Fall 2017 Semester Highlight: Textual Criticism
This past fall semester I began my academic internship at
the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM). Dr. Daniel
Wallace (the professor with whom I took Honors Greek I and II) is its president.
CSNTM has the goal of digitizing Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The
result is an online library of stunning high res images that can be viewed for
free by scholars and the curious alike at csntm.org. This internship is partly
helping a worthwhile nonprofit in its day to day affairs, and a fairly intense
introduction to the field of textual criticism.
What is textual criticism? IT IS SCARY AND THREATENING. IT
WILL DESTROY YOUR FAITH. Just kidding. It is necessary and whether any of us
realize it or not, it is foundational to every single standard English
translation (yes, even including the KJV—no one gets a pass).
As a discipline it becomes a necessary process for any document
when the following are true: 1) The original (autograph) is lost, 2) There is
more than one copy, and 3) the copies are different from one another.[1] Textual criticism is performed
on ancient Greek literature as well as Shakespeare. Consider that even if the
original is lost and only one copy was made, textual criticism is impossible
because there are no other copies to compare. There are over 5,000 Greek NT
manuscripts, and not one of them is a perfect match to another. Naturally,
there is a LOT of material to compare towards the goal of recovering the text
of the original (even if the original manuscript is lost).
Copyists made mistakes. Some by accident, and some on purpose.
Textual critics sift through all the evidence and make judgments concerning
which variants in a given passage of Scripture go all the way back to the
biblical author, and which were introduced later.
Most translation committees feel quite confident that the
evidence is strong for the variants they have chosen as original but you can
look up in nearly any Bible a few places where they are uncertain enough to
include a note. You’ll see this as a footnote or marginal note that says
something about early witnesses. That means there is good evidence for an
alternative reading.
For a fun and also controversial example that shows the textual
criticism behind the scenes, look up John 7:53-8:11. This is the story of the
woman caught in adultery. Your Bible (whether it is hard copy or electronic)
more than likely has a note that says something like, “Not found in the
earliest witnesses.” It may even have brackets indicating that the translation
committee doesn’t think it was part of the original, but because it is so well
known, they felt the need to include it with a caveat. The facts: We have
copies of John in the original Greek going all the way back to at least 150 CE.
In all the copies from 400 CE and earlier, not one of them has John 7:53-8:11—they
go from 7:52 straight into 8:12 (of course, chapter and verse numbers were
invented only a few hundred years ago).[2] This is what the note, “not
found in the earliest witnesses” means.
You may wonder how this affects the doctrines of Scripture
like inerrancy, inspiration, and authority. First, it is important to point out
that nearly all conservative scholars aside from a very few in the KJV only
camp apply these words to the autograph (the document actually penned by a
biblical author) and not any of its copies. You can see why it is so important
for us to get back as close to the original wording as possible, because it is
that wording that is inspired and inerrant. The good news is that the vast
majority of differences between copies are simple spelling differences and word
order changes that do not change the meaning at all. The challenging news is
that there are so many hundreds of thousands of variants, that even if 99% are
trivial, the other 1% make up many thousands of significant differences. There
is room for improvement, but as far as I can tell so far, we are very close to
letter for letter accuracy.
This is the smallest tip of an iceberg and I am excited to
get back into this fascinating field of study in this Spring semester. I will
officially complete the internship in May 2018. I have found textual criticism
so interesting, that I am, at the present moment, a New Testament Textual
Criticism Emphasis in the Master of Theology program.