In 2010, I wrote an essay called
Equitable Eclecticism: The Future of New Testament Textual Criticism, and included it in the Kindle e-book
Assorted Essays on New Testament Textual Criticism. Since then, I have frequently been asked about how my text-critical approach differs from the Byzantine Priority approach and
“Reasoned Eclecticism.
” So, as a convenient reference, here is the essay on Equitable Eclecticism, presented in two parts (with some improvements).
Equitable
Eclecticism:
The Future of New Testament Textual Criticism
Textual
Criticism: Its Goals and Risks
The textual criticism of the
Gospels is a scientific task which has two goals. The primary goal is the reconstruction of the
text of each Gospel in its original form, that is, the form in which it was
initially received by the church. The
secondary goal is the reconstruction of the transmission-history of the text. This involves both the evaluation of rival readings in specific variant-units, and the evaluation of the documents in which the readings are found. Hort, in his 1881 Introduction, argued that if superior readings are consistently found in a particular document or set of documents, in cases that seem easy to decide, then the character of the documents should be a factor when considering harder cases.
Hort expressed this principle as an axiom: “Knowledge of
documents should precede final judgment upon readings.” The
consideration of individual variant-units should never be completely detached
from the question of the relative quality of the witnesses, or from
the question of how groups of variants became characteristic readings of
text-types. Accurate text-critical
judgments will assist in the estimation of the relative values of witnesses,
and in the reconstruction of the text’s transmission-history; simultaneously, accurate assignments of relative
value to the witnesses, combined with accurate reconstructions of the text’s
transmission-history, will assist specific text-critical decisions.
The textual critic who engages this method should vigilantly avoid circularity; the adoption of a reading because “the best manuscripts” support it ought to be a last resort. After observing, on analytical grounds, that
certain witnesses seem to consistently contain the best readings, a textual
critic might then be tempted to abandon the initial
approach which led to that premise, and proceed to use the premise itself to
justify a tendency to adopt the readings of those witnesses. Similarly, a textual critic who notices that
a group of witnesses tends to contain the worst readings might be tempted to
reject the remainder of the testimony of that group of witnesses. If a textual critic proceeds to build on both
such premises, the premises will virtually determine the results of the rest of
the analysis. The “best manuscripts” will seemingly get better and better.
Competing Models of
Transmission-History
The model of transmission-history
adopted by a textual critic has a strong effect upon the values which a textual
critic assigns to the testimony of groups of witnesses, and therefore also upon the final
evaluation of variants. In this respect,
the approach which I advocate – Equitable Eclecticism – resembles the approach
used by Hort. However, Equitable
Eclecticism yields an archetype which is significantly different from the
Revised Text produced by Westcott & Hort, and from the modern descendants
of the Revised Text (such as the 28th edition of the
Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece). This is because research and discoveries
subsequent to Westcott & Hort have required the adoption of a
transmission-model significantly different from the one used by Hort.
Hort, building on premises developed by previous investigators, reasoned that the Byzantine Text
was essentially the result of a recension that consisted of readings drawn from manuscripts
with Alexandrian or Western readings; Byzantine variants were derived from the
Alexandrian Text, or the Western Text, or both, or, in some cases, came into
being during the recension. Hort
therefore rejected all distinctive Byzantine variants. After dismissing the Western Text as
the result of scribal creativity, embellishment, and a general lack of
discipline (with the exception of a smattering of readings), Hort declared the Alexandrian
Text (which he called the “Neutral” text) the only text-type which could possibly be regarded as the
depository of the original text of the Gospels.
Hort’s endorsement of the
Alexandrian Text was not absolute, but it was so strong that he openly stated
that variants shared by the Alexandrian Text’s two flagship codices (B and À) “should be accepted as the true readings until strong internal evidence
is found to the contrary,” and “No readings of ÀB can safely be rejected
absolutely,” while “All distinctively Syrian” – that is, Byzantine
– “readings must be at once rejected.”
