Textual-Criticism

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Peter Head responds to the recent, British Library blog post about Sinaiticus’s New Testament.

Christian Book Distributors now has Hendrickson’s facsimile edition of Codex Sinaiticus on sale for $499.00. For more information, see the the product page.

James Tucker considers Timothy McLay’s comments regarding memory and textual variation in the use of Septuagintal texts, particularly 2 Kgdms 7; Amos 9:11 in conjunction with Acts 15:16.

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Christian Askeland briefly responds to today’s Associated Press piece on Hebrew Bible textual criticism.

This week in the biblioblogosphere:

• Bob Cargill notes that, on December 11, the National Geographic Channel will re-air its special on “Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
• Brian LePort hypertextually ponders Derridean non-extra-textuality and deconstruction, and he notes twenty-nine doctoral theses that the University of Durham has recently made available.
• Michael Bird shows how to benefit most from the new SBL Greek New Testament and notes that the new Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters now has its own blog.
• Google Editions are poised to hit the e-book market later this month and allow fee-based full access to copyrighted titles. For some additional details and thoughts, see Blog Kindle and Google Books Help.

Among the growing body of scholarly resources available on Kindle ( sans page numbers, unfortunately), is Bruce Metzger’s Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Palaeography. Sounds like a good thing to read electronically in bright sunlight to me. :-)

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Along with Logos 4 users, Libronix users may now download and install the SBL Greek New Testament and its apparatus.

HT: Logos.

The equivalent of 15 print volumes of over 1,800 Oxyrhynchus Papyri fragments are now available to order from Logos via their pre-publication discount program. Details about the module and a list of the papyri it will include are available here.

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Over at the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts Blog, Juan Garcés requests suggestions about “which particular Greek manuscripts held by the British Library . . . you [would] like to see digitised and why?” To add your suggestions to the growing list of requests that the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project will consider, head over to Digitised Manuscripts and post your preferences.

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This morning, Tommy Wasserman introduces the new “Digitised Manuscripts Blog,” which will “report on various issues related to the current digitisation projects at the British Library, in particularly the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.” Wasserman especially draws attention to Juan Garcés’s post from yesterday. There, Garcés notes that “[t]he first phase of the Greek Manuscripts Digitisation Project, funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, will include no less than one majuscule from the 7th century, 33 minuscules from the 10th–14th centuries, and 16 lectionaries from the 11th–14th centuries,” and he mentions plans to “post on a selection of these over the following weeks,” a series that will surely prove interesting.

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Today, Philip Payne concludes his critique of Peter Head’s contention that the distigmai in Vaticanus “mark[] textual variation” and “belong to one unified system that was added some time in the 16th century.” To read the series in five parts, click below.

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Diple
• Part 3: Small Numbers, Large Numbers, and Other Marginalia
• Part 4: De Sepulveda
• Part 5: Identifying Later Distigmai and Conclusion

A composite PDF is forthcoming, as is Head’s revised argument that incorporates Payne’s critiques.

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Amy Donaldson’s dissertation on Explicit References to New Testament Variant Readings among Greek and Latin Church Fathers is now available in PDF format through Notre Dame’s thesis and dissertation database. According to the abstract,

In his introduction to New Testament textual criticism, Eberhard Nestle stated a desideratum, later repeated by Bruce Metzger, for a collection, arranged according to time and locality, of all passages in which the church fathers appeal to New Testament manuscript evidence. Nestle began this project with a list of references; Metzger continued the work by examining the explicit references to variants by Origen and Jerome and expanding Nestle’s list. This dissertation picks up where Metzger left off, expanding and evaluating the list. The purpose is to contribute to patristics and New Testament textual criticism in two ways: first, by providing a helpful catalogue of patristic texts that refer to variant readings; and second, by analyzing the collected data with a focus on the text-critical criteria used by the fathers.

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Michael Bird comments that the papers for next week’s Louven conference, “New Perspectives on Paul and the Jews,” are available for download. Of the presenters listed in the program, only Anne-Marie Reijnen’s paper on " Kosmos and Creation in Paul’s Thought" is not currently available.

Additionally, in the developing list of audio and video resources over at Evangelical Textual Criticism:

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Over at Evangelical Textual Criticism, Peter Head just posted about a monastery excavation that links the origin of Codex Sinaiticus to Jerusalem.

If this provenance is correct, then it does, of course, constitute a substantive piece of evidence for a wider geographic distribution of the Alexandrian text type than is sometimes assumed.

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Wilbur Pickering’s updated (2003) defense of the majority text available online. Whatever one’s perspective on methods of textual criticism, Pickering’s analysis at least merits familiarity.

In concert with the theory of textual criticism that he outlines here, Pickering has also posted his own reconstructions of James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, and Revelation, according to the majority text. In these files, Pickering has also included textual apparatuses that provide his statistical analyses for selected variants from these texts.

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Beyond these general reasons that the perspectives of Baur and others on Rom 15–16 are insufficiently supported, several other pieces of evidence also converge to suggest that these chapters, much in the form in which they appear in the modern, printed editions, are original to Romans.

