Rules of Textual Criticism as Adduced by Some Bib. Scholars

[Scribo]

I have not read these yet, no doubt I will dislike them when I do, but none the less I post this here for your perusal.

http://www.bible-researcher.com/rules.html

Abstract:
When the manuscripts differ, how do scholars decide which words are the original ones? There is more to it than simply choosing the readings of the oldest available manuscripts. Here are three historically important sets of rules published by some influential scholars of textual criticism: Bengel, Griesbach, and Hort.

[jeidsath]

It seems like a decent historical overview. I was disappointed though that they didn't reproduce the only all caps section from W&H's discussion of their methods:



And here is Bengel from your link:

6. No conjecture is ever on any consideration to be listened to. It is safer to bracket any portion of the text, which may haply to appear to labour under inextricable difficulties.

!!

[mwh]

All three were New Testament text-critics. That limits the validity of their prescriptive dicta, which in any case rest on dodgy theories of NT manuscript relations. Far better to read a good book on textual criticism such as Martin West's.

That all-caps quote from Hort seems too obvious to be worth saying. But apparently it’s still not obvious to all NT critics; second-hand dogma is easier. Of course “knowledge of documents” is a very vague term. And it could be argued that since knowledge of documents is necessarily defective and always will be, final judgment should always be withheld.

[Barry Hofstetter]

All three were New Testament text-critics. That limits the validity of their prescriptive dicta, which in any case rest on dodgy theories of NT manuscript relations. Far better to read a good book on textual criticism such as Martin West's.

That all-caps quote from Hort seems too obvious to be worth saying. But apparently it’s still not obvious to all NT critics; second-hand dogma is easier. Of course “knowledge of documents” is a very vague term. And it could be argued that since knowledge of documents is necessarily defective and always will be, final judgment should always be withheld.

Lovely ad hominem, Michael. Here are biographies for these gentlemen, in case anyone is interested in the background which they brought to their NT work:

http://www.westcotthort.com/biographies.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Albrecht_Bengel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Jakob_Griesbach

Personally, I tend to sympathize with Emmanuel Tov's approach to TC, which places more emphasis on internal criteria.

[jeidsath]

Shouldn't a decent set of rules be more content-neutral? Why would there be special rules for NT criticism that wouldn't apply to the Shepard of Hermas? Or Demosthenes?

[Barry Hofstetter]

Shouldn't a decent set of rules be more content-neutral? Why would there be special rules for NT criticism that wouldn't apply to the Shepard of Hermas? Or Demosthenes?

I think if you look at more recent work by Metzger or Aland you'll see an attempt at a more systematic text oriented approach. Of course, one difference is the absolute number of manuscripts available for NT TC. If you have one manuscript or a small number available for medieval times, it calls for a different methodology than if you have literally thousands of manuscripts, the earliest of which date from antiquity.

[mwh]

Thanks for providing the mini-bios Barry, though I honestly don't know what you mean by your snarky “lovely ad hominem, Michael.” Anyway, here's what I see as the take-away:
— Bengel, 18th cent.: I had not known that “in constituting the text, he imposed upon himself the singular restriction of not inserting any variant reading which had not already been printed in some preceding edition of the Greek text.” Singular indeed, and absurd. But his main achievement in textual criticism, a very real one, was recognizing the principle of lectio difficilior potior (though he formulated it differently).
— Griesbach, late 18th - early 19th: his textual criticism was still rather primitive. He refined Bengel’s grouping of the NT manuscripts into “Alexandrian,” “Western,” and “Byzantine.” This classification system still holds sway today, despite the more recent appearance of older manuscripts on papyrus that substantially undermine it. The scheme needs radical revision.
— Hort, late 19th, refined further, but shocked some contemporaries. I have nothing much against him, still less against Westcott, except that the belief in divine revelation vitiated his textual criticism.

As to your latest, the basic principles are the same whether you have few manuscripts or many. Homer too has thousands.

[Barry Hofstetter]

Mainly, Michael, with regard to this statement:

All three were New Testament text-critics. That limits the validity of their prescriptive dicta...

I have noticed ever since I joined textkit that you rarely pass up an opportunity to say something negative about the NT or NT scholarship. This tells us about your bias, but otherwise provides very little that is helpful.

Yes, Griesbach and Bengal were early in the process, and much of their work has been superseded. Current NT TC scholarship is well aware of more recent discoveries and their implications, and I know of no one professionally active in the field who currently subscribes to W&H's genealogical approach.

As to the "embarrassment of riches" with regard to NT manuscripts, of course the general principles are the same. Nevertheless, the application of those principles to one manuscript or a tiny surviving group of manuscripts is quite different. If nothing else, internal criteria are far more important to the latter, since there is no comprehensive data set from which to work and draw comparisons.

