What do you think?
Rate this book
The Early Text of the New Testament
The Early Text of the New Testament aims to examine and assess from our earliest extant sources the most primitive state of the New Testament text now known. What sort of changes did scribes make to the text? What is the quality of the text now at our disposal? What can we learn about the nature of textual transmission in the earliest centuries? In addition to exploring the textual and scribal culture of early Christianity, this volume explores the textual evidence for all the sections of the New Testament. It also examines the evidence from the earliest translations of New Testament writings and the citations or allusions to New Testament texts in other early Christian writers.
483 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2012
15 people are currently reading
109 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 7, 2018
Extensively organized and well researched, this book provides a number of important insights for anyone researching the transmission, material culture, and scribal practices involved in the production of early Greek NT manuscripts. The contributors come from a number of different backgrounds, but mostly come to similar conclusions regarding early Christian scribal culture. Most articles agree that the NT writings, in particular the Gospels, were accepted and used as Scripture from a very early date, but that there was no agreed upon culture for the use and citation of NT Scriptural texts, which explains the many variants in the manuscripts and the use of these texts by early Christian writers. The reality is that early Christian writers simply would not have thought about citational precision the way we do now, and this affected the way citations were used, and in part explains why so many early Christian writers make use of the Gospels in such a way that it is difficult to determine which passage in the Gospels they seem to be drawing upon.
I have only one real criticism of this book. Some of the contributors agreed that, because of the loose scribal culture, some early Christian writers likely made slight intentional changes to citations of Scripture for polemical or socio-cultural reasons, in order to clearly illuminate the meaning of the text for their given audience, or to angle the text for polemical purposes. This is a fascinating proposal, and certainly goes without saying in any proper understanding of reception history, but no real attempt was made in this volume to highlight precisely what would have motivated certain changes from certain writers. This may be a question for another project, but even a little insight into this would have been helpful. The one article in this volume that made at least some attempt to answer this question, even in part, was that of Joseph Verhayden.
Overall, I thought this was a fascinating book. Extremely helpful to anyone interested in the transmission of early Greek MSS and the writings of the early Church.
I have only one real criticism of this book. Some of the contributors agreed that, because of the loose scribal culture, some early Christian writers likely made slight intentional changes to citations of Scripture for polemical or socio-cultural reasons, in order to clearly illuminate the meaning of the text for their given audience, or to angle the text for polemical purposes. This is a fascinating proposal, and certainly goes without saying in any proper understanding of reception history, but no real attempt was made in this volume to highlight precisely what would have motivated certain changes from certain writers. This may be a question for another project, but even a little insight into this would have been helpful. The one article in this volume that made at least some attempt to answer this question, even in part, was that of Joseph Verhayden.
Overall, I thought this was a fascinating book. Extremely helpful to anyone interested in the transmission of early Greek MSS and the writings of the early Church.
August 14, 2022
This is definitely intended for a specialist or someone who has some familiarity with textual criticism, not to mention Greek and various other languages. As such, the accessibility is quite limited for the general reader, though I do think the first four chapters would be quite helpful to the curious inquirer into reading culture of early Christianity.
While I'm not a specialist by any stretch of the imagination, I did find this to be helpful reading in expanding my horizons in textual criticism. I will definitely continue to use it as a reference guide.
While I'm not a specialist by any stretch of the imagination, I did find this to be helpful reading in expanding my horizons in textual criticism. I will definitely continue to use it as a reference guide.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews