Talk:Textual criticism/Archive 1

older entries
So, I'm new to Wikipedia and I hope I did this right. I made a change to the NT Textual Criticism section. I added a note recognizing the body of manuscripts in languages other than Greek and Latin. This seemed important to me to add because this body of manuscripts is quite large, all together representing nearly as many manuscripts as the Latin. Also I noted the number of manuscripts supporting the Illiad as a means of comparison, since to many readers who have no idea how many manuscripts critics are usually working with, 24,000 manuscripts might not be a meaningful figure. The comparison to Homer gives a sense of scale to the numbers.

My information came from "A General Introduction to the Bible" by Norman Geisler and William Nix and to the best of my knowledge is accurate and reliable.

I hope I did this correctly, please change anything I didn't do right and leave a note here about it so I don't go around screwing up other articles.

Thanks

Merge with lower criticism?
I've removed the merge notice from this page, because I believe that lower criticism should be merged in here (possibly with a redirect), though I don't have time at the moment to do it myself. the term "textual criticism" is by far the most common term, as a quick Google search confirms. People in this field--especially conservative Christians--tend to avoid the term lower criticism because it is easily confused with higher criticism--something very different and objectionable to many people. I'm relatively new to Wikipedia, so if I've violated any conventions in removing the merge tag, please let me know.--mssever (Blog) 20:37, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)

Biblical Criticism
"Biblical Criticism" should be its own article; it should not redirect to "Textual Criticism", which is one of the tools of biblical criticism.--Peter Kirby 07:39, 9 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Sounds good. Stephen C. Carlson 04:13, 2005 August 10 (UTC)

Academic Honorifics
I noticed that one scholar was called a Dr. (James Trimm) and the rest, all with a Ph.D. or D.D., were not. Without getting into whether Trimm's doctorate (an S.T.D.) was from a properly accredited institution, it seems best to treat all scholars the same way--i.e., omit their degrees. Stephen C. Carlson 18:41, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Fact check re: NT criticism
I've asked for a fact-check/cite on this paragraph:


 * The battle over textual criticism raged in the 18th and 19th centuries as proponents of textual criticism often opposed the divine inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible as the word of God. The textual criticism movement of the 17th-19th centuries helped usher in a rationalism that called into question the veracity of the Bible and has led to the downfall of many Christian denominations, educational institutions, and disciples.

Who says it has lead to rationalism et al.? Hasn't it also lead to greater confidence that we have all the original text?


 * Every reading ever occurring in the New Testament textual tradition is stubbornly preserved, even if the result is nonsense...any reading ever occurring in the New Testament textual tradition, from the original reading onward, has been preserved in the tradition and needs only to be identified. (Kurt and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism, 2d ed. [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989], 296).

I know that alot of KJV/AV1611 literature makes the claim about textual criticism being averse to various doctines, but if that is the source, it should be attributed/cited...otherwise it sounds like the textual critics themselves think that this is the result of their discipline (which a simple reading of Wallace, Metzger, passim, reveals as false), or that is is a well-known fact, which it isn't. --MonkeeSage 19:24, 24 March 2006 (UTC)


 * The second sentence is problematic. Did textual criticism really lead to the downfall of all that stuff? What denominations? What institutions and disciples? "Battle... raged" is colorful language. Is it appropriate for an encyclopedia? I'll wait to see if a citation and defense is presented, but otherwise I propose a significant rewrite.--Andrew c 22:17, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Comment on Introduction/"Love" citation
An earlier edit said:


 * Textual criticism is most commonly performed upon ancient, medieval, and early modern manuscript writings, although the principles employed are generalisable to any document that has been through a process of copying and re-copying. Hence although textual criticism is commonly performed upon manuscript traditions there is also no reason why it should not be performed upon printed witnesses as well (as Love, 1993, points out).

I removed the reference to Love, 1993, but it was subsequently restored as follows:


 * Before the invention of printing, literary works had to be copied by hand, and each time a manuscript was copied, errors were introduced by the human scribe. The age of printing reduced the need for handwritten copies, but printed editions are subject to many of the same kinds of errors. Therefore, as Love points out, there is no reason why printed editions should not be subject to textual criticism as well.

