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Friday, January 24, 2025

How (And How Not) to Define a Text-type

 In the ninth lecture in my online introduction to New Testament textual criticism, I describe text-types.  There has been a recent wave of resistance in academia to affirm the reality of text-types, on the grounds that only the Byzantine text has an archetype capable of confident reconstruction.  This resistance is due to a failure to acknowledge the proper way to define a text-type.  Instead of profiling entire collections of readings in separate genres of the New Testament (Gospels, Acts, General Epistles, Pauline Epistles, Revelation) , a constellation of 50 or less distinct readings is all that is needed to separate manuscripts into the traditionally recognized text-types (Alexandrian, Byzantine, Western, Caesarean).  

Because of pervasive mixture and each manuscript's scribe's uniqueness, once each text-type's distinct variants - the stars in the constellation, so to speak - are identified, 45 out of 50 variants, rather than 50 out of 50, sufficiently shows the type of text a manuscript contains.

This approach is applicable to the full text across a genre; it does not apply to small fragmentary manuscripts, the classification of which should be made and which should also be considered provisional.   Why provisional?  Because block-mixture is real.  It was once proposed that a small sample is sufficient to show the text-type of a manuscript:  the text-type of the extant sample was extrapolated to apply hypothetically to the non-extant portion.   The logic seemed sound:  if you open a jar and stick a spoon inside and pull it out full of grape jelly, it's reasonable to conclude that the whole jar is full of grape jelly.


But sometimes there's a jar like Smucker's Goober-Grape.  One small spoon is an insufficient basis to ascertain the jar's contents.  Some manuscript are like that.  The textual character of Codex Washingtoniensis, 032, varies widely in different segments of text.  Codex Regius, 019, shifts from being predominantly Byzantine at the beginning of Matthew to being mainly Alexandrian by the end of John.  The large manuscripts that only survive as small fragments might have been like that too.  

When we have the text of a full genre preserved in a manuscript, its text can be validly assigned to a type.  Over a century ago, Edward Ardron Hutton, assisted by F. C. Burkitt,  helpfully wrote An Atlas of Textual Criticism in which he presented (or re-presented) a valid basis for dividing groups of manuscripts' text into families.  Hutton affirmed that "The test of antiquity is decidedly against the Syrian," i.e., against the Byzantine text.  Built into his statement is the assumption that we can identify what the Byzantine text is.



Hutton observed that the same kind of close relationship seen in family 13 (see the diagram here) can exists - at a lesser degree of magnification - between larger groups of manuscripts.  He proceeded to list "Triple readings" - variation-units which are so to speak a three-horse race and the three horses are Byzantine ("S"), Alexandrian ("A"), and Western (W").

The text of a non-fragmentary manuscript can easily be assigned to a text-type, or be recognized as mixed, on the basis of Hutton's Triple Readings.  There is no need to add comets and fireflies to the constellation while the stars are blazing bright.

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