Evangelical Textual Criticism Archives

Codex Marchalianus

The Vatican Library has made available a digital facsimile of Codex Marchalianus (7th–8th c.). The codex contains some prefatory material and the text of the prophets, including Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah. Each page has two scans with alternate lighting. Below is a sample of the marginalia from Isa 25:8 (leaf 231) that notes the alternate readings for the passage in Theodotion (top) and Aquila (bottom).

It is (proto-)Theodotion’s reading that Paul reflects in 1 Cor 15:54. On this passage, see also the recent survey by John Meade.

Larsen on New Testament textual criticism and discussion

On Academia.edu, Matthew Larsen has posted his recent Journal for the Study of the New Testament essay on “Accidental Publication, Unfinished Texts and the Traditional Goals of New Testament Textual Criticism.”

Peter Head has started a related discussion on the Evangelical Textual Criticism Blog.

Tyndale House GNT

The Tyndale House Greek New Testament is set to be released with Crossway on 15 November 2017, just in time for SBL. The text is already available for pre-order on Amazon.

According to the volume’s blurb, the principal editors, Dirk Jongkind and Peter Williams, have

taken a rigorously philological approach to reevaluating the standard text—reexamining spelling and paragraph decisions as well as allowing more recent discoveries related to scribal habits to inform editorial decisions.

Meanwhile, the principal editors have begun a blog about the edition. According to the blog’s initial post, future posts

will explore what such method means in practice at the hand of examples, and also probe the boundaries of such approach. However, in practice the emphasis on scribal behaviour implies that if, in the past, exegetical and theological arguments have been used to address a particular variant unit, we happily ignore these arguments if there is also a perfectly adequate transcriptional explanation.

HT: Dirk Jongkind, Mike Aubrey

TC 21

The newest volume of TC has been released, containing eight book reviews and the following articles:

Gregory R. Lanier, “A Case for the Assimilation of Matthew 21:44 to the Lukan “Crushing Stone” (20:18), with Special Reference to 104”
Aron Pinker, “A New Attempt to Interpret Job 30:24”
Georg Gäbel, The Import of the Versions for the History of the Greek Text: Some Observations from the ECM of Acts
Katie Marcar, “The Quotations of Isaiah in 1 Peter: A Text-Critical Analysis”

HT: New Articles and Reviews in the TC Journal — Evangelical Textual Criticism

Logical Impossibility in ECM

Peter Gurry reflects on the “logical impossibility” criterion that feeds into the Editio Critica Maior‘s account of “variants”:

The Editio Critica Maior defines a “variant” as a reading that is both “grammatically correct and logically possible.” If it doesn’t meet these two criteria it is marked with an f for Fehler (= error). Neither criteria is completely objective, but then most of the errors so recorded in the ECM are pretty obvious gibberish. Occasionally, however, one finds cause…

For more, see What Is ‘Logically Impossible’ for the ECM? — Evangelical Textual Criticism