D.THE TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
1.Manuscripts and
History of the Greek New Testament
The
Manuscripts
As we learned earlier
in our discussion of the text of the Old Testament, a manuscript is simply a
handwritten document. We also learned, however, that the term is used
elastically; that is, a "manuscript" is often used to describe
documents other than the handwritten type (e.g., a printed copy of the O.T.
text).
The same can be said of
New Testament documents. While mention will be made of "manuscripts",
the student must realize the term is often being used generically.
There are four kinds
of "manuscripts" (abbrev.= MSS) which witness to the Greek New
Testament:
Papyri ? Manuscripts written on papyrus
leaves. The papyri are written in the uncial script (modified capital letters)
with little or no separation between words. Many of what are classified papyri
are among the oldest manuscripts we possess. None of them, however, contain the
entire N.T. Most of the earliest and most important papyri were discovered or
acquired by two men, Sir Chester Beatty and M. Martin Bodmer (and subsequently
published) between 1934 and 1961.Papyri are labeled with a capital P and a
corresponding number. The most important papyri (all 3rd century) are:
P45, P46,
P47, P52, P66, P72
Uncials ? Manuscripts written on vellum
(animal skin).These MSS are also written in the uncial script (hence the
name).Some of the most important witness to the Greek N.T. are in this class. In
fact, the most important witness we have (Sinaiticus; contains the whole N.T.)
is an uncial. The most significant uncials are:
(aleph)= Codex Sinaiticus (350 A.D.)
B= Codex Vaticanus (325 A.D.)
A= Codex Alexandrinus (475 A.D.)
Minuscules ? Manuscripts written in small,
cursive Greek letters. This script was faster to write and hence aided
copying.Most of the MSS of the Greek N.T. are in this class.
Lectionaries ? Manuscripts which are actually
portions of the Greek N.T. arranged in daily or weekly readings or lessons. This
is the second largest group of MSS. They are written in both the uncial and
minuscule script.
Aside from manuscripts,
New Testament textual critics also look to versions (translations) of the
Greek N.T. in their quest to determine the original reading of the N.T. Obviously,
they are of secondary value. Ancient versions of the N.T. are the Old Latin,
the Latin Vulgate, Old Syriac, the Syriac Peshitta, Coptic, Armenian, and
Ethiopic.
The last source for
N.T. textual critics are quotations (in Greek) of the Greek N.T. in the
writings of the early church fathers.The primary value of the quotations of the fathers lies in
the fact that when they quote from an existing manuscript of their time, the
reading they quote then has a fixed date, since we know when the fathers lived.
Unfortunately, however, the fathers are at times unreliable, for they (like us)
often quoted from memory and thus made mistakes.
2. Introduction
to "Text Types"
As D.A. Carson comments:
"The aim of the
textual critic is to ascertain, as precisely as possible, what reading of any
particular passage is closest to the original, or accurately reflects the
original. The first step is to classify the manuscript evidence in such a way
as to make it manageable. As the church became more institutionalized, certain
definable manuscript traditions tended to become standards within more or less
defined areas . . .
The Greek manuscripts of the New
Testament are generally grouped together into "text types." This
means that the manuscripts belonging to a particular text type all reflect the
same sort of errors, the same variants at crucial passages, the same general
pattern of development. Of course, because all of the manuscripts in any one
text? type have themselves been hand? copied, no two manuscripts in any one
textual tradition are precisely identical. Nevertheless a manuscript can often
be assigned to one text?typeor another; and if a manuscript reflects two or
more text types, it is said to be mixed" (D.A. Carson, The King James
Version Debate, pp.25?26).
In
discussing the same issue, Gordon Fee states:
"The immense
amount of material available to the NT textual critic, exceeding all other
ancient documents by hundreds of times, is both his good fortune and his
problem. It is his good fortune because with such an abundance of material he
can reasonably certain that the original text is to be found somewhere in it ...
However, the abundance of material
is likewise the textual critic's problem, because no two copies are exactly
alike, and the greater the number of copies, the greater the number of variants
among them . . .
. . . Although it is true that no
two MSS are identical, it is equally true that many are so much alike that they
tend to group themselves into three (some textual critics think four) major
families of texts (text?types)" (Gordon Fee, "The Textual criticism of the
New Testament," in Expositor's Bible Commentary, vol.1, p.423).
A "text type",
then, is simply a family of manuscripts.
