Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Interested in textual criticism probably my most useful edited book by Bart D. Ehrman, read by John Paul Middlesworth many people on the blog are interested in textual criticism, the field that examines our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament, to figure out what the authors originally wrote and to see how and why their writings came to be changed by later scribes. One of the most important books I published was one I didn't write, an edited collection of essays by leading scholars in the world on various aspects of the topic. The book was for academics, but some of you might be interested in what it was all about. I was asked about it many years ago on the blog and thought reposting the question in response would be a good way to introduce it here.
[00:00:48] Doctor Ehrman, in your first and second edition of the text of the New Testament in contemporary research, essays on the status questionis that you co edited with Doctor Michael Holmes, what was your role in editing, especially since some articles were beyond your admitted expertise?
[00:01:06] Response this is actually a terrific question, but before addressing it directly, I need to provide a bit of background. The book this person is talking about is in the field of textual criticism in its technical sense, that is, the study of how to reconstruct the original text of the New Testament, given the fact that we don't have the originals, but only much later copies, all of which have mistakes.
[00:01:30] I've repeatedly said on the blog that this discipline is very specialized, but I've never really given any indication of how it is or in what sense. That's what this particular book makes very clear indeed. The book is not for the faint of heart.
[00:01:46] More for anyone wanting to learn the basics of New Testament textual criticism, the best place to start is with Bruce Metzger's classic, the text of the New Testament, its transmission, corruption and restoration.
[00:01:59] This is the book that both undergraduate students who have taken greek and graduate students in the field read first to learn all the basics. How were books made in antiquity? What kinds of writing materials, inks, etcetera? How were they put in circulation? What kinds of manuscripts from antiquity do we have? Papyrus, parchment, etcetera? What are the surviving manuscripts of the New Testament? Specifically, what can we say about some of the most important individual Codex Vaticanus, Codex Siniticus, the individual papyri, etcetera? Into what ancient languages was the New Testament translated, e. G. Latin, syriac, coptic? What kinds of manuscripts of each of these languages do we have?
[00:02:46] How was the New Testament quoted by early christian writers, and how do these quotations help us know what the original New Testament said?
[00:02:54] How was the New Testament changed by scribes over the centuries.
[00:02:59] When and how did scholars first realize that there was a problem knowing the original text?
[00:03:05] What methods did they devise for getting back to the original? How does a scholar today go about deciding what the original was, verse after verse after verse? What methods, criteria, kinds of evidence are cited?
[00:03:18] What verses are most disputed among scholars today? And what is probably the right answer about how those verses were originally worded, etcetera, etcetera.
[00:03:29] Metzger's book gives all this kind of information and much more. It is a treasure of a book, and all that is background to the question that the questioner is asking.
[00:03:39] Just one other bit of background. The term status questionis in the title book that he is asking about means state of the question. It is a scholarly term that means, what is the most important scholarship today saying about this issue?
[00:03:56] So here's the deal. I was Bruce Metzger's final graduate student. He retired when I was writing my dissertation, though he stayed on my committee until I was finished. It is common in the realm of scholarship for a revered scholar to be given a festschrift, which is a collection of scholarly essays written in his or her honor, either by former students or colleagues in the field, or a combination of the two. If you are a really big time scholar, you may have more than one fest shrift presented to you. A fest shrift is usually meant to be a surprise to the recipient. They don't know it's happening until it is presented as a finished product to them.
[00:04:35] The problem with Festschriften, the plural of Festschrift, is that they tend to contain essays on all sorts of topics and of a wide range of quality. There is rarely a fest strip that as a whole is a worthwhile book. To have one or more essays might be important, but often, well, not for that reason. Festripton are a badge of honor for recipients, but most scholars don't pay much attention to them as books, just maybe an article or two in them. Metzger already had two fest Shrifton dedicated to him when, in the early nineties, I decided that he should have a third. But I did not want it to be a regular old festschrift that people would simply acknowledge as a nice gesture. I wanted it to be a book that people would use for years, decades, not even realizing that it was a fest shrift. My idea was instead of having scholars write whatever they felt like in the field of textual criticism, Metzger's main area of expertise, that we should have to have a very specific focus for the volume and make it a book everyone in the field would want and need to have.
