts and illuminations and ornaments give which can identify the
geographical origins (tentatively).

I have noticed that generally speaking the MSS produced within
Constantinople itself (and often in Nicaea (during the Palaiologos)) were
strictly of a Byzantine Ecclesiastical Standard, as yet I have not found any
MSS circa 900 - 1300 written in Constantinople which are not conformed to
this standard. But I look, and if you have any interesting findings, perhaps
you could share them with me. Most which claim to be of a differing
text-type probably (note "probably") were not produced in Constantinople
proper. But I am not laying down some sort of a rule here, just a temporary
guideline.

at your service,
Mr. Gary S. Dykes

---

From: "Maurice A. Robinson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 11:55:28 EDT

On Mon, 20 Sep 1999 22:26:50 -0700 "Mr. Gary S. Dykes"
<[email-masked]> writes:

>normally under Byzantine control. 
>Even when the Latins controlled Jerusalem (circa 12th and again in the
13th >centuries as Outremer kingdom) St. Saba maintained it Greek
"orthodox" status and >produced Greek minuscules,

This addresses Bob's point: if the Arab Conquest effectively shut off
communication as to squash the Alexandrian and/or Caesarean texttypes in
order to allow the Byzantine to achieve dominance, it seems peculiar that
such a conquest neither stopped communication with these two significant
monasteries nor prevented copying and (apparently) exchange and
distribution of MSS with other localities within the non-conquered
Eastern Empire, resulting (somehow) in a dominance of Byzantine MSS even
in these "isolated" source monasteries. 

>However, as you note, both monasteries were shepharded by the 
>Byzantine authorities and the theological position of the "board of
trustees" in
>Constantinople. 

I am not confident that maintaining orthodox _theology_ in accordance
with the Constantinopolitan standard has anything to do with preserving a
specific form of  text in accordance with any similar standard. If so,
the scribes seem to have done a poor job of maintaining quality control.

>the point of my response, is that there are a number of MSS which are 
>not of the standard Byzantine text-type from these monasteries. 

Absolutely. And these MSS in many cases are recent representatives of
older differing texttypes which were preserved and copied anew, despite
their not matching a pre-determined standard text of the later centuries.

>other independent readings. For example 1874 (from Jerusalem, or even 
>St. Cartherines) is clearly Egyptian (or Alexandrine) in its text-type. 
>Its sister MS, 1875 is also clearly of the Egyptian text-type, but  made

>in Calabria. In fact a number of the Jerusalem MSS have a Calabrian 
>connection, according to my preliminary research in the text of I
Corinthians. 

Since I have not worked with those MSS, I am not qualified to speak on
this point; but certainly there are many minuscules preserved at these
monasteries which have non-Byzantine texts or Byzantine texts with
significant variances and which in many cases may have come from other
localities. Cf. Silva New's "Patmos Family" (HTR 1932) as an example.

>Being provincial (and often separated
>from Byzantine oversight from Constantinople) they had a bit more 
>freedom in forming their copies, as they were at some distance from the
"board of
>trustees" in Constantinople.  

I doubt this scenario, since even at Mt Athos or in monasteries in and
around Constantinople, I see little evidence of any "control" imposed
upon the copying of MSS and apparently an equal degree of "freedom"
exemplified in copying. The data which we have shows the abbots being
more concerned with good scribal deportment, orthography, and grammar
than with the precise form and content of the text they copied. Their
primary concern was to faithfully copy the text of the exemplar without
alteration, save in plain and clear cases of error.

>Part of the preparation is being able to recognize the clues which
>the scripts and illuminations and ornaments give which can identify 
>the geographical origins (tentatively).

This indeed is an important criterion, and needs much more work. Were the
provenance of all MSS known, much more could be said about the processes
of transmission.

>strictly of a Byzantine Ecclesiastical Standard, as yet I have not 
>found any MSS circa 900 - 1300 written in Constantinople which are not
conformed 
>to this standard. 

