EclecticOne

New Testament Textual Criticism's Basic Goals and Challenges

The textual criticism of the Gospels is a scientific task which has two goals. The primary goal is the reconstruction
of the text of each Gospel in its original form, that is, the form in which it was initially received by the church. The
secondary goal is the reconstruction of the transmission-history of the text. In order to apply Hort's axiom,
"Knowledge of documents should precede final judgment upon readings," these two goals should be pursued
simultaneously. The consideration of individual variant-units should never be completely detached from the question
of the relative values, or weights, of the witnesses, or from the question of how groups of variants became
characteristic readings of text-types. Accurate text-critical judgments will assist in the estimation of the relative
values of witnesses, and in the reconstruction of the text's transmission-history. Likewise, accurate assignments of
relative value to the witnesses, combined with accurate reconstructions of the text's transmission-history, will assist
specific text-critical decisions.

However, the textual critic who proceeds on such grounds must vigilantly avoid circularity. After observing, on
analytical grounds, that certain witnesses seem to consistently contain the best readings, a textual critic might be
tempted, from that point onward, to abandon the initial approach which led to that premise, and proceed to use the
premise itself to justify a tendency to adopt the readings of those witnesses. Similarly, a textual critic who notices
that a group of witnesses tends to contain the worst readings might be tempted to reject the remainder of the
testimony of that group of witnesses. If a textual critic proceeds to build on both such premises, the premises will
virtually determine the results of the rest of the analysis.

Competing Models of Transmission-History

The model of transmission-history adopted by a textual critic has a strong effect upon the values which a textual
critic assigns to the testimony of groups, and therefore also upon the final evaluation of variants. In this respect, the
approach which I advocate - Equitable Eclecticism - resembles the approach used by Hort. However, Equitable
Eclecticism yields an archetype which is significantly different from the Revised Text produced by Westcott & Hort,
and from the modern descendants of the Revised Text, chiefly the text of the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland
Novum Testamentum Graece. This is because research and discoveries subsequent to Westcott & Hort have
required the adoption of a transmission-model significantly different from the one used by Hort.

Hort, building on foundational premises developed by previous investigators, reasoned that the Byzantine Text was
essentially the result of a recension consisting of variants drawn from MSS with Alexandrian or Western readings;
Byzantine variants were derived from the Alexandrian Text, or the Western Text, or both, or, in some cases, came
into being during the recension. Hort therefore rejected all distinctive Byzantine variants. After the dismissal of the
Western Text as the result of scribal creativity, embellishment, and a general lack of discipline (with the exception of
a smattering of readings), the Alexandrian Text remained as the only text-type which could possibly be regarded as
the depository of the original text of the Gospels.

Hort's endorsement of the Alexandrian Text was not absolute, but it was so strong that he openly stated that variants
shared by the Alexandrian Text's two flagship codices (B and Aleph) "should be accepted as the true readings until
strong internal evidence is found to the contrary," and "No readings of Aleph+B can safely be rejected absolutely,"1
[1 - Introduction, p. 225, § 303. Although Hort used the terms "Neutral" and "Syrian" I have adopted the normal,
less tinted nomenclature.] while "All distinctively Syrian" - that is, Byzantine - "readings must be at once rejected."2
[2 - Introduction, p. 119, § 169.]

Such exceptional favor given to the Alexandrian Text, and such categorical rejection of Byzantine readings, were
natural implications of Hort's model of transmission-history in which the Western Text was derived from the
Alexandrian Text, and the Byzantine Text was derived from both the Alexandrian Text and the Western Text.

However, Hort acknowledged that such a clear-cut genealogical model would be out of place if a transmission-model
persistently involved readings which all had some clearly ancient attestation.3 [3 - Introduction, p. 286, § 373.] This
very thing was subsequently proposed by textual critics in the 1900's. Eminent scholars such as E. C. Colwell, G.
D. Kilpatrick, and Kurt and Barbara Aland maintained, respectively, that "The overwhelming majority of readings,"
"almost all variants," and "practically all the substantive variants in the text of the New Testament" existed before the
year 200.4 [4 - As cited by James Ronald Royse in Scribal Habits in Early Papyri, p. 20, from Colwell's Method in
Establishing the Nature of Text-Types, p. 55, and Kilpatrick's The Bodmer and Mississippi Collection, p. 42, and
Aland & Aland's The Text of the New Testament, p. 295.] Nevertheless the Hortian text has not been overthrown.
Only slightly changed, it has become entrenched in NA-27 and UBS-4 as the primary, and nearly exclusive, Greek
New Testament used in seminaries.