[00:05:43] I wanted the volume to be a kind of next level book for someone who already had the basics of New Testament textual criticism. From knowing Metzger's book and possibly by having done some research in the field, a book that contained one essay on each and every major subfield within the field of New Testament textual criticism. Each essay would take a topic, say, the papyri manuscripts of the New Testament, or the quotations of the New Testament in the Latin Church fathers, or the ancient coptic manuscripts, or scribal habits in copying manuscripts, or one of the important methods to reconstructing the text that scholars have proposed to describe the status ques.
[00:06:23] The essay would explain what had happened in scholarship over the past 50 years, since World War two, and indicate what the best scholarship of the field was saying about it now. What were the problems being addressed, the methods that had been devised, the new discoveries that had been made, and so on. Each essay would include a bibliography of all the most important scholarly books and articles. There would be something like 20 of these essays, and my idea was to get the very best authorities in the world to write them. I realized that editing such a volume would be too much for a mere mortal such as me. So I broached the idea with my friend and colleague Michael Holmes, who teaches at Bethel University in St. Paul. We were friends from graduate student day, since he was the second to last student of Metzger. He was three years ahead of me in the graduate program at Princeton Seminary and had also written a dissertation in textual criticism and was one of the leading scholars in the field in North America. Mike was eager to join forces, and so we did it. We devised 22 subject areas to be covered in 22 essays, and we contacted the top scholars in each field in the US and throughout Europe explaining the project.
[00:07:35] Every single scholar we contacted agreed to write an essay. That was a true miracle. We gave instructions about what the essays were to be, how long, what they were to cover, how to organize them, and so on. Everyone had a year to write them, and they all did.
[00:07:52] Our role then involved setting up the structure of the book, deciding on the sub fields, collecting the essays, and editing them. Editing them meant reading through them very carefully indeed, and suggesting changes in substance, structure, and style, then rereading them when they were resubmitted. We divvied them up so that each of us did. Half.
[00:08:13] Some of the essays were in fields that we were very familiar with. For example, there were essays on the papyri manuscripts on the Maguskal manuscripts, those written on parchment in block letters, the minuscule manuscripts written on parchment in a kind of cursive script, quotations of the NT and the greek fathers, the various editions and apparatuses of the New Testament, etcetera, etcetera. But there were other essays and fields that we really were not experts in at all. For example, essays on the manuscripts of the New Testament in such languages as ethiopic, armenian, and georgian, quotations of the New Testament in the Syriac Church fathers, etcetera. For these, we had to trust that the authors, the leading scholars in each of those fields, knew what they were saying. We didn't edit those to correct anything that was wrong, just for structure and style, especially style.
[00:09:06] Mike and I each contributed an essay. Mine was on how changes in our manuscripts can tell us about the social history experienced by the scribes who made them. For example, in social conflicts over Jews, the roles of women in the church, theology, etcetera. Mike's was on a method called reasoned eclecticism, which is one of the ways of weighing the various kinds of evidence to determine what the original text was and to see how it got changed.
[00:09:34] Editing the volume was a massive amount of work. All the essays were submitted in English except one. The submission on minuscule manuscripts was in German. Mike and I flipped a coin and I lost, so I had to produce an english translation of it. But the volume turned out amazingly well. It was published in honor of Metzger's 80th birthday. We made a surprise presentation of it to him on his birthday in Princeton. And then it came out in the following year, 1990. 515 years later, Mike and I realized that so much had happened in the field of textual criticism that the 1995 status questionis in many of the fields covered by the essays was no longer the status questionis.
[00:10:18] We decided we needed a new edition. We had some of the original authors revise their essays in light of developments. We often had. New authors who had emerged as leaders in their fields present new essays in those areas. And we added seven new essays on seven new topic areas.
[00:10:35] Essays this time were longer. It turned into a massive book with the same title, 882 pages long. It appeared in 2013.
[00:10:46] Metzger had died in 2007. The book continues to be used by all serious students of textual criticism. Anyone who wants to know the current state of research goes to it. That's not at all because of my scholarly knowledge or abilities. Basically, I simply had the idea. It is because of the enormous expertise of others who have dedicated their lives to rather narrow and amazingly complicated fields of research who were willing to write essays telling the scholarly world what they know.
[00:11:16] If any of you is seriously interested in any major subfield of New Testament textual studies, this is the place to go.
