Customer Reviews

The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis (Studies and Documents) (Vol 46)

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This book brings together articles previously published in a variety of journals. The range of authors having differing viewpoints helps bring perspective to a difficult subject. Each of the 22 articles is in depth and has a bibiliography. The collection succeedes in being contemporary, highlighting current thinking in New Testament textual criticism.

I just bought this book and found that it should have been titled ". . . in Research up to c. 1993! It is a festschrift in honor of Metzger. I gave it 3 stars because I had to give it a rating to post this. I'm not sure what my final rating will be.

This reviewer is an advocate of the Textus Receptus, and works for the Trinitarian Bible Society. He does, however, keep abreast of what the modern text critics are saying. Of interest to this reviewer is the fact that Bart Ehrman openly acknowledges (in footnote 6, pp 44-45) that Kurt Aland's hypothesis that the Byzantine Text was the result of a 4th century Lucianic recension of the New Testament text is indeed false. Ehrman has chaired a number of researches for the Society of Biblical Literature (from 1990 through 2003) that have extensively researched the patristic citations of the New Testament, in particular, the Byzantine fathers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa. Gordon Fee, who also has worked closely with Ehrman on this same project, has closely researched the patristic citations of Chrysostom. Both conclude that the Byzantine Text was in a state of flux at this time, that there were variants between the citations of the Byzantine Church Fathers at this time, and therefore, the text could not have been the result of a formal recension inasmuch as a recension would have standardised the text and removed all variants.

Modern reviewers lean now toward the view that the Byzantine Fathers actually were writing down readings that were before them in their manuscripts. However, they tend to posit that the Byzantine Text was the result of an informal eclectic recension, the Fathers pulling one reading from one manuscript, another from another.

However, this theory does not explain why, then, the Byzantine Text rapidly became so uniform. A text produced by informal eclecticism would have remained in a state of perpetual flux; such was the case with both the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate. However, the Byzantine Text came to its majority form by the eighth century, the ninth at the latest, and then remained constant in that status. The only hypothesis that explains this is that, in the 4th century, the Byzantine Fathers began to return the text to the state in which it had existed in the Byzantine area, before Eusebius of Caesarea had introduced many changes in his fifty manuscripts specially edited for the Church of Constantinople for Constantine. Eusebius was an ardent devotee of the Alexandrian church father Origen, and Eusebius accordingly introduced many of Origen's changes into the text. Both Origen and Eusebius were semi-Arians, denying the Nicene doctrine of homoousios. Proof that Eusebius had introduced many changes into the text is amply demonstrated by the near universal presence of the Eusebian canons into all the manuscripts of that time. The Eusebian canons were a system of cross-referencing the historical events of the Gospels using numbers, to make it easier for the reader to look up the parallel account in another Gospel. The universal presence of the Eusebian canons in the manuscripts proves the powerful influence that Eusebius exercised over the NT text during that time.

However, the 4th century Byzantine Fathers, men like Chrysostom, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzus began to purge out the changes introduced by Eusebius textually, to revert the text to its former form. By the end of the 4th century, the Byzantine Text was about 85% in its present form, with 15% of the Caesarean readings still present in it (mostly in the Gospel of Mark). However, by the eighth and ninth centuries, the Caesarean readings were for the most part purged, and the remaining text was the Byzantine text we have today - a text we cannot but believe goes directly back to the autographs themselves, the apostolic churches themselves for the most part being in the Byzantine area. Indeed, the Church of Antioch was the Apostle Paul's home church, and we cannot but believe that that church had exact copies of all of Paul's and Luke's originals. Antioch itself was on the southern tip of Asia Minor. And the Apostle John long resided in Ephesus; it was there that the Holy Ghost used him to pen the Fourth Gospel, and, we believe, the Book of Revelation and his final epistles. Thus, exact copies of the apostolic originals were kept in the Byzantine churches, and these the 4th century Byzantine fathers used to revert the New Testament text to its former state prior to the innovations introduced by Origen and Eusebius.