Developments in Textual Criticism and the Münster Colloquium

25 years ago, people were writing articles about the death of textual criticism, as if everything that could be said about the field had already been said.

Now, we are experiencing some important developments in various aspects of the field. Specifically, we are facing a major attack on the reliability of the transmission of the text, as well as a new method behind the publication of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament text.

Last week, the Institute for New Testament Text Formation Research (INTF) held a major colloquium in which about 55 of the very best text critics were present. If you care to know, I'm talking about people such as Eldon Epp, Larry Hurtado, Barbara Aland and all the Münster people, David Parker and the Birmingham [England] people, the Tyndale House people, Dan Wallace, Bill Warren, Tjitze Baarda and the Amsterdam people, Joel DeLobel, Paul Foster, David Trobisch, Maurice Robinson, Michael Holmes.) No, Bart didn't come.

I was the junior-most member present. I was entirely star-struck, but all the legends of the field were so gracious and warm and welcoming. We all stayed at a hotel which had a couple of lounges which were conducive to sitting down and chatting over coffee, even to the late hours of the evening. We had our meals together too. These personable conversations were so good that the conference was worth attending even if you didn't attend any of the sessions.

Early on, it became obvious that a good number of people think that the transmission of the text from about 80 C.E. to 170 C.E. was so wild and erratic that we will never be able to backtrack from our oldest manuscripts (late second to early third century) to the "original" text.

My PhD project focuses on this particular issue as it is reflected in one particular "wild" manuscript which is one of the oldest manuscripts of Matthew's Gospel.

The other major issue is the new method for assessing textual variation being used by the INTF which produces the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament text. This is THE critical text which serves (more or less) as the basis for all our recent translations of the New Testament, as well as most commentaries.

INTF has developed a computer program which charts the relatedness of a given textual variant to other variants in the same variant unit. They call it the Coherence Based Genealogical Method (CBGM), although some people are simply calling it the Münster method. The method is probably too complex for me to understand, let alone explain. In fact, one of the concerns is that so few outsiders understand it well enough to be able to critique it. Nonetheless, the Nestle-Aland 28th ed will be corrected against it in the Catholic Epistles (i.e., James-3 John) when it comes out in 2010.

An interesting result of the Münster method is that it is finding more and more individual Byzantine readings to be more plausible. This accords well with the general flow of textual criticism over the last 20 or 30 years. I should hasten to say that this does nothing to help out the theory of the priority of the Byzantine text, but simply reinforces the notion that one cannot dismiss a reading simply because it is Byzantine.

One would have thought that Maurice Robinson--one of the world's only Byzantine priortists--would have been pleased to hear that the Münster method was pushing for more Byzantine readings. I talked to him about the issue on several times. Prof. Robinson has to be one of the very nicest, most engaging, and most interesting personas in all of textual criticism.

If I understood him correctly, Prof. Robinson says that he has read every article written by Gerd Mink (the brains behind the Münster Method) whether in German or in English. While many were hesitant to accept the method on the basis that they really didn’t understand it, Prof. Robinson was stating that he opposed the method precisely because he did understand it. He claimed that if he were to feed his presuppositions into the computer’s programming, the Münster method would spit out a Byzantine Priority schema.

To be sure, Prof. Robinson often has a way of seeing the otherwise overlooked elephant in the room. However, condemnation from one corner of the room probably is not enough to dismiss the Münster method. It will be interesting to see how people like Dan Wallace (Dallas Seminary), Bill Warren (New Orleans Baptist Seminary), the Tyndale House people, and Epp and Holmes react to it in the coming years. David Parker and Birmingham seem to be solidly behind the method.

One wonders if all this will lead to a competing edition of the Greek New Testament.

For a more robust review and discussion of the colloquium, go here and to the blog posts prior to it: http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2008/08/mnster-colloquium-on-textual-history-of_06.html

Scholarship, Byzantine Text Type, Majority Text, and the Textus Receptus

Text Scholars who advocate the Byzantine Text Type, the Majority Text, and the Textus Receptus are so few that they could all sit in my living room, more or less comfortably.

Foremost on this list is Maurice Robinson who, with William Pierpont, published The New Testament in the Original Greek. This Greek New Testament represents what Robinson believes is the purest form of the Byzantine Text Type, and therefore, what he thinks is closest to the original Greek. There is much to be admired about this work, if one assumes that the Byzantine Text Type reflects the original texts of the New Testament writers.  Robinson, however, despite his considerable efforts, has not been persuasive. Robinson teaches at Southeastern Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina and is a member of the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog, and is a most gracious member of the (informal) textual criticism guild.

