DOCSLIB.ORG

WHAT TEXT CAN NEW TESTAMENT TEXTUAL CRITICISM ULTIMATELY REACH?* the Question Posed in the Title1 of This Paper Is Daunting

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
WHAT TEXT CAN NEW TESTAMENT TEXTUAL CRITICISM ULTIMATELY REACH?* the Question Posed in the Title1 of This Paper Is Daunting CHAPTER SIXTEEN WHAT TEXT CAN NEW TESTAMENT TEXTUAL CRITICISM ULTIMATELY REACH?* The question posed in the title1 of this paper is daunting for many rea- sons, but for one above all: in my opinion it strikes to the heart of the dilemma upon which New Testament textual criticism is caught. Our study begins by sketching the problems which led to the dilemma. Next, three exhibits which illustrate the dilemma will be presented; they will be glossed with remarks from other scholars. The final section uses the insights gained from the exhibits to answer the question “What text can New Testament textual criticism ultimately reach?” I. Prologue The classicist Paul Maas observed that “The business of textual crit- icism is to produce a text as close as possible to the original.”2 Few would disagree with Maas’ noble-sounding dictum, but applying it to the text of the New Testament is especially difficult. First and fore- most among the problems is the difficulty of defining “original.” The * Reproduced by kind permission of Uitgeverij Kok (http://www.kok.nl). 1 The title was suggested by the convener of the section and our host in Münster, Prof. Dr. Barbara Aland. It stems from a series of discussions between us on this sub- ject, conducted both informally and in the Textual Criticism Seminar of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas. 2 P. Maas, Textual Criticism (translated from the 3rd German edition [1957]: Oxford 1958), 3. Maas was, of course, a proponent of “stemmatics,” the school of textual criti- cism associated with the name of Karl Lachmann (1793-1851). While still ubiquitous in handbooks of New Testament textual criticism, classicists now recognize that Lach- mann’s approach is beset with problems. M. D. Reeve summed up the position of clas- sicists by asserting that “establishing the exclusive derivation of one manuscript from another is not merely difficult but impossible” Eliminatio(“ codicum descriptorum: A Methodological Problem,” in Editing Greek and Latin Texts, ed. J. N. Grant [New York 1989], 1). See also J. Willis, Latin Textual Criticism, Illinois Studies in Language and Lit- erature 61 (Urbana/Chicago/London 1972), who remarks that “Lachmannian methods would fail every time that they were applied” (30), because the practical difficulties are too great: “between the sixth and ninth centuries the lives of classical manuscripts were liable to be of short continuance and full of trouble.” Willis goes on to observe that “a stemma can sometimes tell us which is the reading best attested, never which is the best” (32, italics added). 220 Chapter Sixteen Gospel of Mark illustrates the point. Is the “original” Mark the “Mark” found in our fourth-century and later manuscripts? Or is it the “Mark” recovered from the so-called “minor agreements” between Matthew and Luke? And which—if any—of the four extant endings of “Mark” is “original”? 137 And how does the “Secret Gospel of Mark”—apparently known to and cited by Clement of Alexandria—relate to the “original” Mark? It is clear that, without even having to consider individual variants, de- termining which “Mark” is “original” is a difficult—and perhaps even impossible—task. Another obstacle is the sheer number of sources now available to the textual critic. When Erasmus set out to produce his edition of the New Testament in 1516, he employed only six manuscripts all dating from the eleventh century and later; with one exception (MS 1), all were of the Byzantine text-type.3 He also relied heavily on the Vulgate; Patristic evidence was ignored. Today, however, one must reckon not only with thousands of manuscripts, but also with hundreds of Patristic texts, as well as a growing miscellany of apocryphal and liturgical odds and ends. It should be pointed out, however, that this surfeit of evidence is not a new problem; it was already evident in 1720, when Richard Bentley rather modestly proposed not to recover a text “as close as pos- sible to the original,” but only to produce “an edition of the Gr. Test. [= Greek Testament] exactly as it was in the best exemplars at the time of the Council of Nice [= Nicaea]” (i.e., in 325 ce).4 Bentley’s lead manu- script (which he described as “the oldest and best in the world”5) was Codex Alexandrinus (MS A, fifth century). Bentley assumed that by supplementing this “oldest and best” manuscript with readings from other manuscripts—all of which he presumed were later than Codex Alexandrinus—and from the Latin Vulgate, he could triangulate back to the single recension which he presumed existed at the time of the Council of Nicaea. His project, however, led to unexpected discoveries, especially in one of the earliest collations of Codex Vaticanus (MS B, 3 He used MSS 1eap 1r 2e 2ap 4ap 7p. Their dates are, respectively: XII, XII, XII, XII, XV, and XI. Note that for the gospels, Erasmus had 2 MSS, for Acts 3 MSS, for the corpus paulinum 4 MSS, and for Revelations, only 1 defective MS. Cp. C. C. Tarelli, “Erasmus’ Manuscripts of the Gospels,” JThS 44 (1943), 155-62. 4 “Dr. Bentley’s Proposals for Printing A New Edition of the Greek Testament and St. Hierom’s Latin Version,” in The Works of Richard Bentley, D.D., ed. A. Dyce, Vol. III (London 1838; reprinted New York 1966), 487. Also reproduced in J. H. Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley, D.D., Vol. I (London 18332), 398. 5 Quoted by R. C. Jebb, Richard Bentley (New York 1882), 163..
