THE PERIOD OF RELATIVE FREEDOM (to AD 313)

The history of the text during this period is as important as it is difficult to reconstruct. The ecclesiastical writers give very few clues. The historian finds himself like someone trying to do a jigsaw puzzle which has most of the pieces missing and some of the rest damaged. He has to settle for a rough outline, much of it guesswork. With admirable good sense, most authors skim lightly over this period of the text, but, as long as the use of hypothesis is acknowledged as legitimate, there is no need to follow their example. Bearing that in mind, the reader is asked to forgive the numerous question marks in the pages which follow; there could doubtless be many more still.

COMPOSING A TEXT AND COMMITTING IT TO WRITING

When a piece of prose is produced today, its composition and its setting down in written form tend to be one and the same act. It starts off as a rough draft; then it becomes an autograph manuscript, that is, one written by the author himself; this, in turn, is used to produce the proofs of a book which is finally published in a (first) edition.

THE PURPOSE AND THE ARRANGEMENT OF THIS BOOK

By ‘textual criticism’ is meant any methodical and objective study which aims to retrieve the original form of a text or at least the form closest to the original. Even in a modern book there are nearly always printing errors despite careful checking by the author and proof-readers, so it is not surprising that early writings, copied as they were many times over the centuries, should have frequently undergone alteration. And indeed, from time to time in the old manuscripts of a work different forms of the text can be observed. These different forms are known as ‘variants’; they may also be referred to as divergent or erroneous readings.

The goal of textual criticism as applied to the New Testament is thus a very specific one, namely to select from among the many variants transmitted by the manuscript tradition the one which most likely represents the primitive reading. It is only when the contents of the whole text have been established that the other disciplines can operate: literary criticism, to decide the origin of each book and to locate the sources used by the author; historical criticism, to assess the value of the books as historical documents; exegesis, to define the exact meaning of the text.

It is never easy to write a book introducing a subject: it needs to be as complete and as simple as possible all at once. The job is harder still when there is no general work on the subject already, but only a host of smaller works on points of detail which far from cover the whole area, even taken together. Previous attempts by scholars to write an introduction have tended to focus on certain topics (as, for example, Metzger 1968 and Aland–Aland 1982).

In France, Jean Duplacy had gathered together over a period of twenty years or so a good deal of the material necessary for a general introduction to the textual criticism of the New Testament which would have constituted the foundation of a new handbook on the subject. But his work, though extensive, was never completed. Meanwhile, the need for such a handbook continued to be felt, and so when I was approached by Les Editions du Cerf, I agreed to revise and update the Introduction by Léon Vaganay.

There were two reasons behind my choice. First, fifty years after its first publication, this book is still the most clear-sighted survey of the subject. There was no point in looking for anything more elaborate which would have required considerable re-working.

The guiding principles of textual criticism are the same for all writings, whatever type, although in practice their application varies according to the number, variety and quality of witnesses available. In this sense, then, it is correct to speak of a method of New Testament textual criticism. But that does not mean that it is a fixed method. On the contrary, it is one of the points over which scholars most disagree. They may well generally agree about there being several stages to be worked through by the critic in order to reach the correct reading, but they agree rather less about the order and significance of the stages. The aim here is not to enter into detailed discussion about the various theories nor to lay down any rigid order of procedure. Verbal criticism, external criticism and internal criticism will sometimes be seen to work hand in hand. The chief purpose of this chapter will be to establish points of reference in what is a very complex issue.

VERBAL CRITICISM

In order to re-establish in its original purity an ancient text which has been handed down to us in a more or less altered state, the critic must first of all study the sources of corruption in manuscripts.

I. J. GELB'S DESCRIPTION OF EGYPTIAN PHONETIC SIGNS AS CONSISTING SOLELY OF LOGOGRAMS AND SYLLABOGRAMS

In Chapter 2, “How Writing Worked before the Greek Alphabet,” I describe the phonography of Egyptian writing according to I. J. Gelb's thesis that each phonogram represents one (or more) consonants whose quality is clear, plus an understood vowel (or vowels), or absence of vowel(s), which must be provided by the native speaker. This is not a traditional view among Egyptologists, who prefer to view the phonograms of Egyptian as purely consonantal in nature, where each sign represents one, two, or three consonants, the so-called uniliterals, biliterals, and triliterals. According to this description of Egyptian phonography, the vowels are indeed to be provided by the native speaker, but they are not implicit in the sign.

Homer's floruit falls within the first half of the eighth century. He is perhaps an exact contemporary of the adapter. At the very least, he lived within fifty years of the invention of an idiosyncratic writing that cocks the ear to fine distinctions of sound and is used in its earliest remains to record hexametric verse. If the alphabet was fashioned to record the poet Homer and no other, we can account for the coincidence in time. If we believe that the adapter restructured Phoenician writing not in order to record Homer specifically, but in order to record “hexametric verse in general,” meaning a poet or poets of whose existence and achievement all memory has been lost, we must admit that at the same time, or within a generation and a half at most, the new writing was also used to write down Homer.