Textual criticism
The Center s latest guidelines (2003) no longer prescribe a particular editorial procedure. Cladistics is a technique borrowed from biology, where it was originally named phylogenetic systematics by Willi Hennig. Close-call decisions are usually resolved in favor of the copy-text. The first published, printed edition of the Greek New Testament was produced by this method.Citing the example of Nathaniel Hawthorne, he noted: When an author s manuscript is preserved, this has paramount authority, of course. The CEAA s Statement of Editorial Principles and Procedures, first published in 1967, adopted the Greg–Bowers rationale in full.
A. The French critic Joseph Bédier likewise became disenchanted with the stemmatic method, and concluded that the editor should choose the best available text, and emend it as little as possible. In McKerrow s method as originally introduced, the copy-text was not necessarily the earliest text.
Instead of a scribe miscopying his source, a compositor or a printing shop may read or typeset a work in a way that differs from the autograph. When comparing different documents, or witnesses , of a single, original text, the observed differences are called variant readings, or simply variants or readings. Although nearly all subsequent manuscripts may have included the addition, textual critics may reconstruct the original without the addition. The result of the process is a text with readings drawn from many witnesses.
After the novel s initial publication, Melville s publisher asked him to soften the novel s criticisms of missionaries in the South Seas. Such people include Gail Riplinger, Peter Ruckman, and others.
have been applied to many works, extending backwards from the present to the earliest known written documents, in Mesopotamia and Egypt—a period of about five millennia. The basic problem, as described by Paul Maas, is as follows: Maas comments further that A dictation revised by the author must be regarded as equivalent to an autograph manuscript . Even so, the oldest manuscripts, being of the Alexandrian text-type, are the most favored, and the critical text has an Alexandrian disposition. External evidence is evidence of each physical witness, its date, source, and relationship to other known witnesses.
To secure commercial publication in 1896, Crane agreed to remove profanity, but he also made stylistic revisions. In effect the San aa manuscripts could just as easily fall into one of the oral traditions of the known Ahruf or dialect of the Quran as preserved by Ali or Ibn Masud.
If one reading occurs more often than another at the same level of the tree, then the dominant reading is selected. W.
Greg s rationale as practiced by Bowers and Tanselle has come to be known as the Greg–Bowers or the Greg–Bowers–Tanselle method. In his 1964 essay, Some Principles for Scholarly Editions of Nineteenth-Century American Authors , Bowers said that the theory of copy-text proposed by Sir Walter Greg rules supreme . Whereas Greg had limited his illustrative examples to English Renaissance drama, where his expertise lay, Bowers argued that the rationale was the most workable editorial principle yet contrived to produce a critical text that is authoritative in the maximum of its details whether the author be Shakespeare, Dryden, Fielding, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Stephen Crane. The ultimate objective of the textual critic s work is the production of a critical edition containing a text most closely approximating the original. There are three fundamental approaches to textual criticism: eclecticism, stemmatics, and copy-text editing.
A second advantage of a clear text is that it is easier to quote from or to reprint. The most common division today is as follows: The New Testament portion of the English translation known as the King James Version was based on the Textus Receptus, a Greek text prepared by Erasmus based on a few late medieval Greek manuscripts of the Byzantine text-type (1, 1rK, 2e, 2ap, 4, 7, 817). A minority position represented by The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text edition by Zane C.
One of the earliest was Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752), who in 1734 produced an edition of the Greek New Testament. His rationale was adopted and significantly expanded by Fredson Bowers (1905–1991).
However, the latter claim of variants being not from the canonical 7 cannot be demonstrated as the only known version of the Qur an has been the current form, accepted as the Uthmani recension, with wall inscriptions of certain verses dating further back than the Sana a manuscripts mirroring the current content. In such a situation, a key objective becomes the identification of the first exemplar before any split in the tradition.
It is not a copy of any particular manuscript, and may deviate from the majority of existing manuscripts. Tanselle explained the rationale for this approach: In the first place, an editor s primary responsibility is to establish a text; whether his goal is to reconstruct that form of the text which represents the author s final intention or some other form of the text, his essential task is to produce a reliable text according to some set of principles.
and Nestle-Aland, 27th ed.). He suspected that editors tended to favor trees with two branches, as this would maximize the opportunities for editorial judgment (as there would be no third branch to break the tie whenever the witnesses disagreed).
