Steven Avery wrote:Ulan wrote:When Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, the now powerful church hierarchy unified the Greek and Latin text traditions, respectively. This took a few centuries.
Before you go haywire wth criticism, you should try to write clearly.
I was writing clearly. It's not my fault that you simply drop the "respectively" when you interpret my sentence. If you have difficulties with reading, don't blame it on others.
Steven Avery wrote:So your claim is that two distinct church hierarchies were involved, but your Greek one is unnamed and without a locale. And was not Roman, as you wrote abov, and had nothing to do with your "state religion of the Roman Empire" above.
Here you need some basic historical knowledge. We are talking about the Roman Empire that continued to exist another one thousand years after the fall of its western part (the "fall of the Roman Empire" in the 5th century is western historical fiction). Its name was simply "Roman Empire" (Greek: Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, transcribed "Basileia tôn Rhōmaiōn"), and its citizens were called "Romans". The name "Byzantine Empire" is a historiographical term that was only invented in modern times, long after the Roman Empire ceased to exist in 1453. This has mostly to do with the point that the western Roman Empire was revived as "Holy Roman Empire", and people from the Catholic tradition (which includes Protestants) were the people who wrote our history books.
The state religion of this Roman Empire was the Orthodox Church, which was basically a department of the government, and the emperors decided who leads it and had direct influence on church policies (which is why they are called caesaropapist). That's the environment where the Greek majority text emerged from (as in "gained its majority state"). The TR is basically (though not exactly) the text of the late Roman Empire. Of course, this doesn't mean that "the emperors wrote the text", it just means that the preference for a specific text-type is the product of a centralized bureaucracy. It helped that the Greek world of the Empire had become rather small at that point and there was not much space anymore for different text traditions, which means that you don't even need a conscious decision for this to happen. It's the text that survived the shrinking of the Greek world.
Steven Avery wrote:
And the Latin unification allowed for the Vetus Latina manuscript tradition to not be unified. And if the Latin tradition was so unified, why did you have rather extensive variations in the post-Trent editions?
Also, where do the dozens of later Alexandrian mss fit into this proposed scenario?
Could you unpack your claim into a sensible proposed history.
I guess you are nitpicking my use of "unified" here. Make it a "mostly unified", if you must.
I mentioned the Vulgate for the Latin. It was the most influential text in western Europe, even if the Vetus Latina still existed. However, chasing the phantom of an authentic text is a uniquely Protestant problem (caused by the "sola scriptura" doctrine), which means that the continued use of the Vetus Latina in some areas, or phrases from it in local Vulgate editions, was not an issue. Still, the Vulgate (in our modern use of the term; the old use included the Vetus Latina) was definitely predominant, and Bede refers to the Vetus Latina as the "former edition", because it had been, already in his time (8th century), mostly superseded by the Vulgate. In this sense, the decision of the Council of Trent was just an acknowledgment of the state of affairs at that time. The Vulgate was already for all practical purposes the standard text, because it was more popular.
I gave a rough estimate of >9th century for the Greek versions to converge in the tradition of the Greek Orthodox Church (the so-called "Byzantine text-type"). This is not a fixed date, but rather the time when the balance had shifted. The Alexandrian-type manuscripts are obviously earlier, as are the Western-type ones. They make up the largest part of our early text tradition. It's slightly involved to make statistics of this from before the 9th century, as the manuscripts often mix text types. However, there are so few texts from that time that people have done it. Also, even the Byzantine text-type was not that unified between the early manuscripts. They belong to several distinct subtypes.
But you know all this. You just don't want to know it.