Patristic Quotation, Textual Families and Received Text

Patristic Quotation, Textual Families and Received Text

PATRISTIC QUOTATIONS

It is divided into three

1.      Greek writers: there are more than 5 lakhs quotations. Between 1969 and 1981, an international team under the direction of J. Duplacy has produced a general catalogue of patristic quotations from the Greek Bible.

2.      Latin Church Fathers: The older fathers such as Tertullian or Cyprian retain this place of importance for what they reveal about the NT of the African Church in the first half of the 5^th century or even earlier.

3.      Syriac writers: Ephraem of Nisibis (306-73AD) is a prominent church father who has written commentaries on nearly all of the NT.

TEXTUAL FAMILIES

Manuscripts have been put together into families according to their similar readings and peculiar readings. As the demands for the books increased, copying started in a large scale. It meant that different localities/regions would have had each of these texts in some distinctive form as scribes within the community copied the community’s copies which may have differed in greater of lesser ways from the copies of the other communities. In the process, changes within the text took place that were peculiar to the region.

1.      Alexandrian Family:

By the end of the 2^nd century, Christian scholarship was flourishing in Alexandria and within the next centuries, mss were copied by scribes who had sophisticated appreciation of Greek. It was there that a very ancient line of text was copied and preserved as is evident in such Alexandrian Church writers of the 3^rd and 4^th centuries as Athanasius, Origen and Didymus the blind in such mss as p56, p75, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaticus and in copies of the Coptic versions.

2.      Western Family:

The western text is not aptly named as it has been found as well outside the western parts of the Roman Empire. The western type of text can be traced to a vey early Greek for it was used by Marcion, Justin, Heracleon, Irenaeus and other patristic sources of the 2^nd century. Its most important witnesses are Codex Bezae and the old Latin mss, all of which are characterised bylonger or shorter editions and certain striking missions.

3.      Caesarean family:

In the 3^rd and 4^th centuries, Caesarea was the most important Christian centres in Palestine glorying in the major library and the scholars who used it. The basic text of this group, dating rom the early 3^rd century was probably brought there from Egypt and subsequently it spread to Jerusalem and through the Armenian missionaries to Georgia in the Caucasus. In its development, the Caesarean text tradition stands between the Alexandrian and the western.

4.      Byzantine family:

The other major textual tradition to survive is the Byzantine text, sometimes also known as the Syrian text, Koine text, Antiochan text or Ecclesiastical text. Most of the scholars today see the Byzantine text as a later development in the history of transmission. But nonetheless, it can be found in its rudimentary form as early as the 4^th century in such church writers as Basil the great, Chrysostom. It does appear, however, that the Byzantine editors form their text by taking over the elements of the earlier extant traditions, choosing variant readings from among those already available rather than creating new ones that fit their sense of the imposed text.

THE RECEIVED TEXT

The publication of the Greek NT started with Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing machine. The first major product of Gutenberg’s press was a magnificent edition of the Bible. The text was Jerome’s Latin Vulgate and it was published at Mainz between 1450-1456. During the next 50 years, at least 100 editions of the Latin Bible were published by various printing houses. In 1488, the first edition of the complete Hebrew OT came from the Soncino Press in Lombardy (Italy). But except for several short extracts, the Greek NT had to wait until 1514 to come from the press as the Latin Bible was already popular and it was difficult to create two Greek fonts for printing.

In 1514, the first printed Greek NT came from the press as a part of the polyglot Bible. Planned in 1502 by the Cardinal primate of Spain Francisco Ximenes de Cismeros, this magnificent edition of the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin text was printed at a place called Alcala also called Complutum in Latin. This polyglot Bible, also known as Complutensian polyglot was under the editorial care of several scholars of whom Diego Lopez de Zuniga (also known as Stunica) was the most prominent one. But it appears that for some reasons the polyglot Bible was actually not circulated until about 1522.

Though the Complutensian text was the first Greek NT to be printed, the first Greek NT to be published was the edition that was prepared by the famous Dutch scholar by the name Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469-1536).

A well known publisher Johann Froben persuaded him to undertake immediately an edition of the NT because he had heard of the forthcoming Spanish Polyglot Bible and sensing that the market was ready for an edition of the Greek NT, Froben’s proposal was accompanied by a promise to pay Erasmus as much as anyone else might offer for such a job. It made Erasmus to act hurriedly. He went to Basle in July 1515 and started to work on the Greek mss to be set up along with the Vulgate text. The printing started on 2^nd October 1515 and in a remarkably short time, the entire edition was finished in 1^st March 1516.

The edition consisted of about 1000 pages and as Erasmus himself declared later, it was “precipitated rather than edited.” Owing to the haste in production, the volume contains hundreds of typographical errors. One scholar by the name Scrivener declares that “it is in that respect the most faulty book I know of.” Since Erasmus could not find a mss that contains the entire NT, he utilized several mss for various parts of the NT. For most of the text, he relied on two rather inferior mss from a monastic library at Basle both dating from about the 12^th century.

Erasmus entered occasional corrections for the printer in the margins or between the lines of the Greek script. For the book of Revelation, he had but one mss dating from the 12^th century which he had borrowed from his friend Reuchlin. Unfortunately, this mss lacked the final page which contain the last six verses of the book. Instead of finding another mss, he translated those verses from the Latin vulgate.

The reception was mixed. On the one hand, it found many buyers throughout Europe and within three years, a second edition was published. The 2^nd edition was done in 1519 and it became the basis of Luther’s German translation. The 3^rd edition came out in 1522, the 4^th in 1527. In this 4^th edition, Erasmus included his own Latin version and the Latin Vulgate. In the process of this two editions, Erasmus also incorporated Ximenes Polyglot Bible. In the 4^th Edition, he made alterations in about 90 passages on the basis of the Polyglot Bible. A 5^th Edition appeared in 1535 where he discarded the Latin Vulgate but differed very little from the 4^th edition regarding the Greek text.

The Erasmus Greek text was inferior to the Complutensian Polyglot Bible. Yet, it was first in the market and was available in a cheaper and more convenient format. It attained a much wider circulation and it exercised a far greater influence than its rivals. Apart from the 5 editions of Erasmus, there are more than 30 unauthorised reprints which appeared at places like Venice, Strasbourg, Basil and Paris.

In 1624, a person by the name Bona Venture Elzevir along with his nephew Abraham published in Leiden, a Greek NT and in order to encourage its sale, the editors made some exaggerated claims in the prefix. In the second edition they said, “It has been accepted by everyone. Here is a text which is received by all in which we give nothing, changed or corrupted.” From this preface is the term “Received Text” (Textus Receptus) taken. Overtime, this term has been retroactively applied to Erasmus’s Greek Bible as his work served as the basis of the other books.

The first recognized scholar to break away with the received text was the German scholar Berlin Karl Lachmann who published an edition of the Greek NT that rests upon the application of textual criticism in the evaluation of the variant readings. After five years of work, he published the Greek text in 1831 in Berlin with a list of passages where it differs from the received text.