Koine Dialektos

Questions about areas of controversy or conflict between the Christian faith and the academic discipline can (and sometimes do) assume an easy dichotomy between the two. One's dual commitments to "the Faith" and the guild are often seen as competing allegiances, each vying for possession of the Christian soul. The guild may even be perceived as intolerant or antagonistic toward the Christian faith. Would-be Ph.D. students of evangelical backgrounds, for example, are often warned not to be naïve, but to be suspicious of secular institutions of higher learning. Such was my experience, as I left Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (M.Div.; Th.M.) for doctoral work in NT at Emory University. The problem with the aforementioned formulation, however, is the a priori "us versus them" mentality it fosters-a mentality that can foreclose genuine learning opportunities and undermine the very faith it seeks to defend. It also assumes a broad consensus among Christians on the identity and definition of those items of the faith in need of safeguarding vis-à-vis "the guild." Little did I know that upon returning to my alma mater, I would be the one suspected of having wavered from "the Faith."

Revisions to the Greek NT in NA28 are restricted to the Catholic Epistles—the product of the Münster Institute’s ongoing work on the Editio critica maior. The text of the rest of the NT remains unaltered. The updated manuscript data, however, spans the apparatus of the entire NT and signals a new day for its textual history. The revised correctors of the Apocalypse in Codex Sinaiticus make the point. The proposed revisions have direct and far-reaching implications for the book’s textual history. Corrections once placed in the fourth through sixth centuries now occupy the seventh. The changes appear slight, even inconsequential—“touch ups” in support of the task of reconstruction. The clarification and re-dating of the correctors, though, represent a material shift with instant repercussions. The inclusion of new and additional witnesses—alongside of and in juxtaposition to the corrections—further portend altered textual alignments and disclose forgotten chapters in the history of textual criticism. The clarity of the new data also facilitates an examination of their limitations and unclutters the landscape for renewed textual research. The stage is set for a reappraisal of the Apocalypse’s textual history.

Orthographic variation within the manuscripts of the Greek NT is seldom a cause célèbre beyond the ranks of diehard textual critics. Even among these most will concede that orthographic irregularities amount to little more than evidence of scribal incompetency or inconsistency in their spelling practices. To find the same word both spelled correctly and misspelled with a single manuscript b the same scribe is not uncommon. It approaches the  norm. The critical editions of our Greek NTs have therefore opted, on good grounds, to exclude textual variants displaying non-standardized spelling. To include them would make it impossible for anyone to use the critical apparatuses in a meaningful way. The deluge of senseless errors would drown out variants of demonstrable textual significance.

The publication of Josef Schmid's landmark work on the textual history of the Apocalypse seemingly established the Andreas Text Type as a fourth-century product. The primary evidence for Schmid's claim came from the fourth-century corrections of the Apocalypse in Codex Sinaiticus, corrections which bore a close resemblance to the Andreas text of the Apocalypse. Schmid's reconstruction, however, is flawed. The fourth-century corrections he identified are actually from the seventh-century. The data supporting a fourth-century Andreas text type does not exist. Schmid's widely influential error appears to have been based on a misreading of Milne and Skeat's "Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus."

The steady stream of provocative and popular text-critical works by Bart Ehrman has been stirring the apologetic's hornet's nest for a few years now. There has been no shortage of responses to his claims about proto-orthodox scribes tampering with the text of the NT. Wallace's Revisiting the Corruption of the NT is one of the latest apologetic works to attempt to set the record straight. The volume is successful in demonstrating that textual matters are more complex than is often portrayed and proffers viable, alternative explanations for textual variants in Ehrman's narrative of orthodox corruption. The collection of essays is nonetheless beset by a number of deficiencies, not least of which are its understandings of the text, scribal activity, and history. The book's naked apologetic intent is its greatest liability. Evidence appears to have been used selectively, and partial and misleading comparisons are made for the sake of apologetic gain.

A short article on the origin and development of the longer Trinitarian text of 1 John 5:7-8 as found in the Textus Receptus. The typos that are present in this draft will be corrected before the final version is submitted for publication. These include: Lachman > Lachmann; 1881 > 1831; Montifortianus > Montfortianus; [Ayuso] Ionneum > Ioanneum; [Bludau 1903-1] Bibeldruchen > Bibeldrucken; [Bludau 1919-1] den Glaubensbekenntnis > dem Glaubensbekenntnis; [Fischer] pseudo-autustinischen > pseudo-augustinischen; obiectarum. > obiectarum.’; [Rivière] es trois > des trois. Thanks to Jeff Cate, Peter Gurry, and especially Jan Krans for alerting me to these when it was originally posted on academia in 2015. The data of this DRAFT will also fully updated and footnoted in the 2020 peer-reviewed version in "Early Christianity."

A review of A Gospel Synopsis of the Greek Text of Matthew, Mark and Luke: A Comparison of Codex Bezae and Codex Vaticanus. Edited by Jenny Read-Heimerdinger and Josep Rius-Camp, in collaboration with Enric Muñarch. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Pp. xxi + 315. Cloth, $240.00.

Matthew C. Williams' "Two Gospels from One: A Comprehensive Text-Critical Analysis of the Synoptic Gospels" promises more than it can deliver, misleads readers with its subtitle, and stymies rather than advances the agendas of text-critical research and gospel criticism. Williams' study not only fails to shed new light on the synoptic problem, but also misappropriates (and misapplies) text-critical criteria to problems beyond their purview. The result is a work that amounts to little more than a cataloguing of well-known arguments for Marcan priority, encumbered by repeated attempts to tether a text-critical approach to the Synoptic Problem. Despite the appearance of copious detail, the work is selective in its treatment and founded upon a number of abstractions.

This essay tracks the ways Wilhelm Bousset broke new ground in tracking the Apocalypse's textual history and in particular how he influenced Josef Schmid's landmark work, Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Apokalypse-Textes," which to this day remains the standard text-critical work on John's Apocalypse. The essay also notes the ways in which Bousset continues to exert an influence in the 21st century, despite considerable theoretical, methodological, and artifactual advances.

"The early papyri of Luke are remarkable for their diversity. Six pre-fourth century witnesses are extant. The content, date, provenance, textual relationships, and scribal habits of each vary from fragment to fragment. Their texts range from a few paltry lines to nearly an entire gospel. All were produced in the second, third, or fourth centuries. All are from Egypt--though their precise sites of discovery differ. The nature and frequency of their scribal variations also fluctuate. Nonsense readings, itacisms, and similar orthographic 'deviations' prevail in some; others exhibit little to none of these. The incidence of nomina sacra and numerical abbreviations varies from scribe to scribe, even line to line. Their significance is debated. The amount of surviving text is at once both an accident of history and a byproduct of particular scribal habits. The rates of additions, omissions, transpositions, and the like can be tracked to the individual copyist. Human hands have shaped the bequeathals of history and the absence of 'expected' readings continue to hold the imagination hostage. Questions swirl over textual alignments, while the very nomenclature of 'text types' is decried in some quarters. More than simple artifacts of early Christian piety, these papyri disclose the fault lines of Luke's textual history--well in advance of the great fourth-century codices."