For the same reasons, the most geographically diverse witnesses are preferred. In some cases, McKerrow would choose a later witness, noting that if an editor has reason to suppose that a certain text embodies later corrections than any other, and at the same time has no ground for disbelieving that these corrections, or some of them at least, are the work of the author, he has no choice but to make that text the basis of his reprint. By 1939, in his Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare, McKerrow had changed his mind about this approach, as he feared that a later edition – even if it contained authorial corrections – would deviate more widely than the earliest print from the author s original manuscript. He therefore concluded that the correct procedure would be produced by using the earliest good print as copy-text and inserting into it, from the first edition which contains them, such corrections as appear to us to be derived from the author. But, fearing the arbitrary exercise of editorial judgment, McKerrow stated that, having concluded that a later edition had substantive revisions attributable to the author, we must accept all the alterations of that edition, saving any which seem obvious blunders or misprints. Anglo-American textual criticism in the last half of the twentieth century came to be dominated by a landmark 1950 essay by Sir Walter W.
In the stemmatic method, a manuscript that is derived from more than one source is said to be contaminated. The method also assumes that scribes only make new errors – they do not attempt to correct the errors of their predecessors. About 12,000 fragments belonged to 926 copies of the Qur an, the other 2,000 were loose fragments.
Often, the base text is selected from the oldest manuscript of the text, but in the early days of printing, the copy text was often a manuscript that was at hand. Using the copy-text method, the critic examines the base text and makes corrections (called emendations) in places where the base text appears wrong to the critic. The steps of examinatio and emendatio resemble copy-text editing.
Textual scholars have debated for centuries which sources are most closely derived from the original, hence which readings in those sources are correct. Some of the method s rules that are designed to reduce the exercise of editorial judgment do not necessarily produce the correct result.
Critics will often prefer the readings supported by the oldest witnesses. In his commentary, he established the rule Proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua, ( the harder reading is to be preferred ) Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745–1812) published several editions of the New Testament.
The argument states that the far greater number of surviving later Byzantine manuscripts implies an equivalent preponderance of Byzantine texts amongst lost earlier manuscripts; and hence that a critical reconstruction of the predominant text of the Byzantine tradition would have a superior claim to being closest to the autographs. Other scholars have criticized the current categorization of manuscripts into text-types and prefer either to subdivide the manuscripts in other ways or to discard the text-type taxonomy. Textual criticism is also used by those who assert that the New Testament was written in Aramaic (see Aramaic primacy). In attempting to determine the original text of the New Testament books, some modern textual critics have identified sections as interpolations. This contains a text most closely approximating the original, which is accompanied by an apparatus criticus (or critical apparatus) that presents: Before mechanical printing, literature was copied by hand, and many variations were introduced by copyists.
At the same time, the critical text should document variant readings, so the relation of extant witnesses to the reconstructed original is apparent to a reader of the critical edition. Bowers said that his edition of Stephen Crane s first novel, Maggie, presented the author s final and uninfluenced artistic intentions. not implying any further inquiry as to why the author had made the change. Tanselle discusses the example of Herman Melville s Typee.
It is required, therefore, that the critic can distinguish erroneous readings from correct ones. He surveyed editions of medieval French texts that were produced with the stemmatic method, and found that textual critics tended overwhelmingly to produce trees divided into just two branches.
The age of printing made the scribal profession effectively redundant. Other factors being equal, these are the best witnesses. There are many other more sophisticated considerations.
The method takes its name from the stemma, family tree , which shows the relationships of the surviving witnesses. Instead, the critic forms opinions about individual witnesses, relying on both external and internal evidence. Since the mid-19th century, eclecticism, in which there is no a priori bias to a single manuscript, has been the dominant method of editing the Greek text of the New Testament (currently, the United Bible Society, 4th ed.
In establishing the critical text, the textual critic considers both external evidence (the age, provenance, and affiliation of each witness) and internal or physical considerations (what the author and scribes, or printers, were likely to have done). The collation of all known variants of a text is referred to as a variorum, namely a work of textual criticism whereby all variations and emendations are set side by side so that a reader can track how textual decisions have been made in the preparation of a text for publication. Eclecticism refers to the practice of consulting a wide diversity of witnesses to a particular original. A plausible reading that occurs less often may, nevertheless, be the correct one. Lastly, the stemmatic method assumes that every extant witness is derived, however remotely, from a single source.