I don't dispute that Love said this in 1993. But as printed books have been subject to textual criticism for hundreds of years &mdash; that is, virtually as long as printed books have existed &mdash; it seems odd to credit Love with this insight in 1993. Nevertheless, I have put in a source citation from fifteen years before Love's book. Indeed, I'm sure that without much trouble one can easily find much earlier sources for this rather trivial observation. Marc Shepherd 18:14, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Order of page and stemmatics section
A previous edit placed Stemmatics after Copy-text eding. This is ahistorical, as stemmatics was invented in the mid-19th century, and "copy-text" dates from 1903. It is, therefore, surely incorrect to say that "the stemmatic method adopts the techniques of the other approaches after fitting the manuscripts into a rigorous historical framework," when the other approachas came later. Marc Shepherd 21:09, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Koran and Buddhism
Although a section on textual criticism of the Koran and Buddhist texts would be welcome, the stub sections another edited recently added were just links to topics about the Koran and Buddhism in a general way, rather than textual criticism of those topics. Feel free to reinstate them if there is material pertinent to the topic of the article. Marc Shepherd 16:33, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks
Thankyou very much to whoever added this: http://www.bible-researcher.com/rules.html it wasn't here a few months ago but it is just what I was looking for. I mention this because so far this page perhaps has lots of information on the history of TC but not much on how to begin doing it practically or guidance on doing it better for those who have begun, which is perhaps more often what people looking this up as an unfamiliar subject in an encyclopedia would be looking for? Bhikkhu Santi 00:04, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

good article review
I am passing this as a good article. I have several suggestions: Think about starting with the final paragraph about applications rather than end on that note; or else keep the structure but throghout give some examples of some important riddle solved by textual criticism to increase the casual reader interest. I thought the middle sections were bringing in some pretty long quotes that felt a bit redundant if the points are already summarized. Try to not to rely on quotes that are this long. Finallt, the final two sections do not indicate what their sources were. Otherwise good job people. Goldenrowley 02:45, 6 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Thank you. Will work on these issues. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 03:06, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Good job, meets all the criteria for a good article, it is well written, clearly explanatory, with hardly a comma out of place. The article brought up up several points of view, and different opinions, all in a very neutral voice. Goldenrowley 03:11, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Organization suggestion
Not trying to slam you with overkill here (maybe I shouldn't have used Wiki as a break from grading papers?), just trying to be helpful. In addition to the points made over in the Featured Articles listing, I had forgotten to make a note about organization. Using the 4 modes of criticism (the 3 + cladistics) is a good and sound approach. One of the challenges of editing on screen though is that it is tricky to see when an organizational scheme has gone awry. Thus, sections like the one titled Greg-Bowers-Tansdle confuse the overall structure. It might be helpful to printout the whole article and see visually how the ideas are linked to one another -- sometimes this helps to see where ideas not central to the main structure need to be subordinated. I'll be glad to help some with these revisions, especially in creating a brief text to disentangle the philological textual criticism and the rhetorical/literary textual criticism. warmly, Cyg-nifier 15:36, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * That would be very helpful, SwanSZ. I can work on re-doing all the cites and moving them to the ref format for inline citations to show up on the "Notes" section, and re-doing the References section to be just that, an alpha-sorted collection of sources used in the article. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 16:01, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Archived fac
Featured article candidates/Textual criticism/archive1. Sandy Georgia (Talk) 18:22, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Bibliography or Philology?
The opening notice of this page states that Textual Studies is "a branch of philology or bibliography". I am not familiar enough with linguistics to question the philology part, but I do know that it is a branch of bibliography. If it is indeed a branch of both fields, shouldn't this overlap be clarified? It is confusing as is. I am not familiar enough with linguistics to understand the difference, if there is indeed one, so if someone does understand the difference, please clarify it in the page. If there is no difference, a statement about the presence of (and perhaps the reason for) this overlap would be helpful. Savingedmund 15:09, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

cquote, quotation, or blockquote?
I would say that cquote is way too bombastic for many quotes in an article. Use quotation is recommended instead. If you do not like these, use just a  set of tags. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 18:54, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

unique God...unique Son typo
There seemed to be an accidental reversal in the "Findings" section between "unique God" and "unique Son." The modern scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament favor "unique God" as the original reading. Metzger describes this in his textual commentary: "With the acquisition of P66 and P75, both of which read theos, the external support of this reading has been notably strengthened. A majority of the Committee regarded the reading monogenes huios, which undoubtedly is easier than monogenes theos, to be the result of scribal assimilation to Jn 3.16, 18; 1 Jn 4.9. The anarthrous use of theos (cf. 1.1) appears to be more primitive. There is no reason why the article should have been deleted, and when huios supplanted theos it would certainly have been added. The shortest reading, ho monogenes, while attractive because of internal considerations, is too poorly attested for acceptance as the text.

