Introduction, by Westcott and Hort

[John Reece]

This is a non-debate research thread, the purpose of which is to present, in serial posts, excerpts from Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek by B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort (Harper and Brothers, 1882).

Please do not post any comments in this thread; the amount of material to be presented is so voluminous (425 paragraphs), and the logical progression from paragraph to paragraph so interrelated, that it will be for the best if the successive posts remain uninterrupted throughout the thread.

If anyone wishes to discuss the subject of this thread, or to debate it, please start a discussion and/or debate thread for that purpose.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

1.....This edition [i.e., the then (1882) new W&H edition of the Greek NT -JR] is an attempt to present exactly the words of the New Testament, so far as they can now be determined by surviving documents. Since the testimony delivered by the several documents or witnesses is full of complex variation, the original text cannot be elicited from it without the use of criticism, that is, of a process of distinguishing and setting aside those readings which have originated at some link in the chain of transmission. This Introduction is intended to be a succinct account (I) of the reasons why criticism is still necessary for the text of the New Testament; (II) of what we hold to be the true grounds and methods of criticism generally; (III) of the leading facts in the documentary history of the New Testament which appear to us to supply the textual critic with secure guidance; and (IV) of the manner in which we have ourselves endeavoured to embody the results of criticism in the present text.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

2.....The office of textual criticism, it cannot be too clearly understood at the outset, is always secondary and always negative. It is always secondary, since it comes into play only where the text transmitted by the existing documents appears to be in error, either because they differ from each other in what they read, or for some other sufficient reason. With regard to the great bulk of the words of the New Testament, as of most other ancient writings, there is no variation or other ground of doubt, and therefore no room for textual criticism; and here therefore an editor is merely a transcriber. The same may be said with substantial truth respecting those various readings which have never been received, and in all probability never will be received, into any printed text. The proportion of words virtually accepted on all hands as raised above doubt is very great, not less, on a rough computation, than seven eighths of the whole. The remaining eighth therefore, formed in great part by changes in order and other comparative trivialities, constitutes the whole area of criticism. If the principles followed in the present edition [i.e., W&H's 1882 edition of the GNT -Jr] are sound, this area may be very greatly reduced. Recognizing to the full the duty of abstinence from peremptory decision in cases where the evidence leaves the judgement in suspense between two or more readings, we find that setting aside differences of orthography, the words in our opinion still subject to doubt only make up about one sixtieth of the whole New Testament. In this second estimate the proportion of comparatively trivial variations is beyond measure larger than the former; so that the amount of what can in any sense be called substantial variation is but a small fraction of the whole residuary variation, and can hardly form more that a thousandth part of the entire text. Since there is reason to suspect that an exaggerated impression prevails as to possible textual corruption in the New Testament, which might be confirmed by language used here and there in the following pages, we desire to make it clearly understood beforehand how much of the New Testament stands in no need of a textual critic's labours.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

3.....Again, textual criticism is always negative, because its final aim is virtually nothing more than the detection and rejection of error. Its progress consists not in the growing perfection of an ideal in the future, but in approximation towards complete ascertainment of definite facts of the past, that is, towards recovering an exact copy of what was actually written on parchment or papyrus by the author of the book or his amanuensis. Had all intervening transcriptions been perfectly accurate, there could be no error and no variation in existing documents. Where there is variation, there must be error in at least all variants but one ; and the primary work of textual criticism is merely to discriminate the erroneous variants from the true.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

4.... In the case of ill-preserved ancient writings textual criticism has a further and a much more difficult task, that of detecting and removing corruptions affecting the whole of the existing documentary evidence. But in the New Testament the abundance, variety, and comparative excellence of the documents confines this task of pure ‘emendation’ within so narrow limits that we may leave it out of sight for the present, and confine our attention to that principle operation of textual criticism which is required whenever we have to decide between the conflicting evidence of various documents.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

PART 1

The Need of Criticism for the Text of the New Testament

5.....The answer to the question why criticism is still necessary for the text of the New Testament is contained in the history of transmission, first by writing and then by printing, to the present time. For our purpose it will be enough to recapitulate first in general terms the elementary phenomena of transmission by writing generally, with some of the special conditions affecting the New Testament, and then the chief incidents in the history of the New Testament as a printed book which have determined the form in which it appears in existing editions. For fuller particulars, on this and other subjects not needing to be treated in any length here, we must refer the reader once for all to books that are professedly storehouses of knowledge.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

