- Textual Scholars as Technicians
I’ve been trying in the posts of this thread to explain why textual critics are often thought not to be expert in the wide range of topics that other New Testament scholars are well versed in. They are instead frequently seen as technicians who do the really hard, dirty work that no one else is either that interested in doing or knowledgeable about, even though some of it (not all) is thought to be necessary and important as a kind of preliminary exercise. But it’s to be done by others.
I, on the other hand, was long intrigued with textual criticism, from my early college days. When I went to Princeton Seminary (already knowing Greek) and took a course with Metzger on palaeography (the study of ancient handwriting in the manuscripts and related topics) I was thrilled. In that course we learned how to “collate” manuscripts. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
Collating manuscripts, for most people, is no fun at all. It involves taking a manuscript – that is, a hand written copy – and comparing it word by word with a printed text, to see where it differs. You make a note of every single difference. And then you do it with another text. And another. And pretty soon you have lots of data, indicating what all the manuscripts have as their texts, at every point.
At the time, around 1980 or so – there were, practically speaking, only two ways to have access to Greek manuscripts of the New Testament: some (very, very few) were photographed and printed on books, and others (more) were available on microfilm. And so I learned how to do collations, using both media.
When I got the hang of reading manuscripts both in the more ancient uncial script (which looks kind of like our capital letters, uniformly made, and relatively easy to distinguish) and in the later minuscule script (which looks more like cursive writing, where letters are small case, written together, with numerous ligatures – that is, the letters taking different forms when combined with certain other letters; this is hard to get a handle on at first), and started collating manuscripts, I thought that this was the real deal, hard hitting scholarship, not the soft-core stuff that my colleagues in New Testament studies were doing. They were interpreting texts. Not that hard, I thought. I was *collating manuscripts*!!!
I wanted to devote my life to collating manuscripts. This is an essential and completely fundamental task. It is how we know what this, that, or the other manuscript has as its text of each and every verse that it contains. If we don’t know what the texts of the manuscripts read, then we don’t know what variant readings there are for a passage and so we don’t know what the options are: which reading is the original text and which ones represent scribal changes of the text.
On the other hand, frankly, it does get boring after a while. Metzger had the very good sense not only to teach me how to collate but also to suggest that there might be other even more important things to do for a dissertation. And so he directed me to my project on Didymus.
I’ve known textual scholars who really have wanted to do nothing but detailed studies of manuscripts – just as I myself wanted to do. And if left to my own devices, I probably would have done that, for my entire life. I’m very glad that didn’t happen. Early on in my life as a scholar I came to realize that textual specialists had a reputation among other New Testament scholars as working in technical minutiae that had almost no bearing on the broader interests of the discipline – for example, the interpretation of the NT writings, the theological understandings of the different early Christian authors, the history of the earliest Christian movement, and so on. And I quickly began to see why they had that opinion. If what we did mainly was such things as collate manuscripts – well, that didn’t exactly train us to know how to do engage in the interpretation of Paul’s letter to the Romans, or to understand Gnosticism, or to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus, etc.
There was a moment when I came to understand why other scholars simply didn’t have time for the technical aspects of NT textual criticism. I was at a professional conference – the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting – at some point in my graduate program, I suppose in the very early 1980s. The SBL, as it is called, has thousands of scholars of the Bible come, and papers are read on every biblical topic you can imagine, along with many more that you probably can’t imagine, many papers being presented at different sessions at the same time. I would always go to the sessions devoted to NT textual criticism.
At this particular meeting an unusually erudite (and well-known) European scholar was reading a paper in which he was discussing Matthew 10:10, where Jesus sends out his disciples to preach about the coming kingdom, heal the sick, and cast out demons, telling them not to take with them any money, bag, extra tunics, sandals, or even a staff. The scholar was discussing this word “staff” as it was found in one of the ancient versions (I don’t remember what it was – Armenian or Ethiopic or something). He had collated all the surviving manuscripts at this point, and there were two different words in this version that were used for “staff” in the surviving witnesses. He had a handout that showed which manuscripts had which words. He discussed which manuscripts were older, which were generally more reliable, which of the words occurred elsewhere in these manuscripts, and so on. It was a full 25-minute paper on the alternative possibilities for the word “staff” in this ancient version.
When he finished and took questions, I raised my hand. I asked him what the difference of *meaning* was between the two words. He said there was *no* difference of meaning. So I asked him why it mattered which word was used, if they meant the same thing. He was genuinely irritated by the question and didn’t see the point. For him it *obviously* mattered that you had to have the right word. Otherwise you’d have the wrong word. This wasn’t even the word in the original Greek! It was the word in some obscure version – and either word could have adequately translated the Greek word for staff.
It was at that point that I realized both why textual scholars were not seen as doing significant work by other NT scholars and, more important, that I did not want to be like that.
It sounds like there is a moral to this story but its Armenian or Ethiopic or something ....
I guess it shows how NT scholars maintain great focus on the Greek.
IDK.
