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| Dr. Stephen C. Carlson |
Joining
us today is Dr. Stephen C. Carlson, a professor at the Australian Catholic
University. A former
lawyer, in 2012 Dr. Carlson received a Ph. D. at Duke University; his
dissertation consisted of an attempt to reconstruct the transmission-history of
the text of Galatians, using principles from the biological field of
cladistics. In the process, Carlson
produced new collations of the of the text of Galatians in Papyrus 46, ℵ, B, A,
C, D, F, G, and several minuscules, including 1780 (Codex Branscombius, from c.
1200) which is housed at Duke
University.
His
investigation involved the testimony of 94 witnesses across 1,624 textual
contests. He also made a new compilation
of the entire book, disagreeing with NA27 thirteen times. Let’s ask him some questions about all that.
(1) Dr. Carlson, thanks for taking the time for this
interview. What was the most surprising thing you learned in the course of
researching the text of Galatians?
Carlson: Thanks for taking the trouble to read
my work carefully and propose such well thought-out and intelligent questions. There were a lot
of little surprises but nothing really big. I suppose the most surprising thing
is how few times I ended up disagreeing with the critical text. (Also how
little evidence of theologically motivated changes there was, particularly in
the road up to the Byzantine text.) The biggest differences were Gal 2:12
(“when he came” vs. “when they came”) and Gal 2:20 (“faith of/in God and
Christ” and “faith of/on the Son of God”). Almost everything else involved word-order and word-choice variants.
(2) What is cladistics?
Carlson: Cladistics is a method for inferring a family
tree for a group of entities that were generated by a genealogical process. If we have a way of judging which of two
different proposed family trees fit the data better (i.e., a family tree of
manuscripts that puts very similar manuscripts together is better than one does
not), then the method of cladistics says that we should try as many of the
possible genealogies that we can until we find the “best” one. Moreover,
cladistics proposes a metric for identifying good family trees: they’re the ones that minimize the number of
scribal errors that must have happened throughout the transmission history. This is called “maximum parsimony.”
(3) A lot of attention has been given lately to the Coherence-Based
Genealogical Method. Your approach seems
to involve less data-manipulation, and fewer initial steps that steer results. What can you tell us briefly about (a) what an unoriented stemma is, (b) how you made the unoriented stemma
for Galatians, and (c) how cladistics
guides the process of starting with an unoriented stemma and ending up with an
oriented stemma?
Carlson: Good question. We ordinarily think of a
stemma or family tree as having a chronological direction. It starts with the
original, proceeds to its copies, and then to copies of the copies. In
cladistics, we favor the stemma that minimizes the number of scribal errors,
but this begs the question as to what is a scribal error and what is the
“authorial” reading (also known as the “true” or “original” reading).
The CBGM,
as I understand it, is a development of Kurt Aland’s local genealogical
principle that there are places in the text where we can definitely tell which
readings are errors and build from there. The CBGM is a more rigorous application of
this principle, identifying “potential ancestors” based on how many locally
genealogically prior readings a manuscript has in relation to the other. Of course, the value of this approach depends
on making good judgments about the priority of one reading to another – although
there is some provision for feedback and updating one’s judgments about
genealogical priority.
My
approach defers the question of priority to the back end of the process. The fundamental insight for this is in fact 50
years old; it is this: you don’t need to
know which variant is more likely to be a scribal error in order to determine
the basic shape of the stemma. Regardless of which reading you think is older
than another, the stemma will have the same shape, that is, it will identify
the same manuscripts as being close (or distant) relatives as before.
The only
difference is that the stemmas will have different orientations. A textual critic that likes the Western text
and thinks its readings are prior to those of non-Western manuscripts will
orient the stemma in such a way that the Western manuscripts will at the top,
while a textual critical who likes 1739’s readings a lot can orient the stemma in
such a way that 1739 and its relatives will be at the top. However you orient the stemma, there is only
one “unoriented stemma” that most efficiently arranges the manuscripts with
respect to one another.
It turns
out that finding this unoriented stemma is something that computers are very
good at, and it does not need any judgments about which reading is better or
more prior than another. Once the best
unoriented stemma has been found (of those looked at), the textual critic can
move in and identify the best way to the orient the stemma based on the
critic’s understanding of which readings are more likely authorial or scribal.