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Karl Lachmann Und Die Schriften Der Römischen Landvermesser
    Digitale Bibliothek Braunschweig Karl Lachmann und die Schriften der römischen Landvermesser Schindel, Ulrich Veröffentlicht in: Abhandlungen der Braunschweigischen Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft Band 57, 2006, S.35-53 J. Cramer Verlag, Braunschweig http://www.digibib.tu-bs.de/?docid=00048799 Digitale Bibliothek Braunschweig AbhandlungenKarl der Lachmann BWG und · die Schriften 57 : 35–53 der römischen · Landvermesser Braunschweig, Mai 2007 35 Karl Lachmann und die Schriften der römischen Landvermesser* ULRICH SCHINDEL Albert-Schweitzer-Straße 3 D-37075 Göttingen Wer das Braunschweigische Landesmuseum besucht, erblickt in dessen Foyer eine Reihe von Porträtphotographien der großen Söhne Braunschweigs. Darun- ter sind zwei berühmte Professoren, Karl Friedrich Gauss, Mathematiker, Physi- ker, Astronom in Göttingen, und Karl Lachmann, Klassischer Philologe, Germa- nist, Theologe in Berlin. Der Erstgenannte ist im Jahr 2005 vielfach gefeiert worden, von dem Zweiten und einem seiner ungewöhnlichsten Werke soll jetzt die Rede sein: nicht nur Braunschweig als seine Heimatstadt sondern auch der technisch-mathematische Inhalt dieses Werks laden dazu ein. In einem Drei- schritt will ich das Thema Ihnen nahe bringen: am Anfang soll eine Skizze von Leben und Wesen Lachmanns stehen; dann will ich mich dem wichtigsten Hilfs- mittel zuwenden, welches der Edition Lachmanns zugrunde liegt, der berühm- ten spätantiken Agrimensoren-Handschrift, die seit alters ein Glanzstück der nahen Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel darstellt, und schließlich will ich der Frage nachgehen, wieso sich Lachmann diesem für ihn so untypischen Thema zugewandt hat. I. Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachmann wurde am 4. März 1793 geboren als Sohn des Pfarrers an der Braunschweiger St. Andreas-Kirche1 . Der Vater war vorher Feldprediger in Preußen gewesen; die Mutter, Tochter eines preußischen Majors, starb schon, als Karl Lachmann erst zwei Jahre alt war.
