The Goalpost of New Testament Textual Criticism

A notice and two reviews. Changing the Goalpost of New Testament Textual Criticism, Abidan Paul Shah, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2020

• Book Notice: Changing the Goalpost of New Testament Textual Criticism -- “...the goalpost has incrementally shifted away from the ‘original text’ to retrieving ‘any text’ or ‘many texts’ of the NT.”
• Review of Abidan Paul Shah. Changing the Goalpost of New Testament Textual Criticism. -- “Despite the above minor criticisms, the value in Changing the Goalpost is it’s assembling of modern trends in New Testament textual criticism in a handy reference.”
• WM 215: Review: Abidan Paul Shah, Changing the Goalpost of NT Textual Criticism -- “...on the ‘radical shift’ in the goal of modern textual criticism under the influence of postmodernism...”

Even before the release of Shah’s book, Jeff Riddle had already written and spoken about “a momentous postmodern shift in the contemporary academic NT text criticism.” Now Shah addressed the same. The author agrees with the “old” goal of Westcott-Hort and others, and disagrees with the “new” direction of Ehrman, Parker, and others. The “old” goal was ostensibly to recover the original New Testament. The “new” direction is that the old goal is not possible. I disagree with both positions, holding the view that God providentially preserved his inspired word. Despite the fact that I cannot recommend the direction of the book (since the premise does not realize the goalpost had already been moved), based on Jeff Riddle’s review, it sounds that possibly Shah’s currently one-of-a-kind critique of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method might be worth the price of the book.