Sometimes these considerations can be in conflict. Two common considerations have the Latin names lectio brevior (shorter reading) and lectio difficilior (more difficult reading). Bible Commentaries also discuss these, sometimes in great detail. These possible later additions include the following: It is also worthy to note that various groups of highly conservative Christians believe that when Ps.12:6-7 speaks of the preservation of the words of God, that this nullifies the need for textual criticism, lower, and higher.
The textual critic s task, therefore, is to sort through the variants, eliminating those most likely to be un-original, hence establishing a critical text , or critical edition, that is intended to best approximate the original. Textual criticism (or lower criticism) is a branch of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in the texts of manuscripts.
Relegating all editorial matter to an appendix and allowing the text to stand by itself serves to emphasize the primacy of the text and permits the reader to confront the literary work without the distraction of editorial comment and to read the work with ease. Greg did not live long enough to apply his rationale of copy-text to any actual editions of works.
From the text which arose in this way it is not possible to subtract these forces and influences, in order to obtain a text of the author s own. It is not always apparent which single variant represents the author s original work.
The change of name indicated the shift to a broader agenda than just American authors. In the 1970s, 14,000 fragments of Qur an were discovered in an old mosque in Sanaa, the Sana a manuscripts.
The Center also ceased its role in the allocation of funds. Other things being equal, textual scholars expect that a larger time gap between an original and a manuscript means more changes in the text. .
The sheer number of witnesses presents unique difficulties, chiefly in that it makes stemmatics impractical. Many theological organisations, societies, newsletters, and churches also hold to this belief, including AV Publications , Sword of The LORD Newsletter, The Antioch Bible Society <http://antiochbiblesociety.org/> , and others.
Pierpont in their The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform, and the King James Only Movement. Believers in sacred texts and scriptures sometimes are reluctant to accept any form of challenge to what they believe to be divine revelation.
Tanselle argues that: He suggests that where a revision is horizontal (i.e., aimed at improving the work as originally conceived), then the editor should adopt the author s later version. Puin who led the restoration project revealed, unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography and artistic embellishment. Effectively, textual criticism of the Qur an as extant today is still an ongoing effort as current critiques have still fallen short of conclusively demonstrating any variant outside the already known sphere of Islamic narratives. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints includes the Book of Mormon as a foundational reference.
The process of textual criticism seeks to explain how each variant may have entered the text, either by accident (duplication or omission) or intention (harmonization or censorship), as scribes or supervisors transmitted the original author s text by copying it. Although a reading supported by the majority of witnesses is frequently preferred, this does not follow automatically.
Secondly, because of the systematic character of the work, purely censorial alterations sparked off further alterations, determined at this stage by literary considerations. Greg, The Rationale of Copy-Text .
That reading is then the most likely candidate to have been original. Various scholars have developed guidelines, or canons of textual criticism, to guide the exercise of the critic s judgment in determining the best readings of a text. The practice is based on the principle that the more independent transmission histories are, the less likely they will be to reproduce the same errors.
In modern translations of the Bible such as the New International Version, the results of textual criticism have led to certain verses, words and phrases being left out or marked as not original. Some LDS members believe the book to be a literal historical record, while others believe it is pure fiction rather than historical writing. Textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible compares manuscript versions of the following sources (dates refer to the oldest extant manuscripts in each family): Given the sacred nature of the Hebrew Bible in Judaism, those unaware of the details dealt with in textual criticism might think that there are no corruptions in the text, since these texts were meticulously transmitted and written.
In its application in textual criticism, the text of a number of different manuscripts is entered into a computer, which records all the differences between them. Techniques from the biological discipline of cladistics are currently also being used to determine the relationships between manuscripts. The phrase lower criticism is used to describe the contrast between textual criticism and higher criticism, which is the endeavor to establish the authorship, date, and place of composition of the original text. Textual criticism has been practiced for over two thousand years.
Other types of evidence must be used for that purpose. The major theoretical problem with applying cladistics to textual criticism is that cladistics assumes that, once a branching has occurred in the family tree, the two branches cannot rejoin; so all similarities can be taken as evidence of common ancestry. A CEAA examiner would inspect each edition, and only those meeting the requirements would receive a seal denoting An Approved Text. Between 1966 and 1975, the Center allocated more than $1.5 million in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to various scholarly editing projects, which were required to follow the guidelines (including the structure of editorial apparatus) as Bowers had defined them. The Center for Scholarly Editions (CSE) replaced the CEAA in 1976.
