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Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Video Lecture: Text-types

A new lecture, 32 minutes long, about the basic concept of text-types, is online at YouTube!
This is lecture #9 in the series Introduction to NT Textual Criticism.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXq9Vn_CRkc
Lecture 9 includes, among other things,
details about Griesbach's Canons.




2 comments:

Joey McCollum said...

(Quick note before my actual comment: your link to the YouTube video doesn't work because the URL you provided splits the "https" prefix into "htt" and "ps".)

You do a great job presenting the theory and several examples of text-types and textual families in a succinct presentation! I appreciate your mentioning the detail of Family 13's apparent influence from the lectionary tradition. As you mention, Family 1 and the Harklean group (also called Family 2138 in the Catholic Epistles) are other families of interest in the Gospels and elsewhere. For anyone interested in an informal encyclopedia of these and other textual groups (in addition to various other topics in New Testament textual criticism), I've found Robert Waltz's work (http://www.skypoint.com/members/waltzmn/) to be a helpful reference.

It's a shame that more scholars are arguing that the idea of text-types has had its day. While I agree that classifying manuscripts into "hard" groups fails to capture the diversity of variants we observe between those groups, I think that the theory behind text-types can be refined rather than rejected.

Your presentation on this topic really came at a great time. A while back, I wrote a paper on how to classify manuscripts into "soft" groups, such that manuscripts are described in terms of weighted contributions from different the textual profiles of different families or text-types. I applied this method to Tommy Wasserman's collation of Jude with very promising results. Most significantly, the textual profiles the method identified corresponded to many textual families already identified in the literature (the Old Alexandrian group, Family 2138 / Harklean Group, Family 1739, von Soden's Kr and Kc Byzantine subgroups, commentary manuscripts, a Lectionary group, and others). Andrews University Seminary Studies (AUSS) published my work last year, and the paper is now accessible on their website at https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/auss/vol57/iss1/6/.

James Snapp Jr said...

Thanks for that, Joey; I shall investigate.
The link to the video should work now.