Basics of New Testament Textual Criticism
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Basics of New Testament Textual Criticism Definition Textual criticism is the foundational discipline for access to all ancient literary documents since before interpreting a text, one must first know what it actually says. This is the objective of textual criticism. Textual Criticism (sometimes called Lower Criticism) is the art and science of reconstructing the text of a work that no longer exists in its original form. We should note that the word “criticism” is not a negative term. It refers to methods of careful study and analysis. When applied to the NT, the ultimate purpose is to determine the original text of each book with the greatest possible degree of detail and accuracy through the careful study and comparison of all extant manuscripts. This is accomplished primarily by the collation of manuscripts and evaluation of the data derived from collation. To collate is to compare the text of a manuscript with a base text, letter by letter, and to record each and every difference from the base text. By the comparison of the collations of as many manuscripts as possible, at all places where manuscripts differ (called variant readings or variants), the original text is sought. This process of comparison and evaluation is the primary element of the reconstruction of the original text.1 NT textual criticism is the study of the transmission of the NT texts from their presumed autographs through all of their ms representations. Though its primary objective is to reconstruct the original or earliest form of the text of the NT books, it is concerned also with intermediate and larger forms of the text and, indeed, with all aspects of textual transmission and its history, including localized or geographically limited forms of the text, and ideologically or theologically biased textual formulation. While NT textual criticism has its “scientific” or empirical and objective aspects, including statistical analyses and quantitative measures, it is also very much an “art,” requiring subjective judgments and qualitative decisions based on expert knowledge of the general textual transmission process and on experience with textual variation and scribal habits in particular. NT textual criticism, then, is the science and art that assesses the transmission of the NT text and identifies its alterations and distortions. Textual criticism is “lower criticism,” the establishment of the text of a document as closely as possible to the autograph or the author’s original writing. This is distinguished from “higher criticism,” the assessment of a document’s philological, historical, literary, cultural, and ideological characteristics, as well as its interpretation and meaning.2 1 Draper, C. W. (2003). Textual Criticism, New Testament. In (C. Brand, C. Draper, A. England, S. Bond, E. R. Clendenen, & T. C. Butler, Eds.)Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary. Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers. ms manuscript 2 Epp, E. J. (1992). Textual Criticism: New Testament. In (D. N. Freedman, Ed.)The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary. New York: Doubleday. 2015 William E. Wenstrom, Jr. Bible Ministries 1 Stanley Porter writes “Textual criticism is the discipline that attempts to establish an authoritative text for a given author’s work. Textual criticism involves the informed comparison of all of the known copies of a given text in order to ascertain the earliest recoverable and, if possible, the original form of the text and to trace the history of its development. Textual criticism is often thought of only in terms of NT textual criticism, but it applies to any and all of the documents from the ancient world. Textual criticism focuses usually upon literary authors, such as the classical writers (e.g., Homer, Plato, Aristotle, the dramatists) and the later authors such as Philo, Josephus and the various historians (e.g., Dio Cassius, Polybius), where there is a history of textual transmission and the original documents are no longer extant. However, there is also a need for sound principles of textual criticism to be applied to nonliterary texts, such as papyri and inscriptions (see Inscriptions and Papyri).”3 Textual criticism is the scholarly discipline of establishing the text as near to the original as possible or probable (also known as lower criticism). Since we no longer have any original manuscripts, or “autographs,” scholars must sort and evaluate the extant copies with their variant wordings. For example, errors and the rȇš[ד] commonly occur when letters are confused (in Hebrew the dālet ;are easily confused), when letters and words are omitted (haplography[ר] homoioteleuton) or written more than once (dittography), and when letters are transposed (metathesis) or juxtaposed from parallel words or texts. The textual critic not only sorts through manuscripts and fragments for copyist errors but also considers early translations (such as the Vulgate or Peshitta) and lectionaries for their witness to the text. For example, the Septuagint sometimes has a reading that appears older or closer to what scholars think was the original text of the Hebrew Bible and can form the basis of an emendation (a correction of a text that seems to have been corrupted in transmission). It is not always clear, however, when an ancient translation is preserving a different text or rendering a word or verse in a more comprehensible way. Textual criticism is often seen as the most objective of the various biblical criticisms because there are clear rules governing the establishment of texts. However, judgments regarding any textual reading involve an element of interpretation, so disagreements remain. See also Dead Sea Scrolls; Targum.4 Textual criticism is the study of the copies of any written document whose original autograph is unknown or is non-existent in order to determine the exact wording of the original. In relation to the Greek New Testament, textual criticism studies the existing copies of the original autographs of the Greek New Testament 3 Porter, S. E. (2000). Textual Criticism. In (C. A. Evans & S. E. Porter, Eds.)Dictionary of New Testament background: a compendium of contemporary biblical scholarship. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. 4 Patzia, A. G., & Petrotta, A. J. (2002). In Pocket dictionary of biblical studies. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. 2015 William E. Wenstrom, Jr. Bible Ministries 2 which no longer exist in order to determine the exact wording of these original autographs. If the original of a document still existed, there would be no need for textual criticism. If all the copies of a document were exactly alike, textual criticism would not be possible. So the objective of New Testament textual criticism is to examine the copies of the Greek New Testament in order to get back to the original wording. In recent years, textual criticism has been redefined in the sense that the definition has become what different scribes through the centuries have changed the text and what those changes indicate about their socio or economic cultural circumstances or their religious background or politics, etc. However, this should not be the primary goal of textual criticism but this approach does have a very important role in the process of understanding the transmission of the text. For instance, if a textual critic can find out what influenced a scribe to change X from Y then that tells him that X is not the original reading but came from Y. Textual critics have also been wrestling recent years with how they are to define the term “original.” There are several questions with regards to this. First, is an original text, the text of an author initially wrote but may have then fine tuned it later on? Which one is the original text? Another scholar suggested that we need to have different ideas of what an original text is. This scholar defined the original the form of the text when it left the author’s hands. This is called in German “Ausgangstext” or “autographic text” or “autographs.” This is has been accepted by many textual critics today and appears to be the best definition. Therefore the issue is that when an author writes something and then sends it to readers who are in a different location, and as soon as it leaves that author’s hands, we are now dealing with that document which is finalized as far as the author is concerned. Consequently that is what a textual critic would call the original text or the “autographic” or Ausgangstext.” So the original is the text which has been finalized by the author and sent to a reader or readers in a different location. The original is the text that leaves his hands when it is dispatched to the readers in some other region. Textual criticism is necessary for the Greek New Testament documents just as it is necessary for every piece of ancient Graeco-Roman literature for two reasons: (1) The original autographs of the original Greek New Testament no longer exist. (2) The copies of the original autographs of the Greek New Testament differ from one another. The reason no two copies of the New Testament agree completely is that all of these manuscripts were by definition written by hand. Of course, there was no moveable type printing press in the first century A.D. until the year 1451 A.D. when Johannes Gutenberg invented this machine. Thus, everything was written by hand. Consequently, every single one of these manuscripts has mistakes in them. 2015 William E. Wenstrom, Jr. Bible Ministries 3 However, most of these changes these manuscripts have are very trivial such as spelling differences is one of the most common. The reason for this is that there was no standardized spelling of many words in the ancient world. An example of this is that in the Gospel of John, the author spells a particular word three different ways within the space of eight verses.