    [Show full text]
  • New Testament Textual Criticism in America: Requiem for a Discipline*
    CHAPTER SEVEN NEW TESTAMENT TEXTUAL CRITICISM IN AMERICA: REQUIEM FOR A DISCIPLINE* In view of the rapid approach of the 100th anniversary of the Society 94 of Biblical Literature (1980), it is appropriate to consider the posi- tion held by New Testament textual criticism in American biblical scholarship during that century and especially the place that it holds today. To speak of textual criticism in America may give pause to some. I, for one, have never considered even for a moment the long-term history of American New Testament textual criticism as an isolated phenomenon, or that of any other country for that matter, because textual criticism hardly can be thought of in terms of any distinct geographical area, nor can its development be separated along national lines. Rather, from its earliest period, New Testament textual criti- cism has been a genuinely international effort, with various discov- eries, theories, breakthroughs, or even setbacks espoused now by a scholar of one nation and then by a scholar of another, and so on, so that scholars of all nations together have woven the fabric of our discipline, though with various yet intertwining threads. Witness, for example, the pivotal editions of the Greek New Testament, which generally were built one upon another, starting with Erasmus in Holland, to Stephanus in France (and Switzerland), to Th. Beza in Switzerland, then to John Fell, John Mill and Richard Bentley in England, then J. A. Bengel in Germany, J. J. Wettstein in Switzerland and Holland, then to J. J. Griesbach, Karl Lachmann, and Constantin von Tischendorf in Germany, and again to S.
    [Show full text]
  • Chapter One Inventing the Linguistic Monuments of Europe1
    Chapter One Inventing the Linguistic Monuments of Europe1 No one, professional historian or member of the interested public, comes to the Middle Ages without preconceptions, assumptions, and expectations about this long period of European history. These preconceptions derive not only from popular media including film, fiction, and the internet, but also from centuries of debate and fashioning and refashioning of this long period by scholars who sought not only to understand the past but to mobilize it for debates about their own presents. The Middle Ages have never been merely academic—the continuing fascination with the medieval world has always had implications for the understanding of the present, a search for those models, paradigms, and structures, both social and mental, that define the present. Essential to this process has always been the search for those objects and especially those texts generated during this period, and concomitantly the search for how to understand these documents. The two are intimately interconnected: the selection and privileging of specific documents has always been in relationship to the questions historians have asked, and documents, as they are discovered or rediscovered are made to fit into patterns of meaning by the scholars who have discovered them. While the search for medieval texts has been carried on since the sixteenth century for a spectrum of religious, political, and ideological reasons, the Middle Ages that we study is for better or worse largely a construct of the nineteenth century. Our corpus of sources owe their preservation and publication to the passion of long-forgotten scholars who sought them out because they hoped that they would answer specific questions about the past and the present, questions and interpretations that subsequent generations of scholars and the general public have largely accepted without question.
    [Show full text]
  • The Spirit of Lachmann, the Spirit of Bédier: Old Norse Textual Editing in the Electronic Age by Odd Einar Haugen
    The spirit of Lachmann, the spirit of Bédier: Old Norse textual editing in the electronic age by Odd Einar Haugen Paper read at the annual meeting of The Viking Society, University College London, 8 November 2002 Electronic version, 20 January 2003 Introduction In this paper I would like to discuss some central aspects of textual editing, as it has been practised in Old Norse studies for the past century, and since we now are at the beginning of a new century, I shall venture some opinions on the direction of textual editing in the digital age. I shall do so by beginning with two key figures of modern textual history, the German scholar Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) and the French scholar and author Joseph Bédier (1864–1938). Their approaches to the art and science of editing are still highly relevant. Lachmann The scientific foundation of textual editing has been credited to Karl Lachmann and other classical scholars such as Karl Gottlob Zumpt (1792–1849), Johan Nicolai Madvig (1804–1886) and Friedrich Ritschel (1806–1876). Lachmann himself was active in the fields of Medieval editing, with Nibelungen lied (1826), in Biblical studies, with his new edition of the Greek New testament (1831), and in Classical scholarship, with his edition of Lucrets’ De rerum natura (1850). This made Lachmann’s name known throughout all fields of textual editing, and with some reservations it is probably fair to attach his name to the great changes of editorial techniques made in the begin- ning of the 19th century. However, as Sebastiano Timpanaro (1923–2000) points out in his important study of Lachmann’s contribution, Die Entstehung der Lachmannschen Methode (1971), the method was basically a method of genealogical analysis.
