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.
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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.