A. 6-14... Transmission by writing

6....No autograph of any book of the New Testament is known or believed to be still in existence. The originals must have been early lost, for they are mentioned by no ecclesiastical writer, although there were many motives for appealing to them, had they been forthcoming, in the second and third centuries : one or two passages have sometimes been supposed to refer to them, but certainly by a misinterpretation. The books of the New Testament have had to share the fate of other ancient writings in being copied again and again during more than fourteen centuries down to the invention of printing and its application to Greek literature.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

A. 6-14... Transmission by writing

7....Every transcription of any kind of writing involves the chance of the introduction of some errors : and even if the transcript is revised by comparison with its exemplar or immediate original, there is no absolute security that all the errors will be corrected. When the transcript becomes itself the parent of other copies, one or more, its errors are for the most part reproduced. Those only are likely to be removed which at once strike the eye of a transcriber as mere blunders destructive of sense, and even in these cases he will often go astray in making what seems to him the obvious correction. In addition to inherited deviations from the original, each fresh transcript is liable to contain fresh errors, to be transmitted in like manner to its own descendants.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

A. 6-14... Transmission by writing

8....The nature and amount of the corruption of text thus generated and propagated depends to a great extent on the peculiarities of the book itself, the estimation in which it is held, and the uses to which it is applied. The rate cannot always be uniform ; the professional training of scribes can rarely obliterate individual differences of accuracy and conscientiousness, and moreover the current standard of exactness will vary at different times and places and in different grades of cultivation. The number of transcriptions, and consequent opportunities of corruption, cannot be accurately measured by difference of date, for at any date a transcript might be made either from a contemporary manuscript or from one written any number of centuries before. But these inequalities do not render it less true that repeated transcription involves multiplication of error ; and the consequent presumption that a relatively late text is likely to be a relatively corrupt text is found true on the application of all available tests in an overwhelming proportion of the extant manuscripts in which ancient literature has been preserved.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

A. 6-14... Transmission by writing

9....This general proposition respecting the average results of transcription requires to be at once qualified and extended by the statement of certain more limited conditions of transmission with which the New Testament is specially though by no means exclusively concerned. Their full bearing will not be apparent till they have been explained in some further detail further on, but for the sake of clearness they must be mentioned here.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

A. 6-14... Transmission by writing

10....The act of transcription may under different circumstances involve different processes. In strictness it is the exact reproduction of a given series of words in a given order. Where this purpose is distinctly recognized or assumed, there can be no errors but those of workmanship, 'clerical errors', as they are called ; and by sedulous cultivation, under the pressure of religious, literary, or professional motives, a high standard of immunity from clerical errors has at times been attained. On the other hand, pure clerical errors, that is, mechanical confusions of ear or eye alone, pass imperceptibly into errors due to unconscious mental action, as any one may ascertain by registering and analyzing his own mistakes in transcription ; so that it is quite possible to intend nothing but faithful transcription, and yet to introduce changes due to interpretation of sense. Now, as these hidden intrusions of mental action are specially capable of being restrained by conscious vigilance, so on the other hand they are liable to multiply spontaneously where there is no distinct perception that a transcriber's duty is to transcribe and nothing more; and this perception is rarer and more dependent on training than might be supposed. In its absence unconscious passes further into conscious mental action; and thus transcription may come to include tolerably free modification of language and even rearrangement of material. Transcription of this kind need involve no deliberate preference of sense to language ; the intention is still to transcribe language : but, as there is no special concentration of regard upon the language as having an intrinsic sacredness of whatever kind, the instinctive feeling for sense cooperates largely in the result.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

A. 6-14... Transmission by writing

11....It was predominantly though not exclusively under such conditions as these last that the transcription of the New Testament was carried on during the earliest centuries, as a comparison of the texts of that period proves beyond doubt. The conception of new Scriptures standing on the same footing as the Scriptures of the Old Testament was slow and unequal in its growth, more especially while the traditions of the apostolic and immediately succeeding generations still lived ; and the reverence paid to the apostolic writings, even to the most highly and most widely venerated among them, was not of a kind that exacted a scrupulous jealousy as to their text as distinguished from their substance. As was to be expected, the language of the historical books was treated with more freedom than the rest: but even the Epistles, and still more the Apocalypse, bear abundant traces of a similar type of transcription. After a while changed feelings and changed circumstances put an end to the early textual laxity, and thenceforward its occurrence is altogether exceptional; so that the later corruptions are almost wholly those incident to transcription in the proper sense, errors arising from careless performance of a scribe's work, not from an imperfect conception of it. While therefore the greater literalness of later transcription arrested for the most part the progress of the bolder forms of alteration, on the other hand it could perpetuate only what it received. As witnesses to the apostolic text the later texts can be valuable or otherwise only according as their parent texts had or had not passed comparatively unscathed through the earlier times.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

