Pasi Hyytiäinen | University of Helsinki (original) (raw)
Thesis Chapters by Pasi Hyytiäinen
In the past three decades, the usage of computer-assisted stemmatological methods has increased i... more In the past three decades, the usage of computer-assisted stemmatological methods has increased in New Testament textual criticism, affecting all subsequent critical editions. These are not a unified group of methods but a wide variety of techniques using computers and tree (or network) structures to depict the relationships between manuscripts.
In this dissertation, different computer-assisted methods are applied to the manuscript tradition of the Acts of the Apostles in three peer-reviewed articles. The first two articles test two existing stemmatological approaches widely used in the field, the Coherence- Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) and the phylogenetic analysis of manuscripts. These analyses point to complicated interrelationships between manuscripts of Acts that cannot be depicted using simple tree structures. Instead, the tradition can be depicted (to some extent) using networks that are applied, for example, to cluster manuscripts.
The network methods are often based on distance calculations between manuscripts. Critics have long calculated these distances using collations and variation units, which take considerable time and limit the number of manuscripts taken into the analysis. The third article introduces a new method and a software package named Relate to establish quantitative relationships between manuscripts. The proposed method aims to be more efficient than any existing techniques. The preliminary assessments show that the results of the method are compatible with those of conventional techniques but take only a fraction of the time.
The introductory material introduces an evolutionary theoretical framework to the manuscript tradition of Acts. It uses models from cultural evolution to explain the phenomena seen in the manuscripts. Previous stemmatological studies have shown that the phenomena and problems of textual criticism are like those of evolutionary biology. These parallel phenomena have enabled critics to use sophisticated phylogenetic applications in textual criticism that were originally developed to study biological evolution. This dissertation investigates the interdisciplinary possibilities that evolutionary biology and cultural evolution can offer to textual criticism.
Even though some New Testament textual critics would prefer to abandon all the clustering paradigms in the field, the analysis conducted here, particularly in the second article, reveals that these suggestions are premature. The survey also demonstrates that it is possible to consider all textual evidence in each manuscript tradition of the New Testament by giving a more prominent role to digital techniques in stemmatological analysis.
Papers by Pasi Hyytiäinen
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2022
New Testament textual critics have for decades calculated the similarities between the manuscript... more New Testament textual critics have for decades calculated the similarities between the manuscripts in a similar manner, using collations and variation units. This conventional methodology requires enormous amounts of time and manual work. Here is proposed a new method that does not require these preprocessing steps, enabling the establishment of quantitative relationships using manuscript transcriptions only. This is achieved by applying a technique called shingling, where the manuscript transcriptions are turned in a computerized manner into smaller pieces called tokens or k-grams. Then, a string metric is used to calculate the similarities between the tokenized strings. This method is efficient, meaning that it allows critics to consider all textual evidence in each manuscript tradition. At the same time, it returns similarity values that are compatible with those of conventional approaches.
TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, 2021
New Testament textual critics have long maintained that the earliest textual tradition of the Act... more New Testament textual critics have long maintained that the earliest textual tradition of the Acts of the Apostles is bipolar, transmitted in two early textual forms. This conviction is now being challenged, with recent studies suggesting that the tradition is more complex than the two-text concept had proposed. How should we then approach Acts? This article approaches Acts from an evolutionary point of view, applying phylogenetic methods to its manuscripts. Scholars have been using computer-assisted phylogenetic methods for years to produce trees and networks that describe the relationships among manuscripts within a textual tradition. These methods were originally developed for evolutionary biology, but studies have shown that they can also be applied to manuscript traditions. Here, these methods are applied to selected manuscripts to test their applicability, since Acts has never been subjected to such a study. Chapter 5 of Acts is used as a test case to demonstrate how phylogenetic analysis can be conducted. The preliminary results point to a complex set of relationships among manuscripts, concurring with recent hypotheses about the complexity of the tradition. At the same time, however, these methods do recognize the two early textual groups of Acts. While it seems that the tradition in Acts 5 is too complex to be fitted into a single tree, a network is capable of depicting the complexity of the tradition.