So
to answer your specific questions: (a)
the unoriented stemma is the stemma that most efficiently accounts for the
patterns of readings (but not their priority) among all the manuscripts that
you’re looking at; (b) I made the
unoriented stemma by creating a matrix of manuscripts and variation units that
describe what the variants readings are and fed it to a program I wrote for
finding the stemma that most efficiently accounts for the distribution of the
variant readings; (c) the cladistics
procedure ends with discovery of the best-found unoriented stemma: the rest is
old fashioned text critical work dependent on the critical judgment of the
textual critic.
(4) For a long time, textual critics have been comfortable
working on the premise that community of error implies community of origin.
Does a stemmatic approach confirm that principle, or should that principle be
modified? Or to put it another way, did you find a significant amount of
accidental or coincidental agreements among essentially unrelated witnesses?
Carlson: I would say that a stemmatic approach
implements this principle. Cladistics does recognize that there can be a large
amount of accidental coincidences among relatively unrelated witnesses, but as
long as these coincidences are not patterned more strongly than genetic agreements,
the maximum parsimony principle still works. I would say that within the
medieval transmission of the Byzantine text, most of the coincidences in
non-Byzantine readings are in fact accidental and the result we get in the
stemma is not so much in falsely identifying close relatives when they are not
but rather an inability to identify close relatives at all.
(5) (Long question.) A normal principle in textual
criticism is, “Prefer the reading that
best explains its rivals.” But
sometimes plausible explanations can be given for two rival variants. In those
cases, some textual critics have resorted to making decisions based on the
character of groups, preferring the reading supported by witnesses that tend to
have readings that best explain their rivals. Metzger’s Textual Commentary seems to frequently describe that resort being
taken; Alexandrian readings are often preferred because they are Alexandrian,
which is a little frustrating, because at some point the assumption of the
relative degrees of reliability of witnesses ends up confirming itself. But
what alternative is there? Can
cladistics contribute something to the resolution of finely-balanced contests?
Carlson: Well, normally in textual criticism there are
two kinds of evidence, internal and external. Where the internal evidence is
not decisive we need to look at the external evidence (and vice versa). A thorough-going eclectic might eschew
external evidence, but I don’t know that the alternative is besides giving up. If we knew the history of the text, we should
use it. Metzger and other “reasoned eclectics” would claim that the reason that
Alexandrian readings are preferred in these cases is that in other cases
Alexandrian readings seem to be good. What
I think cladistics/stemmatics can contribute is being consistent in the use of
external evidence, which doesn’t always happen. In addition, there can be variants where
contests are finely balanced both
internally and externally. Those I think
we should try the best we can.
(6) When measuring the relative degrees to which one
witness’ contents are related to other witnesses’ contents, how did you handle
the problem of gaps in the materials, such as missing pages in manuscripts,
incomplete quotations in patristic writings, or the inability of some versional
evidence to express distinctions between rival readings that appear in Greek?
Carlson: The method does allow for gaps in the
witness, which can be coded as “missing.” It doesn’t really affect the algorithm or the
maximum parsimony principle, but with less data the result will be less
precise.
(7) In the most recent N-A/UBS compilation, the testimony
of minuscules 1739 and 1175 seems to have been given more weight, and thus had
more impact, than one might have expected in the General Epistles. Would that
be justified in Galatians, too?
Carlson: In my research for Galatians, they’re of
secondary weight. 1739 turns out to be
as close to the archetype as A but not as close as 01 (Sinaiticus) or 33. It is an important manuscript with an early
text, but not as good as Zuntz claimed for Paul (results could differ in other
letters). 1175 turned out to be a mixed
manuscript: one source is related to 33 and the other source is Byzantine.
(8) The text produced by Westcott and Hort in 1881 has been
criticized for being based on a genealogical method that lacked a real-life
genealogy. Do we now have a real-life genealogy for the text of Galatians?
Carlson: Having a genealogy for Galatians is indeed my
claim. Of course, it is not “real-life” but a proposal based on the evidence of
92 witnesses. The difference over Hort is that it is more precise
and less hand-wavy than the vague groups that Hort predicted.
(9) Tell me about parsimony. Did you find the “expense” of
a particular family-tree of witnesses consistently the same across different
segments of the text? Also, inasmuch as, as you acknowledged in the
dissertation, “history can be messy,” can parsimony ever give us anything more
than a vague that-a-way wave of the hand?