Text types are identified
on the basis of two main criteria (Fee, p.423):
(1) The percentage of
agreement which manuscripts have with each other.
(2) The percentage of
agreement in variant readings.
THE
TWO MAJOR TEXT
TYPES
1.Alexandrian
Derives from
* this type contains
most of the papyri.
* as a result, this type contains
the oldest
manuscript witnesses to the NT.
* since the papyri date in the 200's
A.D.,
this text?type was formed at the
latest
by mid?fourth century
Characteristics:
a.The oldest
manuscripts belong to this group
b.All of the papyri are in
this group
Witnesses:
P75
P66= the gospels (c. 200
A.D.)
P46= Paul
(c.225 A.D.)
P72= Peter
and Jude (c.275 A.D.)
Codex B (Vaticanus)
Codex A (Alexandrinus); except
gospels
Codex a (Sinaiticus); to some degree
According to
Fee, the Alexandrian text type is "considered a carefully preserved
transmission" (p.423).Carson adds, "the Alexandrain text has
excellent credentials, far better than its harshest critics have been willing
to concede" (KJV Debate, p.27).However, as we shall see, oldest does not
always mean best, for most errors in MSS got there in the first three or four
centuries after the apostolic period.
2.Byzantine
* also called the
"majority" text?
type
* over 80% of all extant MSS are in
this family
** MSS with the type of variants
peculiar to this type do not
appear in any MS before 475 A.D.
Origin
of the type
This type shows up in
quotations
in the writings of church fathers
who were associated with the church
at Antioch. Therefore, it's assumed
that this type began at Antioch
(a church with direct apostolic
legacy).
Main witness:
Codex A (Alexandrinus);
gospels only
(c. 475 A.D.)
The origin of this type
is not clear, but "what is known is that such a text was available by A.D.
350, that it had partially begun to influence the text of Alexandria and Rome
(Jerome), that it was carried by Chrysostom from Antioch to Constantinople, and
that probably through his influence it became the dominant text in the Eastern
church." (Fee, p.424)
THE HISTORY
OF THE NEW TESTAMENT TEXT
(the periodization and
much of the material for this discussion is from Fee's article and J.Harold
Greenlee's Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism)
THE PERIOD OF CONFUSION
(to A.D.400)
Labeling this period in
the above fashion is justifiable in light of the extremely unsystematic and
unprofessional way the NT Scriptures were copied during this time. We must
remember that the original NT documents were distributed over a wide
geographical area, so distribution meant unsupervised copying by copyists of
varied skill. In the context of persecution, some member of a local church
probably took it upon himself to copy the Scriptures in the face of the
prospect that it could be taken or destroyed at any time. The mere fact that
copies had to be done by hand (there was no printing press) made errors
inevitable, and once errors were made, they were passed along in the copies.
In his treatment of
this period, Gordon Fee states:
"The vast majority
of errors in the NT MSS occurred during the period that is also the most
difficult to reconstruct the first
four Christian centuries.
"Much of the difficulty stems
from the work of the earliest Christian copyists. In a time when the majority
of people were illiterate and when Christianity periodically underwent severe
persecution, there were probably few professionally trained scribes in the
service of the church . . . [these untrained scribes] introduced thousands of changes
into the text. To be sure, the majority of their errors were unintentional and
are easily discernible slips of the eye, ear, or mind. Hundreds of changes in
the text were, however, made intentionally . . .
" . . . early scribes (and
sometimes later ones) often 'smoothed out' the Greek of the biblical writer by
adding conjunctions, changing tenses of verbs, and changing word order . . .
"During the second century in
particular, when each NT book was being transmitted independently of the
others and when there was wide geographical distribution of these documents
with little or no 'controls', such scribal errors proliferated" (Fee,
p.425).
THE PERIOD
OF TRANSMISSION (A.D. 400?1516)
Two events after A.D.
400 had a great influence on the transmission of the Greek NT – the rise of the
Byzantine (Eastern) half of the Roman Empire to prominence after the fall of
the western half (Rome itself) in 476 A.D., and the rise of Islam as a religion.
What this meant was
that the center of manuscript production became Constantinople (Byzantium).Transmission
of the Greek NT was therefore limited to the Eastern church and the Byzantine
text type. The years 400?1516, then, is nothing more than a the history of the
copying of the Byzantine MSS.
