Talk:Textual criticism/Archive 1

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[edit] older entries

So, I'm new to Wikipedia and I hope I did this right. I made a change to the NT Textual Criticism section. I added a note recognizing the body of manuscripts in languages other than Greek and Latin. This seemed important to me to add because this body of manuscripts is quite large, all together representing nearly as many manuscripts as the Latin. Also I noted the number of manuscripts supporting the Illiad as a means of comparison, since to many readers who have no idea how many manuscripts critics are usually working with, 24,000 manuscripts might not be a meaningful figure. The comparison to Homer gives a sense of scale to the numbers.

My information came from "A General Introduction to the Bible" by Norman Geisler and William Nix and to the best of my knowledge is accurate and reliable.

I hope I did this correctly, please change anything I didn't do right and leave a note here about it so I don't go around screwing up other articles.

Thanks

[edit] Merge with lower criticism?

I've removed the merge notice from this page, because I believe that lower criticism should be merged in here (possibly with a redirect), though I don't have time at the moment to do it myself. the term "textual criticism" is by far the most common term, as a quick Google search confirms. People in this field--especially conservative Christians--tend to avoid the term lower criticism because it is easily confused with higher criticism--something very different and objectionable to many people. I'm relatively new to Wikipedia, so if I've violated any conventions in removing the merge tag, please let me know.--mssever (Blog) 20:37, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Biblical Criticism

"Biblical Criticism" should be its own article; it should not redirect to "Textual Criticism", which is one of the tools of biblical criticism.--Peter Kirby 07:39, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

Sounds good. Stephen C. Carlson 04:13, 2005 August 10 (UTC)


[edit] Academic Honorifics

I noticed that one scholar was called a Dr. (James Trimm) and the rest, all with a Ph.D. or D.D., were not. Without getting into whether Trimm's doctorate (an S.T.D.) was from a properly accredited institution [1], it seems best to treat all scholars the same way--i.e., omit their degrees. Stephen C. Carlson 18:41, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fact check re: NT criticism

I've asked for a fact-check/cite on this paragraph:

The battle over textual criticism raged in the 18th and 19th centuries as proponents of textual criticism often opposed the divine inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible as the word of God. The textual criticism movement of the 17th-19th centuries helped usher in a rationalism that called into question the veracity of the Bible and has led to the downfall of many Christian denominations, educational institutions, and disciples.

Who says it has lead to rationalism et al.? Hasn't it also lead to greater confidence that we have all the original text?

Every reading ever occurring in the New Testament textual tradition is stubbornly preserved, even if the result is nonsense...any reading ever occurring in the New Testament textual tradition, from the original reading onward, has been preserved in the tradition and needs only to be identified. (Kurt and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism, 2d ed. [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989], 296).

I know that alot of KJV/AV1611 literature makes the claim about textual criticism being averse to various doctines, but if that is the source, it should be attributed/cited...otherwise it sounds like the textual critics themselves think that this is the result of their discipline (which a simple reading of Wallace, Metzger, passim, reveals as false), or that is is a well-known fact, which it isn't. --MonkeeSage 19:24, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

The second sentence is problematic. Did textual criticism really lead to the downfall of all that stuff? What denominations? What institutions and disciples? "Battle... raged" is colorful language. Is it appropriate for an encyclopedia? I'll wait to see if a citation and defense is presented, but otherwise I propose a significant rewrite.--Andrew c 22:17, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comment on Introduction/"Love" citation

An earlier edit said:

Textual criticism is most commonly performed upon ancient, medieval, and early modern manuscript writings, although the principles employed are generalisable to any document that has been through a process of copying and re-copying. Hence although textual criticism is commonly performed upon manuscript traditions there is also no reason why it should not be performed upon printed witnesses as well (as Love, 1993, points out).

I removed the reference to Love, 1993, but it was subsequently restored as follows:

Before the invention of printing, literary works had to be copied by hand, and each time a manuscript was copied, errors were introduced by the human scribe. The age of printing reduced the need for handwritten copies, but printed editions are subject to many of the same kinds of errors. Therefore, as Love points out, there is no reason why printed editions should not be subject to textual criticism as well.

