The Critical Edition: The Bane and Boon of the New Testament Scholar

Most every New Testament scholar when looking at the text of the New Testament, opens up their Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament. This resource is the standard New Testament that is used for most academic study. This critical edition is valuable not only because it is standard but also because it is very well done. The problem with it is that this critical edition also creates a standard which does not give respect to the actual manuscripts that we do have. Further, while most scholars are questioning how much the concept of a single Urtext is helpful, there is a practical one in scholarship in this critical edition.

A critical edition is the term for a scholarly compilation of all of the manuscripts that are available in order to create a text that seems to be as close to the original as possible. These are created due to a very good problem – we have so many manuscripts of the New Testament (Bart Ehrman claims that we have approximately 5700 manuscripts of the Greek new Testament) that scholars try to piece them together to make the one they feel is closest to the original.  

As many might know, we have very few manuscripts within the first century after the documents were written and our best manuscripts come from the fourth and fifth centuries. Before this time, we do have some manuscripts, but they are all fragmentary and do not include the whole New Testament. Further as these are handwritten documents it is not surprising that no two are exactly alike. The job of the text critic is to look at all of these, collate them together, and create a critical edition.

Scholars use several criteria in order to establish this text. These criteria include the age of the manuscripts, the number of the manuscripts, the reliability of the manuscript, the geographical diversity of the manuscript, and the difficulty of the reading.[1] These criteria are applied, but many arguments can be made for a variety of different readings (as many readings satisfy some, but not all of the criteria). Therefore, the editors of the critical edition have to make a difficult judgment – and therefore it is not surprising that the Nestle-Aland is now on its 28^th edition. A critical edition then makes a standard text, but then also provides the significant variant readings in the notes.

The value of the critical edition (both for the New Testament and all ancient texts) is that it provides a standard text which can be referenced by all scholars. Further, the Nestle-Aland critical edition is very well done and I would agree it is probably the most historical text that we can put together. In addition to it being historical, it also makes relatively good sense as far as ease in reading (grammatical mistakes are very difficult to interpret in texts). Further, the footnotes showing differences are helpful as they try to inform the reader of significant variances.

The challenge to the critical edition is that it is a complete modern invention. There is no text in antiquity that is exactly what is in the Nestle-Aland. This is a significant issue. While it might be a very good reconstruction, it is a reconstruction. This does take us a few steps away from the actual texts and into this reconstruction.

In graduate school, I did most all of research on the Nag Hammadi texts in which there would be no dream of possibly creating a critical edition that avoided the different manuscripts. While it is true that there are vastly fewer manuscripts for the Nag Hammadi library, the attitude was that of considering the manuscripts themselves. Therefore, rather than using a critical edition that combines the 5 different manuscripts of the Apocryphon of John, the standard edition, put together by Wisse and Waldstein simply puts them in parallel so the reader can depict their individual meaning for themselves.[2]

The value in looking at manuscripts themselves is that one can note the tendencies and interests of each individual manuscript. The differences are quite shocking and collating them together would lose this difference. Karen King has shown this in translation by having parallel columns of the “short” and “long” versions of the Apocryphon of John showing that it is not a difference merely in just a few expanded sections, but that there is a major difference in the tenor of the entire text.[3]

While it might be true that a critical edition such as in the New Testament does provide alternate readings in the notes, the attitude of the Nestle-Aland is opposite that of the texts of the Nag Hammadi. The Nestle-Aland provides on scholarly reconstruction with some notes here and there from various texts. The Nag Hammadi library presents full manuscripts together with various notes here and there from others to reconstruct the missing pieces (as some are badly damaged). Therefore, the attitude is precisely opposite – both are dealing with the manuscripts, but in very different ways. The Nestle-Aland masks the interests of a particular manuscript by citing it here and there; whereas the Nag Hammadi texts mask some of the uniformity of the text. Both approaches have their own merits, but the Nag Hammadi approach is valuable in that it brings readers face to face with the extant manuscripts rather than a modern reconstruction.

My recent study on the book of James revealed a trend in New Testament scholarship. The Nestle-Aland probably was never meant to be the be all end all of the text of the New Testament; however, for the majority of the major commentators of the New Testament it was. Very few mentioned variant readings, and when they did, it was not based on the interest of a particular codex and why it presented the variation that it did; rather, it was based on the fact that the Nestle-Aland text was a bit confusing, so they used a variety of texts and coded them together to present an alternate one. Essentially, they were locked into the Nestle-Aland and they only considered an alternate plan long enough to get a reading they wanted – not based upon going back to an original text – instead, to simply bolster their own interpretation.

The reason that this is so shocking is that the Nestle-Aland has become a de facto urtext – original text – while at the same time New Testament scholarship has challenged how much there was a single “original” text. Rudof Bultmann encapsulates the interest of seeing redactional layers in the New Testament text. He argued that the Gospel of John had at least two major redactions that came together.[4] While many of Bultmann’s interpretations have not stood the test of time, his argument that the text seems to have editorial activity in a systematic scale (meaning full editions) has been convincing. Other texts in the New Testament have been presented in the same way.[5] Therefore, scholars are coming to a general agreement that there was not a single original text. This challenges many of the presuppositions that a critical edition depends upon for its existence.

