Conjectural Emendation Quiz

In collaboration with Evangelical Textual Criticism, a small quotation quiz was organized. Here are the answers in chronological order, with some remarks.

#2 is indeed by Scrivener, in 1861:

It is now agreed among competent judges that Conjectural Emendation must never be resorted to, even in passages of acknowledged difficulty, ...

Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament for the Use of Biblical Students, Cambridge etc.: Deighton, Bell, and Co etc., ¹1861, 369.

Note the typical term ‘resorting to’. In later editions the quotation continues as follows:

... difficulty; the absence of proof that a reading proposed to be substituted for the common one is actually supported by some trustworthy document being of itself a fatal objection to our receiving it.

Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament for the Use of Biblical Students, 2 vols, London etc.: Bell, ⁴1894, II p. 244 (already ²1874, p. 433).

This complex sentence - to me at least - seems to mean that conjectures are unacceptable because they are conjectures. The interesting point is that Scrivener maintains all this, knowing about William Linwood’s support of conjectural emendation of the New Testament. By implication, Linwood would not belong to the select class of ‘competent judges’.

#1 is indeed by Eb. Nestle, in 1901, at least in the English translation:

Not long ago philologists evinced such a fondness for conjectural emendation that the question might not unreasonably be asked why they did not rather themselves write the text that they took in hand to explain.

Eberhard Nestle, Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the Greek New Testament. London: Williams and Norgate, 1901, p. 167.

The German original is from 1899, and sounds even better:

Für’s Konjekturen-machen hatten viele Philologen vor noch nicht langer Zeit eine so grosse Vorliebe, dass man nicht ohne Grund fragen konnte, warum sie die Texte, die sie zu erklären vorgaben, nicht lieber selbst schrieben; ...

Eberhard Nestle, Einführung in das Griechische Neue Testament. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, ²1899, p. 134 (not in ¹1897). (The title of the English translation makes explicit what Nestle took for granted ...)

The Nestle quotation continues, however, on a more positive note:

At the same time, the aversion to this method of criticism which till recently prevailed and still to some extent prevails, especially in the matter of the New Testament text, is just as unreasonable.

In German:

... ebenso unbegründet aber war und ist die Abneigung, die namentlich auf dem Gebiet der nt.lichen Textkritik bis in die jüngste Zeit gegen sie herrschte, zum Teil noch herrscht.

Perhaps ‘unfounded’ would have been a better translation of ‘unbegründet’ than ‘unreasonable’, but the idea is clear. Did Nestle have Scrivener (et al.) in mind? In any case, Nestle himself is known for a number of conjectures on the NT text.

#5 is by Kenyon:

No authority could be attached to words which rested upon conjecture; and a critic who should devote himself to editing the Scriptures on conjectural lines would be merely wasting his time.

Frederic G. Kenyon, Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament. London: Macmillan¹1901, 15 (²1926), p. 17.

Kenyon’s position becomes even clearer if the quotation is taken a bit larger:

It is universally agreed ... that the sphere of conjecture in the case of the New Testament is infinitesimal; and it may further be added that for practical purposes it must be treated as non-existent. No authority could be attached to words which rested upon conjecture; and a critic who should devote himself to editing the Scriptures on conjectural lines would be merely wasting his time. Where nothing but questions of literary style are involved, we may be willing to accept a reading upon conjecture, if no better evidence is to be had; but where it is a question of the Word of Life, some surer foundation is required.

The same agreement, now even universal, as found with Scrivener. To me, Kenyon exemplifies two aspects: (1) the opinion that the wealth of evidence in manuscripts, versions, and citations, almost precludes conjectural emendation, and (2) a theology-driven protest against it; hence ‘authority’, and the need of ‘some surer foundation’.
BTW, the particular use of the semicolon in Kenyon’s prose was once common even in British English, but has been abolished from civilised writing ever since; presumably it survives in certain areas of Australia only.

#3 is indeed by me (thanks Christian), in 2006:

Knowledge of authors should precede judgement of their conjectures.

Jan Krans, Beyond What Is Written. Erasmus and Beza as Conjectural Critics of the New Testament (NTTS 35), Leiden etc.: Brill, 2006, p. 3 (cf. p. 333).

