Larger Cambridge Septuagint Online

4 responses to “Larger Cambridge Septuagint Online”

1. 

   Mark Cox

   25 July 2019

   The Gottingen Text is Eclectic Whoredom. Evidence cannot be “Gamed” yet this is what everyone has been doing. Publish the Evidence as it stands without creating the Smoke Screen of a Synthetic Text that doesn’t exist in the Evidence. That said, Seventy Years after Martin Luther began his Criticism of the Church by writing against the Practice of Indulgences the Church published the only True “Inner Garment” Septuagint Text under Pope Sixtus the Fifth in 1587 and this is the Sixtine Text. Thereafter with the Death of Sixtus in 1590 the Church banned printing the Sixtine Text while stubbornly cleaving to a variant of the Vulgate. Then in England in 1665 the Sixtine Text is Reprinted by John Fields except this Reprint is Molested with editing by John Pearson who becomes the Bishop of Chester. Today the Source Material of the Sixtine Text is still in Quarantine in the Catholic Church while the Ruse is that the Sixtine Text is based on Codex Vaticanus 1209 which is of the Torn Outer Garment and which goes along with Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Ephraim, and Codex Sinaiticus with the Exception to Veracity being that Codex Alexandrinus has a Byzantine Text Type for the Gospels when Codex Alexandrinus should have an Alexandrine Text Type for the Gospels and maybe this is because the Byzantine Scribes could not properly forge the earlier Alexandrine Text after Scraping Off the Original Text. If this is True then apparently the effort in redacting the underlying text was more effective than Redaction Unraveled by Tischendorf with respect to Codex Ephraim ((Codex C)).

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   1. 

      J. David Stark

      26 July 2019

      Thanks for your thoughts, Mark. Eclectic and diplomatic texts both have their positive and negative features. An eclectic text can indeed promote inferior readings into the main text and leave better ones in the apparatus. But a diplomatic text will inevitably do the same—unless of course the one MS chosen for the main text always has the best reading, something we can’t count on. And if the aim of textual criticism is to get to something like an “initial text” behind the MS tradition we have, someone somewhere inevitably has to make an interpretive judgment about what the MS tradition’s evidence suggests that initial text might most likely have been. Diplomatic editions leave this to their readers. Eclectic editions require their editors to render an opinion by determining what they will put in the main text. Eclectic edition editors have just as much a right to give an interpretation of the evidence as anyone else, though. And just like anyone else, one can scarcely assume that—just because a reading appears in the main text of an eclectic edition—that reading, in fact, best reflects the initial text (cf. the changes in the main text of NA28 by comparison to NA27). The decisions behind an eclectic text always need to be subjected to criticism as well.

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2. 

   Ron Craig

   24 October 2022

   Hi David. I’ve read the only two comments on this starkly brief article, pun intended. Mark has very excellent points, which you predictably dance around. I don’t mean you personally are predictable in this way, since I don’t know you. I mean a defender of the eclectic text is predictable in exactly how you answered. Also, I am sure you are aware that using that derogatory term “diplomatic text” is highly offensive and inflammatory. I cannot speak for Mark, but as for me the hubris of imagining that you have the ability to piece together from fragments of texts, even those not on literal fragments, and concoct a text that has never existed anywhere, yet claim it is the closest to the original we can “imagine” into existence, it’s simply unimaginable in a Christian leader. Have I offended you yet? That hubris is off the charts. And none of you have come to grips with it yet. You ARE the Catholic Church of today, but a much bigger monster in the room than the current actual Catholic Church.

   Reply
   1. 

      J. David Stark

      25 October 2022

      Thanks for your comment, Ron. I understand you find the phrase “diplomatic text” derogatory toward that type of text and advocates of that approach to textual criticism. I’m sorry to hear that and haven’t been accustomed to using the terminology with any derogatory intention. What terminology do you prefer to describe that kind of text and approach to producing a critical edition? And if an eclectic approach is off the table, which MS(S) have the correct texts, and how do we know which ones those are?

      And if it helps, no, I’m not offended by your remarks. You have a clear view on the issue that you’ve expressed directly, and I can appreciate that.

      All the best.

      Reply

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