Thursday, March 17, 2022

WM 230: PROBLEMS with modern text advocacy: Are Gurry and Hixson reconstructing the autograph?

 




A few quotes:

D. C. Parker: "We can use philology to reconstruct an Initial Text. But we need not then believe that the Initial Text is an authorial text, or a definitive text, or the only form in which the works once circulated" Textual Scholarship and the Making of the New Testament, 29).

Tommy Wasserman and Peter J. Gurry: "Textual criticism is a discipline that tries to restore texts.... Where that is not possible, it aims to reach back as closely to the initial text as it can" (A New Approach to Textual Criticism: An Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, 1-2).

Daniel B. Wallace: "We do not have now--in our critical Greek texts or any translations--exactly what the authors of the New Testament wrote. Even if we did, we would not know it" (Foreword, Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism, xii).

Elijah Hixson and Peter J. Gurry: "Simply put, we believe the textual evidence we have is sufficient to reconstruct, in most cases, what the authors of the New Testament wrote. We cannot do this with equal certainty in every case...." (Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism, 20).

JTR

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