1. On Origen’s testimony, Marcion truncated the epistle before the beginning of chapter fifteen ( Murray 2.265; cf. Carson, Moo, and Morris 246; Metzger 536). This fact, combined with the observation that Rom 15:1–13 completes the argument begun in Rom 14:1–23 strongly indicates that at least this part of Rom 15–16 is original to Paul.
2. Since only limited, if any, direct, textual evidence exists for the supposed fifteen-chapter version of the epistle, it seems quite likely that, as authenticity goes for one part of the section of Rom 15–16, so it goes for the whole ( Carson, Moo, and Morris 247).
3. The external manuscript evidence for Rom 15–16 is very strong, and the external, patristic testimony also seems reasonably good. Origen (ca. 185–254) includes this section in his Romans commentary ( Bray 353–81, 387), and both Justin Martyr (ca. 100/110-165) and Tertullian (ca. 155/160–240/250) seem to allude to it at various points ( Bray 360, 375, 387). With these last two examples, however, some caution must be exercised, since they do provide only allusions to and not direct quotations from Romans (cf. Bray xxii). Moreover, Carson, Moo, and Morris, 246, note that Tertullian, at least, does not quote from Rom 15–16 in places where he might have been expected to do so. Yet, if Tertullian was indeed writing against Marcionism in these texts ( Murray 2:264), he may have simply been attempting to construct his argument from texts that the Marcionites themselves would accept.
4. Finally, and specifically related to the doxology, very little evidence exists for its omission, and one manuscript (G), although it omits the passage, leaves room for its inclusion ( Metzger 534–35)].

Based on these factors, it seems that only the doxology’s specific placement may remain somewhat in doubt, and one must admit that discerning its original placement is no simple task. Of the three basic positions in which it appears in different manuscripts (i.e., at the end of one of Romans’ last three chapters), a placement after chapter fourteen (either in addition to or instead of the placement at the end of Rom 16) would interrupt the train of Paul’s argument from 14:1–15:13. This placement could, therefore, perhaps be preferred because it is the hardest reading, and scribes copying Romans would have tended to remove rather than create difficulties in the text. Yet, this reading could also have arisen because the Marcionites used and circulated their version of Romans, which ended with chapter fourteen ( Metzger 472). Reading the doxology after Rom 15 has the support of an early third-century manuscript (P46), but this textual basis is very narrow and may merely reflect a scribal idiosyncrasy (cf. Metzger 471, 473). The final placement possibility for the doxology at the end of Rom 16, of the three major possibilities, has perhaps the best breadth and antiquity in its manuscript attestation (e.g., א, B, C, D, cop, eth, it, vg). In the end, therefore, because of the possibility of Marcionite influence in the placement of the doxology after Rom 14, it seems most probable that the doxology originally appeared after Rom 16 and that Rom 15–16 formed the concluding section of Paul’s original composition.

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The arguments against the authenticity of Rom 15–16 that have been summarized are, however, inadequate for several reasons, which including the following:

1. Far from a needless repetition of Rom 12:1ff, Rom 15:1–13 actually provides a necessary continuation of Paul’s argument from Rom 14:1–23 ( Murray 2:263–65).
2. When Paul speaks of ministering “from Jerusalem and around as far as Illyricum” ( Rom 15:19), he does not indicate Jerusalem to be the chronological starting point and Illyricum to be the ending point of his ministry. Rather, he uses these cities to designate the geographical bounds for the region of his ministry ( Murray 2:213–15).
3. First Clement 5:7 speaks of Paul reaching “the limit of the west.” While Clement may have surmised from Rom 15:25, 28 that Paul actually did reach Spain, this text at least provides ancient testimony to the plausibility of the Spanish mission. In any case, the fact that Paul did not mention Spain in any of his other letters does not invalidate the usage here any more than the destination(s) given in a company’s first bulk marketing mailing is invalidated because that company or its employees have not previously been to that place.
4. That Aquilla and Priscilla could not have returned to Rome and established a residence there in the interval between the composition of 1 Corinthians [ca. AD 55 ( Carson, Moo, and Morris 283)] and the composition of Romans is by no means certain, especially if Romans is dated later in the period of AD 55–59 (cf. Murray 2:267–68). Moreover, Paul’s greeting so many other people in a city he had never visited does not necessarily provide evidence for non-Pauline authorship of this section of the epistle, since Paul may well have met these people elsewhere, have been introduced to them through correspondence, or have known them through others.
5. Very little manuscript evidence exists for omitting the doxology, and the consistent testimony of the earliest manuscripts is to have the doxology present at some point ( Metzger 534). Additionally, hypothesizing a Marcionite origin for the doxology seems quite strange, since Marcion’s text of Romans did not contain it ( Murray 2:263).

Perhaps the most persistently thorny issues in textual criticism of Romans are related to: (1) the placement of the doxology, which normally appears in Rom 16:25–27 in modern, printed editions and (2) the cohesion of Rom 15–16 with the rest of the epistle. While distinguishable, however, these issues cannot be completely separated from each other, since, at the very least, the doxology appears to be an ending to something.

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