The Moving Text

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on David Brown and the Bible

Brewer, Allen, Kinlaw III, Christopher R. Brewer, Garrick V. Allen, Dennis F. Kinlaw III

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780334055280
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Drawing upon the pioneering work of the British theologian David Brown who argues for a non-static, 'moving text' that reaches beyond the biblical canon, this volume brings together twelve interdisciplinary essays, as well as a response from Brown. With essays ranging from New Testament textual criticism to the fiction of David Foster Wallace, The Moving Text provides an introduction to Brown and the Bible that will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as specialists in a wide range of fields.

Part 1. The Biblical Text

1. Text and Tradition: David Brown and New Testament Textual Criticism

GARRICK V. ALLEN

In popular perception, New Testament textual criticism belongs to the realm of the überspecialist, practitioners with access to secret knowledge, worshipping at clandestine altars in the recesses of medieval university buildings. They strain by candlelight to use worn copies of Tischendorf’s editio octava critica maior and hoary copies of Westcott and Hort as objects of cultic reverence, combing tattered apparatuses like Babylonian shamen practising extispicy. The fruit of the occult-like activities for NT scholarship – when considered relevant at all – is the creation of the hand edition, usually the Nestle-Aland prepared by the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster (28th edn, 2012). ‘Thank goodness for lower criticism’, they say with relief, ‘and that we are spared from this labour that produced a trustworthy, unproblematic, and authoritative critical edition from which we can get on to the important businesses of history, exegesis, and perhaps even theology.’

This portrait of the textual critic, while an obvious exaggeration on many fronts, points nonetheless to a misconception of the discipline: that it is interested only in establishing an ‘original’ or ‘authoritative’ text (a task that is more or less complete), not the historical, social and religious scruples that influenced the transmission of texts; that the discipline is primarily concerned with the small-scale refinement of adequate editions. In fact, textual scholars are more and more interested in what textual variation and the shape of textual culture tell us about tradents (i.e. the people who produced manuscripts), and the development of Christian tradition.1 The presentation of the text in its manuscripts has come to the fore and textual variation is no longer viewed as a reality to be lamented and corrected.2

Although not the only source of tradition, the Bible played a central role in the development of doctrine and thought, as David Brown himself has argued in Tradition and Imagination. Textual scholars are continuing to discover and describe the ways that Scripture – a randomly preserved sample of ancient texts found in mostly late-antique and medieval documents that encompass parts of Christian sacred works containing various wordings, paratexts and forms – is tradition.3

This contribution analyses the ways that the Greek manuscripts and their wordings of the NT are both shaped by and a product of tradition by bringing the current major project of NT textual criticism, the Editio Critica Maior (ECM), into conversation with the work of David Brown. On the one hand, Brown’s insights into the development of tradition provide perceptive assistance into how the textual traditions and the physical realia of the NT function as mediators of tradition. On the other, the way that many scholars conceive of the task of textual criticism, as something more than hypothesizing or reconstructing the text as it left an author’s hand, provides another example that supports Brown’s overarching argument that tradition not only works alongside Scripture but critiques it, sometimes leading to developments in texts and forms. The place to begin such a discussion is with a brief rehearsal of Brown’s work on Scripture and tradition as it is relevant to the ECM project that focuses on the Apocalypse currently underway in Wuppertal.4 Following this prefatory discussion, which time-travels back to the late 1990s by placing David Brown into conversation with David Parker’s deceptively thin volume The Living Text of the Gospels, I briefly examine some examples of places in the NT’s textual history where the continuing development of tradition left its mark on the wording of scriptural works and where paratexts – the allographic products of tradition – shape the understanding of a particular passage. First, let us turn to the ECM.

Tradition, Imagination and the Editio Critica Maior

The ECM, the brainchild of Kurt Aland,5 was devised to address a need that arose from the fact that the most accurate (Tischendorf 1869, 18722) and complete (von Soden 1913) critical apparatuses were outdated with recent discoveries and complied in different editions.6 The ECM was designed to describe the fullness of the textual data derived from Greek, versional and patristic witnesses to the NT in an accurate and consistent manner through the first Christian millennium. This data would, in turn, implicitly trace the narrative embedded in the text of the NT that provides evidence for how it was conceived of, used and changed over time.7 In addition to its stated goals, the ECM fills out the story of the text with as much data as is possible and/or palatable. To date, only the Catholic Epistles and Acts of the Apostles have appeared,8 and the other portions of the NT are in various stages of completion. Based on the unique textual histories of the various NT works, the workflow of each project must necessarily be tailored to the existing evidence. At the Institut für Septuaginta- und biblische Textforschung at the Kirchliche Hochschule in Wuppertal, the ECM of the Apocalypse (i.e. the book of Revelation) is in production and it is helpful here to briefly describe the stages of the project and its intended goals in order to understand clearly how Brown’s very different theological programme might inform and influence how we conceptualize the value and uses of the ECM in the context of Christian tradition and theological studies broadly conceived.9