    [Show full text]
  • Future Philology! by Ulrich Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff - Rt Anslated by G
    Fordham University Masthead Logo DigitalResearch@Fordham Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Philosophy Collections 2000 Future Philology! by Ulrich von Wilamowitz- Moellendorff - rT anslated by G. Postl, B. Babich, and H. Schmid Babette babich Fordham University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://fordham.bepress.com/phil_babich Part of the Classical Literature and Philology Commons, Continental Philosophy Commons, German Language and Literature Commons, and the History of Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation babich, Babette, "Future Philology! by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff - rT anslated by G. Postl, B. Babich, and H. Schmid" (2000). Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections. 3. https://fordham.bepress.com/phil_babich/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy at DigitalResearch@Fordham. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections by an authorized administrator of DigitalResearch@Fordham. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FUTURE PHILOLOGY!i a reply to FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE’S Ordinarius Professor of Classical Philology at Basel „birth of tragedy“ by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff Dr. Phil. zÏîùô óéëöéùô âáë&Òò ôåýôëéïí ßðüôñéììá hñÃïí ¦ãêÝöáëïí Ïñßãáíïí êáôáðõãïóýíç ôáØôz ¦óô ðñÎò êñåáò ìÝãá. — Aristophanes, Age 17ii i Zukunftsphilologie is a play upon the 1861 German publication of Wagner’s ironically titled “Zukunftsmusik” [“Music of the Future” — the quotation marks are Wagner’s own], an open letter to Frederic Villot, Conservator of the Picture Museums at the Louvre, first translated into and published in French in 1860. See L. J. Rather, Reading Wagner: A Study in the History of Ideas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), p.
    [Show full text]
  • Kurt Aland in Memoriam
    KURT ALAND IN MEMORIAM KURT ALAND IN MEMORIAM 0 1995 by Hemiann KurstStifhlng zur POdenmg der neuteslameniüchenTextfnaehmg M143Münrier/W., Geo~gskornmende7 HersieUunp: Re-g Münster INHALTSVERZEICHNIS Universitätsprediger Prof. Dr. Friedemann Merke1 Predigt im Trauergottesdienst für Prof. D. Kurt Aland am 21. April 1994 .......................................................................................... 7 Grußworte und Reden anläßlich der Gedenkakademie für Prof. D. Kurt Aland am 31. März 1995 im Festsaal des Rathauses zu Münster: Präses D. Hans-Martin Linnemann, stellv. Vorsitzender des Kuratoriums der Hermann Kunst-Stiftung zur Förderung der neutestamentlichen Textforschung Grußwort................................................................................................. 12 Prof. Dr. Erdmann Sturm, Dekan der Evangelisch-Theologi- schen Fakultät der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster Grußwort.............................................................................................. 14 Prof. Dr. Martin Hengel Laudatio Kurt Aland ............................................................................. 17 Landesbischof i.R. Prof. D. Eduard Lohse, Vorsitzender des Vorstands der Hermann Kunst-Stiftung zur Förderung der neutestamentlichen Textforschung Wahrheit des Evangeliums - Zum Gedenken an Kurt Aland .... 35 Bibliographie Kurt Aland (zusammengestellt von Beate Köster und Christian Uhlig t)..... 41 Die wissenschaftlichen Mitarbeiter Kurt Alands seit 1959............ 72 Friedemann Merke1 PREDIGT IM TRAUERGOTTESDIENST'FÜR
    [Show full text]
  • The Textual History of the Greek New Testament Society of Biblical Literature
    The Textual History of the Greek New Testament Society of Biblical Literature Text-Critical Studies Editor Sidnie White Crawford Number 8 The Textual History of the Greek New Testament The Textual History of the Greek New Testament Changing Views in Contemporary Research Edited by Klaus Wachtel and Michael W. Holmes Society of Biblical Literature Atlanta The Textual History of the Greek New Testament Copyright © 2011 by the Society of Biblical Literature All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by means of any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed in writing to the Rights and Permissions Office, Society of Biblical Literature, 825 Houston Mill Road, Atlanta, GA 30329 USA. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The textual history of the Greek New Testament / edited by Klaus Wachtel and Michael W. Holmes. p. cm. — (Society of Biblical Literature text-critical studies ; no. 8) Proceedings of a colloquium held in 2008 in M?nster, Germany. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-58983-624-2 (paper binding : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58983-625-9 (electronic format) 1. Bible. N.T.—Criticism, Textual—Congresses. I. Wachtel, Klaus. II. Holmes, Michael W. (Michael William), 1950- BS2325.T49 2011 225.4'86—dc23 2011042791 Printed on acid-free, recycled paper conforming to ANSI /NISO Z39.48–1992 (R1997) and ISO 9706:1994 standards for paper permanence.
