One of the things I have frequently noted in discussing text
criticism is the fact that the general academic understanding of the goal of text
criticism has significantly shifted and changed over the last few decades. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
the goal was the recovery of the original autograph. In contemporary text criticism this goal is
seen as both impossible (since the closest one can do, according to modern text
scholars, is approximate the text as it stood c. AD 200-300) and inappropriate (since the text of the Bible
is not set in a rigid form but is a “living” text).
This shift in emphasis can especially be seen in the work of
D. C. Parker (see The Living Text of the
Bible [Cambridge, 1997], Textual
Scholarship and the Making of the New Testament [Oxford, 2014]).
Recently, I have run across several folk who have noted that
this shift in definition of the goal of text criticism was already being anticipated
and articulated in the mid-twentieth century.
One frequently cited comment is that of Robert M. Grant of the University
of Chicago in his Historical Introduction
to the New Testament (Harper & Row, 1963):
The primary goal of New Testament
textual study remains the recovery of what the New Testament writers wrote. We
have already suggested that to achieve this goal is wellnigh impossible. Therefore we must be content with what Reinhold
Niebuhr and others have called an ‘impossible possibility.’ Only a goal of this kind can justify the
labours of textual critics and give credit to their achievements and to the distance
between what they have achieved and what they have hoped to achieve (p. 51).
Indeed, Grant and others were already anticipating the “restorationist”
goal of text criticism as an “impossible possibility.” Perhaps if traditional Christians would come
to understand this shift they would also realize the risks inherent in giving
stewardship of their Bibles over to modern academic text criticism. Then, they might also see the winsome stability of the Confessional Text.
JTR