Hodges and Farstad produced their text essentially by a majority vote, without asking which reading might be older. The title, The New Testament according to the Majority Text conveys that whichever reading is attested by a majority of manuscripts is most likely to be original.

The standard critical edition of the Greek New Testament is the Nestle-Aland/UBS text, or the lately produced SBLGNT (Society of Biblical Literature Greek New Testament). A third option is due out in 2018 from Tyndale House, the evangelical think tank/foundation in Cambridge England. These three will be relatively close to one another. If you don't like one of these, your only other options are the Hodges/Farstand or Robinson/Pierpont editions, unless you resort to out of print editions (which are out of print for good reasons).

If you decide to use one of these alternative editions, you should be aware that few Christian colleges and seminaries use them. You should also be aware that none of them have been used as the basis for a standard Bible translation in any language; certainly this is true for publishers of English versions. And you should also be aware that no Bible commentary series in any language is based on them.

We all should be circumspect about whom we trust to tell us which reading is God's word and which isn't. Indeed, the paramount importance of the text of the Bible is so great as to justify the learning of Greek and the science of textual criticism. Otherwise, we are absolutely dependent upon other people who have.

In the case of Hodges and Farstad, and in the case of Robinson and Pierpont, they are all godly men (Pierpont died a few years ago). On the other side, however, is a full, overwhelming array of evangelical scholars (and others, too) who are the giants in the field of New Testament. These scholars have judged these two critical editions as having failed in their effort to establish a viable edition that contains a more ancient textual tradition.

This reality in itself does not refute Byzantine priority or the Majority Text Type. However, for those who don't have the time or means to weigh the arguments carefully, this reality should make them more circumspect.

The Text of Micah

I don't dabble much in Old Testament Textual Criticism--mostly because I don't know anything about it (except for Wurstein's The Text of the Old Testament which I read 15 years ago and don't remember anything I read.

OT text criticism is a different world altogether from NT textual criticism. Bruce Waltke, an evangelical Old Testament exegete, built his scholarly career after establishing himself as an Old Testament text critic. He did his Harvard PhD on the Samaritan Pentateuch. I studied under him, but never took any of his text criticism classes (same with Fee!).

I'm reading Waltke's commentary on Micah currently. Fantastic read. He lays out some basic text critical data. In the New Testament, we have 5500+ Greek manuscripts and about 15,000+ manuscripts of ancient versions. Nearly every verse of the New Testament shows some variation (mostly minor, but many major) in the tradition.

The situation is completely different in the Old Testament. For Micah, we get the Masoretic text letter for letter from a manuscript called the Leningrad Codex--it is rather late--dating to 1010 A.D. Hebrew manuscripts of Micah prior to this are few and far between. However, found in one of the Dead Sea Scroll caves (Cave 5) was a scroll of Micah now known as Mur 88 or Mur XII. It was written about the time of the Second Jewish Revolt (132 A.D.). Incredibly, as Waltke points out, "[It is] virtually identical with the [Masoretic text = Leningrad Codex = BHS]; its nine [!!!] variants from the 1600 words of [Micah] are incidental." Waltke then lists them--all of which are nothing but minutiae (sometimes less than a jot or tittle).

The other ancient sources which attest to the text of Micah are:

1. 23 fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls cache, known as 1QpMic
2. A disputed number of fragments which comprise the Dead Sea Scrolls document 4QpMic or 4Q168.
3. Ancient citations of Micah in the Zadokite Documents
4. Septuagint (the Greek translation of Micah--but the text form is different from Masoretic text type)
5. A Greek translation--Kaige-Theodotian--closer to the Masoretic text type
6. Aquila's Greek translation (c. 130 AD)--even closer to the Masoretic text
7. Syriac
8. Old Latin
9. Latin Vulgate
10. Aramaic targums

As can be surmised, our attestation for Micah is extremely thin compared to any New Testament writing--although the Dead Sea Scrolls date earlier than any of our New Testament manuscripts. But what is amazing is how well preserved the Masoretic text is when compared between the 130 A.D. Qumran manuscript and the 11th century Codex Leningrad.