    [Show full text]
  • TEXT-TYPES? Characteristics / Readings, Unique to Their Location, Resulting in Localized Text-Types Or Textual Families
    As individual New Testament books were received and circulated in the early Christian church, various copies were made and deployed NEW TESTAMENT throughout the ancient world. As manuscripts were circulated within particular geographical regions they began to take on particular TEXT-TYPES? characteristics / readings, unique to their location, resulting in localized text-types or textual families. The Alexandrian text-type is the form of The Western text-type is the form of the New Testament text witness in ALEXANDRIAN Greek New Testament that predominates WESTERN the Old Latin and Peshitta translations from the Greek, and also in in the earliest surviving documents, as well quotations from the 2nd and 3rd century Christian writers, including as the text-type used in Egyptian Coptic Cyprian, Tertullian, and Irenaeus. Alexandrian Codex Sinaiticus manuscripts. manuscripts are is considered to characteristic by be Western in its majuscule or the first eight uncial texts. Above chapters of is John 1:1 in Codex John’s Gospel Only one Greek uncial manuscript is considered to transmit a Western text The two oldest Sinaiticus in its for the four Gospels and the Book of Acts, the fifth century Codex Bezae; the and closest to EARLIER upper case sixth century Codex Clarmontanus is considered to transmit a western text complete copies majuscule texts for Paul’s letters and is followed by two ninth century uncials: F and G. of the New א Codex Sinaiticus - 01 330-360 AD Other early manuscripts of note Testament, are P66 and P75. Codex Sinaiticus Many, if not most, textual critics today believe that and Codex there were two major early text-types that can be Vaticanus,* are ascertained, the Alexandrian and Western.
    [Show full text]
  • Und Seminararbeiten in Der Germanistischen Mediävistik
    Ergänzende Hinweise zu Proseminar- und Seminararbeiten in der Germanistischen Mediävistik Inhaltsverzeichnis 1. PROSEMINARARBEITEN UND SEMINARARBEITEN (BACHELOR-ARBEITEN) ................................. 2 1.1 GRUNDSÄTZLICHES ................................................................................................................ 2 1.2 FORMALES, HANDWERKSZEUG .............................................................................................. 3 1.3 BESONDERHEITEN BEIM ARBEITEN MIT UND ZITIEREN VON MITTELALTERLICHEN TEXTEN 3 1.4 LITERATURANGABEN ............................................................................................................. 4 1.5 ZITATE ..................................................................................................................................... 6 1. PROSEMINARARBEITEN UND SEMINARARBEITEN (BACHELOR-ARBEITEN) 1.1 GRUNDSÄTZLICHES (1) Ausgangspunkt für die Erarbeitung der Fragestellung der Arbeit ist das Proseminar bzw. das Seminar. Von der Arbeit im Proseminar/Seminar ausgehend sollte man zu einer spezifischen, enger gefassten Fragestellung kommen. (2) Proseminararbeiten und Seminararbeiten müssen eine solche – in der Einleitung knapp und präzise formulierte – Fragestellung (ein zu lösendes Problem) aufweisen. (3) Wenn Sie über eine mögliche Fragestellung nachgedacht haben und diese formuliert haben, Forschungsliteratur recherchiert und begonnen haben, diese zu lesen und zu exzerpieren, dann nehmen Sie bitte Kontakt mit dem_der Dozierenden auf. (4) Proseminararbeiten
    [Show full text]
  • The Philological Turn and Jacob Grimm's De
    Chapter 11 Latinitas Goes Native: The Philological Turn and Jacob Grimm’s De desiderio patriae (1830) Joep Leerssen The period 1750–1850 has been described by the great German historian Reinhart Koselleck as the Sattelzeit: a watershed between two historical para- digms, in which social, cultural and conceptual changes co-occurred and mutu- ally reinforced each other.1 Notions of society, time, culture, and the position of the individual in all of these, underwent fundamental alterations. Although Koselleck worked mostly in social and conceptual history, the concept of the Sattelzeit is also useful in literary history, to clarify the simultaneous rise of Romanticism, of historicism (also in the writing of history and of literary his- tory) and of the modern philologies. As I have argued elsewhere, the Sattelzeit witnesses the emergence of what we call ‘national literatures’ in Europe.2 Whereas the concept of literature in Classicism and the early Enlightenment was predicated on a universalist, transhistorical hypercanon (with Homer, Virgil, Horace, Tacitus, Cicero, Dante (Fig. 11.1), Camões, Cervantes and Shakespeare all simultaneously present), a ‘philological turn’ occurs after 1760. Literature (until then almost a singulare tantum, like ‘milk’ or ‘guilt’, referring to ‘the condition of being literate’) turned into a countable plural of literatures, distinguished either as to their period of production (to begin with, ‘ancient’ or ‘modern’) or, crucially, as to the lan- guage of their expression. While, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges, the clas- sicist concept, with its undifferentiated notion of literature, had regarded the plurality of peoples and periods as mere incidentals, the new paradigm turned diversity of period and language into its central taxonomic criterion.3 At the same time, we see, in the philologies, the rise of the ‘modern phi- lologies’ alongside the older classical studies.
