Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 71:1 (NA 2020)
Article: The Critical Editions Of The Greek NT And OT Stability, Change, And Implications
Author: Gregory R. Lanier

TynBull 71:1 (2020) p. 43

The Critical Editions Of The Greek NT And OT
Stability, Change, And Implications

Gregory R. Lanier

([email protected])

Summary

Though their respective practitioners compare notes infrequently, the fields of NT and Septuagint textual criticism share resemblances in their overall trajectory. Namely, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critical editions have given way to decades-long international efforts to produce major critical editions that incorporate a staggeringly larger amount of manuscript data. But how much has the critical text itself changed? This article explores the magnitude of change over the past decades of work on the Greek NT and OT, offering observations about what the tremendous stability in the reconstructed text might tell us about the field(s) in general and the quality of ancient manuscripts.

1. Introduction

An excitingly different new text … was anticipated. But it is immediately obvious that what we have in the much vaunted new text is a damp squib – merely a very modest revision of the [traditional] text! It rather looks to me as if the editors took the [traditional] text … as their working text and only gently or reluctantly adapted it.

With these scathing words, a prominent textual critic expressed considerable letdown regarding the seemingly meagre results of decades of intense work on a recently released critical edition. Though the critic, J. K. Elliott, happens in this case to be speaking of the Editio Critica Maior (ECM) of the Catholic Epistles of the Greek New

TynBull 71:1 (2020) p. 44

Testament,1 one wonders whether a similar kind of sentiment could apply to the critical editions of the Greek Old Testament.

The recent releases of two Greek NT editions and a new Göttingen Septuagint fascicle2 remind us of the long-standing efforts to produce improved critical editions of the Greek scriptures, both NT and OT. While these efforts have tended to operate almost entirely independently of each other (due to the silos in which NT and OT textual critics tend to operate), there are striking similarities on both sides of the canonical divide, particularly in terms of the resulting revisions to the critical text produced by earlier predecessors.

This article aims to explore the results of this century’s worth of intense work on the Greek text of the NT and OT. In particular, we will ask the question ‘How much have the Greek NT and OT texts changed as editors have gained access to mountains of new data?’ We will see that on the whole the answer is ‘...