Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Guest Post by Timothy Decker: A Critical Apparatus of the Textus Receptus Tradition

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The following is a guest post by Timothy L. Decker. He received his Ph.D. from Capital Seminary and Graduate School in 2021. He is a professor of Biblical Languages and New Testament at Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary and an adjunct professor of New Testament with International Reformed Baptist Seminary. He is also one of the pastors of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church near Roanoke, VA. His most recent publication is A Revolutionary Reading of Romans 13.

His edition of the Sermon on the Mount (which provides the data behind this post) is available here.

Thursday, March 07, 2024

SBL Presentation on the Future of Text-Types

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At SBL last fall I gave a paper on the future of text-types for the session on the IGNTP anniversary. Hugh Houghton kindly asked if I would record it for the IGNTP YouTube channel and the videographers at my school kindly lent their time and talents to record it. (If it looks like I had the paper memorized, I did not. It’s just a camera trick and a teleprompter.) The outline of the paper is as follows:

  1. Intro
  2. Text-types as a solution (2:00)
  3. Text-types as a problem (5:25)
  4. Suggestions for progress (13:50)
    1. Define “texts” (14:02)
    2. Clarify their purpose (16:02)
    3. Specify their relationship (17:08)
  5. Conclusion (18:12)
  6. Postscript (19:30)
Besides giving an overview of where I think the discussion on text-types is (and needs to go), this video explains why we are centering our TCI colloquium this summer on this question.

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Review of the Statistical Restoration Greek New Testament

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I'm always excited when a new Greek New Testament comes out. It gives another opportunity to look carefully at the subtle differences between editions. This is a review of the hard copy of the Statistical Restoration Greek New Testament (SRGNT), edited by Alan Bunning (GlossaHouse, 2023), based mainly on a careful consideration of the text of Matthew.

The SRGNT is different from other editions because it is 'the first computer-generated text derived directly from the earliest manuscript witnesses using an algorithmic statistical model to simulate a reasoned-eclecticism approach' (back cover).

Bunning has done a great job entering primary data at www.GreekCNTR.org, a site which I used almost daily for two years when I was evaluating early orthographic information for the Tyndale House Greek New Testament.

At the very least such a computer-generated text, by differing little from the editions produced by human judgement, gives us assurance about the many parts of the Greek New Testament about which there is no dispute.

The edition aims to replace 'the subjective theological bias of human editors with the use of objective statistical and computational methods' (Introduction, p. i). However, computers also do stupid things when humans ask them to, which is why this edition contains hundreds of accentual mistakes and misplaced commas, most of which would have been caught by any careful human editor.

Admittedly wrong accents and commas aren't the most important aspects of a Greek New Testament, but they can be annoying.

In Matthew 5:39 we get this nonsensical comma:

ἀλλʼ ὅστις σε ῥαπίζει εἰς τὴν δεξιὰν σιαγόνα, σου στρέψον αὐτῷ καὶ τὴν ἄλλην·

Or γάρ beginning a clause in Matthew 10:23:

ἀμὴν, γὰρ λέγω ὑμῖν

Or δέ beginning a clause in Matthew 15:14:

ὁδηγοί εἰσιν τυφλοί τυφλὸς, δὲ τυφλὸν ἐὰν ὁδηγῇ, ἀμφότεροι εἰς βόθυνον πεσοῦνται.

There's an interrupting comma after the article in Matthew 25:20:

Καὶ προσελθὼν ὁ, τὰ πέντε τάλαντα λαβὼν, προσήνεγκεν ἄλλα πέντε τάλαντα 

The good news is that such mistakes can all be corrected in a subsequent edition. This is a first edition and can be built upon. As it says in the Introduction (p. ii) 'The SR can be regenerated in less than a minute reflecting all of the latest evidence'.

However, the algorithms are also capable of churning out nonsense readings in more substantial matters. In double square brackets, Matthew 16:2 ends thus: Εὐδία πυῤῥαζει γͅͅὰρ ὁ. The last word of the verse is the definite article and it has no accompanying noun. Good luck translating that!

Again, this is nothing that can't be fixed. But I would argue that this edition overvalues the goal of "scientific objectivity". That's not a problem if it's just an edition within a market place of editions. It can happily be used as a control on other more subjectively produced editions. But it is a problem if you remain convinced that a computer-generated text will give you the best edition.

Here are two examples of where the computer-generated text has produced something inferior to what humans would produce:

1) In Matthew 6:5 the SRGNT produces a switch from the 2nd person singular to the 2nd person plural:

Καὶ ὅταν προσεύχῃ, οὐκ ἔσεσθε ὡς οἱ ὑποκριταί

This unlikely reading may arise because the external attestation for the two verb forms has been treated as unconnected.

