Quoting D. C. Parker

Quoting D. C. Parker:

“...‘we have no means of knowing what ideal form a letter took in Paul’s mind before he wrote it down’ and ‘we have no means of knowing what ideal form his Gospel took in Luke’s mind before he wrote it down’. We can underline emphatically that the authorial fallacy is a fallacy. The New Testament philologist’s task is not to recover an original authorial text, not only because we cannot at present know on philological grounds what that original text might have been, nor even because there may have been several forms to the tradition, but because philology is not able to make a pronouncement as to whether or not there was such an authorial text. The best it can do with regard to the New Testament is to use the evidence derived from our study of the extant tradition to present a model of the problems with the concept of the author...We can use philology to reconstruct an Initial Text. But we need not then believe that the Initial Text is an authorial text, or a definitive text, or the only form in which the works once circulated.” David C. Parker, Textual Scholarship and the Making of the New Testament, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 26-27, 29

This quote indicates that the current trajectory of New Testament textual scholarship is toward the liberal end of the religious spectrum, despite evangelical text critics who claim otherwise. On page 28, Parker decisively describes himself “as one of the tiny number of people employed in making a critical edition of the New Testament...”