Metzger does, however, record a minority opinion from Allen Wikgren favoring monogenes huios. And, of course, the Pierpont-Robinson majority text edition reads monogenes huios.

None of this is an attempt to raise an argument. The article is well written and the writer of the section would have known this already -- which is why I went ahead and corrected it as a typo.

Best, Tim 13:22, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

list for comma johanneum etc
I'd like there to be a list that includes comma johanneum, Mark 16, John 21, etc. Then each of those pages can have the list in its See Also, and someone looking up one can easily find the others. What would the list be called, and what would be on it? "List of New Testament Variations"? Or maybe it ought to be a page, so a reader can get a summary of all of them at once. "New Testament textual variations"? Leadwind (talk) 17:47, 15 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Mark 16 and John 8 are the only large sections of the NT believed not to have been part of the original documents. John 8 (if it was not original) was added very early because it appears in early, just not the earliest, mss. Mark 16 seems to be a later addition since it appears only in somewhat later mss, there is also considerable variation in the various forms that were copied.
 * The comma johanneum is also late. The single Greek witness is widely believed to be a 15th century forgery.
 * These facts are printed in almost every major English Bible translation of the 20th century, they are very old news.
 * These and many other small variations are used by Christians debating other Christians about the value of the King James Version (KJV). Some Christians still argue the KJV is inerrant, even in translation! Other Christians believe it only makes sense to think of the originals as "the Bible" and so demand (and pay for) scholarship and publication of the best text criticism possible -- high technology scans of original manuscripts, computer modelling of incomplete letters and documentation of any uncertainty, lest unreliable readings creep into text that is considered vitally important.


 * The best summary of all the variations of the New Testament mss are in Novum Testamentum Graece (NA27) and The Greek New Testament (UBS3). NA27 is the prefered scholastic standard because it thoroughly documents minor changes (but does draw the line at spelling differences, and at naming insignificant mss that support the various readings).
 * UBS3 is much more practical for preachers checking texts or students learning NT Greek. It limits consideration of variations to only those of a more substantial nature (but often names more evidence for each reading than NA27 does). There is so much evidence about the NT text, that selection must be made about variations. Christians exactly like any one else (maybe even more so) are concerned about the biggest differences. They don't want to use biased texts in their Bibles.


 * I think what you want to see Leadwind is something like this. This is a book that explains every single decision made by UBS when compiling their version of the New Testament in Greek. They came up with exactly the same text as NA27. This is not magic, or from God, it's because some scholars were common to both projects, and because they were all using the same basic methods of text criticism.


 * You would find the book very boring. It explains, for example, why we or you was accepted in various places. These words vary by one Greek letter, and sometimes we can't be sure if the original NT would have had we love God or you love God. It's kind of important, but it's kind of not important. More interesting examples are that many manuscripts do not have Jesus saying at the cross, "Father forgive them", others do not have Jesus using a whip in John 2.


 * The book is not an argument for a reliable NT, it simply looks at each set of variations and explains why it thinks one of them is better than the others. It actually rates each decision for likelihood of being correct. Some decisions are easy, others are hard. Generally, the hardest ones are those that are least important. Important variations usually have predictable biases and it is easy to pick the unbiased version.


 * The book is extremely common. Any Bible college or seminary will have a copy and it takes about 5 minutes to see how it works, though the arguments won't make sense unless you know Greek and Christian theology. Catholics, Protestants and non-Christians all use the same books for this. They sometimes disagree violently about how to understand the words of the NT, but they nearly always agree what the words of the NT actually were.


 * This is extremely good news for people who don't believe the Bible. If the text of the Bible were uncertain, Christians could always escape from being wrong by saying, "Ah! But that's probably an error in copying, not an error in the Bible." No such luck, I'm afraid, the scribes made plenty of mistakes and also made biased edits at times, however, there were just too many of them in too many different locations to actually rewrite the Bible once copies had already spread everywhere, like a virus. Alastair Haines (talk) 03:18, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Textual Criticism of the New Testament
Should an article called something like "Textual Criticism of the New Testament" be split off from this one? I think it would be a good idea. This article is about 56k long, and a split like this would cut it signicantly. Peter Ballard (talk) 10:29, 6 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, I think this is a good idea. Textual Criticism should be the parent article, and should not be dominated by discussing the New Testament. On the other hand, secondary literature about TC of the NT is so massively abundant that it cannot adequately be covered in a short section. Additionally, TC of the NT involves a number of important related issues because of the nature of its content matter.