2) For Christ's dereliction cry the SRGNT has Ἐλωί, Ἐλωί, λεμὰ σαβαχθάνι in Matthew 27:46 and Ἐλωῒ, Ἐλωῒ, λεμὰ σαβαχθάνι in Mark 15:34. Literally the only differences arise through editorial inconsistency about diaeresis and accents. However, the deeper problem is having the same spelling of the Semitic expression for 'my God' in Matthew and Mark, which does nothing to explain the underlying manuscript differences.

But more positively the work of this edition can definitely help improve other editions. Despite taking great care in considering the orthography of the New Testament, here's a variation I had previously missed, and now know through the SRGNT:

Luke 10:13 Οὐαί σοι, Βηθσαϊδά

but Matthew 11:21 Οὐαί σοι, Βηθσαϊδάν.

The THGNT has Βηθσαϊδά in both cases. Arguably it's a detail we missed and the final nu should be there in Matthew.

So I want to thank Alan Bunning and his collaborators and cheer them on in their task, even as I remain firmly persuaded of the value of the human element in making good editorial decisions.

#SRGNT, #AlanBunning, #THGNT

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Further Arguments for the Verb in Eph 5.22

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I’ve blogged a fair bit about Eph 5.22 over the years, culminating in my argument for one of the longer readings in NTS back in 2021. Today, Joey McCollum of Australian Catholic University has a new article out in JSNT extending my argument. He gives much more attention than I could to the internal evidence and concludes in favor of the third person plural imperative. It’s especially helpful to have his thoughts on the function of the third person imperative, a question I only barely touched on in my essay but one that commentators especially need to consider.

Here’s the abstract:

This study revisits a contested textual variant concerning the presence, placement, and person of an imperative directed at wives in Eph. 5.22. Most previous treatments of this variant have decided the matter (typically in favor of the reading without an imperative) on the basis of manuscript support and transcriptional arguments about how readers and copyists of the text would have changed it, but the intrinsic probabilities of what the author would have written based on his argument and style have generally been neglected. This study fills this gap by assessing the intrinsic probabilities of the variant readings in Eph. 5.22 using discourse and information structure, the pragmatics of the Greek imperative, and stylistic observations in Ephesians. As a result of this analysis, the reading with the highest intrinsic probability is shown to be τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδράσιν ὑποτασσέσθωσαν, which bolsters the recent case made by Gurry (2021) for the same reading.

Thankfully, the article is open access too. Read it here.

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Registration Now Open

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I’m happy to report that registration for our 2024 TCI Colloquium at Yarnton Manor is now open. The fee is $100/person and includes lunch both days. I hope to see some of our readers there. You can register at textandcanon.org/events/text-types/

Friday, February 09, 2024

Scribal Habits in Near Eastern Manuscript Tradition and the Dead Sea Scrolls

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I recently read and reviewed Scribal Habits in Near Eastern Manuscript Traditions for the journal, Presbyterion, published by Covenant Theological Seminary. I thought an overview of the book and some of my takeaways as an OT textual critic studying the Dead Sea Scrolls might be helpful here. To purchase the book with a 40% off coupon, use this code generously provided by the publishers: SH40%

https://www.gorgiaspress.com/scribal-habits-in-near-eastern-manuscript-traditions

 




Overview: The paratextual elements of Near Eastern manuscripts are the focus of Scribal Habits in Near Eastern Manuscript Traditions. These elements, such as annotations, colophons, illustrations, diacritical signs, and commentaries are often overlooked by those interested in biblical studies because of an emphasis on a manuscript’s main literary text. This tendency is understandable given evangelicals' commitment to the text of Scripture but neglecting these paratextual elements ultimately obscures a fuller and more complete understanding of these manuscripts and the texts they transmit. This book, Scribal Habits, highlights these features to provide readers with the ability to ‘“virtually look over the scribes’ shoulder” (xiii; a slight rephrase of the words of J. R. Royse).

Here is a sampling of the book’s content. Elizabeth Buchanan concluded in her chapter that the use of the diaeresis in Byzantine Egypt evinces patterns. One of these patterns is that the “more accomplished writers” used the sign most consistently (23). Binyamin Katzoff studied the chapter divisions in the Tosefta and concluded that the divisions in the E tradition corresponded with the divisions of the Mishna. This study provides insight into how one tradition could be influenced by another literary work: in this case, the Mishna (102). Katzoff’s second chapter of the book investigated how a text could be systematically corrected to a text of an alternative textual tradition (112). This summary suffices to show the importance of these features, especially for evangelicals when studying biblical texts. Our assessment of the biblical text has to consider these features. 

Application to OT Textual Criticism: As a biblical scholar, in particular, a textual critic primarily concerned with the Dead Sea Scrolls, two topics of this book intrigued me. First, I was interested to learn about the significance of the paratextual elements in Near Eastern manuscripts since several of these elements are also present in the Dead Sea Scrolls. For example, diacritical signs are used in some manuscripts such as the margins of 1QIsaa and 4QCantb, 1QIsaa may preserve a marginal gloss, and a drastic shift in paleography occurs in 4QJosha. Moreover, there is a shift from poetry to prose in 11QPsa. Given the use of these features in the Dead Sea Scrolls, I was interested in how these paratextual elements functioned in other texts of this region.