This article challenges the common scholarly conviction that Acts in Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis ... more This article challenges the common scholarly conviction that Acts in Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis (D05) represents a single cohesive textual tradition, arguing instead that D05 should be understood as an evolving text, consisting of multiple textual layers without any trace of unified editorial activity. The Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM), together with detailed internal considerations, is used to show that it is possible to differentiate intermediary variants in Acts 5:38–39 between the shorter readings in B03 (Codex Vaticanus) and the longer ones in D05. Such intermediary textual stages are also found among the so-called Western readings, revealing how Gamaliel tradition gradually grew over time as new pieces were added to the text from various sources. These findings challenge the notion of the Western text as a definable textual entity.
Vartija : ihminen, uskonto, yhteiskunta, 2021
Vartija : ihminen, uskonto, yhteiskunta, Sep 26, 2021
Vartija : ihminen, uskonto, yhteiskunta, 2021
Kirjakääröistä digiraamattuun : Pyhän tekstin idea, muoto ja käyttö, 2021
Teologinen Aikakauskirja, 2021
Books by Pasi Hyytiäinen
Conference Presentations by Pasi Hyytiäinen
EABS Annual Conference, 2022
New Testament texts have a rich and diverse transmission history, resulting in many changes. The ... more New Testament texts have a rich and diverse transmission history, resulting in many changes. The majority of these can be labeled as scribes’ mistakes or errors. Cultural evolution calls these types of variations mutations, underlining their random nature. However, studies have also paid attention to another random force affecting cultural traits' frequency: cultural drift. The mechanisms behind this force are seldom addressed in textual criticism.
Cultural drift refers to a process where the frequency of a particular cultural variant is affected by random events; that is, some traits may become widespread, decrease in numbers, or disappear entirely not because they are beneficial or somehow better compared to others, but because some accidental events have occurred. The smaller the population, the stronger the effect of cultural drift. For instance, a unique whistling language developed in a small Greek island village of Antio. If an earthquake, for instance, wiped out the 18 people proficient with the language, the language would die out.
The transmission history of the New Testament is full of disturbances and textual earthquakes. During the persecutions of Christians in the Roman empire, large quantities of manuscripts were confiscated and destroyed. These events can be described as random since there was no way of foreseeing which manuscripts would survive and be used as exemplars for the new copies. These types of events are referred to here as textual drift. Evidence shows that some variants or textual forms decreased in numbers or disappeared due to this systematic destruction of manuscripts.
It is argued here that the concept of textual drift can explain some of the phenomena we see in the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament. It also gives tools to consider the role of chance and coincidence in the transmission history of the New Testament.
EABS Annual Conference, 2021
Different books of the New Testament circulated in varied textual forms during the first Christia... more Different books of the New Testament circulated in varied textual forms during the first Christian centuries, but from the ninth century CE onwards, one single textual tradition prevailed. Today this tradition, which drove all others into extinction, is known as the Byzantine text. The text became popular in Constantinople and spread throughout the Byzantine Empire. Most surviving Greek manuscripts are of this type. Most often, it is seen as the result of later textual development. However, a small but growing number of critics argue that the Byzantine text preserves the original text of the New Testament. They insist that it is always most probable that the majority of witnesses will preserve the original text.
The survey at hand challenges this Byzantine priority hypothesis by focusing on the pattern the text spread throughout the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. This process had two stages. First, there was a long initial phase, lasting from the late fourth to eighth century CE, during which the text frequency was low among the New Testament manuscripts. Second, in the ninth century CE, this tradition experienced rapid growth, at which point it suddenly began to occupy the majority of the surviving manuscripts. This development can be pictured as an S-shaped growth curve. This corresponds to the pattern of new cultural traits spread in cultures when biased cultural selection (content-, model- and frequency-based bias) is the predominant effecting force, causing initially rare innovations, ideas, beliefs, values, etc., to become widespread within a given human group. Hence, this survey argues that the Byzantine text does not represent the original text (nor the majority text until the ninth century CE), but instead an innovation that emerged in the fourth century and later superseded older textual forms, coinciding with the dynamics of cultural evolution.
Annual Conference of EABS, 2019
Before printing presses, texts were copied by hand and every act of copying introduced changes to... more Before printing presses, texts were copied by hand and every act of copying introduced changes to the texts, such as, errors. Other changes occurred in a process of contamination where more than one exemplar were used in copying a text, that is, the resulting manuscript is a mixture of several exemplars. Scribes also invented readings, which led to a coincidental emergence of variants, meaning that manuscripts, which are not closely related, may share readings.