Thus, in the approach used by Hort, the degree of favor that was given to the
Alexandrian Text was matched only by the degree of disregard that was given to the Byzantine Text. The categorical rejection of Byzantine readings was a natural implications of Hort’s model of transmission-history in which the
Western Text was derived from the Alexandrian Text, and the Byzantine Text was
derived from both the Alexandrian Text and the Western Text.
However, Hort acknowledged that
such a clear-cut genealogical model would be out of place if a
transmission-model persistently involved readings which all had some clearly
ancient attestation. [See Hort’s Introduction, page 286, § 373.]
This
very thing, or something very close to it, was subsequently proposed by textual critics in the 1900s. Eminent scholars such as E. C. Colwell, G. D.
Kilpatrick, and Kurt and Barbara Aland maintained, respectively, that “The
overwhelming majority of readings,” “almost all variants,” and “practically all
the substantive variants in the text of the New Testament” existed before the
year 200. Nevertheless the
Hortian text has not been overthrown.
Only slightly changed, it has become entrenched in NA-28 and UBS-5 as the primary, and nearly exclusive, Greek New Testament used in
seminaries.
With the discovery and publication
of Egyptian New Testament papyri in the 1900s – beginning with Grenfell and
Hunt’s work at Oxyrhynchus – Hort’s claim that the Alexandrian readings have a
demonstrably greater antiquity than their rivals has eroded. Harry A. Sturz collected and categorized
dozens of distinctive Byzantine variants which were supported by at least one
early papyrus. Sturz’s data
does not vindicate the entire Byzantine Text (and we should not expect it to do so). What it does do is demonstrate that Hort’s main reason for
rejecting distinctive Byzantine readings was unsound. According to Hort’s transmission-model, none
of the early distinctive Byzantine readings listed by Sturz should exist. The fact that they obviously did exist, even
in papyri found in Egypt,
demonstrates that the Byzantine Text may, at any given point, attest to an
ancient distinctive reading. Hort’s theory of the origin of distinct Byzantine readings was wrong.
In addition, discoveries about the
texts in the papyri, in early versions, and in early parchment codices have
contributed to the erosion of one of the building-blocks of Hort’s
approach: the proposal that conflations
in the Byzantine Text demonstrate that it is later than the Alexandrian Text
and the Western Text. As Edward
Miller objected in 1897, eight conflations cannot justify the rejection of the
entire Byzantine Text. They
may be comparable to recently minted coins dropped in an ancient well.
Dr. Wilbur Pickering, in Appendix D
of his book
The Identity of the New Testament Text, showed that an apparent conflation exists in Codex Sinaiticus at John
13:24 (where the Alexandrian Text has και λεγει αυτω ειπε τις εστιν, the
Byzantine Text has πυθεσθαι τις αν ειη, and Sinaiticus reads πυθεσθαι τις αν ειη περι
ου ελεγεν, και λεγει αυτω ειπε τις εστιν).
A conflation appears to occur in B at Ephesians 2:5 and at Colossians 1:12 (where
the Western Text has καλεσαντι, the Byzantine Text has ικανωσαντι, and B has
καλεσαντι και ικανωσαντι). In D, a
conflation appears to occur at Acts 10:48 and John 5:37 (where the Alexandrian
Text – supported by P75 – has εκεινος μεμαρτυρηκεν, the Byzantine Text –
supported by P66 - has αυτος μεμαρτυρηκεν, and D has εκεινος αυτος
μεμαρτυρηκεν).
 |
In the world according to Hort,
this should not happen. |
The papyri have supplied direct
evidence against Hort’s belief that apparent conflations imply that the text in
which they are found must be late. In
P53, the text of Matthew 26:36 seems to read ου αν, where the Byzantine text has ου
and the Alexandrian Text and Western Text have αν. Papyrus 66 reads σχισμα ουν παλιν at John
10:19 (agreeing with the Byzantine Text), where the Alexandrian Text has σχισμα
παλιν and the Western Text has σχισμα ουν.
Similarly, P66 reads εβαστασαν ουν παλιν at John 10:31 (again agreeing
with the Byzantine Text), where the Alexandrian Text has εβαστασαν παλιν and
the Western Text has εβαστασαν ουν.
