The Origins of Textual Criticism as a Scholarly Discipline

The Origins of Textual Criticism as a Scholarly Discipline" Metzger & Ehrman pp. 197-204

Where did the whole idea of textual criticism come from? Is this practice of deciding what the original reading of a document might be a very recent practice? Does it apply only to biblical studies or is it carried on in other genres of literature as well?

Metzger and Ehrman point to the origins of textual criticism in the Classical period and more so in the Hellenistic period when ancient Greeks starting in the 5th century B.C. would analyze different manuscripts of Homer and try to sift out variant readings and portions which seemed not to be original to the thext.

p. 198 "It is less widely appreciated - indeed, the qustion has seldom been raised - how far the methods of textual criticism current at Alexandria were adopted by scholars in the Church and applied to the text of the New Testament." Metzger and Ehrman go on to summarize some of the early patristic efforts to confirm the earliest text of the New Testament.

p. 199 "It appears that a learned leather merchant named Theodotus, lately come from Byzantium to Rome, had been stung by certain criticisms that Galen, the famous Greek physician, had leveled against the philosophical naivete of many Christians. In an attempt to introduce improvements in the methodology of scriptural interpreation, Theodotus and his followers seem to have undertaken a critical recension of the biblical text." Eusebius quotes a segment from a pamphlet published against those people. p. 199 "According to this author, the Theodotians deserved to be condemned on three scores: (1) they were engrossed in the study of logic, mathematics, and empirical science . . . (2) rejecting allegorizing, they practiced strict grammatical exegesis; and (3) they applied textual criticism to the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament." We really know virtually nothing more about this early movement, except that the people involved in it (p. 199) "were excommunicated as heretics by the authoritarian bishop of Rome, Pope Victor 1 (served as pope c. A.D. 187-198)."

p. 200 "Origen of Alexandria and Caesarea began a text-critical study of the entire Old Testament in Hebrew and in several Greek transations. His resulting Hexapla, which must have required many years of the most painstaking labor, was a monumental tool that many patristic scholars consulted in the famed library of Pamphilus at Caesarea, until its destruction in the seventh century during the Islamic conquest of the Near East."

These efforts at textual criticism, and the comments of Metzger and Ehrman about the excommunication of the Theodotians, along with a realization that Origen was also later considered a heretic, do not tell us a great deal about either the theology of the patristic period or about the fruitfulness of the textual studies. There is no real reason to believe that people have been excommunicated based on a desire to study the Scripture more effectively. There is also no real reason to believe that their actual textual work was particularly ground-breaking. An interesting insight, brought out on pp. 200-201 is that Origen documented some variant readings but then endorsed the positive aspects of the various readings, emphasizing their spiritual usefulness and insight, rather than talking about which one was a more likely original reading or giving reasons to prefer one over another. This is akin to people who will evaluate modern translations or paraphrases of the Bible based on whether they like the expressiveness or theological slant of one or another, rather than based on which is a more fair and accurate representation of the Scripture which God has given to his people.

p. 201 "Judged according to modern standards, St. Jerome (c. 347-420) was a more sagacious textual critic than Origen, well aware of the varieties of error that arise in the transcription of manuscripts." Jerome talks about the various ways a scribe could make a copying error or could choose to correct what he considered a poor reading of a passage.

p. 202 "Although primarily a theologian, St. Augustine (354-430) showed on occasion a keen critical judgment in textual problems." He suggests considering majority readings, but also seems aware that there are some instances when a majority reading may exist because of many copies being made from a corrupted text. Therefore he also recommends the practice of looking to manuscripts held in places of great learning and research when there are passages which are in doubt.

p. 203 "During the Middle Ages, when knowledge of Greek was at a low ebb, text-critical efforts were now and then directed toward the purification of Jerome's Vulgate text." Medieval authors will sometimes make comments suggesting the Greek which would presumably lie behind Jerome's translation.

p. 203 "At the time of the Renaissance and with the spread of the knowledge of ancient Greek, scholars began to correct the Latin Vulgate by the original Greek." The work of Erasmus and Beza, as well as the editors of the Geneva Bible, shows not only interest in the Vulgate text but also in comparison of Greek manuscripts.

p. 204 "The first scholar to make any use of all three classes of evidence for the text of the New Testament - that is, Greek manuscripts, the early versions, and quotations from the fathers - was probably Francis Lucas of Bruges (grugensis) in his Notationes in sacra Biblia, quibus variantia . . . discutiuntur (Antwerp, 1580). Toward the close of the seventeenth century, the scientific foundations of New Testament criticism were laid in four monumental publications of richard Simon 91638-1712), a French Catholic scholar far ahead of his day in biblical research." Simon chose to view the Bible specifically as a piece of literature, applying the same interpretive methods to it as would be applied to other pieces of literature.