    [Show full text]
  • The Text of the New Testamentl
    Grace Theological lournal9.2 (1988) 279- 285 REVIEW ARTICLE The Text of the New Testament l DANIEL B. WALLACE The Text of the New Testament, by Kurt and Barbara Aland. Translated by Erroll F. Rhodes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans/Leiden: E. 1. Brill, 1987. Pp. xviii + 338. $29.95. Cloth. With the long-awaited translation of Der Text des Neuen Testaments (1982), English-speaking students may now share in the debt of gratitude owed to the well-known German scholars, Kurt and Barbara Aland. The five-year delay, due to a number of complications, has resulted in more than a translation; the English edition "represents a revision of the original Ger­ man edition of 1982" (translator's preface, viii). Though modeled after Wtirthwein's Der Text des Alten Testaments (ET: The Text of the Old Testament [1979]), the NT counterpart tends to be more practical since a follow-up volume by Kurt Aland for advanced students is in the present time (Uberliejerung und Text des Neuen Testaments: Handbuch der modernen Textkritik). Nevertheless, the advanced student and scholar alike can profit from this volume: the computer-generated/ assisted tables, charts, and collations are, by themselves, worth the price of the book, representing the equivalent of countless thousands of man-hours. This could only have been produced at the Institute for New Testament Textual Re­ search in Munster. Besides sixty-five plates (all but three of various NT manuscripts), eight tables and six charts (including one two-sided detached fold-out), the Alands have provided the essentials for a thorough introduction to textual criticism: an overview of the history of the printed NT text-from Erasmus to Nestle­ Aland26 (=UBSGNT3); a discussion of the interrelation of early church history and NT textual criticism (our appetites are barely whet, however, in the twenty-four pages on this topic); a description of the extant Greek manuscripts, as well as Greek patristic evidence (it should be noted here that readers of Metzger's Text of the New Testament2 will find this chapter to be II wish to thank Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • Scribal Habits in Selected New Testament Manuscripts, Including Those with Surviving Exemplars
    SCRIBAL HABITS IN SELECTED NEW TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS, INCLUDING THOSE WITH SURVIVING EXEMPLARS by ALAN TAYLOR FARNES A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing Department of Theology and Religion College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham April 2017 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract In the first chapter of this work, I provide an introduction to the current discussion of scribal habits. In Chapter Two, I discuss Abschriften—or manuscripts with extant known exemplars—, their history in textual criticism, and how they can be used to elucidate the discussion of scribal habits. I also present a methodology for determining if a manuscript is an Abschrift. In Chapter Three, I analyze P127, which is not an Abschrift, in order that we may become familiar with determining scribal habits by singular readings. Chapters Four through Six present the scribal habits of selected proposed manuscript pairs: 0319 and 0320 as direct copies of 06 (with their Latin counterparts VL76 and VL83 as direct copies of VL75), 205 as a direct copy of 2886, and 821 as a direct copy of 0141.
    [Show full text]