The groundwork for the ECM project consisted of assembling microfilm and photographs of all NT Greek manuscripts, a task that was 90 per cent complete in 1970,10 and more recently in their digitization in the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room.11 This task is mostly complete for Revelation, owing to the fact that the Apocalypse has no lectionary witnesses and relatively few Greek manuscripts in comparison to other NT works.12 Next, the texts of the collected witnesses were initially tested at 180 different variation units (paired down to 123 Teststellen) to determine Revelation’s internal textual affiliations and to see which text families might be discerned among material based on the numerous variants preserved.13 Although there is no clear majority text for Revelation, two traditions – the Andrew text related to Revelation’s most prevalent commentary tradition and the Koine group (a text associated with the Byzantine period) – dominate the extant attestation. As such, many late manuscripts that belong to these groups (especially the Koine text, which is more unified in its wording than the Andrew text) and which clearly have derivative texts have been set aside, leaving around 110 manuscripts for the next stage of the project.14

The task of phase two of the project (2014–17) is to transcribe selected manuscripts from the digitized photographs, noting numerous features including variant readings, line and column divisions, varieties of marginalia, punctuation, corrections, nomina sacra, the division of sense contours, capitals, colophons, rubrications and artwork.15 The transcriptions will be electronically published and collated with the data from patristic citations and the early versions (Latin, Sahidic, Syriac and Ethiopic) to create an initial apparatus.

In the third phase of the project (2017–20) the material will be submitted to analysis using the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM), a stemmatic method for evaluating and plotting the textual genetics of the tradition in an effort to create the oldest attainable text in each variation unit.16 This method creates text-flow diagrams that illustrate the reading of a given variation unit from which all others arose based on the omnibus of editorial decisions, creating an eclectic text supported by the philological skills of the editor. This process is followed in the next phase (2020–3) with the finalization of the main text and the organization of the apparatus. The edition will be published in both paper and electronic forms.

In sum, the ECM provides, on the one hand, a reliable, accurate and consistent critical edition for exegetes, historians, translators, students and theologians; on the other (and this is perhaps the key point), it implicitly describes of the book of Revelation as a fluid product of Christian tradition. In addition to emphasizing the variation of Revelation’s wording, the transcription of manuscripts provides fresh insight into the influence of textual presentation on the reading of particular manuscripts. Put simply, the ECM points out the fact that the distinction between Scripture and tradition is untenable – the shape of the text and its format is shaped by interpretative traditions embedded within the life of the Church and behaviours of production. The project’s consideration of the graphic medium upon which our scriptural texts are inscribed ...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Contents
• Contributors
• Editor’s Introduction
• Part 1. The Biblical Text
• 1. Text and Tradition: David Brown and New Testament Textual Criticism
• 2. From the Magi to Pilate’s Wife: David Brown, Tradition and the Reception of Matthew’s Text
• 3. Memory, Remembrance and Imagination in the Formation of Redemptive Tradition: Reflecting on the Gospel of John with David Brown*
• 4. Moving Texts and Mirror Neurons: David Brown and Eleonore Stump on Biblical Interpretation*
• Part 2. The Visual Imagination
• 5. Paradise Reclaimed: Kerry James Marshall and Chris Ofili in the Garden of Eden
• 6. Re-visions of Sacrifice: Abraham in Art and Interfaith Dialogue
• 7. ‘Surely the Lord is in this Place’: Jacob’s Ladder in Painting, Contemporary Sculpture and Installation Art
• 8. Understanding John’s Visions: Unlocking the Insights of Revelation’s Visual History
• 9. The Stained Glass Biblia Pauperum Windows of Steinfeld Abbey: Monastic Spirituality, Salvation History and the Theological Imagination
• Part 3. The Literary Imagination
• 10. David Brown and the Virgin Mary: A Literary Perspective
• 11. Intertextuality, Tradition and Finding Theology in Unexpected Places: Reading Frankenstein with the Help of David Brown
• 12. The Forms of Faith in Contemporary American Fiction
• The Moving Text – A Reply*
• Appendix. The Moving Text in the Life of the Church
• Introduction
• The Ladder between Heaven and Earth: John 1.43–51
• Rachel and Leah: Genesis 29.15–28
• Food Offered to Idols and Idolatry in Word and Image: Revelation 2.12–17
• Emotion and the Tears of Peter: Mark 8.31–38
• Bibliography