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| Charles L. Quarles |
Quarles’ volume has much less well-masked propaganda that Metzger & Ehrman’s obsolete The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. Whereas Metzger adhered to the untenable theory of the Lucianic recension for his entire academic career, Quarles appears up-to-date and does not suffers from an excess of Hort-echoing like his predecessor. Rather than badger his readers with reminders of how awful the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text are supposed to be, Quarles reports that Western Christian academia in general has treated the case for Byzantine Priority with relative disinterest so far.
Unfortunately he seems to have assumed, in the course of
Part One, some points that he himself acknowledges as tentative by the end of
the book. For example he asserts that
“no satisfactory explanation for this disappearance [ i.e., the disappearance
of predominantly Byzantine manuscripts prior to Chrysostom] has been offered,”
but this is not true: the simple
historicity of the enforcement of Roman policies under Decius, and again under Diocletian,
resulted in the destruction of Christian writings of all kinds. This, and the effects of humidity upon
papyrus everywhere, except in
In addition, while patristic evidence is lacking for sustained strings of distinct Byzantine readings in patristic writings, that is due to (1) the tendency of the Byzantine, Alexandrian, and Western transmission-lines to agree, and (2) the absence of patristic ante-Nicene evidence from many locales where the Byzantine Text dominated soon afterward. Are we so fixated on the Egyptian text, merely because the writing-materials have endured thanks to the dry weather of Egypt, that in the middle of the doctrinal disputes of the second half of the 300s the Gothic version and the Peshitta arose brimming with novel readings and that the churches, rather than protest and riot, welcomed the novelties and tossed aside the texts handed down to them by their persecuted predecessors? Liturgical adjustments aside, such a wholesale replacement seems unlikely.
Back to the book though:
the last section of Part 1 superbly reviews the tools for New Testament
textual criticism, sampling the best parts of the author’s earlier 40
Questions About the Text and Canon co-written with L. Scott Kellum. New features in the Nestle-Aland compilation
such as the blank diamond (♦) are included.
Online tools are also described and links are given to the Institute for
New Testament Textual Research in
The second part is a delightfully balanced presentation about how to evaluate external and internal evidence, blended with an investigation into Matthew 18:15. Quarles is a strong advocate for Hort’s dictum that “Knowledge of documents should precede final judgment upon readings,” and he appeals to it repeatedly. He very candidly acknowledges however that the foundation of Hort’s transmission-model – that the Byzantine text emerged as a combination of the Alexandrian and Western text-types – was incorrect: “Text critics have recognized that the old text-type approach is problematic and must be abandoned.” Without the acceptance of text-types Hort’s model cannot exist.
Instead of shifting the text-critical train into reverse and shouting a loud apology to Western Christendom for leading to public down the wrong path by a phantom theory for generations, though, Quarles proceeds to make a case for retaining the popular “reasoned eclectic” approach which happens to produce the same results as Hort’s approach 99% of the time. Nevertheless he affirms that “The testimony of multiple witnesses is usually more trustworthy than the testimony of a single witness” – and (with the Tyndale House GNT and the SBLGNT) recommends ἀμάρτήσῃ εἰς σέ in Matthew 18:15.
Over and over the reader is shown that it is crucial to engage one’s intelligence when weighing internal considerations against each other. Nevertheless, while Quarles’ most detailed analysis is made to three small contests in Part Three, he expresses his position about many others as if they are fully settled, content to leave some details vague and some assertions unbalanced in the interest of brevity. For instance regarding the contest between ΘΣ and ΟΣ in First Timothy 3:16 he states, “The reference to Jesus’ incarnation in the verse understandably prompted a Christian scribe to mistakenly read the Ο as a Θ.” It is equally understandable however that any scribe could in a moment of carelessness fail to add the crossbar, just as people writing by hand have occasionally failed to cross the lowercase “t” and thus wrote about limes instead of times.
An interesting development in the evaluation of internal evidence is that conflations are downplayed; consideration of scribal subvocalization is given as much emphasis. A degree of subjectivity is likely to be unavoidable when readers attempt to apply Quarles’ cogent-sounding statement (p. 89), “Textual critics should prefer readings that initially seem difficult but make better sense after further study.” How difficult does a reading need to be before it merits being rejected as a palpable mistake? The reading τῆς Ἰουδαίας in Luke 4:44 is used as an example of a superficially difficult reading – but not a very persuasive one inasmuch as the longevity of the writing-materials seems to have been given too much weight (i.e., the age of the ancestor shared by Α D Byz 700 Vulgate Peshitta ita ite itaur Syriac Harkleanmargin Armenian Georgian Ethiopic was not necessarily later than the shared ancestor of P75 01 03 019 032 892 Sahidic). A reading may be intelligently salvageable without this becoming commendable. I wonder what Quarles does with the readings of 01 in Matthew 13:35 and Luke 1:26.
Without telling Quarles’ conclusions about Matthew 16:2b-3 and John 1:18 and Colossians 1:12 in Part Three, I am confident that there is plenty to both dismay and delight readers whether they favor the readings of supermajorities or tiny minorities of witnesses.
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Repeatedly I was confronted by a candid regret that more research needs to be done in specific areas of research – the same sort of plea that John Burgon made over 120 years ago. The dating of the supplemental pages of 032 is particularly significant, and Quarles’ observations should be considered through the lens of what Ulrich Schmid wrote in his chapter “Reassessing the Palaeography and Codicology of the Freer Gospel Manuscript” on pp. 227-249 of The Freer Biblical Manuscripts (2006 ed. Larry W. Hurtado).
The Appendices must not be overlooked, especially III (Problems with the Text-type Approach) – which tends to show that the problem is by no means fatal to the apparoach but comes down to an over-reliance on statistics, but that is something to explore elsewhere) and IV (Thoroughgoing Eclecticism, eulogizing the great J. K. Elliott). The glossary, though, is too short.
In conclusion, Quarles has provided an helpful and intriguing and up-to-date introduction to the field of New Testament textual criticism that raises as many little questions as it resolves – and that is not a bad thing.
A few closing points:
On p. 79 the reinforcement of 03’s text is attributed to a “10th- or 11th- century scribe” but the basis for this date is not given; I suggest that a date several centuries later is plausible.
On page 31 in a footnote, “305” should read instead “304.”
On p. 65 all mention of the forgery 2427 should be removed.