With the discovery and publication of Egyptian New Testament papyri in the 1900's - beginning with Grenfell and
Hunt's work at Oxyrhynchus, and continuing to the present day - Hort's claim that the Alexandrian readings have a
demonstrably greater antiquity than their rivals has eroded. Harry A. Sturz collected and categorized dozens of
distinctive Byzantine variants which were supported by at least one early papyri.5 [5 - See the lists in Sturz's 1984
book The Byzantine Text-Type and New Testament Textual Criticism.] Sturz's data does not vindicate the entire
Byzantine Text (and we should not necessarily expect papyri found in one locale to attest to readings in a text from
other locales), but he persuasively demonstrated that Hort's main reason for rejecting distinctive Byzantine readings
was unsound. According to Hort's transmission-model, none of the early distinctive Byzantine readings listed by
Sturz should exist. The fact that they obviously did exist, even in papyri found in Egypt, demonstrated that the
Byzantine Text may, at any given point, attest to an ancient distinctive reading.

In addition, discoveries about the texts in the papyri, in early versions, and in early parchment codices have
contributed to the erosion of one of the most empirical aspects of Hort's approach: the proposal that conflations in
the Byzantine Text demonstrate that it is later than the Alexandrian Text and the Western Text. In 1897, Edward
Miller objected that eight conflations cannot justify the rejection of the entire Byzantine Text6 [6 - See Miller's
comments about conflation in The Oxford Debate and the general assent given to them by his fellow debaters,
including William Sanday.]. They may be comparable to recently minted coins dropped in an ancient well.

Dr. Walter Pickering, in Appendix D of his book The Identity of the New Testament Text, showed that an apparent
conflation exists in Codex Sinaiticus at Jn. 13:24 (where the Alexandrian Text has kai legei autw eipe tis estin, the
Byzantine Text has puqesqai tis an eih, and Sinaiticus has puqesqai tis an eih peri ou elegen, kai legei autw eipe
tis estin). A conflation appears to occur in Codex Vaticanus at Eph. 2:5 and at Col. 1:12 (where the Western Text
has kalesanti, the Byzantine Text has ikanwsanti, and Vaticanus has kalesanti kai ikanwsanti). In D, a conflation
appears to occur at Acts 10:48 and John 5:37 (where the Alexandrian Text - supported by P75 - has ekeinos
memarturhken, the Byzantine Text - supported by P66 - has autos memarturhken, and D has ekeinos autos
memarturhken), among other places.

The papyri have supplied direct evidence against Hort's belief that apparent conflations imply that the text in which
they are found must be late. In P53, the text of Mt. 26:36 seems to read ou an, where the Byzantine text has ou and
the Alexandrian Text and Western Text have an. Papyrus 66 reads scisma oun palin at Jn. 10:19 (agreeing with the
Byzantine Text), where the Alexandrian Text has scisma palin and the Western Text has scisma oun. Similarly, P66
reads ebastasan oun palin at Jn. 10:31 (again agreeing with the Byzantine Text), where the Alexandrian Text has
ebastasan palin and the Western Text has ebastasan oun. The appearance of such readings in very early MSS
forces the concession that they do not imply that the text in which they appear is late; instead, they prove that an
early text can appear to include conflations. Nevertheless some modern-day textual critics still appeal to Hort's list
of eight Byzantine conflations as if it demonstrated that the entire Byzantine Text was secondary.7 [7 - For example,
Dr. Dan Wallace, in his 2010 online essay The Conspiracy Behind the New Bible Translations.]