ESTABLISHMENT OF THE
TEXTUS RECEPTUS (TR) (A.D.1516-1633)
J. Harold Greenlee
captures the historical context of the early sixteenth century which so
affected the way the text of the New Testament was transmitted from the
Reformation period onward:
"In the middle of
the fifteenth century the world of literature was revolutionized by the
invention of printing from moveable type. For the first time it had become
possible to reproduce a document in an unlimited number of copies, and to have
these copies absolutely identical in their text. The difference which this
invention made for the civilized world is almost beyond comprehension.
"The age of manuscripts was
virtually at an end. This does not mean that every scribe laid down his pen as
the first printed sheet came from the press; some manuscripts continued to be
copied for generations. Yet the printing press signaled the beginning of the
new age in which literature would no longer be dependent upon single copies
tediously made by hand" (Greenlee, Introduction to NT Textual Criticism,
p.69).
This period of textual
transmission, then, was characterized by the "mass" production of
printed editions of the Greek New Testament. As such, a certain amount
of textual criticism (the comparing of MSS with one another) went into this
production. Unfortunately, however, these editions were dependent on very few
MSS for some elementary reasons:(1) there were few MSS known at the time ? all
of the MSS which we regard today as the "best" witnesses to the NT
were not yet discovered in the 1500's; (2) Just obtaining the MSS which were
available was a difficult task for logistic reasons. There was no "postal
service"! As a result, these editions were often based on one family or
text type ? the type which was geographically closest.
Printed Editions of the
Greek New Testament
1514= Erasmus' first
edition (did not contain the Trinitarian formula of I John 5:7 due to its
absence in all the materials he had – and in fact, it's absence in any
manuscript prior to the Middle Ages)
1522= Erasmus' third
edition – contains the above wording; the one the KJV is ultimately based on
Erasmus' text relied
exclusively on later (12th?13th century) Byzantine minuscules.
Of Erasmus' edition,
Kurt Aland notes:
"[Erasmus' sources
reflect] the most recent and poorest of the various New Testament text types,
and his successors [used] the same . . . The sources used by Erasmus for his
edition are known. He took manuscripts readily available to him in Basel for
each part of the New Testament (the Gospels, the Apostolos [Acts and the
Catholic letters], the Pauline letters, and Revelation), entered correction in
them where he felt it necessary, and sent them directly to the printer . . .
Erasmus was unable to find in Basel any manuscript of the Revelation of John,
so he borrowed one from his friend Johann Reuchlin.Because its ending was
mutilated, Erasmus simply translated Rev.22:16?21 from Latin back into Greek
(introducing several errors).He modified the text elsewhere as well, conforming
it to the Latin version"
THE SEARCH
FOR A CRITICAL TEXT (1633-1881)
This period can be
nicely divided into two eras:
a.The Accumulation
of Textual Evidence (1633?1831)
The activity of this
period is concisely summarized by Gordon Fee:
"The next period
in the history of the NT text was one in which scholars made great efforts to
amass new information from Greek MSS, the versions, and the fathers. Yet the
texts published during this period [to 1831] continued to print the time-honored
TR; the new evidence, especially that from much earlier MSS, was relegated to
variant readings in the apparatus (i.e., critical notes)." (p.426)
There are several
important individuals to take note of who worked during this period
J.A. Bengel (1734) =
J.J.
Wetstein (1751?52) =
J.J.
Griesbach (1774?1807) =
b.Work
of Constructive Criticism (1832?1881)
Again Fee summarizes
what went on during this second portion of the period under discussion:
"The period that
followed Griesbach was to see the overthrow of the TR and the rise of the new
critical editions based on the more significant MS finds and the principles of
criticism pioneered by Wetstein and Griesbach" (p.427).
* This was the period
in which many of the key UNCIALS of the NT text were discovered or made
accessible to scholars. This greatly affected the quality of the text editions.
Important Figures/Achievements
During This Period:
Karl Lachman
* first to attempt to
produce a Greek
text using a scientific method
rather than just counting MSS.
* first to set aside the TR
Constantine von Tischendorf
* published 8 critical
editions
* his last edition was in 1872; his
critical apparatus in this edition
tried to list the variants of all
known uncials
** DISCOVERED many MSS
unknown until
his day.The most significant
of these was Sinaiticus (1844,
1853, 1859; publ.in 1911, 1922)
B.F. Westcott and
F.J.A. Hort
* easily the most
important figures
of the period, and two of the most
important in the history of textual
criticism.As Fee notes:
"Although many
others made contributions during this period . . . the Greek text edited by
B.F. Westcott and F.J.A. Hort (1881) was to supersede all others in significance.