Although no device can insure accuracy of quotation, the insertion of symbols (or even footnote numbers) into a text places additional difficulties in the way of the quoter. Starting in the nineteenth century, scholars sought more rigorous methods to guide editorial judgment.
Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) greatly contributed to making this method famous, even though he did not invent it (see Timpanaro, The genesis of Lachmann s method). For example, readings that depart from the known practice of a scribe or a given period may be deemed more reliable, since a scribe is unlikely on his own initiative to have departed from the usual practice. Internal evidence is evidence that comes from the text itself, independent of the physical characteristics of the document.
Among them was a variant of Bengel s rule, Lectio difficilior potior, the harder reading is better. Another was Lectio brevior praeferenda, the shorter reading is better , based on the idea that scribes were more likely to add than to delete. Early textual critics were concerned with preserving the works of antiquity, and this continued through the medieval period into early modern times until the invention of the printing press. Many ancient works, such as the Bible and the Greek tragedies, survive in hundreds of copies, and the relationship of each copy to the original may be unclear.
Emendations not supported by any known source are sometimes called conjectural emendations. The process of selectio resembles eclectic textual criticism, but applied to a restricted set of hypothetical hyparchetypes. In his 1796 edition, he established fifteen critical rules.
Though the editor may indeed give a rational account of his decision at each point on the basis of the documents, nevertheless to aim to produce the ideal text which Crane would have produced in 1896 if the publisher had left him complete freedom is to my mind just as unhistorical as the question of how the first World War or the history of the United States would have developed if Germany had not caused the USA to enter the war in 1917 by unlimited submarine combat. If we succeed in establishing the text of The textual critic s ultimate objective is the production of a critical edition .
Eclecticism allows inferences to be drawn regarding the original text, based on the evidence of contrasts between witnesses. Eclectic readings also normally give an impression of the number of witnesses to each available reading. Stemmatics and copy-text editing – while both eclectic, in that they permit the editor to select readings from multiple sources – sought to reduce subjectivity by establishing one or a few witnesses presumably as being favored by objective criteria. Stemmatics or stemmatology is a rigorous approach to textual criticism.
On the other hand, Reformation biblical scholars such as Martin Luther saw the academic analysis of biblical texts and their provenance as entirely in line with orthodox Christian faith. Best-text editing (a complete rejection of eclecticism) became one extreme.
McKerrow introduced the term copy-text in his 1904 edition of the works of Thomas Nashe, defining it as the text used in each particular case as the basis of mine. McKerrow was aware of the limitations of the stemmatic method, and believed it was more prudent to choose one particular text that was thought to be particularly reliable, and then to emend it only where the text was obviously corrupt. Although biblical books that are letters, like Greek plays, presumably had one original, the question of whether some biblical books, like the gospels, ever had just one original has been discussed.
The manuscripts are then grouped according to their shared characteristics. If a scribe refers to more than one source when creating his copy, then the new copy will not clearly fall into a single branch of the family tree.
Interest in applying textual criticism to the Qur an has also developed after the discovery of the Sana a manuscripts in 1972, which possibly date back to the 7-8th century. In the English language, the works of Shakespeare have been a particularly fertile ground for textual criticism—both because the texts, as transmitted, contain a considerable amount of variation, and because the effort and expense of producing superior editions of his works have always been widely viewed as worthwhile. Thomas Tanselle (1934–) vigorously took up the method s defense and added significant contributions of his own.
Thus, the consideration of internal and external evidence is related. After considering all relevant factors, the textual critic seeks the reading that best explains how the other readings would arise. The lack of autograph manuscripts applies to many cultures other than Greek and Roman.
The evaluation of internal evidence also provides the critic with information that helps him evaluate the reliability of individual manuscripts. Although Melville pronounced the changes an improvement, Tanselle rejected them in his edition, concluding that there is no evidence, internal or external, to suggest that they are the kinds of changes Melville would have made without pressure from someone else. Bowers confronted a similar problem in his edition of Maggie.
He concluded that this outcome was unlikely to have occurred by chance, and that therefore, the method was tending to produce bipartite stemmas regardless of the actual history of the witnesses. For example, where there are more than two witnesses at the same level of the tree, normally the critic will select the dominant reading.