PhD Proposal: Codex Schoyen

Versional specialist Tjitze Baarda (Free University, Amsterdam) wrote of the Schøyen codex that it "presents us with a most intriguing version of Matthew, and therefore it should be studied carefully to establish the place which it takes in textual history…. I entertain the hope that this enigmatic text will become the object of a careful investigation in the near future. It might be an appropriate research object for a dissertation of someone who is interested in the relation of the Greek text and the early translations of the New Testament in general and the Coptic versions in particular" (NT 46.3, p.306).

Codex Schøyen 2650, the recently discovered (1999) Coptic manuscript of Matthew's gospel, is extraordinary for its great antiquity (300-350 C.E.), and sensational for its unusual text which may differ from canonical Matthew. Its editor, the late Hans-Martin Schenke, claimed it reflects a Hebrew or Aramaic Matthew derived from a Greek Vorlage unlike any other extant manuscript. His conclusions would have a wide range of consequences for Matthean studies, including the formative development of the gospels.

Some of these conclusions were questioned on methodological grounds by Baarda. While Baarda emphasized that his criticisms could only speak to the small portion of text which he examined (Matt 17:1-9), he urged that a full review of the entire manuscript be undertaken.
Even if some of Schenke's conclusions go too far, ms. Schøyen 2650 remains a potentially important witness to the text of Matthew. The great antiquity of the codex gives it automatic significance. Further, it may reflect one of the earliest attempts to translate Matthew into Coptic, and give indication of the latitude a translator might deem appropriate. Moreover, the publication of ms. Schøyen 2650 necessitates reconsideration of the development of the Coptic versions. A thorough understanding of the Schøyen codex and the place of the Coptic versions will probably become increasingly critical as Egypt continues to be the primary source of new manuscript discoveries.

Therefore, I propose to analyze ms. Schøyen 2650 in the hopes that codicological, papyrological, and textual data will assist in explaining its unusual text and its role in transmission history. This analysis will be achieved by a comparison of ms. Schøyen 2650 with other Coptic versions and manuscripts, and with the translation dynamics of other early versions, with a particular sensitivity to textual variation in the whole manuscript tradition. Ultimately, the project will be designed to make ms. Schøyen 2650 and the Coptic versions more helpful in establishing the text of Matthew, and address implications regarding the formative history of Matthew's gospel.

Gordon Fee and Textual Criticism

(This is the text of my successful argument that Gordon Fee should be given the 2006 Hall of Fame/Lifetime Achievement Award by the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog.)



Perhaps the student can be forgiven for nominating, from his limited experiences, his own favorite professor to an award. Perhaps, despite the student's own experiential limitations, that professor really is deserving. Let me argue such on behalf of Gordon Fee in regard to the highly esteemed and world renowned Evangelical Textual Criticism Hall of Fame/Lifetime Achievement Award.

First, let me explain that as a student of Prof. Fee, amazingly, I actually never read a single textual critical work of his. I came to study with him well after he had established his reputation as text-critic-turned-exegete, and my work with him was exegetically oriented, with only sideward glances at text criticism. What I know of his tc work comes from informal readings after my graduate degree.

In this light, I was surprised to find in my first real tc research paper how often I resorted to citing Prof. Fee's various works. The variety and scope of his writings and their strategic importance necessitated such frequent citation.

With a few exceptions, scholarship in textual criticism is not so much reflected in tomes, but in shorter research articles (Colwell and Birdsall, for example, had but two tc books published between them). Prof. Fee has written two volumes on tc, but his research articles are of such importance that we recall them as quickly as we recall the names of the few larger, important books in the field. These works are often definitive, and future scholarship will not be able to avoid prefacing their work with reference to Prof. Fee's works.

One example of this is William L. Petersen's 2002 article, "The Genesis of the Gospel" (in A. Denaux's New Testament Textual Exegesis) wherein he argued for a closer look at the early Fathers to determine gospel texts which look quite different from our canonical gospels. Despite his recognition of the cautions expressed in Prof. Fee's article, "The Text of John in Origen and Cyril of Alexandria" (Bib 52 [1971], 357-394), one wonders if the phenomena Petersen observed in citations from Theophilus (40) and the Didache (51-53) may be explicable in terms proffered by Prof. Fee thirty years earlier. Prof. Fee's passionate cautions regarding Patristic evidence were such as to have spilled over even into his introductory exegesis courses. One suspects that the radical revision of the Patristic evidence in the apparatus of NA-27 had a portion of its impetus from Prof. Fee's own writings (see also "The Text of John in The Jerusalem Bible: A Critique of the Use of Patristic Ciations in New Textament Textual Criticism" and "The Use of Greek Patristic Citations in New Testament Textual Criticism: The State of the Question").