 * The more I think about it, the more I think I should probably draft something when I have time. It'll save me having to write it into talk pages all the time. ;) Alastair Haines (talk) 03:34, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I agree. This is too focussed on religious texts. I have altered the introduction to remove some of the focus on religious texts. There are also various misconceptions about phylogenetics (misnamed "cladistics") which I have also correct Peterrr73 (talk) 08:29, 16 May 2017 (UTC) (Peter Robinson, working as part of the KU Leuven Text Schol group)

More copies than any other ancient work?
"The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work, having over 5,300 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Ethiopic and Armenian. This compares to less than 700 manuscripts for Homer's Iliad, the next most well-documented work from antiquity". It's a common claim, but is it true? No citation is provided, and IIRC there are about 250,000 extant ancient copies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and presumably there are a lot of copies of the Koran around. --Robert Stevens (talk) 12:03, 10 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Josh McDowell, "More than a Carpenter" (Tyndale, 1987), p.48. (Not saying he's right, just giving a cite). I've always assumed that the Qur'an doesn't qualify because it isn't sufficiently old (though one could argue that the line is just drawn at a convenient place). It's hard to imagine it not exceeding the 700 MSS of Homer's Iliad. The 250k extand copies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead sounds awful high to me, I'd like to see a cite on that. Peter Ballard (talk) 12:45, 10 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Oops, my apologies, that should have been 25,000. I'll check the preface to my copy (if I can find it), I probably got the number from there.).  But McDowell is a highly unreliable source, and presumably he's counting all the copies made throughout the Middle Ages, which isn't specifically relevant.  And most of those would be later than Islam: as you say, the cutoff date was probably chosen for "convenience".  I'll snip the hyperbole (not relevant to the article anyhow), but leave the number-of-copies info for the NT (dubious though it may be). --Robert Stevens (talk) 14:42, 10 April 2008 (UTC)


 * This is a quote from Bart Ehrman's The New Testament which is a college level introductory text (also, Ehrman is an actual, notable scholar, not an apologist like McDowell): "if we count up all of the New Testament manuscripts that have been discovered, the number is impressive. We currently know of some 5,400 Greek copies of all or part of the New Testament, ranging from tiny scraps of a verse or two that could fit in the palm of your hand to massive tomes containing all twenty-seven books bound together. These copies range in date, roughly from the second century down tot he invention of the printing press int he fifteenth century. As a result the New Testament is preserved in far more manuscripts than any other book from antiquity. There are, for example, fewer than 700 copies of Homer's Iliad, fewer than 350 copies of the plays of Euripides, and only one copy of the first six books of the Annals of Tacitus." -Andrew c [talk] 14:52, 10 April 2008 (UTC)


 * This link has some more sources here. However, there clearly is a POV being pushed, and some of the quotes are selective and we probably cannot use the webpage as a reliable source here. But it does contain references to actual scholarly works that may be helpful.-Andrew c [talk] 14:56, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I really like that source, and I only know of it because I've seen you using it Andrew. It's ideal to have a source biased against another source, because it gives a good indicator of the "limits of distortion". Even critics of X say ... is a good boundary of reliability.

I've added a reference here that explains why Egyptian Book of the Dead doesn't compare. This is not a Book really, it is the name of a literary genre, very numerously attested to be sure, and including much common material, but not a unified work. Alastair Haines (talk) 03:38, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Various tidbits
While following up my linking of Johann Jakob Griesbach, I created the redirect textual critic to point here. I presume that this is the right phrase to use. From what links here I found authorial intentionality, which might be something that should be linked from this article and made consistent with what is said here (or vice versa). I also found some redlinks at User:The Anome/Moby nouns/T that might be relevant: Text edition, Text hand, Textuaries and Textuary (none are linked from anywhere else other than that pages and now this talk page). Could someone please explain these in the context of textual criticism if they are relevant? Thanks. Carcharoth (talk) 14:25, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Blogosphere textual criticism
Just a forward thinking comment.