I have not found any MSS copied within this same period which reflect any
such "standard"; so we differ on this point (note that the "general"
Byzantine text found in most MSS of this period is not itself evidence of
any standard being imposed; the differences in the MSS themselves serve
as evidence against such a control ever having been made).

---

From: "Maurice A. Robinson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 11:55:28 EDT

>[ ...Lots of nice agreement, not that that helps any :-)... ]

But it makes us feel good. :-)

>dominant at an early date.

Agreed, you did not. But it seems an either/or hypothesis. If all texts
were local in nature, then how would dominance be rapidly achieved, even
with the Arab conquest, since an amalgam of  "local text" MSS should have
dominated the Empire if there was no one dominant text. Even allowing the
Arab conquest to remove two or three "localities," this would not under
normal transmissional processes wipe out the otherwise-extant amalgam
permeating the remainder of the Empire in such a way as to allow the
rapid growth and dominance of a single remaining local text.

>But I maintain that, *if* all areas had a local text (and the 
>assumption is that they would, even though different areas might have
local texts
>were wiped out, we would expect that local text to become dominant.

But how would this be accomplished _quickly_ under the slow "process"
view of transmission?

>dominant one in later centuries. Doesn't matter what its earlier

Except that one hardly has to wait till the 12th century to find this
dominance already existing. Basically the history after the 10th century
is irrelevant to the point.

>mean Noah was the first man, just the first man to survive. Archetype,

Certainly. But I was talking transmission and neither archetype nor
autograph.

>exemplars. The evidence seems to indicate, if anything, the contrary.

So far as I know, all extant MSS were copied from older exemplars. :-) 
_How_ old is another question, but they still are all in a line of
transmission which stretches back for centuries. The problem is reflected
in the Lake, Blake, and New study of the MSS at Sinai, Jerusalem, and
Athos, which was somewhat frustrating to them since they saw no real
signs of genealogical connection between the existing MSS preserved in
each individual location (whether they were overly-pessimistic on this
point is another matter). This implied clearly that the lines of
transmission stemmed from what were apparently earlier exemplars which
similarly preserved their relative genealogical autonomy, even within a
basic Byzantine Textform. How far back this relative autonomy went, of
course, no one knows.

>out what all those correctors wrote. Which do you pick?

Wait a minute -- first you have to explain how those isolated Sinai monks
who were totally used to uncial MSS became attracted to and adopted the
minuscule script (which only arises relative to NT MSS in the 8th
century), long after the Muslim conquest of that region. And what would
make them decide to abandon their centuries-long practice of copying in
uncials (which for those who used such were _easier_ to read than
minuscule (ask modern student collators), just as later on the minuscule
became easier to read than uncial for those trained in such). And why
would they use an upstart "new" MS of (say) Kx type as the basis for all
their new copying endeavors when it differed so radically from what they
had been supposedly been used to for centuries?  Tradition is a difficult
thing to overcome, but with a change of script added as well, it would
seem well-nigh impossible. 

>Kx manuscript. 

Actually, I think the Sinai monks might well have been early versions of
Hort, and would prefer the older uncials to which they had been used
rather than any "new" and upstart differing text, especially assuming
relative isolation caused by the Arab conquest as a preserving factor
within their tradition.

>So texts of this type could easily become widespread

If so, then what precisely did the Arab conquest damage in regard to MS
transmission?  Are you suggesting that MSS of a given texttype could flow
_in_ to the isolated areas, but that those of a different texttype would
not flow _out_?

>manuscripts at Sinai are Byzantine!) that the Byzantine text was
>dominant there.

The Byz MSS do dominate the collection at Sinai, as well as at Jerusalem.
Whether such dominance existed from ancient times is a different matter,
but quite clearly the Byztxt was dominant in those locations for most of
the time following the Arab conquest.

>Sinai seems, from what little I know, to have been a Byzantine

There are histories, but separating pious tradition from actual fact
might be difficult. 
Probably no real reason to reject at least the Justinian-era foundation
for some form of monastic activity in that area, and  (if various
traditions be correct) it may be likely that those MSS (including Aleph)
which were found in that monastery may well have been there from close to
the time they were written. But again, all is speculation on these
points.