Prof. Fee has had a knack for publishing strategically important articles for the discipline. This was true of his debunking of the myth that the "Alexandrian" text form was a recension. To a large degree, this work confirmed the basic Hortian program of reconstructing the NT text largely on the basis of the strict text form behind B, at a time when such confidence was beginning to lag.

Prof. Fee has been in the frontlines on issues which have been polemical. At a time when some Christian conservatives (Evangelicals and Fundamentalists) were being swayed by a revival of the Majority Text, Prof. Fee entered the arena and published several articles and debates on the issue. The same is true over the issue of eclecticism; his arguments for a reasoned eclecticism have seemed to have won the day against the rigorous eclecticism of Kilpatrick and Elliott.

Prof. Fee's work still speaks to current issues in tc. The last two decades have seen an increasing interest in the relationship between tc and gospel formation prior to 180 CE. Much of this scholarship would undermine our confidence in our critical text and in the "original text." Prof. Fee has probably written the definitive work looking at the implications of synoptic harmonization for the Synoptic Problem ("Modern Textual Criticism and the Synoptic Problem: On the Problem of harmonization in the Gospels"). Also, he himself has recognized the first 300 years as the "Period of Confusion," yet gives an analysis of this period which is far more sympathetic to Evangelicals and to the issue of biblical authority than is often given ("Textual Criticism of the New Testament;" cf. Koester, Petersen, Ehrman). In a short review of Ehrman's The Orthodox Corruption of the Text, Prof. Fee politely and with some subtlety shreds methods and conclusions so thoroughly that the book needs to be re-read with great reservation (Critical Review of Books and Religion, Aug 1995, 203-206).

I wonder if Prof. Fee has made his own contribution to the canons of criticism. He argues that "one criterion above all others superintends the scholar's choice at any point of textual variation: the variant that best explains the origin of all the others is most likely original." This probably is not original to Prof. Fee, but in my own limited experience, I have not seen the criterion stated so lucidly elsewhere.

A word should be said in regard to Prof. Fee's relationship to evangelicalism. As a Pentecostal, he admits to having some tensions within his evangelical world. One of these tensions is his emphasis on the Spirit's role in interpreting the text. He is more concerned with what, for example, Paul meant than what the text actually said. As such, he has been a little outside of the issue of inerrancy, and one wonders if maybe his emphasis on the Spirit has more in common with Prof. Parker and the living text approach than the earlier comment may suggest.

More importantly, however, Prof. Fee's evangelicalism can be seen in his far-reaching exegetical work. In an era when the Pastorals were considered not even deutero-Pauline, but trito-Pauline, Prof. Fee argued for their authenticity, and his tiny commentary on the Pastorals (New International Bible Commentary) rocked liberal scholarship way back on its heels. The same is true in regard to Paul's Trinitarianism; while it had become commonplace to dismiss orthodox Trinitarianism as a later Church development, Prof. Fee has boldly argued that the Trinitarianism of the later creeds is latent in Paul's writings, and largely assumed in his theology (God's Empowering Presence, 898; cf. Pauline Christology, 2007).

One important exegetical insistence of Prof. Fee's has import for some recent developments in tc. In the attempt to reconstruct primitive forms of the gospels prior to 180 C.E., a number of scholars have argued that the early Fathers and texts seem uninformed in regard to Jesus' life and teaching. They point out that this is a feature of the earliest Christian writings, and surmise that the four canonical gospels must not have been widely received by the Church in the first two centuries. In so doing, they point to the Pauline writings which have little to say about Jesus' life and ministry, suggesting that Paul knew little of Jesus' life. Prof. Fee would cry foul to this line of reasoning, arguing first of all the ad hoc nature of the Pauline epistles, and that they were task oriented, not treatise of theology or ethics. Typically, Paul wrote to fix problems, and the situation rarely would have required Paul to cite sayings or deeds of Jesus. In this regard, Prof. Fee was fond of pointing out that overly skeptical scholars would assume that Paul knew nothing of the Lord's Supper, except that, quite incidentally, observance of the institution had become a problem in Corinth, requiring Paul to address the situation. Likewise, in our attempt to push the text beyond the 180 C.E. barrier, we should remember this admonition, and ask whether a writing or a writer really had the occasion to refer to Jesus' life and ministry.