It is my short formula for the ‘historical turn’ in the study of NT conjectural emendation. HT to Hort, of course; he was the one who was ‘clever with words’ (PH).

#4 is by Georg Luck, in 2009:

It is a sobering experience to observe what flights of fancy Biblical scholars indulge in order to discredit a conjecture.

Georg Luck, ‘Conjectural Emendation in the Greek New Testament’. In Verae Lectiones. Estudios de Crítica Textual y Edición de Textos Griegos. Eds. M. Sanz Morales and M. Librán Moreno. Cáceres: Huelva, 2009, 169-202, 183.

The entire article is not (yet) very well known, but it nicely shows a current-day classical scholar’s take on NT conjectural emendation. For members of the Textual Criticism Group, a scan of it is available under ‘files’.
The context of this remark is actually Kilpatrick’s defence of the transmitted reading ὑσσώπῳ (‘on hyssop’) against the conjecture ὑσσῷ (‘on a javelin’) in John 19:29.
Peter Head (in the comments on the ETC post) deduced an 18th-century date for the quotation, because it reflects a period in which biblical scholars were still remembered to discuss (and reject) specific conjectures, instead of them simply rejecting conjectural emendation in principle. Perhaps then, in the eyes of Luck, Kilpatrick becomes a biblical scholar instead of a textual critic, just because he deals with conjectures the way he does.

This concludes the quiz; there could easily be made a second one, with quotations just as interesting. Maybe next year.

3. How to Track Down a Conjecture - A Note on Method

This is the third instalment of a series on conjectures in the Nestle editions. See the sidebar for other posts.

In a comment on my posting on 1 Thes 2:16, Peter Head asks whether there are any short-cuts in tracking down the source of a given conjecture in the NA apparatus, compared to the following steps:

1. get a basic idea of the era of the person;
2. check the older detailed commentaries that are likely to discuss this sort of thing;
3. locate the original source in a good library.

The discussion is important enough to be given a separate posting. The general problem is the following. The Nestle editions indicate numerous conjectures in their critical apparatus, but the information consists of only two elements: a reading and a name. How does one proceed to find out which author is meant, and what the original source for the conjecture is (assuming that the author proposed it in a written source)?

Well, I agree with Peter’s method, but I do have some preferences and some short-cuts. Most of the following, by the way, applies just as well to conjectures that did not make it into the Nestle apparatus, but which are mentioned without proper references in commentaries and articles.

To begin with, I already have a detailed list of any conjecture’s first appearance in any Nestle edition, which gives me a first terminus ante quem. Besides, in many cases it is not very hard to guess the author (‘Erasmus’; but try e.g. John 20:17 ‘Lepsius’/‘Lipsius’ or 2 Tim 3:10 ‘v. Wyss'), and for many authors, the source is not hard to guess. In the case of Erasmus, for instance, his Annotationes are the obvious place to go, and there indeed his opinion on Col 1:15 (see NA²⁵) and Jas 4:2 is found.

The key term for the most important short-cut is ‘collections’. It may be true that especially older German commentaries (KEK (Meyer), KNT (Zahn), HNT (Holtzmann)) discuss many conjectures, but one fares much better with special sources of collected conjectures.

The first collection to mention is Wettstein. If the conjecture occurs in Wettstein’s 1750-1751 edition (or in the list found in the 1730 Prolegomena), the possible period becomes much shorter, of course, and in most cases, the author can be identified with confidence. The second collection is from the same century, namely Bowyer’s Critical Conjectures (various editions up to 1812), as important as Wettstein, with even the advantage that Bowyer regularly gives a - rudimentary - reference (he actually gives one if he happens to have one).

The other collections are found in the second half of the nineteenth century. Monographs, dissertations, and articles by scholars in the ‘Dutch School’ are very useful. First came the general books by van Manen and van de Sande Bakhuyzen. Later, dissertations by Franssen, van de Beke Callenfels, de Koe and Baljon gave more detailed discussions of conjectures on individual books of the NT. Together with a series of articles by Baljon, these detailed discussions eventually formed a collection covering the entire NT (except Acts and Revelation).

