Featured Does the Greek Text Matter?

The Wiki wording is that of Treu's.

No, you are jumping to conclusions, just like the clumsy paratrooper who forgot to pull the ripcord. I have a friend who reads German and has the book in German by Treu.

 

It's really not a material issue in Byzantine-priority. It doesn't prove or disprove either the eclectic method or the Byz.-pri. method. Alexandrian mss will be Alexandrian, there is no doubt about that.

 

If I may, I'll teach you a little about Googling. When you do a search without the quotation marks that I used, you do get your figures--but the list will include a huge number of hits unconnected to the issue, such as this one: http://historum.com/ancient-history/47787-alphabet.html. So your search was inaccurate.

 

Well, of course they don't have the PA. I never said they did. It just doesn't affect my view of textual criticism one way or the other. Plus this is VBS week at our church and I'm short on time. Since you are so adamant, though, I'll try to comment more on this in the afternoon today.

 

Yes, it is about the Alexandrian. The section of the ms the PA would have been in (John 5:12 on) is Alexandrian (Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, 4th ed., by Frederic Kenyon, p. 151). If you had checked your favorite source, the ever unreliable Wikipedia, you may have found this out.

 

The apparatus of my handy UBS3 Greek NT (can't afford UBS4 yet) assures me that that the Diatessaron does not have the PA. Strangely, W (032) is not mentioned in the apparatus there in UBS3, but then they listed the minuscules "only when they are of special significance for certain variants" (p. xx).

Regardless, I accept that W does not have the PA. But my reply is (again), so what? That part of the manuscript is Alexandrian.

Here's something interesting, though. A scholar friend has informed me that the Gospel of John in W ends with a complete blank page at the ending of John and the beginning of Luke (the Western order of the Gospels). Also, John ends with a subscription KATA IWANNHN ("according to John"), but the Gospels usually have EUAGGELION ("the Gospel of") before KATA. This is evidence that the scribe knew of the existence of more to John than his ms had--no doubt the PA.

 

I finally looked closer and found it in the UBS3 apparatus. As my weak excuse, I was looking for it as 032 but it was there as W.

As you probably know, evidence in textual criticism is divided into external and internal. What the manuscript is like is part of external evidence, which figures more in Byz.-pri. than internal evidence.

Paper was precious, so it was not an accident in this case that an extra page was included. The Greek subscript without "The Gospel" shows that the scribe had further information that he believed was from John, but had not been included in his exemplar, the ms he was copying from. The only possible passage in John that might have been left out that would have fit a whole page is the PA.

Dr. Robinson once did a paper at an ETS meeting on this very point. Hopefully I can get it from him sometime and inform myself more. :type:

 

There is no historical evidence of "the oral traditions of the PA," therefore the subject is not germane to textual criticism.

Not sure what you mean by "J." I can't find it in any of my books.

It's actually only 12 verses earlier in 225.

You must mean 1528 and Family 1, and there are many other mss that do so. That doesn't affect my view.

Chris Keith has an article in Novum Testamentum that refutes this completely. No ms before the 10th century which has the PA has it in any other location than the traditional one, and the ones with a different location have it there fore lectionary purposes. You may download a PDF of the article here: file:///C:/Users/John/Downloads/Reading_article_3.pdf

That is exactly the point I was making.

Again, I have no problem with brackets in the Greek NT, though since I use the Byzantine textform NT mine doesn't have that. As for having it in an English translation, my point is, why expose the problems of textual criticism to the average man in the pew? The subject is very technical, and is hard enough for the average Greek teacher to get his head around, much less the average believer (or Internet denizen).

What has been produced by the brackets in Eng. Bibles is a host of people on the Internet who have "a little knowledge," often from Wikipedia, and that's "a dangerous thing." :smilewinkgrin:

 

Oh, the information is out there for anyone who wants to put the work in to actually learn it, rather than have it spoon fed. In order to truly learn textual criticism, knowing Greek is essential. Once a believer, even a layman, knows Greek then he can learn about textual criticism. The believer who doesn't know Greek but strives to learn textual criticism becomes like the person who goes on the Internet to self-diagnose his illness. I read recently that self-diagnosis fails 80% of the time, and that describes textual criticism without a knowledge of Greek.

One layman who succeeded admirably at learning Greek and then learning textual criticism was William Pierpont, the co-editor of the Byzantine textform Greek NT. I have to respect the tremendous effort and 1000s of hours it took him to do so, much as I respect his co-editor Dr. Maurice Robinson, who went through the many years and dollars and 1000s of hours needed to get a PhD in textual criticism.

For the man in the pew to read a book or two, then go to Wikipedia and think he knows textual criticism, to me is disrespectful to such men who put the work in. For that matter, I myself have spent 1000's of hours learning Greek, teaching it and translating it, but know that I have much to learn still.

 

You know, BB rules require that one cites a source if he is going to cut and paste. Just sayin'. :smilewinkgrin:

 

Okay, I understand.