So thoroughly and well did they do their work that almost all subsequent
textual criticism is defined in relationship to it. Their forte was the
refinement and rigorous application of a scientific methodology to the NT
text. The result was issued in two volumes as The New Testament in the Original
Greek. Volume 1 contained their resultant Greek text; volume 2 comprised a
lengthy Introduction, written by Hort, and an Appendix, in which certain
problem passages were discussed" (Fee, p.427).
* Westcott
and Hort took 28 years to produce these two volumes!
* the result of their
work was the complete overthrow of the TR as the
standard Greek text (in Fee's words,
they "laid the TR to rest").
* With this rejection
of the Byzantine text type, Westcott and Hort chose
the Alexandrian text as that which
was most authentic. In their
terminology, theAlexandrian was the
"neutral" text type; Hort called the
Byzantine"Syrian".
* It is important to
note that Westcott and Hort had what are currently
regarded the most significant MS
witnesses to the NT at their disposal
(Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, and Vaticanus);
this was a first in text critical
work:
** Westcott and Hort's
conclusions regarding the TR and the Byzantine
("Syrian") text in general
are very important.Basically, they listed three
reasons as to why the Byzantine text
was to be regarded inferior to the
Alexandrian:
(1) "The Syrian
text type is filled
with conflate readings"
(readings
that combine the elements found
in the two earlier types; Fee,
p.427).
(2) "The readings
peculiar to the
Syrian text type are never found
in the ante Nicene Fathers, neither
East or West" (Fee,p.427).
(3) Internal evidence
(comparison of
peculiar readings to readings in
the other text types).
THE AGE OF
THE CRITICAL TEXT (1881 - PRESENT)
New Discoveries Since Westcott and Hort
By far the most important
discoveries for NT text-critical studies during the last 100 years is the
"discovery" (in some cases, "acquisition" would be more
apt) of the papyri. As Kurt Aland comments:
"Not until the
twentieth century did the New Testament papyri achieve the special prestige
they enjoy so widely now . . . only nine papyri were known or edited by the
turn of the century, and only one of those was cited in the critical apparatus
of any edition(P 11, cited only partially by Constantin von Tischendorf).By the
1930s the number of known papyri had grown to more than forty without any of
them arousing any special attention, despite the fact that many of them were of
a quite early date.Then came the discovery of the Chester Beatty papyri:P45,
P46, and P47.The excitement aroused by these manuscripts
had not yet subsided when in 1935 Colin Henderson Roberts published P52
dating from about A.D. 125.The problems raised by these papyri were still being
debated when the Bodmer papyri P66, P72, and P74 were
published between 1956 and 1961)" (Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, The Text
of the New Testament, revised and enlarged edition, Eerdmans/E. J. Brill, 1989,
p.84).
Summary of
Greek MSS, Text types, and the Bases for printed editions of the Greek N.T.
Greek
MSS Data:
Text types and Greek
MSS:
Alexandrian Text?
* witnessed by ALL the important
papyri (P/ 46,66,72,75)
* witnessed by ALL the
most important uncials ( a, B, A [except
the gospels])
Byzantine/Majority
(Hort=Syrian) ?
* oldest witness = the
gospels of A (475 A.D.)
* early consistent type
seen in8th?9th century minuscules
* the type behind
Erasmus' editions (and hence the later TR)
For
our purposes, the other significant printed editions of the Greek NT are:
Stephanus' 3rd ed. (1550) ? based on Erasmus' 3rd ed.
Beza's 1588?89, 1598
eds. ? based on
Erasmus and Stephanus
Elzevir brothers' 1633
ed., the TR ? based
on Stephanus and Beza, and therefore mirrors Erasmus. Since the connection with
Erasmus is so profound, the TR and the Erasmian text are nearly the same. This
is why, despite the 1633 date, many link the KJV to the TR.
Tischendorf's 1872 ed. ? based on known MSS ofthe day, NOT
only Byzantine text/minuscules. Had Sinaiticus at his disposal.
Westcott and Hort's
1881 ed. ? based on
all known MSS of the day; all the major uncials.
UBS 3rd ed. (1975) ? follows Westcott and Hort; use of
the papyri
Nestle?Aland 26th ed
(1979, 1987) ?
follows Westcott and Hort; use of the papyri
Hodges and Farstad
(1982) ? follows
the Byzantine text type preserved in the TR and Erasmus' 3rd ed.