But for Prof. Fee, the goal of exegesis is hermeneutics…how one applies what was said back then to our lives today. I think if this is not the essence of evangelicalism, it is very close to its core. For it is only the appropriation of the text into our lives that we are truly Christian. And this is clearly evident in Prof. Fee's life's work.

Misquoting Metzger

I'm intrigued by the conclusion in Prof. Metzger's The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, in which Metzger and Prof. Ehrman take pains to correct the impression that the text of the NT was transmitted haphazardly. They write,

Lest the foregoing examples of alterations should give the impression that scribes were altogether willful and capricious in transmitting ancient copies of the New Testament, it ought to be noted that other evidence points to the careful and painstaking work on the part of many faithful copyists…. Even in incidental details one observes the faithfulness of scribes…. These examples of dogged fidelity on the part of scribes could be multiplied and serve to counterbalance to some extent, the impression that this chapter may otherwise make upon the beginner in New Testament textual criticism (4th ed., 271).

One wonders how this conclusion can be squared with Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. Indeed, the foregoing two paragraphs in their entirety would seem to serve to contradict the most basic impression found in Misquoting Jesus.

Tregelles and the Hortian Text

(Some of this discussion was inspired by a 2005 or 2006 Society of Biblical Literature presentation by Peter Head on the text critic Tregelles, of whom I have no first hand knowledge.)

Few people incur the wrath of KJV-onlyites as Wescott and Hort do.

Throughout the 19th century, scholars were studying the thousands of variant readings which were known to exist in the Greek manuscripts. As they studied the manuscripts and the readings, scholars realized that some manuscripts agreed with others more than others. When they sorted it out, they came to a general consensus that there were three (more or less) broad streams of related manuscripts.

One of those streams came to be known as the Byzantine text type which, by a fluke of history, claimed the most manuscripts, the vast majority of which were 12th century or later.

Previously, naïve students of the text of the Bible assumed that whichever reading could boast of the most manuscripts was most likely to be the original reading. This method, if it could be called such, made the place of the Textus Receptus, secure and made all (English) Bible believing Christians feel confident about their KJV.

However, the work of various scholars in the 19th century, and especially of Westcott and Hort, unraveled this confidence. Once they demonstrated that all those manuscripts of the Byzantine Text were simply the offspring of one of the three or four grandchildren of the original text, scholars realized that you can't just count manuscripts to determine the original reading.

In effect, Wescott and Hort overturned the discipline of textual criticism from a democratic election into a something more like a representative republic. To press the analogy, it would be like the state of West Virginia with its 3 million people getting the same number of representative votes as the State of California with its 20 million votes.

Consequently, whenever someone might point out to 200 Byzantine manuscripts with a given reading compared to one or two manuscripts from another text type, the response would be, "So what? We don't count manuscripts anyway. We weigh them." Thus, a large quantity of late manuscripts supporting one reading only shows that the reading of one variant reading produced more manuscripts which are currently extant.

This overturning of the basic (pseudo)-methodology of the Textus Receptus (~ Byzantine ~ KJV), then is one of the great legacies of Westcott and Hort, and this is the reason why they are hated so much by KJV-onlyites. But there's more to the story….

KJV-onlyites rarely are capable of attacking Westcott and Hort on methodological grounds. The reality is, few of them are capable of reading Hort's famous introduction. Consequently, the attack against Westcott and Hort is almost entirely ad hominem. In particular, Hort is attacked for things like rejecting inspiration, or maybe even high doctrines like the Trinity…, whatever. (Apparently, little is known about Westcott's own personal life.)

Actually, KJV-onlyites know only one or two things about Hort, but their rhetoric gets fanned into ever increasing inflammatories and deprecations.

But now, the record needs to be set straight!

I'm not going to defend Hort. Say what you may.

However! Let me tell you about an Englishman named Tregelles. Apparently, Tregelles was a devoted believer, deeply involved in the Brethren movement which continues to be Great Britain's equivalent of American Fundamentalism, albeit gentler. He was known for his personal piety and theological orthodoxy.

