How We Got the New Testament (Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology)

Text, Transmission, Translation

Porter, Stanley E., Evans, Craig A., McDonald, Lee

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441242686
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

2013 Word Guild Award (Biblical Studies) A recognized expert in New Testament Greek offers a historical understanding of the writing, transmission, and translation of the New Testament and provides cutting-edge insights into how we got the New Testament in its ancient Greek and modern English forms. In part responding to those who question the New Testament's reliability, Stanley Porter rigorously defends the traditional goals of textual criticism: to establish the original text. He reveals fascinating details about the earliest New Testament manuscripts and shows that the textual evidence supports an early date for the New Testament's formation. He also explores the vital role translation plays in biblical understanding and evaluates various translation theories. The book offers a student-level summary of a vast amount of historical and textual information.

1
The Text of the New Testament

Introduction

A. T. Robertson, the great Greek grammarian as well as textual critic and general student of the New Testament,1 tells the following story about John Brown of Haddington, Scotland. Born in 1722, John Brown was the son of common and ordinary parents, although they had an interest in learning. His father, a weaver by winter and a salmon fisherman during the summer, taught himself to read so that he could read Christian books. In the area where John grew up, local schooling was not always available, so he accumulated only a few months of formal education. Nevertheless, these rare experiences excited his interest in learning, and he read whatever he could, even starting to learn Latin. Unfortunately, John’s father died when the boy was eleven, as did his mother not long after. The orphaned John, however, was soon adopted by a Christian family. A sickly child, he was converted to Christian faith when he was twelve years old, and he became a shepherd. His adoptive father could not read, so John spent many days reading to his new parent. John also borrowed Latin books and spent time improving his Latin, and during his two-hour lunch break he often visited his local minister, who gave him Latin exercises. John graduated to Greek next. Greek was not as well known as Latin, and so he tackled this language on his own. He borrowed a Greek New Testament and, using his Latin grammar book and a copy of the works of the Roman poet Ovid, figured out the Greek alphabet and its sounds. John then started to learn Greek vocabulary by comparing short words to those in his English Bible. He began learning Greek grammar by comparing the Greek endings with those in Latin.

One day, at the age of sixteen, John Brown heard that a bookstore in St. Andrews, Scotland, twenty-four miles away, had a copy of the Greek New Testament for sale. He very much wanted to have one of his own. He left his sheep with a friend and made the trek by foot to the city, walking throughout the entire night, so that he arrived the next morning in St. Andrews, where he found the bookstore of one Alexander McCulloch. He entered the shop, likely with some trepidation, and asked the no-doubt surprised shopkeeper for a Greek New Testament. Here was this slight, roughly clothed, barefoot young man asking for a Greek New Testament. “What would you do wi’ that book? You’ll no can read it,” the bookstore owner said. “I’ll try to read it,” John humbly replied. There happened to be some professors who had entered the shop, and they heard this short conversation. One of the professors, probably Francis Pringle, professor of Greek at the university, asked the bookstore owner to fetch the Greek New Testament. Tossing it on the counter, he said, “Boy, if you can read that book, you shall have it for nothing.”

No doubt there was a lightness in John Brown’s step as he walked all the way back from St. Andrews that day, new Greek New Testament tucked under his arm. He had eagerly taken up the book, read out a passage to the amazement of everyone there, including Pringle, and turned and walked out the door, his prize firmly in his grasp. By the afternoon of the same day, John was back tending his flock while reading from his Greek New Testament. However, the story does not end there.

Some other young men became jealous of this shepherd who was becoming an accomplished scholar. These young men were studying for the ministry in the area, and one of them accused John of having gotten his knowledge from the devil. John treated such accusations as a joke because, after all, he knew what hard work had gone into gaining such knowledge. Not only did he know Latin and Greek, but he also taught himself Hebrew. His increased knowledge led to increased suspicion, with even his own pastor agreeing that witchcraft explained John’s knowledge. After five years of such unfounded accusations, the elders of his church unanimously voted a certificate of full membership for John, although his pastor refused to sign it. John continued to learn while supporting himself as a peddler, soldier, schoolmaster, and then preacher and divinity student, and eventually as a pastor, professor of theology, and scholar. John Brown published in 1769 A Dictionary of the Holy Bible, only the second Bible dictionary ever published, and one that stayed in print until 1868. Brown’s The Self-Interpreting Bible, first published in 1778, was last published in 1919.2

As Robertson states in his mammoth grammar of the Greek New Testament,

There is nothing like the Greek New Testament to rejuvenate the world, which came out of the Dark Ages with the Greek Testament in its hand. Erasmus wrote in the Preface to his Greek Testament about his own thrill of delight: “These holy pages will summon up the living image of His mind. They will give you Christ Himself, talking, healing, dying, rising, the whole Christ in a word; they will give Him to you in an intimacy so close that He would be less visible to you if He stood before your eyes.” The Greek New Testament is the New Testament. All else is translation.3

Robertson eloquently expresses the centrality of the Greek New Testament for all New Testament study and appreciation. This centrality comprises the first consideration of this series of studies on the topic of how we got the Greek New Testament. In the course of these three chapters I will deal with three specific subtopics: the text, its transmission, and its translation. I begin with the text of the Greek New Testament. But which Greek New Testament is Robertson talking about? In the course of this chapter I will consider this question, along with tracing the history of the development of our modern text of the Greek New Testament. I will also examine in some detail one recent challenge to the integrity of our Greek New Testament and will, finally, make my own suggestion regarding which Greek New Testament we should consider using today.

