Posted on 06/24/2003 10:05:20 AM PDT by ksen
1 J.Harold Greenlee, Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), p. 73,
2 Wilbur N. Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text (Nashville: Nelson, 1977), pp. 15-19.
3 Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, From God to Us: How We Got Our Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1974), p. 165.
4 Greenlee, Intro. to NT Textual Criticism, p. 70.
5 Jack Finegan, Encountering New Testament Manuscripts: A Work- ing Introduction to Textual Criticism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), p. 59. 6 Pickering, Identity, p. 32, See also Erm~~t C66ColYSll, "Method in Evaluating Scribal Habits: A Study of P , P , P ,11 in Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament. New Testament Tools and Studies Series, ed. Bruce M. Metzger (Grand Ra- pids: Herdeans, 1969), p. 106.
7 Burgon gave prominence to the basic concept of the MT in the second of his seven "Notes of Truth" which calls for "Consent of Witnesses, or Number." (Pickering, Identity, p. 129.) Hoskier at- tacked the neutrality and the dignity of the Vaticanus MS (the main- stay of Westcott and Hort's text) (Everett P. Harrison, Introduction to the New Testament [[Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1971], p. 77.)
8 Eugene A. Nida, "The New Testament Greek Text in the Third World," in New Testament Textual Criticism: Its Significance for Exegesis, edited by Eldon Jay Epp and Gordon 1). Fee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 378.
9 Zane C. Hodges and Arthur L. Farstad, eds. The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text (Nashville: Nelson, 1982), p. xii.
10 Ibid.
11 Zane C. Hodges, "The Greek Text of the King James Version," in Which Bible? third ed., ed. David Otis Fuller (Grand Rapids: Grand Rapids International Publications, 1972), p. 34.
12 Hodges and Farstad, eds., NT According to the Majority Text, p. x.
13 Pickering, Identity, pp. 43-45.
14 Ernest C. Colwell, "Genealogical Method: Its Achievements and Its Limitations," in Studies in Methodology, ed. Metzger, p. 65.
15 J. K. Elliot, "The United Bible Societies' Textual Connen- tary Evaluated," in Novum Testamentum 17 (April 1975): 131.
16 Edward P. Hills, "The Magnificent Burgon," in Which Bible? third ed., ed. David Otis Fuller (Grand Rapids: Grand Rapids Interns- tional Publications, 1972), pp. 104-105.
17 Edward P. Hills, The King James Version Defended (Des Moines, Ia.: Christian Research Press, 1984), p. 200.
18 Hodges and Farstad, eds., NT According to the Majority Text, p.x. 19 D. A. Carson, The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), pp. 44-47, 51-54.
20 Ibid. p. 61.
21 Hodges and Farstad, eds., NT According to the Majority Text, pp. xi-xii.
22 Hodges, "The Greek Text of the KJV," p. 26.
23 Carson, The KJV Debate, p. 116,
24 Ibid., p. 113.
25 Ibid.
26 Hodges, The Greek Text of the KJV, pp. 32-34.
27 Carson, The KJV Debate, p. 113.
28 Ibid., p. 62.
29 Ibid., p. 47.
30 Bruce M. Metzger, "St. Jerome's Explicit References to Variant Readings in Manuscripts of the New Testament " in New Testament Studies: Philological, Versional, and Patristic, New Testament Tools and Studies Series, ed. by Bruce M. Metzger (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1980), p. 208.
31 Ernest C. Colwell, "Hort Redivivus: A Plea and a Program," in Studies in Methodology, ed. Metzger, p. 156.
32 K. W. Clark, "The Effect of Recent Textual Criticism Upon New Testament Studies," in The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology, edited by V. D. Davies and D. Daube (Cambridge: Universi- ty Press, 1964), p. 30.
33 Harrison, Introduction to the NT, p. 80.
34 Colwell, "Hort Redivivus," p 157.
35 Colwell, "Scribal Habits," p. 107.
36 Pickering, Identity of the NT Text, pp. 79-82.
37 Ibid. What is apparently the same article to which Pickering refers also appears under the title "Method in Evaluating Scribal Habits: A Study of P45, P66, P75, " in Studies in Methodology, ed. Metxger, pp. 106-124.
38 Carson, The KJV Debate, p. 16.
39 Colwell, "Genealogical Method," p. 75.
40 Ibid., p. 66.
41 Ibid., p. 68.
42 J. N. Birdsall, "The New Testament Text," in The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol. 1, P. R. Ackroyd and C. P. Evans, eds. (Cambridge: University Press, 1970), p. 376.
I am very interested in hearing from those who do support the Critical Text explain their reasons, and vice-versa.F.Y.I.
I do not necessarily support the Critical, or Eclectic Text per se - but I do not buy into the adulatory acceptance of the so-called Textus Receptus either.
A lot of it has to do with one's presuppositions, one set of which the author of the article condemns out of hand, while he accepts another set of presuppositions uncritically.
I will lay my presuppositions on the table: I believe that the Bible was given by the Holy Spirit to the Church and that the Church's living liturgical usage is the measure of the text, not archaeological conjecture.
In this sense, both the TR and the Critical Text are artifacts - highly useful and salutary ones - but not living expressions of the Scriptures in the Church.
For example, the most widely used edition of the TR, the Stephanus recension of Scrivener, was altered consciously and deliberately in order to conform the Greek text to the English translation of the KJV.
One could argue, if one believed that the Church subsisted in the form of British Protestantism, that the KJV was effectively the living Scripture of the Church and that therefore tailoring the Greek to conform to the KJV was a legitimate exercise. In fact, that is implicitly what Scrivener was doing - truing up the TR to the lived reality of the Christian community.
