Thursday, April 19, 2012

Stephen Carlson's Duke Dissertation on the Text of Galatians

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Over at Hypotyposeis, Stephen Carlson gives a synopsis of his Duke University Dissertation on the text of Galatians.
This dissertation investigates the text of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians and its history, how it changed over time. This dissertation performs a stemmatic analysis of 92 witnesses to the text of Galatians, using cladistic methods developed by computational biologists, to construct an unoriented stemma of the textual tradition. The stemma is then oriented based on the internal evidence of textual variants. After the stemma is oriented, the textual variants near the base of the stemma are examined and the text of Galatians is established based on stemmatic and eclectic principles. In addition, two branches of the textual tradition, the Western and the Eastern-Byzantine, are studied to assess the nature of textual variation in their history. This study reaches the conclusion that a modified stemmatic approach is an effective way to study both the text of a New Testament book and its history.

Hopefully this will soon be available at DukeSpace.

Update (TW): We all congratulate Stepen on the successful defense of his PhD, and I take the opportunity to cite his supervisor Mark Goodacre who said:

His thesis title was "The Text of Galatians and Its History". Those of you who know Stephen's work will not be surprised to hear that his thesis was outstanding, and his defense of it exemplary. If we awarded "honors" here at Duke, or "graduation with distinction", this thesis would have received that award. Very many congratulations, Stephen, on a richly deserved PhD, and all the very best for your future!

10 comments

  1. Well done! Now, what are the highlights? How many differences to NA27? What kind of differences etc?

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  2. How did he address the problem of mixture? Or is this just not a big problem when the text of Galatians is concerned?

    Yours in Christ,

    James Snapp, Jr.

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  3. Congratulations!

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  4. Hi there, awesome site. I thought the topics you posted on were very interesting. I tried to add your RSS to my feed reader and it a few. take a look at it, hopefully I can add you and follow.





    Top Dissertation Sites

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  5. Hi there, awesome site. I thought the topics you posted on were very interesting. I tried to add your RSS to my feed reader and it a few. take a look at it, hopefully I can add you and follow.





    Top Dissertation Sites

    ReplyDelete
  6. We can all brag that we knew him back when he was only a lawyer! Hearty congrats, my friend!

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