The internet is just ripe for textual criticism. Websites often edit text continuously, some of which is accessed and cited at different times. Archives of previous text are not always kept. If it has not happened already, I think it may only be a matter of time before reconstructions of edit histories of web publications become commonplace.

Think Wiki. Wiki talk pages and edit histories are the text critic's dream world—precise documentation of every change, all the way back to an original text. More than attempted transcription is involved in each step, of course, however, where articles are genuine attempts to neutrally synthesize reliable sources, this is a conceptual transcription. Editor's attempts to harmonize Wiki text with reliable sources are sometimes a fascinating process to observe.

Other textual critical issues in cyberspace include urban myths and neologisms that circulate the web. Tracing the evolution or etymology of these is certainly widely discussed already.

Text criticism of ancient documents is like the internet on speed. Perhaps there is already a journal article somewhere about this. ;) Alastair Haines (talk) 12:23, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Added sections to other articles
I've added a Manuscript evidence section to Comma Johanneum, Pericope Adulterae, John 21 and will add a similar section for the long ending of Mark at some stage. A generous Polish contributor has provided articles on many of the key manuscripts. Wikipedia makes NT text criticism verifiable in an extraordinarily efficient way. Alastair Haines (talk) 04:55, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Summary of manuscript evidence now added at the bottom of the very long Mark 16 article. Alastair Haines (talk) 02:54, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Early textual critic, Wilhelm Canter
If appropriate, consider adding reference to Wilhelm Canter (1542-75). Reynolds says "He also wrote a short manual on textual criticism, Syntagma de ratione emendandi scriptores Graecos, appended to his Latin translation of the different types of error in Greek texts, brought under such headings as the confusion of certain letters, wrong word-division, omissions, additions and transpositions, errors arising from assimilation or the misunderstanding of abbreviations, and illustrated with examples taken almost exclusively from Aristides." Robert B. Waltz in a non peer-reviewed, online text entitled The Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism call Syntagma de ratione emendandi scriptores Graecos "the first real study of textual criticism from the modern standpoint". Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 15:35, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

moved scary label
I'm moving the citation to the top of the notes section. I think it's ridiculous to post such a label without explaining on the Talk page when the article is as developed and brainy as this one, whatever points remain to be resolved. It gives the first-time visitor the impression that the article lacks credibility, but compared to most articles on literary topics, this one has intellectual heft. Cynwolfe (talk) 14:47, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

The article is well-sourced. Since there are no specifics challenges to the sources on the Talk page, I think the citation should be removed. Lamorak (talk) 16:00, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

please comment
On this AfD (an article on someone claiming to be competent in research in textual criticism) Slrubenstein  |  Talk 20:32, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Lower Criticism? The term is grotesque. A textual critic must interpret the text in the broadest and most precise senses of the word. Every word he allows to stand, every letter he introduces, must be backed up by an interpretation, even though his interpretation could only be expressed in a full commentary, which he is not necessarily obliged to produce in order to publish a critical text and apparatus. The idea that the textual critic is a lower form of "working-class" scholar who then turns over the text to an "upper-class" literary critic is wrong, and shows a complete failure to understand the role of the textual critic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.103.103.59 (talk) 23:15, 28 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I couldn't agree more. It's a philological disgrace to let that outdated and absurd distinction stand here.  Someone should rewrite the opening and take that out.  Also, is Paul Maas mentioned anywhere here?--Log37 (talk) 21:57, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

moved paragraph from intro
I moved a paragraph from the intro (where it had been the last paragraph) to the New Testament section. It's the paragraph beginning "§ It is also worthy to note that various groups of Highly Conservative Christians believe" etc. (The purpose of § eludes me.) The paragraph distorted the focus of the article, which seeks to cover the full range of textual criticism. I'm also a little skeptical of the claim that textual criticism as it pertains to the recovery of classical texts simply grew out of biblical studies, even though this claim is sourced to Habib. At any rate, since I regularly link to this article for the purpose of illuminating the history and problematic status of classical texts, I don't think the intro should imply that this is the sole province of biblical studies. Cynwolfe (talk) 12:55, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

I propose to introduce criticaledition.com
I propose to introduce www.criticaledition.com which is dedicated to textual criticism. Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.127.4.14 (talk) 05:22, 10 May 2009 (UTC)