The
appearance of such readings in very early manuscripts forces the concession
that they do not imply that the text in which they appear is late. Instead,
they prove that an early text can appear to include conflations. Nevertheless some modern-day textual critics
still appeal to Hort’s list of eight Byzantine conflations as if it
demonstrated that the entire Byzantine Text was secondary. [See for example Dan Wallace’
s treatment of the data in his online essay The Conspiracy Behind the New Bible Translations.]
Ironically, as the
papyri-discoveries took away the pedestal upon which Hort’s transmission-model had stood, they also tended to
exonerate Hort’s favored text of the Gospels, the Alexandrian Text, by
demonstrating the high antiquity of the Alexandrian text of Luke and John. Papyrus 75, in particular, possesses a
remarkably high rate of agreement with B. This shows that the Alexandrian Text of
Luke and John was carefully preserved in the 200s, and this has tended to alleviate the
suspicions of some earlier scholars that the Alexandrian Text was the result of
editorial activity in the 200s.
The correspondence between Papyrus
75 and Codex B was interpreted by some textual critics as a demonstration of
the antiquity and superiority of the entire Alexandrian Text. Kurt Aland compared the situation to sampling
a jar of jelly or jam: a mere spoonful
is enough to show what is in the rest of the jar. However, although the agreement between P75
and B proves that the Alexandrian Text of Luke and John is not the result of
scribal editing conducted in the 200s, it did not prove that Alexandrian
readings are not results of earlier scribal editing.
Theoretically, if the Western Text could
develop in the period prior to the production of P75, so could the Alexandrian Text. Papyrus 75 proved that the Alexandrian Text
of Luke and John is very early; it did not prove that Alexandrian readings are
not the result of very early editorial activity. (As late as 1992, Bruce Metzger maintained that most scholars “are still inclined to regard the
Alexandrian text as on the whole the best ancient recension,” on page 216 of The
Text of the New Testament, third edition (1992), emphasis added.)
Nor did Papyrus 75 prove that
the Byzantine Text is less ancient than the Alexandrian Text. It shows what kind of Gospels-text (or at least, major parts of the Gospels-text) was in use in Upper
Egypt
in the early 200s. It does not constitute evidence about what form of text was used, or was not used, in other places.
The most significant evidence
for the absence of the Byzantine Text prior to the 300s is the lack of
patristic testimony for its use, but this is largely an argument from
silence. The natural destructive effects
of humidity upon papyrus-material, allied with Roman persecutors who
sought to destroy Christian literature, silenced a large proportion of the Christian
communities of the first three centuries of Christendom. According to Hort’s theories, when these
communities adopted the Byzantine Text in the 300s and 400s, they embraced a
new, imported text of the Gospels, setting aside whatever they had used
previously. A more plausible alternative is
that they simply continued to use their own local texts which consisted
primarily of Byzantine readings. (For additional thoughts on this subject see my post
Byzantine Manuscripts: Where Were They Before the 300s?.)
The discovery of the papyri led
some textual critics to advocate an undue emphasis upon the ages of witnesses,
resulting in a lack of equity toward variants with no support in Egypt. Because the Egyptian climate allowed the
preservation of papyrus, the oldest copies will almost always be copies from Egypt. To favor the variant with the oldest
attestation is to tilt the playing-field, so to speak, in favor of whatever readings are found in whatever manuscripts were stored in the gentlest climate. But this
is no more reasonable than favoring the variants of a manuscript because it was
found closer to the equator than other manuscripts. Certainly when two rival variants are
evaluated, and the first is uniformly attested in early witnesses, while the
second is found exclusively in very late witnesses, the case for the first one is
enhanced. But to assign values to
witnesses according to their ages without considering factors such as climate
is to introduce a lack of equity into one’s analysis.
The papyri-discoveries elicited
another interesting development. Before Hort, pioneering scholars such as Griesbach had organized witnesses into three
main groups – Western, Byzantine, and Alexandrian. Each group, characterized by consistent
patterns of readings, was considered a text-type, and manuscripts sharing those
special patterns of readings were viewed as relatives of one another. Hort then divided the Alexandrian group into
two text-types, calling its earlier stratum the “Neutral” text, supported by Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. Then, following analysis by Kirsopp
Lake, the Caesarean text of the
Gospels was added. But the evidence from
the papyri indicates that even in a single locale (Egypt),
the text existed in forms other than those four.