Needless to say, one would have to have some command of the beautiful Dutch language in order to use these sources (just as Latin for Wettstein and English (and German!) for Bowyer). And we all know that references in those times were not always very clear, but in many cases they are just sufficient to track down the source.

For 1 Thes 2:16, for instance, I now notice that I could have used one of the articles by Baljon (or van Manen’s book) as well, but I had already noted Lünemann’s reference in my files.

A good library is indeed essential, or actually several good ones. Luckily, the Netherlands is a small country. The Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung turned out to be available in microform at the Nijmegen Radboud University. Sometimes nowadays one can be even more lucky and find books and articles on Google Books or archive.org, to name just the two most important sites. The future may be bright for this type of research.

Now that the short-cuts are discussed, the necessary roundabout routes should be mentioned as well. The most important problem is that the information on conjectures and their authors in the Nestle editions is not always reliable. Conjectures can have earlier authors (but how could one possibly know that?), they can have been withdrawn, or proposed quite differently by the authors that are mentioned, etc. Besides that, the Nestle editions often mention only one conjecture for a given textual problem, whereas the nature of conjectural emendation (and the scholars’ indépendance d'esprit) more often than not leads to several efforts worthy of attention. Historical research of NT conjectural emendation is intricate, to say the least.

In the end, one of the remarkable results in tracking down conjectures is that most riddles remain for the period after, say, 1890. More recent books and articles are of course easier to find, but the manner in which the conjectures found their way into the Nestle apparatus can at times be very obscure. I sometimes speculate about someone simply writing a letter to Eberhard Nestle, or to Paul Wilhelm Schmiedel who then informed Nestle. In any case, there is still a lot of work to be done here.

SBL San Diego 2007 II - Mark

Monday morning, I attended a session of the Mark group, if only because (1) it was to be focussed more on textual criticism than usual, and (2) we were supposed to assemble for the ETC lunch there.
The first paper was given by Peter Head, who guided us through the particularities of the presentation of Mark's gospel in Codex Sinaiticus. Though he admitted that his contribution contained more observations than conclusions/interpretations of the findings, I liked it very much, especially the way Peter uses PowerPoint to highlight the points he is making (you had to be there to know what I mean).
A nice example of an observation in search of a fitting explanation is the remarkable use of ekthesis in Mk 9: the many instances of καί with which the paragraphs start are pushed more to the left than usual. One can even observe this phenomenon in Tischendorf's pseudo-facsimile (here - enter "any"/"any" when prompted for a login), but why was it done?
After a short discussion, Nicholas Perrin discussed a well-known variant reading in Mk 1:41: should it read that Jesus was σπλαγχνισθείς ("moved with compassion") or ὀργισθείς ("angered") when a leper said to him; "If you choose, you can make me clean"? Against Ehrman (and others) he defended the first reading.
Vicki Cass Phillips took a different approach to the issue; if the two readings existed, and were scripture for some early communities, what meaning may they have had for these communities?
In my view, Perrin's paper was not really text-critical. The only thing he did was mounting a case for σπλαγχνισθείς as a reading that actually makes a lot of sense in the gospel of Mark. How strong his appeal to the "exodus motive" really is I am not able to judge, but no textual critic ever suggested that Jesus' being moved here would not make sense. The rub lies elsewhere.
Only in the discussion afterwards one of the important questions was raised: if the reading σπλαγχνισθείς is original, how can one explain the origin of the reading ὀργισθείς? There were some confused allusions to the tendency of either the Western text or the scribe of Codex Bezae, but really, this question should have been addressed in the paper. The lectio difficilior argument for ὀργισθείς is too important to be dealt with in a footnote.
The other important question was not even mentioned: part of Ehrman's case - if I remember correctly - is the observation that Luke and Matthew take over Mark's story, but each in a different way, as if they took offense to Mark presenting Jesus as "angered". Here too, thus, a kind of lectio difficilior reasoning: one can better explain the way Mark is used by the other evangelists if one assumes that they read ὀργισθείς. In order to counter Ehrman's case, Perrin should address this issue as well.
After the time for discussion, I quietly left the room, not for lack of interest in the other papers, but because I had to rehearse my own presentation with Geert van Oyen for the TC session in the afternoon (more on this session in a following posting).