[mwh]

There’s nothing ad hominem in what you quote (unlike in what you write). The point is that to formulate “rules” of textual criticism on the basis of such a small corpus as the NT, regardless of the number of witnesses, is temerarious at best. It’s the insularity I deplore.
But I mean no disrespect to those scholars, each of whom significantly advanced the field. And none of them, for all their belief in the holiness of scripture, would have had any truck with this new thing oxymoronically called “evangelical textual criticism,” the ultimate in bias.

You’re right that current NT scholarship has begun to try to come to terms with the evidence and implications of recently published papyrus fragments. So it’s not all bad.

As to helpfulness, I always mean my posts to be helpful, and I’m sorry you tend not to find them so. You are not my target audience.

[RandyGibbons]

Joel asked:
Shouldn't a decent set of rules be more content-neutral? Why would there be special rules for NT criticism that wouldn't apply to the Shepard of Hermas? Or Demosthenes?

mwh wrote:
the basic principles are the same whether you have few manuscripts or many

I know the subject of the article Scribo linked us to is "rules", but I prefer mwh's less rigid "principles" (A.E. Houseman's 1922 talk The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism comes to mind, and his caustic criticism of the mindlessly rigid application of the genealogical approach: "If a dog hunted for fleas on mathematical principles, basing his researches on statistics of area and population, he would never catch a flea except by accident.") If the goals are the same - in the case of NT textual critics, to establish the original text, as best as possible, of the earliest biblical manuscripts, completely setting aside notions of divine authorship and church authority - then I don't see why the principles wouldn't be the same. And based on the little I know, I agree with mwh that basic cross-language, cross-era, cross-genre principles apply regardless of the number of relevant manuscripts (relevant for purposes of establishing the original text; see the principle eliminatio codicum descriptorum). Karl Lachmann's groundbreaking recension of Lucretius was based on three manuscripts, but previously he published a critical study of the Homeric texts and a critical edition of the New Testament (and studies of medieval German poetry). Beyond some fundamental principles, of course "knowledge of documents" goes, as mwh says, without saying, and each work and author(s) present their own problem sets.

------

For a school paper I wrote a few years ago (on the potential application of cladistics - phylogenetic systematics - to the establishment of manuscript relationships), I dipped into the history of textual criticism. For those reading this thread who may be nurturing a similar interest, here are some notes from the bibliography I assembled for that paper.

The four works I found essential for understanding the history of "scientific" textual criticism (largely that means the genealogical approach) were (1) Lachmann's commentary to his 1850 edition of Lucretius; (2) Paul Maas's Textkritik, which boiled down "Lachmann's Method", in Maas's original 1927 edition, into eleven pages; (3) Giorgio Pasquali's Storia della tradizione e critica del testo. This was a book published in 1934 that had started as a review of Maas; a second, expanded edition was published in 1952. The title reflects an important distinction between textual history and textual reconstruction, the former (which Mr. Houseman called "fudge", but I don't agree) being a prerequisite to the latter; (4) Sebastiano Timpanaro's La genesi del metodo del Lachmann, published as a book in 1963, qualifies Lachmann's status as an innovator by tracing the roots of modern textual criticism back to the Humanists. Glenn Most published an excellent, value-added English translation in 2005. The same Glenn Most, along with Anthony Grafton and J.E.G. Zetzel, published an equally excellent and value-added translation of Augustus Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum, another essential work in the history of textual criticism.

The Teubner publishers commissioned M.L. West to to replace Maas as their entry in this field (largely because Maas had ignored the problem of "horizontal transmission" of errors), and that is the Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique (1973) mwh refers to.

Some other works I found quite helpful and interesting: In Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research (1995), edited by D.C. Greetham, R.J. Tarrant has an excellent essay (Classical Latin Literature) on the history and technical issues of textual criticism, with some interesting contemporary social commentary. Deep and very well written: the twenty of his articles collected by Michael D. Reeve (a defender of the stemmatic method) in Manuscripts and Methods: Essays on Editing and Transmission (2011). Chapter 6 in the fourth edition (2013) of L.D. Reynolds & N.G. Wilson's Scribes & Scholars is a decent overview of textual criticism, and if you happen to just be learning Greek and/or Latin and starting to warm up to the issue of textual variants and reconstruction, read Scribes & Scholars in its entirety.

I would be very interested in a well-written book (beyond the abundance of material I could find on the internet) from a non-theological source on the history of biblical textual criticism, if anyone has one to recommend.

[jeidsath]

As someone who has spent some time working in the genetics industry, where transmission of error along descent pathways is the name of the game, I'm a little frustrated at how non-mathematical textual criticism is, NT or otherwise.