Homoioteleuton occurs when two words/phrases/lines end with the same sequence of letters. If it seems that one manuscript is by far the best text, then copy text editing is appropriate, and if it seems that a group of manuscripts are good, then eclecticism on that group would be proper. The Hodges-Farstad edition of the Greek New Testament attempts to use stemmatics for some portions. The stemmatic method assumes that each witness is derived from one, and only one, predecessor.
This position is also held by Maurice A. If two competing readings occur equally often, then the editor uses his judgment to select the correct reading. After selectio, the text may still contain errors, since there may be passages where no source preserves the correct reading.
What one omits, the others may retain; what one adds, the others are unlikely to add. Between influences on the author and influences on the text are all manner of transitions. Bowers and Tanselle recognize that texts often exist in more than one authoritative version.
When a text has been improved by the scribe, it is said to be sophisticated, but sophistication impairs the method by obscuring a document s relationship to other witnesses, and making it more difficult to place the manuscript correctly in the stemma. The stemmatic method requires the textual critic to group manuscripts by commonality of error. Where the editor concludes that the text is corrupt, it is corrected by a process called emendation , or emendatio (also sometimes called divinatio).
The step of examination, or examinatio is applied to find corruptions. The principle is sound without regard for the literary period. For works where an author s manuscript survived – a case Greg had not considered – Bowers concluded that the manuscript should generally serve as copy-text.
There were, however, intermediate cases that could reasonably have been attributed to either intention, and some of Bowers s choices came under fire – both as to his judgment, and as to the wisdom of conflating readings from the two different versions of Maggie. Hans Zeller argued that it is impossible to tease apart the changes Crane made for literary reasons and those made at the publisher s insistence: Firstly, in anticipation of the character of the expected censorship, Crane could be led to undertake alterations which also had literary value in the context of the new version. This rule cannot be applied uncritically, as scribes may omit material inadvertently. Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901) and Fenton J.
Legitimate textual criticism may be resisted by both believers and skeptics. Muslims consider the original Arabic text to be the final revelation, revealed to Muhammad from AD 610 to his death in 632. Erasmus, the editor, selected a manuscript from the local Dominican monastery in Basle and corrected its obvious errors by consulting other local manuscripts.
Farstad argues that the Byzantine text-type represents an earlier text-type than the surviving Alexandrian texts. The second, lectio difficilior potior (the harder reading is stronger), recognizes the tendency for harmonization—resolving apparent inconsistencies in the text.
This is ascribed to the fact that early soferim (scribes) did not treat the text with the reverence given to it later on. The New Testament has been preserved in more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Ethiopic and Armenian. And yet, as in the New Testament, in particular in the Masoretic texts, changes, corruptions, and erasures have been found.
Greg noted, That if a scribe makes a mistake he will inevitably produce nonsense is the tacit and wholly unwarranted assumption. The critic Joseph Bédier (1864–1938) launched a particularly withering attack on stemmatics in 1928. Robinson and William G.
It does not account for the possibility that the original author may have revised his work, and that the text could have existed at different times in more than one authoritative version. When copy-text editing, the scholar fixes errors in a base text, often with the help of other witnesses. As Shillingsburg notes, English scholarly editions have tended to use notes at the foot of the text page, indicating, tacitly, a greater modesty about the established text and drawing attention more forcibly to at least some of the alternative forms of the text . In 1963, the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) established the Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA).
It would be ridiculous to argue that Hawthorne made approximately three to four thousand small changes in proof, and then wrote the manuscript of The Blithedale Romance according to the same system as the manuscript of the Seven Gables, a system that he had rejected in proof. Following Greg, the editor would then replace any of the manuscript readings with substantives from printed editions that could be reliably attributed to the author: Obviously, an editor cannot simply reprint the manuscript, and he must substitute for its readings any words that he believes Hawthorne changed in proof. McKerrow had articulated textual criticism s goal in terms of our ideal of an author s fair copy of his work in its final state . Bowers and Tanselle argue for rejecting textual variants that an author inserted at the suggestion of others. Hodges and Arthur L.
While this assumption is applicable to the evolution of living creatures, it is not always true of manuscript traditions, since a scribe can work from two different manuscripts at once, producing a new copy with characteristics of both. Nonetheless, software developed for use in biology has been applied with some success to textual criticism; for example, it is being used by the Canterbury Tales Project to determine the relationship between the 84 surviving manuscripts and four early printed editions of the Canterbury Tales. All texts are subject to investigation and systematic criticism where the original verified first document is not available. Such cases also include scribes simplifying and smoothing texts they did not fully understand. Another scribal tendency is called homoioteleuton, meaning same endings .