A. 6-14... Transmission by writing

12....Again, in books widely read transmission ceases after a while to retain exclusively the form of diverging ramification. Manuscripts are written in which there is an eclectic fusion of the texts of different exemplars, either by the simultaneous use of more than one at the time of transcription, or by the incorporation of various readings noted in the margin of a single exemplar from other copies, or by a scribe's conscious or unconscious recollection of a text differing from that which lies before him. The mixture, as it may be conveniently called, of texts previously independent has taken place on a large scale in the New Testament. Within narrow geographical areas it was doubtless at work from a very early time, and it would naturally extend itself with the increase of communication between distant churches. There is reason to suspect that its greatest activity on a large scale began in the second half of the third century, the interval of peace between Gallienus's edict of toleration and the outbreak of the persecution. At all events it was in full operation in the fourth century, the time which from various causes exercised the chief influence over the many centuries of comparatively simple transmission that followed.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

A. 6-14... Transmission by writing

13....The gain or loss to the intrinsic purity of texts from mixture with other texts is from the nature of the case indeterminable. In most instances there would be both gain and loss ; but both would be fortuitous, and they might bear to each other every conceivable proportion. Textual purity, as far as can be judged from the extant literature, attracted hardly any interest. There is no evidence to show that care was generally taken to choose out for transcription the exemplars having the highest claims to be regarded as authentic, if indeed the requisite knowledge and skill were forthcoming. Humanly speaking, the only influence which can have interfered to an appreciable extent with mere chance and convenience in the selection between existing readings, or the combination of them, was supplied by the preferences of untrained popular taste, always an unsafe guide in the discrimination of relative originality of text. The complexity introduced into the transmission of ancient texts by mixture needs no comment. Where the mixture has been accompanied or preceded by such license in transcription as we find in the New Testament, the complexity can evidently only increase the precariousness of printed texts formed without taking account of the variations of text which preceded mixture.

[John Reece]

Please read and heed the the OP.

A. 6-14... Transmission by writing

14....Various causes have interfered both with the preservation of ancient manuscripts and with their use as exemplars to any considerable extent. Multitudes of the manuscripts of the New Testament written in the first three centuries were destroyed at the beginning of the fourth, and there can be no doubt that multitudes of those written in the fourth and two following centuries met a similar fate in the various invasions of East and West. But violence was not the only agent of destruction. We know little about the external features of the manuscripts of the ages of persecution : but what little we do know suggests that they were usually small, containing only single books or groups of books, and not seldom, there is reason to suspect, of comparatively coarse material ; altogether showing little similarity to the stately tomes of the early Christian empire, of which we possess specimens, and likely enough to be despised in comparison in an age which exulted in outward signs of the new order of things. Another case of neglect at a later period was doubtless obsoleteness of form. When, once the separation of words had become habitual, the old continuous mode of writing would be found troublesome to the eye, and even the old 'uncial' or rounded capital letters would at length prove an obstacle to use. Had biblical manuscripts of the uncial ages been habitually treated with ordinary respect, much more invested with high authority, they could not have been so often turned into 'palimpsests', that is, had their ancient writing obliterated that the vellum might be employed for fresh writing, not always biblical. It must also be remembered that in the ordinary course of things the most recent manuscripts would at all times be the most numerous, and therefore the most generally accessible. Even if multiplication of transcripts were not always advancing, there would be a slow but continual substitution of new copies for old, partly to fill up gaps made by waste and casualties, partly by a natural impulse which could be reversed only by veneration or an archaic taste or a critical purpose. It is therefore no wonder that only a small fraction of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament preserved to modern times were written in the uncial period, and but few of this number belong to the first five or six centuries, none being earlier than the age of Constantine. Most uncial manuscripts are more or less fragmentary ; and till lately not one was known which contained the whole New Testament unmutilated. A considerable proportion, in numbers and still more in value, have been brought to light only by the assiduous research of the last century and a half.