Ironically, as the papyri-discoveries destroyed Hort's transmission-model, they also tended to exonerate Hort's
favored text of the Gospels, the Alexandrian Text, by demonstrating the high antiquity of the Alexandrian text of
Luke and John. Papyrus 75, in particular, possesses a remarkably high rate of agreement with B, showing that the
Alexandrian Text of Luke and John was carefully preserved in the 200's, and thus alleviating the suspicions of some
earlier scholars that the Alexandrian Text was the result of editorial activity in the 200's.

The correspondence between Papyrus 75 and Codex Vaticanus was interpreted by some textual critics as a
demonstration of the antiquity and superiority of the entire Alexandrian Text. Kurt Aland compared the situation to
sampling a jar of jelly or jam: a mere spoonful is enough to show what is in the rest of the jar.8 [8 - See p. 58 of
Aland & Aland's The Text of the New Testament, English translation by Errol Rhodes.] However, although the
agreement between P75 and B proves that the Alexandrian Text of Luke and John is not the result of scribal editing
conducted in the 200's, it did not prove that Alexandrian readings are not results of earlier scribal editing.
Theoretically, if the Western Text could develop in the period prior to the production of P75, so could the
Alexandrian Text. Papyrus 75 proved that the Alexandrian Text of Luke and John is very early; it did not prove that
Alexandrian readings are not the result of very early editorial activity.9 [9 - Bruce Metzger granted that most scholars
"are still inclined to regard the Alexandrian text as on the whole the best ancient recension," on p. 216, The Text of
the New Testament, 3rd ed. (1992), emphasis added.]

Nor did P75 prove that the Byzantine Text is less ancient than the Alexandrian Text. As a surviving example of a text
used in Egypt in the early 200's, P75 does not constitute evidence about text-forms used elsewhere. The most
significant evidence for the absence of the Byzantine Text prior to the 300's is the lack of patristic testimony for its
use, but this is largely an argument from silence. The natural destructive effects of humid climates upon papyrus-
material, allied with Roman persecutors who sought to destroy Christian literature, silenced a large proportion of the
Christian communities of the first three centuries of Christendom. According to Hort's theories, when these
communities adopted the Byzantine Text in the 300's and 400's, they embraced a new, imported text of the Gospels,
setting aside whatever they had used previously. A plausible alternative is that they simply continued to use their own
local texts which consisted primarily of Byzantine readings.

The discovery of the papyri led some textual critics to advocate an undue emphasis upon the ages of witnesses,
resulting in a lack of equity toward non-Egyptian variants. Because the Egyptian climate allowed the preservation of
papyrus, the oldest copies will almost always be copies from Egypt. To favor the variant with the oldest attestation
is, in many cases, to favor the variant in the manuscript that was stored in the gentlest climate. But this is no more
reasonable than favoring the variants of a manuscript because it was found closer to the equator than other
manuscripts. Certainly when two rival variants are evaluated, and the first is uniformly attested in early witnesses,
while the second is only found in late witnesses, the case for the first one is enhanced. But to assign values to
witnesses according to their ages without considering factors such as climate is to introduce a lack of equity into
one's analysis.

The papyri-discoveries elicited another interesting development. Pioneering scholars such as Griesbach had
organized witnesses into three main groups - Western, Byzantine, and Alexandrian. Each group, characterized by
consistent patterns of readings, was considered a text-type, and MSS sharing those special patterns of readings were
viewed as relatives of one another. (Hort had divided the Alexandrian group into two text-types, calling its earlier
stratum the "Neutral" text, supported by À B.) Following analysis by Kirsopp Lake, the Caesarean text of the
Gospels was added. But the evidence from the papyri indicates that even in a single locale (Egypt), the text existed
in forms other than those four.

One example is Papyrus 45, a fragmentary copy of the Gospels and Acts from the early 200's (or slightly earlier). In
Mark 7:25-37, when P45 disagrees with either B or the Byzantine Text or both, P45 agrees with B 22% of the time, it
agrees with the Byzantine Text 30% of the time, and 48% of the time it disagrees with them both. Such departures
from the usual profiles of text-types has led some textual critics to reconsider the existence of early text-types,
arguing instead that the text in the 100's and 200's was in a state of fluctuation.10 [10 - The most famous textual
critics to do so are Kurt and Barbara Aland, who proposed a new classification-system of MSS into Categories,
listed by numbers, rather than by text-type names.] A plausible alternative is that some of the papyri attest to the
existence of some text-types which became extinct, without implying that the Western, Byzantine, and Caesarean
text-types did not exist prior to the 300's.

