The Director of the
Caskey
Center for Biblical Text and Translation, in
Wake Forest, South Carolina
USA, has given
the public a new resource that promises to shine a bright light on a field that
is often overlooked and minimized in modern Christian academia. Resisting the temptation to treat the field
as a mere branch of apologetics, Dr. Charles L. Quarles efficiently presents in
161 pages the purposes, materials, and methods used in the field of New
Testament textual criticism, and gives readers examples of his own detailed analysis
in three specific textual contests (Matthew 16:2
b-3, John 1:18, and Colossians 1:12) and invited consideration of
many more (without gauging importance according to their length) such as those
in Matthew 19:4, Mark 7:2, Luke 7:31, John 8:20, Romans 14:19, Hebrews 10:38, and
James 1:12. No variants from the Petrine
Epistles, Jude, or Revelation are covered.
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 Egypt’s
exceptionally dry conditions, explains the lack of early Byzantine manuscripts
outside Egypt.
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 Muenster, Germany, the Center
for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts in Texas, the International Greek New
Testament Project, and the Center for New
Testament Textual Studies at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and
more.
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.
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.
