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Studies in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (New Testament Tools and Studies) PDF

417 Pages·2006·2.25 MB·English
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Studies in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament New Testament Tools and Studies Edited by Bruce M. Metzger, Ph.D., D.D., L.H.D., D. Theol., D. Litt. Professor of New Testament Language and Literature, Emeritus Princeton Theological Seminary and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and Bart D. Ehrman, Ph.D. James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Volume 33 Studies in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament by Bart D. Ehrman BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2006 Cover: P52, a fragment of the Gospel of John discovered in a trash heap in the sands of Egypt. This credit-card sized scrap is the earliest surviving manuscript of the New Testament, dating from around 125–150 c.e. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Ehrman, Bart D. Studies in the textual criticism of the New Testament / by Bart D. Ehrman. p. cm. — (New Testament tools and studies, ISSN 0077-8842 ; v. 33) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90-04-15032-3 (alk. paper) 1. Bible. N.T.—Criticism, Textual. I. Title. II. Series. BS2325.E48 2006 225.4’86—dc22 2005058208 ISSN 0077-8842 ISBN 90 04 15032 3 © Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 09123, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands CONTENTS Foreword .................................................................................... vii 1. The Text of the New Testament ...................................... 1 2. Methodological Developments in the Analysis and Classification of New Testament Documentary Evidence .............................................................................. 9 3. The Use of Group Profiles for the Classification of New Testament Documentary Evidence .......................... 33 4. A Problem of Textual Circularity: The Alands on the Classification of New Testament Manuscripts .......... 57 5. The Text of the Gospels at the End of the Second Century ................................................................................ 71 6. The Text as Window: New Testament Manuscripts and the Social History of Early Christianity .................... 100 7. A Leper in the Hands of an Angry Jesus ........................ 120 8. The Text of Mark in the Hands of the Orthodox ........ 142 9. The Cup, The Bread, and the Salvific Effect of Jesus’ Death in Luke-Acts .................................................. 156 10. The Angel and the Agony: The Textual Problem of Luke 22:43–44 (co-authored with Mark A. Plunkett) ...... 178 11. Jesus and the Adulteress .................................................... 196 12. 1 John 4:3 and the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture .............................................................................. 221 13. The Use and Significance of Patristic Evidence for Textual Criticism ................................................................ 247 14. Heracleon, Origen, and the Text of the Fourth Gospel .................................................................................. 267 15. Heracleon and the ‘Western’ Textual Tradition .............. 281 16. The Theodotians as Corruptors of Scripture .................. 300 text and tradition: the role of new testament manuscripts in early christian studies 17. Text and Interpretation: The Exegetical Significance of the “Original” Text ........................................................ 307 18. Text and Transmission: The Historical Significance of the “Altered” Text .......................................................... 325 vi contents christ in early christian tradition: texts disputed and apocryphal 19. Texts Disputed and Apocryphal: Christ Come in the Flesh ...................................................................................... 343 20. Texts Disputed and Apocryphal: Christ as Divine Man ...................................................................................... 361 21. Texts Disputed and Apocryphal: Christ Against the Jews ................................................................................ 377 Index ............................................................................................ 395 FOREWORD Already during my college days, before I learned Greek, I devel- oped an interest in the textual criticism of the New Testament. I had discovered that not only do we not have the “original” texts of the New Testament (we spoke unproblematically of the originals in those days), we also do not have accurate copies of the originals. For me this was both a problem to contemplate and a puzzle to solve, and I was interested in learning all that I could about it. In the late 1970s I went to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with Bruce Metzger, then the dean of the discipline in America. After completing my MDiv, I stayed on to do my PhD under Prof. Metzger’s guidance (he retired at the age of 70 while I was com- pleting my dissertation; David R. Adams then took over as the official chair of my committee, although Prof. Metzger continued to guide me as well). While still a PhD student I began publishing articles in the field of New Testament textual criticism, and have continued doing so, intermittently, in the twenty years since receiving my degree. The present volume, in the Brill series New Testament Tools and Studies, which Prof. Metzger himself started and which we now co-edit, con- tains a number of the articles that I have published in the field— several introductory pieces for beginners, some highly technical pieces for fellow textual critics, and some articles for scholars of early Christianity who are interested in seeing how textual criticism can be important for exegesis and for understanding the formation of Christian doctrine and the social history of the early church. The volume also includes two sets of lectures on text-critical themes, one delivered at Duke University in 1997 (and previously published in electronic form), and the other at Yale University in 2004 (previ- ously unpublished). A lot has happened in the field of New Testament textual criti- cism in the twenty-two years covered by these essays and lectures. Developments can be seen in particular (a) in the progress made by the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster, until this past year under the direction of Barbara Aland, as it has begun to publish its editio critica maior of the Greek New Testament; (b) viii foreword in the work of the British and North American Committees of the International Greek New Testament Project, with David M. Parker of the University of Birmingham leading the way, as they produce an apparatus of the Fourth Gospel, and (c) in the offshoots of both projects, both in terms of publications and in advances in our meth- ods—especially as these have involved the use of computers and the presentation of a critical apparatus. Although I do not describe these recent advances in detail, many of them will be recognized as rele- vant to the chapters found here, as I attempt to grapple with sev- eral of the key issues in the field. Given the nature of this collection—which includes essays written for different occasions and different contexts, but sometimes on sim- ilar themes—there will necessarily be overlap among the chapters. As a collection, they explore several important matters that have occupied me in the course of my career so far: the relationship of textual criticism to exegesis, the interconnections between the trans- mission of the text on the one hand and the social and theological development of early Christianity on the other, the role of the church fathers in understanding early scribal practices, and certain issues of method. I have organized the essays, roughly, by topic. After an essay orig- inally designed as a general introduction to the field there are sev- eral articles written early in my career on aspects of text-critical method (especially in the classification of manuscripts); there then follow two articles on the history of the text, several articles on specific textual problems (the solution of which involves significant aspects of the history of early Christianity and the transmission of its texts), three articles on the importance and use of patristic evi- dence for text-critical purposes, and finally the two sets of lectures mentioned above, the Kenneth W. Clark Lectures delivered at Duke University in 1997 (“Text and Transmission: The Role of New Testament Manuscripts in Early Christian Studies”); and the Shaffer Lectures delivered at Yale University in 2004 (“Christ in the Early Christian Tradition: Texts Disputed and Apocryphal”). I am grate- ful to both institutions for their generous invitations to deliver these lectures and the hospitality they provided me while I was with them. I would like to thank several people who have made this volume possible: my teacher, Bruce M. Metzger, who accepted the volume in the series; Loes Schouten of E. J. Brill Publishers who handled foreword ix editorial duties connected with its publication; and Carl Cosaert, my graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who went to inordinate lengths to prepare the manuscript for the press. Thanks are also due to Jared Anderson, also a graduate stu- dent at Chapel Hill, for preparing the indexes. Bart D. Ehrman June, 2005

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