It is becoming clear that ancient books – much like modern ones – were not written at one time, but had several editions that needed editing. Raymond Starr has argued that an earlier draft frequently was sent to friends in order to get edits and then the text was rewritten.[6] However, as nearly every author on the circulation of books in antiquity emphasizes, as soon as something was out of the hands of the author, there was no control over it.[7] The friend could easily have something copied and now that first edition – which, of course, never was intended to be read the way it was, is now being circulated.

To show that editions of texts could be circulated before the author wanted them to, consider the example of Augustine and Tertullian who complained of this very problem. Tertullian argues that he had an early edition of Adversus Marcionem which was circulated:

The first edition, too hastily produced, I later withdrew, substituting a fuller treatment. This too, before enough copies had been produced, was stolen by one who was at one time a brother but later became an apostate, and who copied excerpts very incorrectly and made them available to many people. Thus emendation was required. This occasion persuaded me to make some additions. Thus this composition, a third following a second, and instead of a third from now on the first, needs to begin by reporting the demise of the work it replaces in order that no one may be confused if in one place or another he comes across varying forms of it.[8]

Tertullian clearly wrote several editions and did so because while writing one that was not meant to be circulated, was stolen and was sent out. There clearly is no clear point at which the text was “done” and therefore a real question is asked as to what was “the original.” Tertullian wants people to consider his third edition as the only one – he does not want someone to later collate the three together into an “original” text. That would be losing much of his point – and of course it would not be original at all. It would be a new fourth edition that Tertullian could not have imagined. Augustine similarly rewrites his De Trinitate because it was taken before he was ready: “I had laid the work aside after discovering that it had been carried off prematurely or purloined from me before I had completed it or revised and corrected it as I had planned.”[9] Due to this challenge, he, like Tertullian, wrote a new edition that was being published in order that it could be clarified.

The fact that authors did not have a single edition of the text makes us rethink the value of a compiled critical edition. There is real question as to what is the “original.” It is even questionable when something becomes an “edition” and when it is still being originally composed. The line between writing and editing is a very blurry one and we seem to be working from the idea that there was one original that we want to reconstruct – even though in scholarship we generally assume there wasn’t a single “original.”

This conversation is not meant to imply that all manuscripts of the New Testament are amazing documents that need to be considered on their own – they certainly can be, but there are some very poor manuscripts. There are some that are so rife with errors that it leads us to think that the reason the text diverges so greatly is simply due to incompetence. These manuscripts probably are not the ideal candidates to study; however, I question how true this always is – we have some very good manuscripts (codex Alexandrinus, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus being among the best). These manuscripts ought to be studies as they are – we can now say they have “mistakes” but that is only comparing them to the critical edition we completed. The far more important discussion would be if one could see patterns and interests in that codex itself. There might well be a systematic pattern as to why it has divergences from the norm on a variety of levels.

The functional value of studying manuscripts themselves rather than the critical edition is attitudinal. It might be far better to think of these documents as “editions” rather than an attempt at the urtext which is full of “errors.” It might be quite likely that these manuscripts have a point to make as living documents rather than merely data to be chopped up and reconstituted.

After this brief discussion of the critical edition compared with the use of the texts on their own, I happily admit that I tend to use the critical edition in much of my own study. This is due primarily to the universality of the critical edition (and as mentioned earlier, they are generally very well done). My guess is that the reason more work is not done at the level of the manuscript is simply its difficulty. It is hard work to compare the different manuscripts of the New Testament and see those differences between whole codices rather than just a single verse.

The second challenge to the practical application of this is the atomization of a study. If one only studies Sinaiticus on James, much of the content is not particularly unique to Sinaiticus and the same themes and arguments could be made about Alexandrinus. As a result, scholars want to appeal to as large an audience as possible and so they simply use the common source. However, if it is true that these works do have common themes, why is it so impossible for someone studying Alexandrinus to look at a study on Sinaiticus? If the challenge is universality, then we can continue to look universally without the value judgment of the manuscripts compared to the “original text.”

The hard work is precisely what needs to be done to remain consistent. It is far better to work hard than it is to claim that we do not hold to an urtext when it was originally composed, but silently accept one that was put together by modern scholars now on its 28^th edition.

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[1] See Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration 2^nd edition (New York and Oxford: OUP, 1968).

[2] Michael Waldstein and Frederik Wisse The Apocryphon of John: Synopsis of Nag Hammadi Codices II,1; III,1; and IV,1 with BG 8502,2 (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

[3] Karen L. King, The Secret Revelation of John (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

[4] Rudolf Bultmann The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. G.R. Beasley-Murray, R.W.N. Hoare, and J.K. Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971).

[5] See Delbert Burkett Rethinking the Gospel Sources: From Proto-Mark to Mark (Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2004).

[6] Raymond J. Starr “The Circulation of Literary Texts in the Roman World” Classical Quarterly, 37(1) 1987, 213-223.

[7] See Harry Y. Gamble Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995) and Catherine Hezser Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).  

[8] Tertullian, Adv. Marc. 1.1 quoted and translated in Gamble, Books and Readers, 118-119.

[9] Ep. 174 quoted in Gamble, Books and Readers, 133.