Consider Papyrus 45, a
fragmentary copy of the Gospels and Acts from the early 200s (or slightly
earlier). In Mark 7:25-37, when P45
disagrees with either B or the Byzantine Text or both, P45 agrees with B 22% of
the time, it agrees with the Byzantine Text 30% of the time, and 48% of the
time it disagrees with them both. Such
departures from the usual profiles of text-types has led some textual critics
to reconsider the existence of early text-types, arguing instead that the text
in the 100s and 200s was in a state of fluctuation. A plausible alternative is that some of the
papyri attest to the existence of localized text-forms which became extinct, without
implying that the Western, Byzantine, and Caesarean forms did not exist
prior to the 300s.
Competing Greek New Testaments
In the late 1800s, Westcott &
Hort’s Greek text of the New Testament faced several obstacles. First was the popularity of the Textus Receptus, which, as the base-text
of the King James Version, had the status of an ancient landmark in
English-speaking countries, regardless of how carefully attempts were made to
demonstrate that its Reformation-era compilers, or some stealthy editors in
ancient times, were the real landmark-movers.
In 1898, the Würrtemburg Bible Society
published the first edition of Novum
Testamentum Graece, an inexpensive Greek New Testament which closely resembled the Westcott-Hort compilation, and which was designed
to compete with the edition of the Textus
Receptus which was being widely disseminated by the British and Foreign
Bible Society. (The leaders of BFBS
apparently had not found Hort’s 1881 case for his compilation irresistible.)
Eberhard Nestle wrote
an enthusiastic recommendation of this handy Greek New Testament; his brief review appeared in
the
Expository Times in June of
1898. He pointed out how “disgraceful”
it would be to continue to circulate Erasmus’ errors in Rev. 17:8 and Rev.
22:19-21. He invited the British and
Foreign Bible Society to begin to circulate
Novum
Testamentum Graece instead of the
Textus
Receptus. In 1904 the British and
Foreign Bible Society began circulating the fourth edition of
Novum Testamentum Graece. Its editor: Eberhard Nestle.
While that was happening, a scholar
named Hermann von Soden was in the process of compiling an edition of the
Greek New Testament which textual scholars expected to become definitive,
superseding all previous editions. But
when von Soden’s Greek New Testament was released in 1902-1911, it was found to
be extremely cumbersome, and it was flawed in various ways. Nestle’s Novum
Testamentum Graece was on hand to meet the need of seminarians and other textual researchers, and it has
done so ever since – and it eventually was adopted, in later editions, as the primary base-text for new translations.
But should that be the case? According to Kurt and Barbara Aland, the 27th edition of NTG
differs from the text compiled by Eberhard Nestle “in merely 700
passages.” Considering the high number of variant-units involved,
this implies that the text of the Gospels in NA-27 and UBS-4
is essentially the same text that was published by Eberhard Nestle in the early
1900s. (See page 20 of The
Text of the New Testament: “In its
657 printed pages the early Nestle differs from the new text in merely seven
hundred passages.” Consider that in the Gospels alone, the 25th and 27th editions of NTG disagree at over 400 places.)
It is as if the papyri (and the research into early
versions, and the revisions of patristic writings, and other significant
discoveries and research undertaken in the 1900s) have scarcely had an impact, whereas in reality they cracked the transmission-model that was a large part of the foundation of the Westcott-Hort compilation.
The marketplace for Greek New
Testaments in the early 1900s rapidly became crowded: Bernard Weiss, Alexander Souter, and J. M. S.
Baljon made compilations which rivaled Nestle’s. F. H. A.
Scrivener’s editions of the Textus
Receptus remained in circulation. Thomas Newberry’s 1870 Englishman’s Greek New Testament – an interlinear edition of the Textus
Receptus which featured a presentation of variants adopted by textual
critics prior to Westcott & Hort (Griesbach, Lachmann, Tregelles,
Tischendorf, Alford, and Wordsworth) – also remained in print. The public generally had to choose between
either a Greek text similar to the 1881 revision of Westcott & Hort, or the
Textus Receptus.
