Dan Wallace and the Byzantine/Majority Text

Pete Williams interviewed Dan Wallace, text critic and professor at Dallas Theological Seminary (http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2006/03/interview-with-dan-wallace.html). One question which was asked pertained to the Byzantine/Majority Text Type.

Here's the question and comment from the interview:

PJW: You’ve been known for becoming involved in debates about the Majority Text. How would you explain origins of the Byzantine text?

DBW: That’s an excellent question. We don’t have enough concrete evidence to argue decisively about its roots, but the work of Kurt Aland, Gordon Fee, Bart Ehrman, Michael Holmes, and Tim Ralston has helped immeasurably.

Aland did some nice work showing that the first father to use the Byzantine text qua text was Asterius, one of Lucian’s students. Fee and Ehrman have shown that the Byzantine text just didn’t seem to exist anywhere prior to the fourth century, and that its earliest form is decidedly different from later forms. This also was the point of Tim Ralston’s doctoral dissertation at Dallas Seminary....

My best guess on the origins of the Byzantine text—a view that is constantly being shaped—is that it originated in the early fourth century as a consciously edited text, cannibalizing readings from earlier textforms, even to the point of almost obliterating any traces of one of those textforms (the Caesarean).

But then it took on a life of its own, developing into a growing text that had several sub-branches. Two major recensions were done on it, one in the ninth and one in the eleventh century.

Ironically, the text that Hodges and Farstad produced, and the one that Robinson and Pierpont produced, did not, in every respect, represent the majority until the fifteenth century.

Hort’s threefold argument against the Byzantine text is still a good argument that demonstrates the Byzantine text to be secondary, late, and inferior. Although there are a few leaks in the Hortian boat, it’s not enough to sink the ship.

Digging up Manuscripts without Getting Your Fingernails Dirty

It's really odd where you might find New Testament manuscripts.

Prof. Wallace told me earlier about discovering several manuscripts stashed away at a small town public library in Greece.

Today I found out about one of his manuscript discoveries at a...HIGH SCHOOL!!! Incredible.

Dr. Head told me today about an important complete New Testament (a witness to F13, i.e., family 13) housed in a county records office north of here about 100 miles.

While Gordon Fee was teaching at Gordon-Conwell near Boston, someone opened an old book in the library and found an uncatalogued Greek New Testament manuscript.

One text critic tells the story of a famous scholar in charge of one of the U.K.'s more prestigious universities. The staff were doing an annual inventory of the ancient manuscripts, but they couldn't find one important papyrus manuscript. None of them wanted to tell the head guy because he was known for his temper. So they looked, and looked again and again, searching everywhere for the papyrus.

Finally, they had to give up the search, and admit to the head guy face to face that they had lost the manuscript.

They went to his office and confessed to not being able to find it. The professor looked at them, and then a lightbulb went off in his head. He got up from his seat, went to the corner of the room, lifted up the corner of the carpet and picked the manuscript off the floor. (I guess the manuscript needed some flattening out.)

Photoshooting Tregelles

Dan Wallace of Dallas Thelogical Seminary is here at Tyndale House, Cambridge now. He founded an institution whose mission it is to photograph as many ancient biblical manuscripts as possible to make them available on the web. He's here to take pictures of manuscripts housed in the 100+ libraries in Cambridge and the university.

His Cambridge expedition, however, begins with a photo shoot of an 1860s print edition of a Greek New Testament, in particular, Tregelles' text. From my earlier postings, people might recall that our current critical edition of the Greek New Testament (i.e., Nestle Aland) is often said to be a "Hortian" text--of the famed Westcott and Hort. However, some have recently argued that the text behind the Nestle-Aland edition is more of a Tregellian text. Thus, Tregelles' Greek New Testament is being recognised as being more and more important. It is less extreme in its commitment toward Codex Vaticanus, and is a marginal step or two closer toward the Byzantine text.

The photoshoot is very complicated, requiring a four man team. It requires exacting work in various aspects. Prof. Wallace invited me to watch. I looked over his shoulder at his computer as the images lined up against a grid. He was kind enough to say things like, "Look at this, Jim," and "Check this out, Jim."

Interestingly, the copy of Tregelles' Greek New Testament belonged to perhaps the greatest evangelical biblical scholar of the 20th century, F.F. Bruce, and is now in the possession of Codex Sinaiticus scholar Dirk Jongkind, who is fellow here at Tyndale House. When the images are made available on the web, you will be able to turn the cover and see his handwritten name at the top of the first page.

Great work Dan! We are all your debt.


Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts www.csntm.org