Pasi Hyytiäinen - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Thesis Chapters by Pasi Hyytiäinen
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.
Uuden testamentin käsikirjoitusten merkityksestä
Vartija : ihminen, uskonto, yhteiskunta, Sep 26, 2021
Apostolien teot suomeksi Codex Bezaen mukaan
Uuden testamentin käsikirjoitusten merkityksestä
Vartija : ihminen, uskonto, yhteiskunta, 2021
Muuntuva ja mukautuva Uusi testamentti: Evolutiivinen näkökulma käsikirjoitusmuutoksiin
Kirjakääröistä digiraamattuun : Pyhän tekstin idea, muoto ja käyttö, 2021
Käännöshanke apostolien teoista Codez Bezaen mukaan
Teologinen Aikakauskirja, 2021
Apostolien tekojen matka läpi vuosisatojen: Kirjurit paitsi välittivät traditiota myös tulkitsivat sitä uudelleen
Teologia.fi, 2021
Algoritmilla parempi testamentti? CBGM:n keskeisimmät periaatteet
Teologia.fi, 2021
Books by Pasi Hyytiäinen
Apostolien teot suomeksi Codex Bezaen mukaan
Conference Presentations by Pasi Hyytiäinen
Kirkko ja maailma: Ortodoksisuuden tutkijana -symposiumi, Joensuu, 2024
Eksegeettinen päivä, 2023
Digital Research Data and Human Sciences – Diversity of methods and materials , 2022
Textual Drift in the Manuscripts of the New Testament
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.
The Spread of the Byzantine Text and Biased Cultural Selection
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.
The living text of Acts: Evolutionary approach to textual changes
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.
Textual Evolution in Acts 5:38-39 of D and the Effect of Social-Historical Context
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.
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.
Uuden testamentin käsikirjoitusten merkityksestä
Vartija : ihminen, uskonto, yhteiskunta, Sep 26, 2021
Apostolien teot suomeksi Codex Bezaen mukaan
Uuden testamentin käsikirjoitusten merkityksestä
Vartija : ihminen, uskonto, yhteiskunta, 2021
Muuntuva ja mukautuva Uusi testamentti: Evolutiivinen näkökulma käsikirjoitusmuutoksiin
Kirjakääröistä digiraamattuun : Pyhän tekstin idea, muoto ja käyttö, 2021
Käännöshanke apostolien teoista Codez Bezaen mukaan
Teologinen Aikakauskirja, 2021
Apostolien tekojen matka läpi vuosisatojen: Kirjurit paitsi välittivät traditiota myös tulkitsivat sitä uudelleen
Teologia.fi, 2021
Algoritmilla parempi testamentti? CBGM:n keskeisimmät periaatteet
Teologia.fi, 2021
Apostolien teot suomeksi Codex Bezaen mukaan
Kirkko ja maailma: Ortodoksisuuden tutkijana -symposiumi, Joensuu, 2024
Eksegeettinen päivä, 2023
Digital Research Data and Human Sciences – Diversity of methods and materials , 2022
Textual Drift in the Manuscripts of the New Testament
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.
The Spread of the Byzantine Text and Biased Cultural Selection
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.
The living text of Acts: Evolutionary approach to textual changes
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.
Textual Evolution in Acts 5:38-39 of D and the Effect of Social-Historical Context
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.
Ortodoksisuutta pintaa syvemmältä, 2024
Automated stemmatic analysis of Acts: Toward fully computerized New Testament textual criticism
Eighth Workshop of Studia Stemmatologica, 2019
The Current State of New Testament Textual Criticism: How Computer-Assisted Stemmatology Is Changing The Field
Seventh Workshop of Studia Stemmatologica, 2017