I don't dispute that Love said this in 1993. But as printed books have been subject to textual criticism for hundreds of years — that is, virtually as long as printed books have existed — it seems odd to credit Love with this insight in 1993. Nevertheless, I have put in a source citation from fifteen years before Love's book. Indeed, I'm sure that without much trouble one can easily find much earlier sources for this rather trivial observation. Marc Shepherd 18:14, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Order of page and stemmatics section

A previous edit placed Stemmatics after Copy-text eding. This is ahistorical, as stemmatics was invented in the mid-19th century, and "copy-text" dates from 1903. It is, therefore, surely incorrect to say that "the stemmatic method adopts the techniques of the other approaches after fitting the manuscripts into a rigorous historical framework," when the other approachas came later. Marc Shepherd 21:09, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Koran and Buddhism

Although a section on textual criticism of the Koran and Buddhist texts would be welcome, the stub sections another edited recently added were just links to topics about the Koran and Buddhism in a general way, rather than textual criticism of those topics. Feel free to reinstate them if there is material pertinent to the topic of the article. Marc Shepherd 16:33, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks

Thankyou very much to whoever added this: http://www.bible-researcher.com/rules.html it wasn't here a few months ago but it is just what I was looking for. I mention this because so far this page perhaps has lots of information on the history of TC but not much on how to begin doing it practically or guidance on doing it better for those who have begun, which is perhaps more often what people looking this up as an unfamiliar subject in an encyclopedia would be looking for? Bhikkhu Santi 00:04, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] good article review

I am passing this as a good article. I have several suggestions: Think about starting with the final paragraph about applications rather than end on that note; or else keep the structure but throghout give some examples of some important riddle solved by textual criticism to increase the casual reader interest. I thought the middle sections were bringing in some pretty long quotes that felt a bit redundant if the points are already summarized. Try to not to rely on quotes that are this long. Finallt, the final two sections do not indicate what their sources were. Otherwise good job people. Goldenrowley 02:45, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. Will work on these issues. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 03:06, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Good job, meets all the criteria for a good article, it is well written, clearly explanatory, with hardly a comma out of place. The article brought up up several points of view, and different opinions, all in a very neutral voice. Goldenrowley 03:11, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Organization suggestion

Not trying to slam you with overkill here (maybe I shouldn't have used Wiki as a break from grading papers?), just trying to be helpful. In addition to the points made over in the Featured Articles listing, I had forgotten to make a note about organization. Using the 4 modes of criticism (the 3 + cladistics) is a good and sound approach. One of the challenges of editing on screen though is that it is tricky to see when an organizational scheme has gone awry. Thus, sections like the one titled Greg-Bowers-Tansdle confuse the overall structure. It might be helpful to printout the whole article and see visually how the ideas are linked to one another -- sometimes this helps to see where ideas not central to the main structure need to be subordinated. I'll be glad to help some with these revisions, especially in creating a brief text to disentangle the philological textual criticism and the rhetorical/literary textual criticism. warmly, Cyg-nifier 15:36, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

That would be very helpful, SwanSZ. I can work on re-doing all the cites and moving them to the ref format for inline citations to show up on the "Notes" section, and re-doing the References section to be just that, an alpha-sorted collection of sources used in the article. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 16:01, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Archived fac

Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Textual criticism/archive1. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:22, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bibliography or Philology?

The opening notice of this page states that Textual Studies is "a branch of philology or bibliography". I am not familiar enough with linguistics to question the philology part, but I do know that it is a branch of bibliography. If it is indeed a branch of both fields, shouldn't this overlap be clarified? It is confusing as is. I am not familiar enough with linguistics to understand the difference, if there is indeed one, so if someone does understand the difference, please clarify it in the page. If there is no difference, a statement about the presence of (and perhaps the reason for) this overlap would be helpful. Savingedmund 15:09, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] cquote, quotation, or blockquote?

I would say that {{cquote}} is way too bombastic for many quotes in an article. Use {{quotation}} is recommended instead. If you do not like these, use just a <blockquote></blockquote> set of tags. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 18:54, 27 October 2007 (UTC)


[edit] unique God...unique Son typo

There seemed to be an accidental reversal in the "Findings" section between "unique God" and "unique Son." The modern scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament favor "unique God" as the original reading. Metzger describes this in his textual commentary: "With the acquisition of P66 and P75, both of which read theos, the external support of this reading has been notably strengthened. A majority of the Committee regarded the reading monogenes huios, which undoubtedly is easier than monogenes theos, to be the result of scribal assimilation to Jn 3.16, 18; 1 Jn 4.9. The anarthrous use of theos (cf. 1.1) appears to be more primitive. There is no reason why the article should have been deleted, and when huios supplanted theos it would certainly have been added. The shortest reading, ho monogenes, while attractive because of internal considerations, is too poorly attested for acceptance as the text.

Metzger does, however, record a minority opinion from Allen Wikgren favoring monogenes huios. And, of course, the Pierpont-Robinson majority text edition reads monogenes huios.

None of this is an attempt to raise an argument. The article is well written and the writer of the section would have known this already -- which is why I went ahead and corrected it as a typo.

Best, Tim 13:22, 3 November 2007 (UTC)