Epp, It'S All About Variants
It's All about Variants: A Variant- Conscious Approach to New Testament Textual Criticism Eldon Jay Epp Harvard Divinity School* The goal of New Testament textual criticism would appear to be simple enough: to restore the original text written by each author of the New Testament books. Upon examination, however, the notion of simplicity vanishes immediately and each of the key terms here—"restore," "original," "text," and "author"—has its problematic aspects, but more importantly the simply stated goal itself turns out to be inadequate. Grist for the text-critical mill consists of textual readings or variants, which for the relatively small collection of writings called the New Testament are not merely in the hundreds or thousands, or even the tens of thousands, but run to perhaps a third of a million. They stem from the nearly 5,500 Greek manuscripts, some 10,000 versional manuscripts, and innumerable patristic citations of New Testament passages. Over time, variants have been valued differently by various textual critics depending largely upon their views of the goal of textual criticism. When that goal is defined as restoring the original text of the various authors, variants tend to have a binary character—they are either in or out, that is, accepted or rejected. If accepted they assume a position in the privileged critical text that often has been labeled "original," but if rejected, variants are relegated to the apparatus at the foot of the page (in much smaller type!). At the opposite end of the spectrum, when the goal of textual criticism is to explore the wealth of information about the history and thought of the early churches that is disclosed by variant readings, then all meaningful variants are held in much higher esteem.
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