The changes being introduced during the copying of texts closely resembles molecular evolution. As cells divide, the genetic information has to be duplicated. Errors, however, occur in this process, resulting in changes, that is, mutations. Other source of variation is recombination, where two pairs of chromosomes trade sections of their DNA, resulting in a mixture, that is, combination of two DNA sequences. Evolution also creates similar or analogous features to different species, which are not closely related, termed convergent evolution.
Clearly, there are close parallels between textual criticism and evolutionary biology, opening up new methodological and theoretical possibilities. The Book of Acts is a revealing example how an evolutionary point of view can change the way we approach variations. For years, scholars have favored the idea that there are two textual forms in Acts, the Alexandrian and Western texts. The evolutionary approach enables us to move beyond this static view to a living picture of our manuscripts, seeing them as living organisms, constantly adapting to the changing social-historical circumstances. It also gives tools to evaluate the dynamics behind changes, why and when they possible emerged.
The following survey supplies examples how the evolutionary approach can be applied, using Acts as a test case for it underwent rapid changes during the first three centuries, yielding interesting examples of changes.
SBL International Meeting, 2016
Several textual critics have seen the Acts of the Apostles as represented in Codex Bezae (D) as a... more Several textual critics have seen the Acts of the Apostles as represented in Codex Bezae (D) as a result of one editorial process, or work of one single author. Whether D is seen as the prominent witness of the Western text or containing the original text, it is maintained that the text of D represents one tradition. But, what if we abandon the idea that the Acts in D was written or copied at one single point in time and think the possibility that we are dealing here with an evolving text? According to this idea, Codex Bezae is a product of a process. We can see traces of different stages of textual evolution in D. The Gamaliel tradition in Acts 5:38-39 is used in this occasion to demonstrate this point of view. Consequently, we are not dealing here with one editorial or textual layer but several. By applying the tools of Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, which uses electronic database in order to evaluate the relationships between manuscripts, we can suggest that certain readings in Acts 5:38-39 of D seem to be older than those in B03, while others are clearly later scribal alterations. However, these textual changes do not bring any new theological tendencies but underline the existing ones. Later textual layers supplemented the previous ones. It seems that the Gamaliel tradition grew in the course of textual transmission while the esteem for Gamaliel increased within the Christian communities which led to the Gospel According to Gamaliel and ultimately to his canonization. This process, on the other hand, emphasizes that the texts of New Testament were not isolated from the surrounding social-historical context but they interacted with one another.
Talks by Pasi Hyytiäinen
Eighth Workshop of Studia Stemmatologica, 2019
In the past three decades, the usage of computer-assisted stemmatological methods has increased i... more In the past three decades, the usage of computer-assisted stemmatological methods has increased in New Testament textual criticism, affecting all subsequent critical editions. These are not a unified group of methods but a wide variety of techniques using computers and tree (or network) structures to depict the relationships between manuscripts.
In this dissertation, different computer-assisted methods are applied to the manuscript tradition of the Acts of the Apostles in three peer-reviewed articles. The first two articles test two existing stemmatological approaches widely used in the field, the Coherence- Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) and the phylogenetic analysis of manuscripts. These analyses point to complicated interrelationships between manuscripts of Acts that cannot be depicted using simple tree structures. Instead, the tradition can be depicted (to some extent) using networks that are applied, for example, to cluster manuscripts.
The network methods are often based on distance calculations between manuscripts. Critics have long calculated these distances using collations and variation units, which take considerable time and limit the number of manuscripts taken into the analysis. The third article introduces a new method and a software package named Relate to establish quantitative relationships between manuscripts. The proposed method aims to be more efficient than any existing techniques. The preliminary assessments show that the results of the method are compatible with those of conventional techniques but take only a fraction of the time.
The introductory material introduces an evolutionary theoretical framework to the manuscript tradition of Acts. It uses models from cultural evolution to explain the phenomena seen in the manuscripts. Previous stemmatological studies have shown that the phenomena and problems of textual criticism are like those of evolutionary biology. These parallel phenomena have enabled critics to use sophisticated phylogenetic applications in textual criticism that were originally developed to study biological evolution. This dissertation investigates the interdisciplinary possibilities that evolutionary biology and cultural evolution can offer to textual criticism.