And because the King James Bible is based on later manuscripts, such verses became part of the Bible tradition in English-speaking lands. Most modern Bibles have footnotes to indicate areas which have disputed source documents. For example, a second edition of a Shakespeare play may include an addition alluding to an event known to have happened between the two editions.
Ehrman, These scribal additions are often found in late medieval manuscripts of the New Testament, but not in the manuscripts of the earlier centuries, he adds. Since errors tend to accumulate, older manuscripts should have fewer errors.
The resulting text, except for the accidentals, is constructed without relying predominantly on any one witness. W. Thus it may happen that in a critical edition the text rightly chosen as copy may not by any means be the one that supplies most substantive readings in cases of variation.
Hort (1828–1892) published an edition of the New Testament in 1881. But where a revision is vertical (i.e., fundamentally altering the work s intention as a whole), then the revision should be treated as a new work, and edited separately on its own terms. Bowers was also influential in defining the form of critical apparatus that should accompany a scholarly edition.
Indeed I regard the uninfluenced artistic intentions of the author as something which exists only in terms of aesthetic abstraction. W.
In addition to the content of the apparatus, Bowers led a movement to relegate editorial matter to appendices, leaving the critically-established text in the clear , that is, free of any signs of editorial intervention. Crane originally printed the novel privately in 1893.
Printed editions, while less susceptible to the proliferation of variations likely to arise during manual transmission, are nonetheless not immune to introducing variations from an author s autograph. Again in consequence of the systemic character of the work, the contamination of the two historical versions in the edited text gives rise to a third version.
The oldest known copy of the Qur an so far belongs to this collection: it dates to the end of the 7th-8th century. This makes it more like an automated approach to stemmatics.
The nonspecific form of censorship described above is one of the historical conditions under which Crane wrote the second version of Maggie and made it function. The important find uncovered many textual variants not known from the canonical 7 (or 10 or 14) texts.
Bowers s approach was to preserve the stylistic and literary changes of 1896, but to revert to the 1893 readings where he believed that Crane was fulfilling the publisher s intention rather than his own. Homeoarchy refers to eye-skip when the beginnings of two lines are similar. The critic may also examine the other writings of the author to decide what words and grammatical constructions match his style.
In a purely eclectic approach, no single witness is theoretically favored. In biology, the technique is used to determine the evolutionary relationships between different species.
Some manuscripts show evidence that particular care was taken in their composition, for example, by including alternative readings in their margins, demonstrating that more than one prior copy (exemplar) was consulted in producing the current one. Readings supported by a majority of witnesses are also usually preferred, since these are less likely to reflect accidents or individual biases.
In such a case, while there can be no logical reason for giving preference to the copy-text, in practice, if there is no reason for altering its reading, the obvious thing seems to be to let it stand. The exactly balanced variants are said to be indifferent. Editors who follow Greg s rationale produce eclectic editions, in that the authority for the accidentals is derived from one particular source (usually the earliest one) that the editor considers to be authoritative, but the authority for the substantives is determined in each individual case according to the editor s judgment. However, it may be no more than fortuitous that more witnesses have survived that present a particular reading.
Furthermore, most quotations appear in contexts where symbols are inappropriate; thus when it is necessary to quote from a text which has not been kept clear of apparatus, the burden of producing a clear text of the passage is placed on the quoter. However, where there is a difference, the computer does not attempt to decide which reading is closer to the original text, and so does not indicate which branch of the tree is the root —which manuscript tradition is closest to the original.
Applying this principle leads to taking the more difficult (unharmonized) reading as being more likely to be the original. Various considerations can be used to decide which reading is the most likely to be original.
This assumption has often come under attack. The family tree is also referred to as a cladorama. Having completed the stemma, the critic proceeds to the next step, called selection or selectio, where the text of the archetype is determined by examining variants from the closest hyparchetypes to the archetype and selecting the best ones.
The Westcott and Hort text, which was the basis for the Revised Version of the English bible, also used the copy-text method, using the Codex Vaticanus as the base manuscript. The bibliographer Ronald B. Yet the fallacy is still maintained that since the first edition was proofread by the author, it must represent his final intentions and hence should be chosen as copy-text.
