Bart Ehrman usually isn’t my “go-to” guy to quote. He is theologically on the other side of the world from me. However, in some of my recent reading I saw that he made a comment I felt worth repeating. I often mention text criticism (textual criticism) and text critics (textual critics). However, I am not sure it has occurred to me to define it, just assuming my readers are familiar with the term! Ehrman replied to a question he received about textual criticism, and, unlike me, began by clarifying what the term meant. Here is what he wrote:
“Textual criticism is the attempt to establish what an author originally wrote whenever there is some uncertainty about it. For example, if Dante wrote the Inferno by hand, and we don’t actually have the hand-written copy he produced, and different surviving copies of the work have differences among them – which one is most like what he actually wrote? That is especially a big issue, for example, for Shakespeare (massively important for Hamlet and other plays) and … well, and the New Testament.”
So, textual criticism in the biblical context is the branch of textual scholarship that attempts to establish what is the original reading of the Bible. The textual critic engages in the work of textual criticism, using evidence in the attempt to recover the original text. This, then, is what these guys are doing, whether or not we agree with their purpose or their research.
[Note: much of biblical textual criticism has now devolved into speaking of determining (rather than the text of the original autograph) the Ausgangtext – “a hypothetical, reconstructed text, as it presumably existed, according to the hypothesis, before the beginning of its copying.” Additionally, we providential preservationists believe we have God’s word and that it does not need recovering.]
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