Greer-Heard: David Parker Session

Do the variants matter? Did they matter to the early church? How do you make choices between variants? Do you go with the most reliable manuscrips? The most reliable editors? The most popular text?

These are the questions that are important to textual criticism today. While there are those to whom the exact wording of the text matters a great deal (fundamentalists, the orthodox), the church at large (today and throughout history) is quite simply here, and orthodoxically similar, despite these variants.

Parker gave different examples between church sects (fundamentalists, orthodox, Syrian Christianity) and the texts they used.

Two methodologies: one attempts to formulate a critical text. one attempts to protect/find the inspired text. Neither fully explains the situation.

"You cannot say that every word is reliable." "There is no solid foundation from which to survey everything, no point of highest ground from which to select everything." Perhaps, therefore, it's time for the quest for the original text to be abandoned. Parker develops an example: the people in this building today are the first to have at their access 30 manuscripts of an unknown text. The 30 are all unique, and they all differ in wording due to omissions, additionas, substitutions, and transpositions. Each manuscript agrees sometimes with one manuscript, sometimes with another, and is sometimes unique. Utilizing various principles, we could figure out what we think the original was, publish a critical text, and essentially try and convince people that we've got the original.

"Reliability is a comparative, and not an absolute."

When do we stop thinking about variant forms of the text. For the scholar, it probably ends when they finish the edition. For the user, it ends when the book ends. For a subsequent editor, the first edition is used as a stepping stone to something else.

Editors change the text, they pronounce something as the earliest forms, but other forms never go away. For example, the PA has been removed for a century and a half, and yet it doesn't go away, everybody knows it. Mark 1.41 has the same thing going on: even when we decide that yes, Jesus was angry, interpretations of the passage still rely on the idea of compassion.

The evidence is that most significant variation that happened in the New Testament happened by the second century. Parker argues, in the case of the gospels, is that this is because the gospels were a living text, edited freely. We also don't see individual books early on, but collections: Gospels, letters of Paul, editions of Luke and Acts, seven catholic apostles, and the apocalypse.

What is the job of the editor? Do we attempt to construct a "family tree" of variants, a stemma. Analogy to genealogy: anyone who's done a family tree knows that at some point, you get to your earliest identifiable ancestor...and it's usually not Adam.

There will always be a gap between the writing of the text and our texts today. Our job is to reconstruct as early as we can, to reconstruct the collections, but we can't do more than that. We are not re-creating anything anyone wrote (Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc.), we are editing the texts.

1. we don't know what happened back beyond the second century
2. we have the different character development of the manuscripts
3. as editors, we are attempting to construct an initial text, not every word that matthew mark or luke wrote.

Opposing and irreconcilable views is the nature of things since Peter. The day we agree on everything is the day we stop talking. Textual variation is the result, and indeed the engine, or this process. So how reliable is the New Testament? Parker asks another question, "If the NT text was reliable, would it have survived?"

Parker makes the point that a copy, even if it is late, of an early copy, a copy close to the original, then it's still a good copy. But the NT, because it was copied so much, has a greater 'age' in the sense of being several generations away from the initial text.

TODAY, we are used to a single printed text. Early Christians were used to the uncertainty of many different manuscript copies. In fact, the ancients would utilize the various readings for their devotion.

The use of printed texts have impoverished our textual world. Today, different traditions and texts are relegated to the smaller text at the bottom of the page. So far, textual criticism has relied on a few scholars doing the work. With IGNTP and electronic publication of Sinaiticus, we go in part to recovering our textual tradition.

What is the textual reliability of the NT? Wrong question. Even if every word were certain, the variation would remain essential to our use of it.

Ehrman asks, why try and get back to earliest form of the text, why privilege that form? PARKER: Making an edition is something like telling a story. If you have three variants, and you can determine the development between them, that is a story that needs telling. EHRMAN: But still, why privilege the earliest story? PARKER: Well, not everyone has. The Byz/Greek Orthodox want the text as it came to them, not as it was originally.

Long discussion of this point.

Bart really pressed Parker on the difference between the original and initial text, and whether using internal probabilities is even defensible if we recognize we're not really getting back to an original 'author.'

We reconstruct in our heads that we call the author, and we attribute words to the hypothetical author, and we establish a consistency of style, vocab, etc. Then some variants coincide with this construct, and some don't. Without that hypothetical construct however (i.e., getting rid of the author), we need to get rid of internal probabilities.

WALLACE: If we're not concerned to try to get back to what the author said, then it does throw out internal probability. The other problem is that TC tries to shut itself off from other disciplines. Trying to ignore exegesis doesn't help the exploration of textual criticism.

PARKER: Taking Paul as an example, what we have today descended from a collection of Paul's leters. We are trying to create the collected epistles of Paul, not what Paul originally wrote.

WALLACE: Whether or not we think we can get back to the original, still needs to be the text critic's job.