They proposed nine critical rules, including a version of Bengel s rule, The reading is less likely to be original that shows a disposition to smooth away difficulties. They also argued that Readings are approved or rejected by reason of the quality, and not the number, of their supporting witnesses , and that The reading is to be preferred that most fitly explains the existence of the others. Many of these rules, although originally developed for biblical textual criticism, have wide applicability to any text susceptible to errors of transmission. Since the canons of criticism are highly susceptible to interpretation, and at times even contradict each other, they can often be employed to justify any result that fits the textual critic s aesthetic or theological agenda. Additionally, the examination of the texts yielded a demonstration that the textual difficulties pointed towards a very strong oral tradition which would be indicative of the manuscript being written in the Qiraat or recitation style of the author - a phenomenon already seen in older inscriptions and wall markings. The examination of Gerd R.
Many of these men called themselves Christian humanists, precisely because textual criticism (usually of biblical texts) lay at the heart of their work. While textual criticism developed into a discipline of thorough analysis of the Bible — both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament — scholars also use it to determine the original content of classic texts, such as Plato s Republic. Ancient scribes made errors or alterations when copying manuscripts by hand.
The scribe, having finished copying the first, skips to the second, omitting all intervening words. However, unlike the New Testament where the earliest witnesses are within 200 years of the original, the earliest existing manuscripts of most classical texts were written about a millennium after their composition.
The difference between cladistics and more traditional forms of statistical analysis is that, rather than simply arranging the manuscripts into rough groupings according to their overall similarity, cladistics assumes that they are part of a branching family tree and uses that assumption to derive relationships between them. Some opponents and polemicists may look for any way to find fault with a particular religious text.
This can be done by looking for places in the base text that do not make sense or by looking at the text of other witnesses for a superior reading. When one collates the manuscript of The House of the Seven Gables against the first printed edition, one finds an average of ten to fifteen differences per page between the manuscript and the print, many of them consistent alterations from the manuscript system of punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and word-division.
In fact, the other techniques can be seen as special cases of stemmatics in which a rigorous family history of the text cannot be determined but only approximated. He also noted that, for many works, more than one reasonable stemma could be postulated, suggesting that the method was not as rigorous or as scientific as its proponents had claimed. The stemmatic method s final step is emendatio, also sometimes referred to as conjectural emendation. But in fact, the critic employs conjecture at every step of the process.
In Islamic tradition, the Qur an was memorised and written down by Muhammad s companions and copied as needed. However, it is well known to scholars that: written versions vary enormously in materials, format and aspect . There are far fewer witnesses to classical texts than to the Bible, so scholars can use stemmatics and, in some cases, copy text editing.
Even footnotes at the bottom of the text pages are open to the same objection, when the question of a photographic reprint arises. Some critics believe that a clear-text edition gives the edited text too great a prominence, relegating textual variants to appendices that are difficult to use, and suggesting a greater sense of certainty about the established text than it deserves. W.
Practical experience shows the contrary. The first is the general observation that scribes tended to add words, for clarification or out of habit, more often than they removed them.
Previously, translations of the New Testament such as the King James Version had mostly been based on Erasmus s redaction of the New Testament in Greek, the Textus Receptus from the 1500s based on later manuscripts. According to Bart D. Consequently, New Testament textual critics have adopted eclecticism after sorting the witnesses into three major groups, called text-types.
Greg proposed: Greg observed that compositors at printing shops tended to follow the substantive readings of their copy faithfully, except when they deviated unintentionally; but that as regards accidentals they will normally follow their own habits or inclination, though they may, for various reasons and to varying degrees, be influenced by their copy. He concluded: The true theory is, I contend, that the copy-text should govern (generally) in the matter of accidentals, but that the choice between substantive readings belongs to the general theory of textual criticism and lies altogether beyond the narrow principle of the copy-text. That exemplar is known as the archetype.
The failure to make this distinction and to apply this principle has naturally led to too close and too general a reliance upon the text chosen as basis for an edition, and there has arisen what may be called the tyranny of the copy-text, a tyranny that has, in my opinion, vitiated much of the best editorial work of the past generation. Greg s view, in short, was that the copy-text can be allowed no over-riding or even preponderant authority so far as substantive readings are concerned. The choice between reasonable competing readings, he said: Although Greg argued that an editor should be free to use his judgment to choose between competing substantive readings, he suggested that an editor should defer to the copy-text when the claims of two readings .. appear to be exactly balanced. .. Starting in the 1970s, G.
