The Relevance of Andrew of Caesarea for New Testament Textual Criticism

Contemporary textual critics attend to a variety of pressing questions. No longer restricted to the quest for the "original" text of the NT,¹ current practitioners pursue a number of interrelated issues. Topics like scribal activity, theological variation, the nature and scope of the NT canon, and the sociohistorical worlds of scribes and their manuscripts are now commonplace in text-critical discussions.² The definition of what a textual critic is (and does) has been broadened to include the pursuit of questions once considered peripheral to the discipline.

These questions are not new. Writing at the threshold of the early Byzantine era, Andrew of Caesarea displays an awareness of competing variants,³ comments on their theological significance,⁴ and condemns scribes who atticize the Greek manuscripts of the Bible.⁵ Andrew's Commentary on the Apocalypse appears to reflect the same integration of issues that characterizes contemporary text-critical research, albeit from the perspective of the seventh century.⁶ Andrew's handful of text-critical exempla speaks directly to a discipline that probes the relevance of scribal activity and challenges contemporary assumptions about its significance. In particular, Andrew's assessment of textual variation confounds modern sensibilities. Andrew embraces textual variants that produce a semantic difference in the reading of the Apocalypse and excoriates scribes who make stylistic changes. Andrew's Commentary on the Apocalypse offers a distinctively Byzantine appraisal of variants that enriches our understanding of textual variation and contributes to current discussions about its significance for textual criticism.

I. History of Research

Little is known about Andrew of Caesarea or his commentary today. Despite the availability of Josef Schmid's critical edition of Andrew's Greek text,⁷ scholarship in this area has stalled for six decades. The challenge of dealing with an untranslated, early Byzantine text is a major factor. Many works of late antiquity and the early Byzantine period share this fate. This état des choses, coupled with Schmid's daunting text-critical apparatus for Andrew's commentary, can discourage even the most daring scholars. No modern translation of Andrew's commentary exists in any language today.⁸ Portions of the work are available in English, but a full rendering of the nearly three-hundred-page commentary has yet to be published—a critical first step for understanding any ancient work.⁹

The lack of a full translation is only one problem. Most of the available research remains inaccessible to the broader community of scholars, appearing mostly in dated studies. With the exception of Schmid's monograph, treatments of the archbishop's work are also brief and offer only a sampling of what can be learned from the commentary.¹⁰ The Apocalypse's putative status as an eschatological work presents another challenge. Andrew's commentary is often mined for information about "the world to come." Such a narrow focus, however, fails to do justice to the commentary's standing as an exemplar of early Byzantine practices.¹¹ Other aspects of the work require attention, and Andrew's assessment of textual variation in light of his broader hermeneutical approach to Scripture will occupy the discussion here.

II. Form, Structure, and Hermeneutic of the Commentary

We know very little about Andrew. We know that he was the archbishop of Caesarea Cappadocia (Kayseri in modern-day Turkey) and that his administration, spanning the years 563-614, began as the age of Justinian (d. 565) drew to a close. At the time he lived, the effects of the previous era's christological debates—epitomized in the Council of Chalcedon—were still being felt and made their way into the commentary.¹² Andrew's occasional remarks on the text appear to reveal more about early Byzantine attitudes toward the Bible than about his actual text-critical practices.¹³

Andrew divides his commentary into twenty-four "discourses" (λόγοι), which are then subdivided into three "heads" (κεφάλαια), resulting in seventy-two sections in the work.¹⁴ Each of the λόγοι concludes with a doxology. Andrew derives the number twenty-four from the number of elders before God's throne.^15...