It wouldn't take much to start talking about the P(error in copying event | for a given type of error | for a given manuscript) and P(correction in collation event | etc.) and P(error in collation event | etc.). You could make a probability distribution for a given manuscript based on its errors which would tell you something about the type of copying/collation history it had, as well as tell you how likely any given error/correction is compared to known errors. This sort of approach could give lot of scope for empiricism and genius, would mesh well with discussions about genetic history of texts and collation events, and would really let people approach textual emendation more scientifically.

CBGM on the other hand, which seems to be the big new thing in NT criticism, is a "just let the computers do it" approach that I'm not at all impressed by. It doesn't seem to extend very well to smaller document trees and is fairly content-neutral, both of which tell me off the bat that it's much more likely to be looking at noise than signal.

[Barry Hofstetter]

As to helpfulness, I always mean my posts to be helpful, and I’m sorry you tend not to find them so. You are not my target audience.

For the record, I normally find your posts very helpful. Every once in a while (and very rarely) not so much.

[RandyGibbons]

Joel, for informed, skeptical, but not dismissive discussions, you might want to check out these two articles, if you can find them:

• Michael Reeve's article Editing classical texts with a computer: Hyginus's Astronomica, in the collection I mentioned above

• Paolo Trovato's 2014 essay (I was able to find a Kindle edition of it): Everything you Always Wanted to Know about Lachman's Method: A Non-Standard Handbook of Genealogical Textual Criticism in the Age of Post-Structuralism. Especially section 4, Highs and lows of computer-generated stemmatics.

Search on 'P. Robinson Textual Criticism Challenge Old Norse' for some articles on early attempts. For a biologically precise explanation of the parallel, see Christopher Howe et al., Parallels Between Stemmatology and Phylogenetics, in Studies in Stemmatology II (Philadelphia, 2004).

[mwh]

Thanks, Randy, for rescuing us from the stultification that was threatening to overtake this thread. This is probably not the best board to discuss textual criticism, but I’d add to your well-chosen “essential” list E.J. Kenney’s The Classical Text. (And perhaps as an optional extra Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love.)

Beyond that I’ll say only that more than twenty years ago now I decided (and said in print) that cladistics would be useless in dealing with traditions such as Homer’s, not only because of the practical difficulty of distinguishing shared derived characteristics from shared primitive ones (i.e. identifying "error," in our terms, and apparently Joel's), but more fundamentally because it’s monophyletic. I haven’t revisited the matter (I’m sure advances have been made in the interim—my original source for cladistics was a 1991 piece by Maynard Smith in the New York Review of Books entitled “Dinosaur Dilemmas”!), but I take this opportunity of asking you if you agree. — And Joel too, whose mathematical approach I look forward to seeing tested on open traditions. I trust it’s more than stemmatics or cladistics under another name.

[Hylander]

In addition to the essay cited by Randy, Richard Tarrant has a full book-length discussion of Latin textual criticism that is well worth reading, Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism (Cambridge 2016). Although focused primarily on Latin, Tarrant's book is nearly as relevant to Greek textual criticism as well. Tarrant is the editor of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the OCT series.

I deleted my previous post because it didn't add anything to the discussion.

[RandyGibbons]

Hylander - Your sketch of the situation is as I understand it and as usual, superbly articulated! [EDIT: I'm sorry you deleted it!] Let's distinguish two questions, viz., the validity of the stemmatic method itself, and the validity of the application of cladistics to the establishment of a stemma. On the former, I don't know if I can say, with you, that stemmatics "really doesn't play a significant role in textual criticism today" or that surviving manuscripts are "in most cases" the product of a contaminated tradition (defined as being infected with horizontal transmission of errors). The situation is, as you say, eclectic. A recent example I intend to study but haven't yet is Cynthia Damon's 2015 OCT edition of Caesar's Bellum Civile. Besides her preface in that edition (in English), she wrote an entire separate book (Studies on the Text of Caesar’s Bellum Civile) on how she went about establishing the text. Using the collations of the late Virginia Brown, Damon went to great lengths to establish a stemma leading back to a reconstructed archetype ω, but she also concluded that the tradition was infected with some horizontal transmission. Her conclusion (Preface, xxii): “[The presence of some degree of horizontal transmission] makes the reconstruction of the archetype less mechanical and more a matter of editorial judgement … .”

mwh - If you're asking me if I agree that cladistics would be of no help in dealing with the Homeric tradition, my simple and honest answer would be, I have no idea! My instinct is to agree, because of the nature of the Homeric Problem - specifically, I don't know what "archetype" even means in the Homeric tradition. (It may be that, just as God dictated the bible, the Muse dictated the Homeric poems .) But you'll have to tell me what you mean by that tradition being monophyletic and whether that is a good thing or a bad thing vis-a-vis cladistic analysis. (Thanks for the references to Kenney and Stoppard; I look forward to reading both.)