Tregelles was not famous like Cambridge professor Hort was, even though Tregelles was older. Tregelles had been working on his own edition of the Greek New Testament, being well ahead of Hort. But the two men struck up a serious camaraderie, resulting in Tregelles sending Hort his edition and notes on the Greek New Testament as each page was written.

To be sure, Hort was critical of Tregelles for his firm belief in scripture, but Hort was impressed by Tregelles' work. In fact, Tregelles had a huge impact on Westcott and Hort's New Testament. A comparison of Tregelles' text to Westcott and Hort's text would see a characteristic similarity between the two.

Scholars are in the habit of referring to the Standard Text (i.e., Nestle-Aland's critical text) as the Hortian text. In reality, however, perhaps we should speak not so much of the Hortian text, but of the Tregellian text!

With all this background information, it seems that we can all dispense with the vicious attacks against Hort for his liberalism. KJV-onlyites might be able to make hay, so to speak, by attacking Hort, but in reality, Hort's text was largely derived from a seriously devoted believer who was committed to biblical inspiration, theological orthodoxy, and holy living.

Why I'm Studying Coptic

Somebody pm'd me and asked about my PhD project, explaining they were interested in how my studies in Coptic were going.

Interested in Coptic Matthew? I asked. Are you crazy?

In prior years, our interest in the ancient versions was that they might help us with text critical issues. For example, in 1 Tim 3:16, we're not sure if the text is supposed to read "who" or "God." Whichever is the correct reading, Paul goes on to connect the word to Jesus. If "God" is the correct word, then here you have an iron-clad reference to Jesus' deity. If "who" is correct, then you lose this prooftext for his deity.

The difference between "God" and "who" is that God is spelled theos--actually, the th is one letter, the letter theta. Theta looks like a round 0 with a dash going through it. In contrast, "who" is spelled os.

The reason why these two words were confused is that Christians always "abbreviated" theos with the first and last letters: theta and sigma with a line over both letters. Thus, the two words looked nearly alike: who--OS; and God--OS (with a dash in the 0 and a line over top).

Since Coptic and the other two ancient versions (Latin and Syriac) were translated in the second or third centuries, and since they have completely different translation words for "who" and "God," they tell us what their Greek manuscripts read. In these languages, you can't confuse "who" and "theos." This is especially important since we don't have any manuscripts of 1 Tim 3:16 earlier than the fourth century.

But my particular project goes in a different direction. I'm working on a specific manuscript named Codex Schøyen. It came to light back in 1999 and is owned by a private collector in Norway (http://www.schoyencollection.com/Coptic.htm#2650). It supposedly dates to the early fourth century (300-325), and if true, it is the oldest substantial copy of Matthew's gospel we have; it is the earliest text of Matthew in 11 whole chapters.

Few have published on the manuscript. Only two monographs exist, the authors of which have died since 2003 (Schenke and Boismard). Their work was methodologically faulty and their theories probably untenable. Apart from these two, Tjitze Baarda, a retired professor in the Netherlands, has written three articles. As far as I know, however, I'm the only one working on it now. (I invite additional information….)

Of course, this manuscript is already extremely important due to its old age. But what makes this manuscript even more interesting is that its text is rather different from all the other manuscripts of Matthew. We would use the technical term "wild," relatively speaking. Nearly every verse has two or three unique readings, often more. For example, the paralyzed man lowered through the roof had been paralyzed for 18 years; when Matthew was called and left his tax collector's booth, it was to Peter's house that they went for a meal (with many tax collectors and sinners); they don't accuse Jesus of blasphemy when he forgives sin; the text almost never says "behold" (in stark contrast to biblical Matthew); instead of Jesus' fame getting spread throughout "all the land," it spreads in the district (without "all"). The list could go on and on.

But otherwise, each verse of Codex Schøyen corresponds to our biblical Matthew. This project is important, especially in these last 10 years, because some scholars are making dramatic claims that the biblical text changed wildly in the late first, second and third centuries. The two dead scholars referenced above used Codex Schøyen to accentuate this claim.

My task is to give a more reasoned explanation for the peculiarities of this text. I have a long way to go before really understanding how this text was ever produced, but I think I will be able to explain a good number of peculiarities simply as translation technique, and a good number of peculiarities as normal text critical issues. Hopefully this will de-mystify this manuscript, and keep it from being the poster child of the chaos mongerers and extreme sceptics.