New Testament Criticism: Helps And Hurts (original) (raw)
Book Review, 2022
There seem to be more bad arguments attempting to defend the Bible than there are direct attacks on it. Unfortunately, one does not have to peruse the bookshelves or internet long to find some truly scandalous statements claiming to prove the purity of the Bible. In an effort to address various myths and mistakes, Elijah Hixson and Peter Gurry gathered students of textual criticism from around the world. The product is a fifteen-chapter volume addressing some of the more egregious claims made by apologists and ill-informed New Testament commentators.
Review of Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism
Christian Apologetics Journal, 2023
The editors, Elijah Hixson and Peter Gurry, assembled several contributing evangelical scholars writing in their area of expertise (some on their dissertation) to bring long overdue correction to Christian apologists, especially, how and what they report or how they argue about the textual reliability of the New Testament (NT).
Challenges in New Testament Textual Criticism for the Twenty-First Century
2009
Thirty years ago, NT textual criticism on this side of the Atlantic seemed to be on its last legs—so much so that Eldon Epp could write with a straight face an essay entitled “New Testament Textual Criticism in America: Requiem for a Discipline”—an article published in the Journal of Biblical Literature.1 Five years earlier, he lamented the fact that there were probably more textual critics working at the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster than there were in all of North America.2 (The INTF is responsible for producing the Nestle-Aland Greek text; there are about half a dozen fulltime textual critics working there.) What Epp described was a sad state of affairs, but the postmortem reports were nonetheless a bit premature. In the last decade and a half, the cadaver has come back to life3 and is stronger than ever. Who could have predicted that a book on textual criticism would ever make the New York Times Bestseller list? Yet Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus: The S...
A brief introduction and a short digression (on the questions of "is the 'original text' an authoritative text?" and "is the 'original text' a privileged goal?") set up a survey of the meaning of the phrase "original text' in late 19th and 20th-century usage. A description and assessment of several contemporary proposals to redefine the goal(s) of NT (including Epp, Wachtel & Parker on the "initial text", Ellingworth, Trobisch, Swanson, Holmes, Parker, and [for the OT] Hendel) is followed by a discussion of some collateral issues (how early a text can TC recover; is it possible to recover an authorial text; and are the gospels the sort of texts that have originals). A survey of the philosophical and epistemological commitments that shape the practice of TC concludes the essay. Publication info: in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis, 2nd ed. (ed. by Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes; NTTSD, 46; Brill, 2013 [November 2012] 637-688.
Inspiration, Preservation, and New Testament Textual Criticism
New Testament Essays in Honor of Homer A. Kent, …, 1991
This statement is not meant to imply that MT = TR, but that within this school of thought are two divisions-those who hold that the printed edition of Erasmus (TR) is NEW TESTAMENT TEXTUAL CRITICISM 23 replica of the autographs. Inspiration (and inerrancy) is also used for the Byzantine text's correctness in two other ways: (1) only in the Byzantine text do we have an inerrant New Testament; (2) if any portion of the New Testament is lost (no matter how small, even if only one word), then verbal-plenary inspiration is thereby falsified. If inspiration and preservation can legitimately be linked to the text of the New Testament in this way, then the (new) KJV NT is the most accurate translation and those who engage in an expository ministry should use this text alone and encourage their audiences to do the same. But if this theological argument is not legitimate, then New Testament textual criticism needs to be approached on other than a theological a priori basis. And if so, then perhaps most modern translations do indeed have a more accurate textual basis after all. Our approach will be to deal first with the arguments from preservation, then to deal with the arguments related more directly to inspiration and inerrancy. 5
A History of Biblical Textual Criticism
Textual criticism of the Bible is not a new science. It has been used by Jews and Christians for over 2,000 years, as a natural outworking of their belief in divine inspiration: if God has inspired a text to teach us about salvation, then we should preserve it as carefully as possible and restore it whenever necessary. This article surveys the history of biblical textual criticism, primarily in the Patristic and Modern periods. The Patristic period contains instructive examples of early textual criticism in practice, whereas modern textual criticism has relied heavily on published editions of both Testaments.
In Pursuit of a Singular Text: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Desire for the True Original
'In Pursuit of a Singular Text' surveys developments in the field of New Testament textual criticism, exploring the underlying desire for a transcendent text that informs this work. In the nineteenth century, New Testament text critics and their rivals, defenders of a traditional or Byzantine Greek text, set out to restore the original and, therefore, true text of the New Testament. Identifying the original with long-lost autograph copies and assuming that a fixed, standardized text must form the basis of Christian faith, these scholars reinforced culturally specific notions of true text in order to restore the link between diverse, particular manifestations of text and the sacred, abstracted text of the New Testament. Yet, worries about textual corruption and claims about the necessity of correction are not exceptional or new, they are fundamental to the maintenance of a belief in a stable textual ground upon which interpretive claims can be legitimately based. Interpretation, especially interpretation of sacred texts, is often rooted in the fantasy that there is a transcendent text, which stands apart from any particular physical manifestation of that text (Dane 2003). In the case of texts sacred to Christians – transmitted for two millennia in every conceivable media, in multiple languages and across vast stretches of both time and space – faith in a transcendent text has required regular recapitulation and reconfiguration in light of historically situated challenges to textual authority and even to the very concept of 'sacred text'. Thus, each generation has produced its text critics, experts perceived to be capable of 'correcting' physical texts so that they conform more closely to a hypothetical trans-cendent text that is stable, fixed, and true in all its particulars. Malicious interpreters, ignorant copyists or other instruments of corruption dangerously threaten the text, or so it is claimed. Since the transcendent text is by definition hypothetical, however, such assertions suggest not that the pure text has been threatened but that a longed-for, imaginary link between available texts and the transcendent text has been challenged in some way. The precise content of the true text has always been, and will always be,
The texts of the Hebrew Bible: Perspectives in the Textual Criticism
Religio, 2001
The text gives a basic overview of existing and forthcoming critical and other editions of the Hebrew Bible. Before introducing them, it goes through the basic issues of the Urtext and continuous textual transmission. The editions that are reviewed include the BHS and BHQ, as well as The Hebrew Bible University Project, The Oxford Hebrew Bible, The Qumran Bible, and The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible. The study concludes with questions reaching beyond textual criticism and related perspectives on textual criticism itself.