Frankentext (or Franken-text), noun. Reconstructed textual readings which can be found in no extant manuscripts; that is, textual units (e.g., a verse) of a printed Greek New Testament whose exemplar cannot be found in any extant Greek manuscript (a portmanteau of Frankenstein and text).[i]
Thomas Ross talked about this problem in his debate with James Whiteout R. White. White seemed somewhat unable to comprehend it. (Listen to the opening statement of Ross, starting about 50:14 through 52:25. Ross lists 41 examples from Matthew and Mark alone. His statements are based on the work of Reuben Swanson and others in New Testament Greek Manuscripts: Variant Readings Arranged in Horizontal Lines Against Codex Vaticanus, Matthew; Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic, 1995.)
The following comments are by Robert Adam Boyd from the Dwayne Green YouTube Channel, slightly edited for print medium (and used with Green’s permission). I do not believe I have changed any meaning with the lite editing, but to get the exact statements of Adam Boyd, please listen to “The Byzantine text is BETTER THAN the Critical Text” at about 7:38 to 8:49.
A great example is Matthew 19:29. The English Standard Version translation reads:
And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.There are two variants here. The first one is “houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands.” The only manuscript that says it that way is Vaticanus (Codex Vaticanus). All of the other manuscripts add the word “wife” – “or wife or children or lands.”
The other variant is “hundredfold.” There are a lot of manuscripts that say “hundredfold,” but Vaticanus is not one of them. Vaticanus says “manifold.” When you put those two variants together, you do not have any manuscript whatsoever that reads the way the ESV translation reads. So the ESV is translating, as you call it, a “Frankentext.” It’s not actually translating from any manuscript for the entirety of the verse.
[Note 1: Adam Boyd says he finds it “quite implausible that the original text of the Greek New Testament would not be preserved in at least one manuscript, and that that would happen more than a hundred times over the course of the Greek New Testament. I don’t believe that.” At about 6:25, Boyd says that are about 105 verses in the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament that, when you string together the variants, you cannot find any manuscript whatsoever that has that exact reading. See 105 Verses in the Critical Greek Text of the New Testament Without Any Manuscript Support, by Maurice Robinson.]
[Note 2: Robert Adam Boyd is an ordained minister, a linguist/translator with Wycliffe Bible Translators in Papua New Guinea, and the translator & editor of The Text-Critical English New Testament: Byzantine Text Version. To be clear, Adam Boyd is a Majority Text proponent, while Thomas Ross and I are Textus Receptus proponents. Nevertheless, we agree about “Frankentext,” and Boyd does a good job giving a succinct singular example here.]
[i] “Frankenstein” technically refers to the scientist Victor Frankenstein in Mary W. Shelley’s novel by that same name; but in common parlance a “Frankenstein” is a monstrous creature stitched or spliced together from various odd sources. In the story, the creator (Dr. Frankenstein) loses control of his creation and that ultimately destroys Victor Frankenstein. Correspondingly, a “Frankentext” is a monstrous creature stitched or spliced together out of various odd parts of Greek manuscripts to create a new, previously unknown, Greek text.
4 comments:
Great article. I had always heard about the so-called frankentext, I was happy to have Adam Boyd come on and give some examples. I learned a ton!
Thanks, Dwayne. I thought Adam did an excellent job focusing in on that and making it clear what he was talking about.
Frankentexts are stronger ground for Majority Text / Byzantine Priority folk than they are for TR proponents.
At one level all printed editions including the RP Byz text are Frankentexts.
No ms. has yet been found that corresponds to the Kx / Byz text at every point throughout the NT. Yes some have been found for short 1-3 chapter books of the Bible. I even found by my own collation a couple of manuscripts that correspond exactly to the text of the Computensian Edition in Philemon. BUT I will grant that the "frankentext" problem is far less of a problem for the RP Byz, and it largely exist only at the "book" rather than the chapter and verse level of resolution.
However, no ms. corresponds to the TR. To "Reconstruct" the TR from extant manuscripts one has use multiple ms., insert Vulgate readings, and a small heap of what could be called Erasmian guesses (aka conjectures or retroversions). In fact in some parts of the NT the frankentext problem might be larger in the TR than it is in the 'critical texts.'
Now some TR proponents might reply but what if there were other manuscripts. To which the critical text proponent says OK... the critical text is the text of the other manuscript: the autograph.
Hefin Jones,
Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I will try to make a quick reply, as we are finishing packing and loading up for a vacation beginning early in the morning.
I will grant that on this matter the advantage goes to the Majority Text folks. However, I think it as a practical matter, English language translations that most English-speaking Christians are using are based either on the CT or TR. So I was looking at the matter more from that angle (that is, comparing the two prominent categories). It seems to me a common tactic used from the past by CT proponents (I think White uses this in his debates) is to criticize the TR based on some passage that they say has little or no Greek manuscript support (such as Rev. 16:5 or 1 John 5:7). This “Franken-text” issue in Critical Texts, in my opinion, exposes the inconsistency of CT proponents when they criticize some reading in the TR simply for lack of manuscript evidence.
There are lots of other points of discussion, but that is what I am pointing out with this post. Have a good night.
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