That changed in 1982, when Zane Hodges and Arthur
Farstad published a compilation called The
Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text. As its name implies, this text was intended
to consist of the readings shared by the majority of Greek manuscripts. Hodges and Farstad proposed that the Alexandrian
Text is a heavily edited, pruned form of the text, and that the Majority Text is
much better, inasmuch as “In any tradition where there are not major
disruptions in the transmissional history, the individual reading which has the
earliest beginning is the one most likely to survive in a majority of
documents.” The work of Hodges and Farstad was the basis for many
text-critical footnotes in the New Testament in the New King James Version,
which was published around the same time under Dr. Farstad’s supervision.
A similar work was released in 1991
by Maurice Robinson and William Pierpont, called
The New Testament in the Original Greek According to the Byzantine/Majority Textform. A
second edition was published in 2005.
Rejecting any notion of defending the
Textus Receptus (which differs from the Byzantine Text at over
1,800 points, about 1,000 of which are translatable), Robinson and Pierpont
regarded the Byzantine Text as virtually congruent to the original text. The
Byzantine Textform consists of a series of majority readings, wherever majority readings clearly exist. Outside the
pericope adulterae (John 7:53-8:11) and the book of Revelation, almost
no analytical attempts to reconstruct the relationships of variants within the
Byzantine tradition seems evident, since the question is usually settled by a
numerical count (or, by a consultation of representative manuscripts, using data from von Soden’
s work).
In some respects, Hodges &
Farstad and Robinson & Pierpont have paved a trail that was blazed in the
1800s by John Burgon, who opposed the theories of Westcott & Hort. Burgon’s aggressive writing-style sometimes
overshadowed his argumentation; nevertheless some of his views have been vindicated
by subsequent research.
For example,
Hort asserted that “even among the numerous unquestionably spurious readings of
the New Testament there are no signs of deliberate falsification of the text
for dogmatic purposes,” but Burgon insisted that the opposite was
true. Burgon’s posthumously published Causes of Corruption (1896) even
included a sub-chapter titled “Corruption by the Orthodox.” Almost a century later in 1993, a variation
on Burgon’s theme was upheld by Bart Ehrman in the similarly titled book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. As a result, although Ehrman exaggerated his
case in many respects, no textual critics now consider Hort’s assertion to be
correct.
Many scholars and interested
bystanders, noticing that the weaknesses of several of Hort’s key premises and
assertions have been exposed, have been willing to consider the model of
transmission-history proposed by the supporters of the Byzantine Textform. Others have irresponsibly attempted to associate it with the fundamentalist doctrine of King James Onlyism.
Others have rejected it because, despite detailed lists of principles of
internal and external evidence in Dr. Robinson’s essay
The Case for Byzantine Priority, the factor that usually determines the adoption of a variant in the approach advocated by
Robinson is its attestation in over 80% of the Greek manuscripts. Patristic evidence and the testimony of early
versions are not included in the equation of what constitutes the majority
reading. Distinctive Alexandrian
variants, Western variants, Caesarean variants, and even minority readings
attested by the oldest Byzantine witnesses (such as parts of Codices A and W)
have no chance of being adopted; generally, if a variant is supported by
over 80% of the Greek manuscripts, it is adopted.
The validity of such an approach
depends upon the validity of the premise that the transmission of the text of
the Gospels was free from “major disruptions.”
However, major disruptions have had enormous impacts upon the
transmission of the text. Roman
persecutions – followed by Roman sponsorship – wartime and peacetime, dark ages and golden
ages – all these things, plus innovations and inventions related to the copying
of manuscripts, drastically changed the circumstances in which the text was
transmitted, and while all text-types were affected by them, they were not all
affected to the same extent. It is no more scientifically valid to adopt a reading because it was favored in Byzantine scriptoriums than it is to adopt a reading because the manuscripts that support it were kept in an area with low humidity (namely Egypt) and thus lasted longer than the manuscripts in other places.
[Continued in Part 2]