Even though some New Testament textual critics would prefer to abandon all the clustering paradigms in the field, the analysis conducted here, particularly in the second article, reveals that these suggestions are premature. The survey also demonstrates that it is possible to consider all textual evidence in each manuscript tradition of the New Testament by giving a more prominent role to digital techniques in stemmatological analysis.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2022
New Testament textual critics have for decades calculated the similarities between the manuscript... more New Testament textual critics have for decades calculated the similarities between the manuscripts in a similar manner, using collations and variation units. This conventional methodology requires enormous amounts of time and manual work. Here is proposed a new method that does not require these preprocessing steps, enabling the establishment of quantitative relationships using manuscript transcriptions only. This is achieved by applying a technique called shingling, where the manuscript transcriptions are turned in a computerized manner into smaller pieces called tokens or k-grams. Then, a string metric is used to calculate the similarities between the tokenized strings. This method is efficient, meaning that it allows critics to consider all textual evidence in each manuscript tradition. At the same time, it returns similarity values that are compatible with those of conventional approaches.
TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, 2021
New Testament textual critics have long maintained that the earliest textual tradition of the Act... more New Testament textual critics have long maintained that the earliest textual tradition of the Acts of the Apostles is bipolar, transmitted in two early textual forms. This conviction is now being challenged, with recent studies suggesting that the tradition is more complex than the two-text concept had proposed. How should we then approach Acts? This article approaches Acts from an evolutionary point of view, applying phylogenetic methods to its manuscripts. Scholars have been using computer-assisted phylogenetic methods for years to produce trees and networks that describe the relationships among manuscripts within a textual tradition. These methods were originally developed for evolutionary biology, but studies have shown that they can also be applied to manuscript traditions. Here, these methods are applied to selected manuscripts to test their applicability, since Acts has never been subjected to such a study. Chapter 5 of Acts is used as a test case to demonstrate how phylogenetic analysis can be conducted. The preliminary results point to a complex set of relationships among manuscripts, concurring with recent hypotheses about the complexity of the tradition. At the same time, however, these methods do recognize the two early textual groups of Acts. While it seems that the tradition in Acts 5 is too complex to be fitted into a single tree, a network is capable of depicting the complexity of the tradition.
This article challenges the common scholarly conviction that Acts in Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis ... more This article challenges the common scholarly conviction that Acts in Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis (D05) represents a single cohesive textual tradition, arguing instead that D05 should be understood as an evolving text, consisting of multiple textual layers without any trace of unified editorial activity. The Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM), together with detailed internal considerations, is used to show that it is possible to differentiate intermediary variants in Acts 5:38–39 between the shorter readings in B03 (Codex Vaticanus) and the longer ones in D05. Such intermediary textual stages are also found among the so-called Western readings, revealing how Gamaliel tradition gradually grew over time as new pieces were added to the text from various sources. These findings challenge the notion of the Western text as a definable textual entity.
Vartija : ihminen, uskonto, yhteiskunta, 2021
Vartija : ihminen, uskonto, yhteiskunta, Sep 26, 2021
Vartija : ihminen, uskonto, yhteiskunta, 2021
Kirjakääröistä digiraamattuun : Pyhän tekstin idea, muoto ja käyttö, 2021
Teologinen Aikakauskirja, 2021
EABS Annual Conference, 2022
New Testament texts have a rich and diverse transmission history, resulting in many changes. The ... more New Testament texts have a rich and diverse transmission history, resulting in many changes. The majority of these can be labeled as scribes’ mistakes or errors. Cultural evolution calls these types of variations mutations, underlining their random nature. However, studies have also paid attention to another random force affecting cultural traits' frequency: cultural drift. The mechanisms behind this force are seldom addressed in textual criticism.
Cultural drift refers to a process where the frequency of a particular cultural variant is affected by random events; that is, some traits may become widespread, decrease in numbers, or disappear entirely not because they are beneficial or somehow better compared to others, but because some accidental events have occurred. The smaller the population, the stronger the effect of cultural drift. For instance, a unique whistling language developed in a small Greek island village of Antio. If an earthquake, for instance, wiped out the 18 people proficient with the language, the language would die out.
The transmission history of the New Testament is full of disturbances and textual earthquakes. During the persecutions of Christians in the Roman empire, large quantities of manuscripts were confiscated and destroyed. These events can be described as random since there was no way of foreseeing which manuscripts would survive and be used as exemplars for the new copies. These types of events are referred to here as textual drift. Evidence shows that some variants or textual forms decreased in numbers or disappeared due to this systematic destruction of manuscripts.
It is argued here that the concept of textual drift can explain some of the phenomena we see in the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament. It also gives tools to consider the role of chance and coincidence in the transmission history of the New Testament.
