Greer-Heard: Thoughts on David Parker Session
This is the session I had been waiting for. It was by far the most "inside baseball" talk, going over very particular pieces of evidence and decisions that will guide the rest of the text-critical world. It delineated the two basic sides for textual criticism right now: there is an original, and we can try to get back to it OR there may be an original, but we should simply reconstruct the text as it is and show how it's changed. As I am the ultimate fence sitter, I fall somewhere between these two perspectives, though I'd probably err on the side of the former. I think there is an 'original' text, and in addition to the job of textual criticism (to reconstruct the earliest text possible), I think there are goals and new disciplines and new tools popping up that allow us to go beyond the external evidence in some cases, getting even earlier than previously possible. Parker actually illustrated some of these tools in his presentation, showing slides (see above) of how he has utilized software designed for the human genome project to demonstrate the relationship between various manuscripts. At the same time, I think it's important to recognize the way the text changed, to talk about how and why it changed, and what communities used what texts and so forth.
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Hmm; I think I've seen a diagram with a format like that before somewhere! (See the "Textual Araneum" in the online "Development of the New Testament Text" article.)
I don't see what the story is here; it seems as if Parker is basically saying that the earliest recoverable text -- the archetype -- is not necessarily identical to the text of the autographs. But this has always been a given. If someone can make a sustainable conjectural emendation, great. If not, the archetype stands, at least provisionally. The idea that the archetype of the text of a NT book is identical to the autographic text has been, and will be, something to be taken on faith.
Another thing taken on faith is the assumption that God wanted the autographic text, and only the autographic text, to guide the church. But that's more of a theological/Bibliological question, not a text-critical one.
Thanks for summarizing the discussions. Is there any chance you could produce some of the exact quotes about Mark 16:9-20 and Mark 1:41?
Yours in Christ,
James Snapp, Jr.
www.curtisvillechristian.org
Well, I think Parker's point would take that idea (that we can only recover the archetypes) a bit further, by saying (1) that's why in some sense the text of the New Testament isn't reliable, or at least can't be shown to be reliable (answering the question of the debate) and (2) that's why the ultimate goal of textual criticism needs to move away from recovering the 'original' text.
Dale Martin's presentation was actually geared precisely toward raising and answering the question about whether it was the 'original' text which should guide the church, and what kind of bibliology necessitated an 'original' text (a bibliology he felt was insufficient).
As for exact quotes, unfortunately my typing skills were not up to the challenge. Whatever direct quotes I had are already in the summaries. I can tell you that those two passages, along with the PA, were recognized by Parker, Wallace, Ehrman, and Holmes to be inauthentic.
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