Second, I hoped that this book would help me ask different questions about the Dead Sea Scrolls and open new avenues of study for me. This task is comparative. That is, I hoped to compare these mostly later more extant manuscripts and their signs and features to the earlier less extant Dead Sea Scrolls.

Before I engage in this comparative task, it is helpful to mention a few difficulties with this process. Perhaps the most profound difficulty in comparing these later Near Eastern manuscripts to the Dead Sea Scrolls is that the Dead Sea Scrolls exist in a highly fragmentary state. Anyone familiar with this discipline understands this reality, and it can easily be illustrated by turning to the back of a DJD volume and observing the PAM plates. One can also see this reality by exploring “The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library” accessed here https://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/home. Many Dead Sea fragments are unidentified, and some are only probably identified (see the debate around 4Q118, for example). This reality complicates an investigation into the paratextual elements of the Dead Sea Scrolls since many upper, lower, and intercolumnar margins have decayed. Handle sheets, title pages, and the endings of most manuscripts have deteriorated into dust. What precious information that these columns of parchment once contained is now lost, regrettably so, so that scholars can only dream of what a now lost colophon might have contributed to our understanding of these manuscripts.

Another difficulty with this process is the chronological and cultural gap between the Scrolls and the texts analyzed in Scribal Habits. For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls are usually earlier than the manuscripts discussed here although there is at least one exception to this (see Szilvia Sövegjártó’s chapter on the Sumerian texts from the Old Babylonian era). Scribal habits, and the paratextual elements that they utilized, may not have remained static. The same can be said of the cultural differences between ancient Jews and the cultures of the scribes who preserved the manuscripts discussed in Scribal Habits. These realities, likewise, might complicate the comparative task.

Despite these difficulties, I did enjoy comparing these texts to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Here are some thoughts regarding one of the chapters. T. C. Schmidt discussed the reception history of the Book of Revelation in Eastern churches, and in particular, the scribal strategies that might indicate a scribe's general assessment of the book. For example, the material used for writing, the books to which Revelation was bound, and the writing style of the scribe were all strategies that might demonstrate the scribe's attitude about the book’s status.

These insights provided me with interesting questions to ask of the Dead Sea Scrolls such as Does the quality of the script have any effect on a book’s status? Is there any connection between expertly copied texts and the status of the texts preserved in these manuscripts? Here I am thinking of what Tov labels de luxe edition manuscripts (see Scribal Approaches, 125-129). What does the phenomenon of stitching biblical and nonbiblical texts together signify about these texts’ status? This question continues to be an important issue regarding 11QPsa. Although most of the Dead Sea Scrolls are copied on parchment, what does the use of papyrus signify if anything during the Second Temple period? This distinction was significant in rabbinic literature. Is there a correspondence between the orthographic profile of a manuscript and the manuscript’s paleographic style? This one chapter demonstrates the importance of Scribal Habits for those interested in the history of ancient manuscripts including manuscripts that preserve the biblical text.

Overall, Scribal Habits was an enjoyable and insightful read, and it rightly stressed the importance of these paratextual features. Going forward let's open our eyes to the margins of the manuscripts, and let's get excited about what we might see. 

Thursday, February 08, 2024

Book Notice and Giveaway: Going Deeper with Biblical Hebrew

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I don't post here too often these days, but when I do, I announce a wonderful, new book and a giveaway! We're giving away two copies of Going Deeper with Biblical Hebrew: An Intermediate Study of the Grammar and Syntax of the Old Testament by H.H. Hardy II and Matthew McAfee.

Lest one thinks this book is only an intermediate Hebrew Grammar (as if that wouldn't be sufficient), it also includes a chapter on Old Testament textual criticism along with a guided lesson for students to learn to do it for themselves.

To enter the giveaway, share the link of this post on Facebook or X (@ETCtomwas) and tag the ETC Blog in it or simply Share or Repost the original social posts. I'll announce the winners of the giveaway on Friday afternoon!

More from the publisher:

Learning any language is no small task, not least one that sounds as unusual as Hebrew does to most English speakers’ ears. Going Deeper with Biblical Hebrew primarily aims to equip second-year grammar students of biblical Hebrew to read the Hebrew Scriptures. Using a variety of linguistic approaches, H. H. Hardy II and Matthew McAffee offer a comprehensive and up-to-date textbook for professors and students.

From an endorser:

Both practically accessible and linguistically rigorous, Hardy and McAffee’s valuable resource meets the needs of students and professors. Though not shying away from the technical details, the authors carefully balance the technical semantic information with the important pragmatic implications. Using famously complex passages (such as the Nephilim) as examples both draws students in and illustrates the importance of the issues. Overall, the authors make the technical relatable and, most of all, practical to second-year Hebrew students. –JoAnna M. Hoyt
Table of Contents