Competing Greek New Testaments

In the late 1800's, Westcott & Hort's Greek text of the New Testament faced several obstacles. First was the
popularity of the Textus Receptus, which, as the base-text of the King James Version, had the status of an ancient
landmark in English-speaking countries, regardless of how carefully attempts were made to demonstrate that its
Reformation-era compilers, or some stealthy editors in ancient times, were the real landmark-movers. This obstacle
was cleverly surmounted by Eberhard Nestle. In 1898, the Würrtemburg Bible Society published the first edition of
Novum Testamentum Graece, an inexpensive Greek New Testament which was designed to compete with the
edition of the Textus Receptus which was being widely disseminated by the British and Foreign Bible Society. The
leaders of BFBS apparently had not been fully convinced by Hort's 1881 Introduction. The Greek text of Novum
Testamentum Graece was based on the revised Greek New Testaments which had been compiled by Westcott &
Hort, by Constantine von Tischendorf, and by Richard Weymouth.

Nestle wrote an enthusiastic recommendation of this handy Greek New Testament; his brief review appeared in the
Expository Times in June of 1898. He pointed out how "disgraceful" it would be to continue to circulate Erasmus'
errors in Rev. 17:8 and Rev. 22:19-21. He invited the British and Foreign Bible Society to begin to circulate Novum
Testamentum Graece instead of the Textus Receptus. In 1904 the British and Foreign Bible Society began
circulating the fourth edition of Novum Testamentum Graece. By that time, it became known that the editor of the
1898 edition had been none other than Eberhard Nestle.

As that was happening, a scholar named Hermann von Soden was in the process of compiling a grand edition of the
Greek New Testament which textual scholars expected to become definitive, superseding all previous editions. But
when von Soden's Greek New Testament was released in 1902-1911, it was found to be extremely cumbersome, and
it was flawed in various ways. Nestle's Novum Testamentum Graece was on hand to fill the vacuum, so to speak,
and it has done so ever since.

But should it? According to Kurt and Barbara Aland, the 27th edition of NTG differs from the early text compiled by
Eberhard Nestle "in merely 700 passages."11 [11 - p. 20, The Text of the New Testament: "In its 657 printed pages
the early Nestle differs from the new text in merely seven hundred passages." This is comparable to the difference
between the 25th and 27th editions of NTG, which differ in the Gospels at over 400 places.] Considering the high
number of variant-units involved, this implies that the text of the Gospels in NA-27 and UBS-4 is essentially the same
text that was published by Eberhard Nestle in the early 1900's. It is as if the papyri and the implications of their
contents (not to mention the research into early versions, the revisions of patristic writings, and other significant
discoveries and research undertaken in the 1900's) have been treated as if they did little but confirm the revised text,
whereas in reality they shook the foundational premises that had been used by Westcott and Hort.

The marketplace for Greek New Testaments in the early 1900's rapidly became crowded: Bernard Weiss, Alexander
Souter, and J. M. S. Baljon made compilations which rivaled Nestle's.12 [12 - After the publication of Weiss' Greek
text, Nestle used it instead of Weymouth's to arbitrate between the texts of Westcott & Hort and Tischendorf.] F.
H. A. Scrivener's editions of the Textus Receptus remained in circulation. Thomas Newberry's 1870 Englishman's
Greek New Testament - a fine interlinear edition of the Textus Receptus which featured a presentation of variants
adopted by textual critics prior to Westcott & Hort (Griesbach, Lachmann, Tregelles, Tischendorf, Alford, and
Wordsworth) - also remained in print. The public generally had to choose between either a Greek text similar to the
1881 revision of Westcott & Hort, or the Textus Receptus. Greek New Testaments which were used as the base-
texts for English translations tended to have the highest and longest-lasting popularity in English-speaking countries.