The original TR was the result of an artificial project undertaken by Erasmus and then Beza to recover the "primitive text" of the NT. The Scrivener TR was an effort to undo that project.
When Erasmus found certain passages which seemed to make more sense in the Latin of the Vulgate than in the Greek he had, he conformed his TR to the Vulgate, but in other places - where he felt the Vulgate went astray - he chose variants from the Vulgate sense.
In many ways both the TR and the Critical Text(s) reflect the personal prejudices of Erasmus and Beza and Hort and Westcott and Aland. In many ways the Vulgate and other translations reflect the institutional prejudices of the Church.
I personally would rather rely on the collective sensus fidei of the Church rather than the rather timebound and culturebound sense of a handful of individuals.
Remember also that concern for the original languages was not an overriding issue for the Church until the Reformation, although it was a concern. The Early Church's first Bible was the Septuagint - not the texts of the Jewish Masoretes.
Remember also that concern for the original languages was not an overriding issue for the Church until the Reformation, although it was a concern. The Early Church's first Bible was the Septuagint - not the texts of the Jewish Masoretes.
?.....1947.....'Isaiah Scroll'.....Qumran scrolls...Masoretes' sources ?
The problem is that there is no copy of the oldest text. What we have is people deciding which is the "oldest variant" in a range of texts, all of which are probably at best tenth or twelfth hand copies of the originals. Some researchers claim that certain texts are older than others and other, equally qualified researchers think those texts are more recent.
People are talking about altering the Greek to match the English and Latin translations, which I find horrifying.
Let's take an example: we know that St. Jerome, when translating the Latin Vulgate had access to the Hebrew texts of Scripture extant in the Holy Land and spoke in Hebrew with Jews of the Holy Land while he was working on his translation: in other words he translated in the 4th century under close to ideal conditions.
Today, the oldest complete text of the Hebrew Scriptures we have dates to the year 1009 - six hundred years older than the texts to which St. Jerome had access. In some cases, passages in our editions of Hebrew Scriptures which seem very obscure to us have a quite lucid and plausible reading in St. Jerome's Vulgate - which is why references to the Vulgate are an indispensable part of the critical apparatus of any scholarly edition of the Hebrew Scriptures. St. Jerome gives us a view into editions of the Hebrew which are now forever lost.
Surely the true meaning of what was actually written by the hand of--or dictated by the lips of--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is absolutely authoritative.
From a textual-critical point of view we can only guess as to what the Evangelists precisely wrote - the original autographs are lost forever.
The Douay-Rheims is a solid translation of St. Jerome's Vulgate - although it is written in Elizabethan English.
I have read--can't remember where--that the Jews were very, very careful about keeping errors from creeping into their manuscripts on recopying. You seem to be saying that, say, the Hebrew versions of the OT now extant differ from the versions available to St. Jerome.
Orthodox Rabbinical Judaism has a view of Scriptural inerrancy - especially regarding the Torah or Pentateuch - which is much more intense and elaborate than any Christian notion of inerrancy. Orthodox Jews claim that the techniques they use for textual preservation date back to the time of Moses - the best empirical evidence shows that these techniques date back to the sixth century.
The version of the Hebrew Scriptures used by most Orthodox Jews is the Bomberg or Rabbinic Bible, also known as the Mikraot Gedolot. Bomberg's edition was first printed in its entirety in 1525, I believe. The text of the Leningrad Codex from 1009, the one used by most modern scholars, is significantly different textually from the Mikraot Gedolot.
Since both texts were produced according to the strict Masoretic rules of transmission, this creates some doubt about the very high reputation of Jewish text transmission techniques.
If there is a difference between a Masoretic text of 1009 and 1525 (516 years' difference) it stands to reason that there were variants between a Masoretic text of 380 and 1009 (629 years' difference).
I also wonder, if the Apostles came from a tradition of being that careful with manuscripts, whether a version of the Gospels survives that is not substantially identical with the originals.
This is doubtful. The beginning of Jewish canonical activity dates from the establishment of the scribal school of Tiberias after the destruction of the Temple. At that time there were a large number of Jews who read Scriptures in widely varying versions of Greek.
The Tiberian school refused to consider any Greek language document as holy.
The Apostles (except for perhaps Matthew) wrote in Greek - so they were separating themselves from the stricter textual school of the Pharisaic Jews already.
Additionally, immemorial Jewish practice was to use texts until they became too fragile - and then to bury those texts the way one would bury a person. Most surviving texts of ancient Hebrew documents exist only because they were buried in extreme desert climates where they did not rot.
The original texts of the NT were probably written in well-watered communities like Antioch and Jerusalem and the coastal cities of Greece and Turkey.
Given the propensity of Jews to bury well-thumbed texts, the autographs would most likely be lost forever.
Well, I use the Vulgate for devotional and liturgical purposes, but I think knowing the Scriptures in the original languages is a very worthwhile endeavor. I will probably read the Douay-Rheims to my children when they are old enough to comprehend speech.
Of course, the Vulgate itself exists in various versions - only two officially though: the Clementina (which is in actuality a revision of the edition of Pope Clement VIII), and the Nova Vulgata.
The very first printed Bible - the Gutenberg Bible, was a Vulgate according to the text used at the University of Paris.
Of course, there are many arguments against using the Vulgate - it is not a critical text; it is a translation; we are not sure exactly what Greek sources St. Jerome used; it itself endured the vicissitudes of transmission until it was redacted 11 centuries later; etc.
My belief is that the Scripture officially proclaimed by the Church in the liturgy is the standard and therefore the Clementina and the Nova are authoritative for me.
A worthwhile book for the NT could be either Aland's or Metzger's.
Greetham has a decent book on the basic methods of textual criticism.
All these authors take a pretty broadminded relatively non-ideological approach to the subject.
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