EABS Annual Conference, 2021
Different books of the New Testament circulated in varied textual forms during the first Christia... more Different books of the New Testament circulated in varied textual forms during the first Christian centuries, but from the ninth century CE onwards, one single textual tradition prevailed. Today this tradition, which drove all others into extinction, is known as the Byzantine text. The text became popular in Constantinople and spread throughout the Byzantine Empire. Most surviving Greek manuscripts are of this type. Most often, it is seen as the result of later textual development. However, a small but growing number of critics argue that the Byzantine text preserves the original text of the New Testament. They insist that it is always most probable that the majority of witnesses will preserve the original text.
The survey at hand challenges this Byzantine priority hypothesis by focusing on the pattern the text spread throughout the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. This process had two stages. First, there was a long initial phase, lasting from the late fourth to eighth century CE, during which the text frequency was low among the New Testament manuscripts. Second, in the ninth century CE, this tradition experienced rapid growth, at which point it suddenly began to occupy the majority of the surviving manuscripts. This development can be pictured as an S-shaped growth curve. This corresponds to the pattern of new cultural traits spread in cultures when biased cultural selection (content-, model- and frequency-based bias) is the predominant effecting force, causing initially rare innovations, ideas, beliefs, values, etc., to become widespread within a given human group. Hence, this survey argues that the Byzantine text does not represent the original text (nor the majority text until the ninth century CE), but instead an innovation that emerged in the fourth century and later superseded older textual forms, coinciding with the dynamics of cultural evolution.
Annual Conference of EABS, 2019
Before printing presses, texts were copied by hand and every act of copying introduced changes to... more Before printing presses, texts were copied by hand and every act of copying introduced changes to the texts, such as, errors. Other changes occurred in a process of contamination where more than one exemplar were used in copying a text, that is, the resulting manuscript is a mixture of several exemplars. Scribes also invented readings, which led to a coincidental emergence of variants, meaning that manuscripts, which are not closely related, may share readings.
The changes being introduced during the copying of texts closely resembles molecular evolution. As cells divide, the genetic information has to be duplicated. Errors, however, occur in this process, resulting in changes, that is, mutations. Other source of variation is recombination, where two pairs of chromosomes trade sections of their DNA, resulting in a mixture, that is, combination of two DNA sequences. Evolution also creates similar or analogous features to different species, which are not closely related, termed convergent evolution.
Clearly, there are close parallels between textual criticism and evolutionary biology, opening up new methodological and theoretical possibilities. The Book of Acts is a revealing example how an evolutionary point of view can change the way we approach variations. For years, scholars have favored the idea that there are two textual forms in Acts, the Alexandrian and Western texts. The evolutionary approach enables us to move beyond this static view to a living picture of our manuscripts, seeing them as living organisms, constantly adapting to the changing social-historical circumstances. It also gives tools to evaluate the dynamics behind changes, why and when they possible emerged.
The following survey supplies examples how the evolutionary approach can be applied, using Acts as a test case for it underwent rapid changes during the first three centuries, yielding interesting examples of changes.
SBL International Meeting, 2016
Several textual critics have seen the Acts of the Apostles as represented in Codex Bezae (D) as a... more Several textual critics have seen the Acts of the Apostles as represented in Codex Bezae (D) as a result of one editorial process, or work of one single author. Whether D is seen as the prominent witness of the Western text or containing the original text, it is maintained that the text of D represents one tradition. But, what if we abandon the idea that the Acts in D was written or copied at one single point in time and think the possibility that we are dealing here with an evolving text? According to this idea, Codex Bezae is a product of a process. We can see traces of different stages of textual evolution in D. The Gamaliel tradition in Acts 5:38-39 is used in this occasion to demonstrate this point of view. Consequently, we are not dealing here with one editorial or textual layer but several. By applying the tools of Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, which uses electronic database in order to evaluate the relationships between manuscripts, we can suggest that certain readings in Acts 5:38-39 of D seem to be older than those in B03, while others are clearly later scribal alterations. However, these textual changes do not bring any new theological tendencies but underline the existing ones. Later textual layers supplemented the previous ones. It seems that the Gamaliel tradition grew in the course of textual transmission while the esteem for Gamaliel increased within the Christian communities which led to the Gospel According to Gamaliel and ultimately to his canonization. This process, on the other hand, emphasizes that the texts of New Testament were not isolated from the surrounding social-historical context but they interacted with one another.