Carlson: My impression is that the text of Galatians
is less stable (and hence would have a higher “expense”) in the first two
chapters than in the last four. As for
parsimony, it is like Occam’s Razor: all other things equal, we go for the
simplest, not because it is more likely to be true but because we don’t really
know or have a justified basis in claiming how the true reality is specifically
more complicated.
(10) What did you find out about minuscule 1854 that was
interesting?
Carlson: Out of the 92 witnesses of Galatians I
studied, a full two-thirds of them were Byzantine, and most of these had
scribal errors that differed from the Byzantine prototype in about a dozen or
so places. 1854 is interesting in that it only deviated in four (and in some of
those four, the Byzantine Text itself is divided). Since 1854 is an eleventh-century text much
younger than some uncial Byzantines of the 800s, it suggests that some
important and early exemplars of the Byzantine were still available to be
copied centuries after they were made.
(11) Sifting through the textual commentary on select
variant-units embedded in the dissertation, I noticed that you occasionally
favored a Byzantine reading over the reading of Vaticanus. Do you think this
trend would continue if a cladistics-based approach were applied to the entire
Pauline corpus?
Carlson: Those cases are mainly based on how I
evaluated the internal evidence, while cladistics helps me the external. I do
think that the critical text over-values Vaticanus when it omits short words.
(12) What are our top three Greek manuscripts of Galatians?
Carlson: Sinaiticus (01), Vaticanus (B), and
Claromontanus (D), but I think in terms of good combinations of manuscripts
instead of good manuscripts. Choose any
one manuscript from {D, F, G}, one from {B, P46}, and one from {01 33 A 1739
1611 1854 (Byz)}, and adopt the reading supported by at least two of the three. That will give you a very good approximation
of the archetype just from those three. The
three closest are B 01 33, but since 01 and 33 are too closely related, you
will need a Western (or even a Byzantine because of its readings shared among
Westerns) instead of 01 or 33 to get a better text than what the combination of
B, 01, 33 alone can give you.
(13) In Galatians 2:16 you rejected the Byzantine
non-inclusion of δε even though the Byzantine reading is supported by 1739, the
Harklean group, and Papyrus 46. Do you still have the same view, and if so,
could you briefly walk us through your reasoning for that?
Carlson: This is a very close case in my opinion. In favor of the inclusion of δέ we have D*FG d
b vg; B; 01; C 1241S, and Chrysostom.
For non-inclusion of δέ we have P46, 33 1175, AP, 1739 Ψ hark Byz. In terms of external evidence, aside from the
Westerns (DFG), every other group is split, so there’s slight weight on the
inclusion. Transcriptionally, the
omission of the connective particle δέ looks harder than its inclusion, but as
Royse has shown, the omission of such little words was fairly common in the
earliest period. Intrinsically, i.e., in
terms of what Paul meant, the best interpretation of the non-inclusion is the
same as one with the inclusion of δέ, so that’s not much help. I ended up favoring the slight external
evidence for the inclusion, thinking that its omission would have been more
common in the early period. But it’s not
a judgment I would bet the farm on.
(14) Regarding a reading in Galatians 5:21, you claimed
that a deliberate insertion (of φóνοι, “murders”) was more likely than its
accidental omission via simple parablepsis. Could you elaborate on the basis
for your reasoning there?
Carlson: I think both possibilities did happen in the
transmission of the text. On my stemma, it was inserted twice and omitted
twice. Ultimately, I went for the
intrinsic evidence, what I think fits Paul’s argument the best, and the sin of
“murders” seemed somewhat out of place compared with the other sins of the
Galatians. But, yeah, another variant
I’m not betting the farm on.
(15) Robert Waltz, the custodian of the Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual
Criticism website, has finished a compilation of the text of Galatians, and
although his approach employed different principles from yours, I think he
would concur that the text of 4:25a is “all over the map.” You gave this passage some attention back in 2014. Should the phrase “Sinai is a mountain in Arabia”
be considered an interpolation? Or is
that conclusion a case of cutting the knot rather than untying it?
Carlson: I’ve argued that it came from a marginal note
in an early (second-century) authoritative edition of Paul’s letters. Textual critics are by and large skeptical of
such solutions. I suppose it is cutting
the knot (if any reading is original, I would favor that one starts with τὸ γὰρ
Σινᾶ) rather than untying it, but maybe the existence of the knot in the first
place is because of such a marginal note.
Thanks, Dr. Carlson, for sharing your research with our readers.
I Cor. 10:2 – 804 has εβαπτισθησαν, agreeing with NA. 