The question I was interested in in my paper was this (having done some reading on cladistics and then having heard somewhere about interest in applying it to textual reconstruction): I assumed there would be a gut reaction against the proposition on the part of some classicists. In reaction to the evolution of science in the last few centuries, I distinguish in my mind two types of philologists, which in my idiosyncratic mental world I label the Bennett type and the Houseman type. The Bennett type is gung ho for "scientific" or "mathematical" (and today, computerized) methods and techniques and perceived rigor. (In my first year of graduate study, I was privileged to be in a seminar with Emmett Bennett studying the decipherment of Linear B. I had no idea at the time what a computer even was, but Bennett once mentioned an enthusiastic interest he had in the potential use of computers for cryptography and for decipherment, and that intrigued and always stuck with me. Hence the Bennett type. However, I am thinking of renaming this the Eidsath type.) The Houseman type recoils. (Peter Robinson was pivotal in promoting research in this field with his "The Textual Criticism Challenge 1991" posted on an electronic bulletin board. He summarized the challenge as "Prove Houseman Wrong".) Think STEM vs. Liberal Arts.

So I thought, let's set aside inevitable gut reaction and, in an era where computers have defeated the world champions of chess, Jeopardy, and Go, let's find out objectively how far this notion of cladistics has been and can be taken. For what they are worth, here are the main and strictly amateur conclusions I came to.

• If 100 years of stemmatic methodology (Lachmann's 1850 Lucretius to the third edition of Maas, 1957), is flat out wrong and needs to be entirely jettisoned (like 19th century metrical analysis), then cladistics is a moot point. But as I suggested above, I don't think that is the case.

• Cladistics is not a substitute for the hard work of collating the manuscripts (or knowing enough to judge and trust someone else's collation), learning the script, acquiring the highest level of expertise in the language, etc. If the would-be editor hasn't spent years ten or more years (I'll arbitrarily say) doing those things, she is no position to judge the output of a cladistics program. Reeve's article on Ghislaine Viré’s 1992 Teubner edition of Hygini de Astronomia is a sobering case study. Trovato's analysis of Peter Robinson's digital Wife of Bath's Prologue comes to a similar conclusion.

• Philologists' interest in cladistics seems to have peeked in the 1990s and perhaps petered out since. (Michael, the date of your publication (1991) is interesting!) Like all other professions, philologists were busy in the 90s exploring the professional use of personal computers, and my impression is that a lot of that energy has and is being channeled into the field of digital critical editions. Cynthia Damon (who was kind enough to give me some pointers in my research) pointed me to Digital Critical Editions (2014), and in particular to an article The Digital Turn in Textual Scholarship: Historical and Typological Perspectives. That article discusses the genealogical method and mathematical analysis and arrives at this bloodless conclusion: “Rather than dethroning the editor, early computer-assisted textual criticism has confirmed his or her central position, adding tools and enlarging his or her decision space. Given the wide array of document-encoding tools and standards available nowadays, as described elsewhere in this book, and the general availability of presentational tools and easy access to online publication, the digital text scholar may choose to offer all elements of ..." blah blah blah. Cladistics seems relegated here to being an optional tool in the digital toolbox. If that's true, get ready for amateur hour and the digital equivalent of the vulgate text.

• If the results so far are not too impressive and if interest itself has waned, are there any positive prospects? Can computerized cladistic analysis save an editor time, suggest undetected possibilities, forestall pitfalls? I wouldn't rule it out. But there would be a host of technological and cultural prerequisites that I'm too tired right now to get into (and indeed that would probably merit a separate thread).

[mwh]

Thanks Randy. I can’t address this properly right now, but will simply say that you have gotten Housman badly wrong. (As did Peter Robinson with his ridiculous “challenge.”) Housman was rigorously scientific in his approach to manuscripts, as you’ll see if you read his editions or his reviews; but he recognized the primacy of judgment, iudicium, in textual criticism as such.

I’ll just add that in many cases stemmatics is invaluable; also that what used to be called contamination, while wreaking havoc on the tidy construction of stemmas, is to be welcomed as potentially providing a wider range of access to inherited readings.

But this is no place to discuss all this..

[RandyGibbons]

No disagreement about Houseman's rigor as a philologist. Undoubtedly unfairly, he just somehow became the eponym in my (and evidently in others') mental categories for the type in question. Thanks again for the references, I'm especially looking forward to the Stoppard.