In 1982, Zane Hodges and Arthur Farstad published a compilation called The Greek New Testament According to
the Majority Text. As its name implies, this text was intended to consist of the readings shared by the majority of
Greek MSS. Hodges and Farstad proposed that the Alexandrian Text is a heavily edited, pruned form of the text,
while the Majority Text is much better, inasmuch as "In any tradition where there are not major disruptions in the
transmissional history, the individual reading which has the earliest beginning is the one most likely to survive in a
majority of documents."13 [13 - p. xi-xii, Hodges & Farstad's Introduction, 2nd ed.] The work of Hodges and
Farstad was the basis for many text-critical footnotes in the New Testament in the New King James Version, which
was published around the same time under Dr. Farstad's supervision.

A similar work was released in 1991 by Maurice Robinson and William Pierpont, called The New Testament in the
Original Greek According to the Byzantine/Majority Textform. A second edition was published in 2005. Rejecting
any notion of defending the Textus Receptus (which differs from the Byzantine Text at over 1,800 points, about
1,000 of which are translatable), Robinson and Pierpont regarded the Byzantine Text as virtually congruent to the
original text. A disadvantage of the Byzantine Text is that its component readings are whatever the majority of
Byzantine MSS support; almost no analytical attempts to reconstruct the relationships of variants within the
Byzantine tradition are undertaken since the question is usually settled by a numerical count.

In some respects, Hodges & Farstad and Robinson & Pierpont have paved a trail that was blazed in the 1800's by
John Burgon, who opposed the text of Westcott & Hort. Burgon's aggressive writing-style sometimes
overshadowed his argumentation; nevertheless some of his views were vindicated by subsequent research. For
example, Hort asserted that "even among the numerous unquestionably spurious readings of the New Testament
there are no signs of deliberate falsification of the text for dogmatic purposes,"14 [14 - p. 282, § 369, Hort's
Introduction.] but Burgon insisted that the opposite was true. Burgon's posthumously published Causes of
Corruption (1896) even included a sub-chapter titled "Corruption by the Orthodox." Almost a century later in 1993,
a variation on Burgon's theme was upheld by Bart Ehrman in the similarly titled book The Orthodox Corruption of
Scripture. As a result, though Ehrman exaggerated his case in many respects, no textual critics now consider Hort's
assertion to be correct.

Many scholars and interested bystanders, noticing that the weaknesses of several of Hort's key premises and
assertions have been exposed, have been willing to consider the model of transmission-history proposed by the
supporters of the Byzantine Textform - but not many have decided to embrace it. Some have irresponsibly
associated it with the novel American fundamentalist doctrine of King James Onlyism. Others have rejected it
because, despite detailed lists of principles of internal and external evidence in Dr. Robinson's essay The Case for
Byzantine Priority,15 [15 - Robinson's essay serves as an appendix in the second edition of the Robinson-Pierpont
text.], the quality which usually determines the adoption of a variant in the approach advocated by Robinson is its
attestation in over 80% of the Greek MSS. Patristic evidence and the testimony of early versions are not included in
the equation of what constitutes the majority reading. Distinctive Alexandrian variants, Western variants, Caesarean
variants, and even minority readings attested by the oldest Byzantine witnesses (such as parts of Codices A and W)
have no chance of being adopted; generally, whenever a variant is supported by over 80% of the Greek MSS, it is
adopted.

The validity of such an approach depends upon the validity of the premise that the transmission of the text of the
Gospels was free from "major disruptions." However, major disruptions have had enormous impacts upon the
transmission of the text. Roman persecutions and Roman sponsorship, wartime and peacetime, dark ages and
golden ages - all these things, plus innovations and inventions related to the copying of MSS, drastically changed the
circumstances in which the text was transmitted, and while all text-types were affected by them, they were not all
affected to the same extent, as a review of history will show.16 [16 - As Kirsopp Lake wrote in his little book The
Text of the New Testament, the ideal textual critic must possess "a complete knowledge of all the bypaths of Church
history."] Greek fell into relative disuse in Western Europe; Constantinople became the center of eastern Greek-
speaking Christendom; Islamic conquests squelched the vitality of the transmission-streams in regions where Islamic
rule was imposed; copyists in or near Constantinople invented more efficient ways to copy the text. Such historical
events completely invalidate results that are based on a transmission-model that assumes the non-existence of such
disruptions.