The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis (review)

This Festschrift in honor of Bruce M. Metzger, probably the finest textual scholar whom America has produced, is volume 46 in the rejuvenated Studies and Documents series, founded by Kirsopp and Silva Lake and now edited by Eldon Jay Epp. The aim is to survey the contemporary scene (1993) in textual criticism and its achievement is excellent, covering every major issue in twenty-two full-length essays by the outstanding scholars in the field. In particular, since many of the complicated set of disciplines of textual criticism are in rapid transition, the intention is to provide a text because no such resource, apart from valuable introductions, exists for those who are more advanced.

The range of topics speaks for itself: Greek manuscripts (with separate articles on the papyri, the majuscules, the minuscules and the lectionaries), the early versions (Diatessaron, Syriac, Latin, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, and Georgian), patristic citations (Greek, Latin, and Syriac), studies of scribal habits, approaches to manuscript classification, the use of computers for textual criticism, recent apparatuses and critical editions, methods for evaluating variant readings (the Majority text theory, thoroughgoing eclecticism, and the use of textual data for early Christian social history. Each section has an up-to-date bibliography.

The final chapter by Bart D. Ehrman on “The Text As Window” dealing with the social history of early Christianity was a surprise. The sections ranged from the internecine struggles of early Christianity, Jewish-Christian relations, the suppression of women, the use of magic and fortune-telling, the spread of early Christianity, to the literary character of early Christianity.

Important also is J. Keith Elliott’s article on thoroughgoing eclecticism in textual criticism, the tenor of which is critical of the method used largely by Bruce Metzger during his long and successful career. Elliott notes for example that the editors of the two standard Greek texts (UBSGNT 3 and NA 26) “often jettison their own principles of internal criteria if they, or a majority of them, did not approve of the MS support for the reading that the internal criteria pointed to as original. Compromises among the members of the committee reveal themselves in the Commentary with its talk of majority and minority voting . . . in the cowardly overuse of brackets in the text, and in the vacillating rating letters applied in the apparatus . . .” (325).

The majority of scholars use today either the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament or Nestle-Aland, both of which agree with one another as far as the Greek text is concerned. However Nestle has 15,000 variants in comparison to the severely restricted 1,400 in the U.B.S. Metzger’s textual commentary to U.B.S. has been revised in 1994 but not to the satisfaction of many.

This Festschrift, then, fills an indispensable place if scholars are to come closer to the ultimate goals of textual criticism so well envisaged and practiced by Metzger himself: “to establish the original text of the New Testament and to write the history of its transmission.”