| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
| Contents | ||
Before the invention of printing, literary works had to be copied by hand, and each time a manuscript is copied, errors were introduced by the human scribe. The difficulty in textual criticism is that it is not always immediately apparent which variant is original and which is an error. The task of the textual critic, therefore, is to sort through the variants and establish a "critical text" that is intended to represent the original by explaining best the state of all extant witness. In establishing the critical text, the text critic considers both "external" evidence (the age, provenance, and affiliation of each witness) and "internal" considerations (what the author and scribes were likely to have done).
There are three fundamental approaches to textual criticism: copy text editing, eclecticism, and stemmatics. Techniques from the biological discipline of cladistics are now also being used to determine the relationship between manuscripts.
With copy text editing, the textual critic selects a base text from a manuscript thought to be reliable. Often, the base text is selected from the oldest manuscript of the text, but in the early days of printing the copy text was often a manuscript that was at hand.
Using the copy-text method, the critic examines the base text and makes corrections (called emendations) in places where the base text appears wrong to the critic. This can be done by looking for places in the base text that do not make sense or by looking at the text of other witnesses for a superior reading. Close-call decisions are usually resolved in favor of the copy text.
The first published, printed edition of the Greek New Testament was produced by this method. Erasmus, the editor, selected a manuscript from the local Dominican monastery in Basle and corrected its obvious errors by consulting other local manuscripts. The Westcott and Hort text, which was the basis for the Revised Version of the English bible also used the copy-text method, using Vaticanus as the base manuscript.
Eclecticism is the practice of examinating a wide number of manuscripts and selecting the variant that seems superior. Evaluation uses internal and external evidence. In this approach, no single manuscript is theorectically favored. Instead the critic will form opinions about individual manuscripts.
Since the mid 19th century, eclecticism, in which there is no a priori bias to a single manuscript, has been the dominant method of editing the Greek text of the New Testament (currently the United Bible Society 4th edition and Nestle-Aland, 27th edition). Even so, the oldest manuscripts, being of the Alexandrian text-type are the most favored, and the critical text has an Alexandrian disposition.
The critic forms an opinion about the individual manuscripts available. For example, one manuscript may have a tendency to drop words. Another manuscript may have a tendency for interpolations. After evaluating how the reliability of individual manuscripts applies to a particular problem, he will form an opinion about which variant has the strongest manuscript support.
Various considerations can be used to decide which reading is the most likely to be original. Sometimes these considerations can be in conflict.
One of the techniques is lectio difficilior potior based on taking the more difficult reading as being more likely to be the original. It is based on the idea that copyists are more likely to simplify and smooth a text they do not fully understand.
Another scribal tendency is called "Homoioteleuton" meaning "same endings". Homoioteleuton occurs when two words/phrases/lines end with the same sequence of letters. The scribe, having finished copying the first, skips to the second, omitting all intervening words.
Another technique is to examine the other writings of the author to decide what words and grammatical constructions match his style.
The process of evaluating internal evidence also provides the critic with information that helps him evaluate the reliability of individual manuscripts. Thus there is an inter-relationship between internal and external evidence.