Hone Your Craft as a Biblical Scholar
Crossway has provided a nice video introduction to the new Greek New Testament edition, produced at Tyndale House.
HT: Peter Gurry. Peter has also posted an initial review of the edition that links to those of several others as well. See also Tyndale GNT to Be Available for Free, Tyndale House GNT, Harmonization Triggers, and TNT Updates.
This text will be available digitally and will be free for many uses around the world, in accord with the joint desire of both Tyndale House and Crossway to serve the global church in an open-handed way with the very best Greek text possible.
For other discussion of the Tyndale edition, see Tyndale House GNT and TNT Updates.
Dirk Jongkind reflects on harmonization triggers, especially in the Pauline corpus. In part, he suggests,
Apparently there is something in tightly argued prose that puts it in less danger of textual change than simple narrative, especially narrative with synoptic parallels. Yet even within the Pauline corpus the same phenomena are present that you can find in the Gospels. Ephesians and Colossians contain sufficient parallel material to allow for cross-contamination, and the same happens with Galatians and Romans.
For the balance of Jongkind’s comments, see his original post on Tyndale House’s Greek New Testament blog. See also the cross-post and further discussion on Evangelical Textual Criticism. For more information on Tyndale’s Greek Testament project, see also Tyndale House GNT and the in-post related links.
The latest issue of the Tyndale Bulletin carries Kim Phillips’s essay, “A New Codex from the Scribe behind the Leningrad Codex: L17.” According to the abstract,
Samuel b. Jacob was the scribe responsible for the production of the so-called Leningrad Codex (Firkowich B19a), currently our earliest complete Masoretic Bible codex. This article demonstrates that another codex from the Firkowich Collection, containing the Former Prophets only, is also the work of Samuel b. Jacob, despite the lack of a colophon to this effect. The argument is based on a combination of eleven textual and para-textual features shared between these two manuscripts, and other manuscripts known to have been produced by the same scribe.
Phillips acknowledges that definitively linking the scribes of L and L17 isn’t entirely possible. But, he helpfully marshals several different lines of evidence to suggest the strong possibility of this connection.
For the essay’s full text and related links, see the Tyndale Bulletin website. See also PaleoJudaica. HT: Peter Williams.
Two latest posts on the Tyndale New Testament blog contain some interesting further comments about the edition and its preparation.
The edition was based on Tregelles’s text because
by starting from Tregelles we go back beyond Westcott-Hort and their influential and lucid textual theories, but not as far back as the Textus Receptus. We could have opted for the text of Lachmann too, but I think that Tregelles is more explicit, and certainly more accessible, in justifying his methodology and theoretical approach. Another reason is that Tregelles is the most recent critical text that was not included in the triad of texts used to create Nestle’s first edition (Westcott-Hort; Tischendorf 8th; Weymouth [in itself the result of a comparison of editions]) or fourth (Weymouth replaced with Weiss).
The next entry discusses text(s) and the relationships among works, editions, and manuscripts. The post comments, in part,
Most people who think for a moment about the text and the various forms in which it appears, solve the question the same way as Plato did. Different manuscripts with their slightly different wording, and even different translations of the text in a wild variety of languages, all constitute different instances of the same text.
This same dynamic often functions unconsciously too when congregants in a church setting might “open their Bibles,” agree that they are all looking at “the Bible,” and yet have different versions like the ESV, NIV, or NRSV of the “same text” among them.
For these posts’ full comments, see The First Step: Digitising Tregelles and The Text of the New Testament, of an Edition, and of a Manuscript on the TNT blog.
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