Is There a Text of the Greek New Testament? Or, What Is the Goal of Textual Criticism?

There has been much recent discussion about the original text of the Greek New Testament. After a number of years in which textual studies have been relatively quiet, there is renewed interest in the text of the New Testament and whether we indeed can come close to identifying or reconstructing the original. As a result, some recent scholarship has attempted to question the traditional opinion regarding the original text and its recoverability. In this section I will examine the traditional opinion, scrutinize some recent counterproposals, and then offer some opinion on this recent debate.4

Traditional Opinion

The traditional opinion of the purpose of textual criticism of the Greek New Testament is, ideally, to find the original autograph that the author wrote. Failing that, the purpose is to work back through the manuscript evidence to arrive at the earliest form of the text and then, through principles of textual criticism, to posit or reconstruct what the original text must have been. This has been the motivating principle of textual criticism from earliest times to the present. In somewhat of a whirlwind tour through the work of textual critics of the last five hundred years, I will cite a number of significant voices on this topic because I will be returning to some of their work in subsequent discussion.5

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), the Renaissance humanist and the first to publish a Greek New Testament, appends at the end of his Greek New Testament the statement that it was “with regard to the Greek truth” (ad Graecam veritatem), believing, apparently, that he had published as close to the original Greek text as he could.6

The nineteenth century was an age of textual criticism, and the opinion of the major critics of the day is unanimous. Samuel Tregelles (1813–1875), a “common man” like John Brown, writing in 1844, defines textual criticism as the means “by which we know, on grounds of ascertained certainty, the actual words and sentences of that charter [the Bible] in the true statement of its privileges, and in the terms in which the Holy Ghost gave it.”7 J. Scott Porter (1801–1880 [no relation, so far as I know]), the then well-known biblical scholar, writing in 1848 in one of the first books on textual criticism, states that textual criticism is that area of learning that treats ancient writings, especially the Bible, “of the means which may be applied for ascertaining the true text.”8 Constantin Tischendorf (1815–1874), the man who discovered and published the now famous Codex Sinaiticus (01 ℵ [about which I will say more in what follows]) as well as numerous other manuscripts, and whose eighth edition of the Greek New Testament still constitutes one of the most important sources of text-critical information in its textual apparatus,9 says that he determined to devote himself “to the textual study of the New Testament, and attempted, by making use of all the acquisitions of the last three centuries, to reconstruct, if possible, the exact text, as it came from the pen of the sacred writers.”10 B. F. Westcott (1825–1901) and F. J. A. Hort (1828–1892), who published the most important hand edition of the Greek New Testament for the English-speaking world, write of their first Greek edition of 1881, “This edition is an attempt to present exactly the original words of the New Testament, so far as they can now be determined from surviving documents.”11 Frederick Scrivener (1813–1891), one of Westcott and Hort’s most intelligent critics and editor of the fifth-century Codex Bezae (05 D), says of textual criticism that “it aims at bringing back that text, so far as may be, to the condition in which it stood in the sacred autographs; at removing all spurious additions, if such be found in our present printed copies; at restoring whatsoever may have been lost or corrupted or accidentally changed in the lapse of eighteen hundred years.”12 The theologian Benjamin Warfield (1851–1921) says that textual criticism involves a process of examining documents “with a view to discovering from them whether and wherein it has become corrupted, and of proving them to preserve it or else restoring it from their corruptions to its originally intended form.”13 Finally, although others could be cited, Eberhard Nestle (1851–1913), a German scholar and developer of the Nestle Greek New Testament, which is still the basis of the standard critical edition (the so-called Nestle-Aland), writes, “The task [of textual criticism] is to exhibit what the original writer intended to communicate to his readers, and the method is simply that of tracing the history of the document in question back to its beginning, if, and in so far as, we have the means to do so at our command.”14

If the nineteenth century reflects a common critical opinion of the task of textual criticism, most of the twentieth century is not much different. Frederic Kenyon (1863–1952), editor of many papyri, including 𝔓45,15 and director and principal librarian of the British Museum and Library, writing in 1901, states, “The province of Textual Criticism is the ascertainment of the true form of a literary work, as originally composed and written down by its author.”16 Alexander Souter (1873–1949), editor of the Oxford Classical Texts Greek New Testament,17 writes, “Textual criticism seeks, by the exercise of knowledge and trained judgment, to restore the very words of some original document which has perished, and survives only in copies complete or incomplete, accurate or inaccurate, ancient or modern. If we possessed the twenty-seven documents now composing the New Testament exactly in the form in which they were dictated or written by their original authors, there would be no textual criticism of the New Testament.”18 Kirsopp Lake (1872–1946), textual critic and coeditor of the original photographs of Codex Sinaiticus (01 ℵ), writes, “The object of all textual criticism is to recover so far as possible the actual words written by the writer.”19 Leo Vaganay (1882–1969), one of the leading French textual critics, writes, “By textual criticism we mean every kind of scientific research in quest of the original, or at least, of the most nearly original text of some document.”20 J. Harold Greenlee (1918–), well-known Greek scholar and textual critic, writing in 1964, states, “Textual criticism is the study of copies of any written work of which the autograph (the original) is unknown, with the purpose of ascertaining the original text.”21 Bruce Metzger (1914–2007), one of the editors of the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament, also writing in 1964, notes, “The textual critic seeks to ascertain from the divergent c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Text of the New Testament
• 2. The Transmission of the New Testament
• 3. The Translation of the New Testament
• Conclusion
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Modern Authors
• Notes
• Back Cover