The textbook by Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament (trans. Erroll F. Rhodes; 2d ed.; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989), 280-281, presents twelve basic rules for textual criticism. This post takes a look at the second one:
2. Only the reading which best satisfies the requirements of both external and internal criteria can be original.
This basic rule does a number of different things. Primarily, it introduces the concepts of external evidence and internal evidence as the basis for text critical judgment. Though other critics have proposal finer classes of evidence (e.g., Hort’s various categories of evidence, and Metzger’s subdivision of internal evidence into intrinsic and transcriptional), it seems to me that this basic distinction between an abstract text as a sequence of words and the concrete manuscripts that embody the text–corresponding to the internal and external evidence respectively–is fundamentally sound. This distinction will be fleshed out among Alands’ later basic rules, so a detailed discussion of them will be deferred until later.
What I would like to address in this post is an issue that has gained salience after the publication of Alands’ revised edition of their textbook, and that issue is the notion of an original text. In an important essay, Eldon J. Epp, “The Multivalence of the Term ‘Original Text’ in New Testament Textual Criticism,” HTR 92 (1999): 245-281, problematizes the notion of an “original” text, at least a single coherent concept, and calls for four dimensions of originality:
- A predecessor text-form. This refers to earlier stages in the composition of a work. Epp would allow investigations into such a predecessor text-form–as part of textual criticism proper–only if the predecessor text-form manifested itself in manuscript evidence or textual variation (268).
- An autographic text-form. This is the usual sense of “original” in text-critical discussion: the form of the text as it was given out by the author for public distribution.
- A canonical text-form. This refers to the form of the text when it became authoritative. Obviously, when this happened might not be clearly known.
- An interpretative text-form. This refers to the state of the text as existed in the life of the church (think Parker’s living text or Ehrman’s orthodox corruptions).
Epp’s essay is helpful in getting us to think about different kinds of “originals,” but ultimately the only kind of “original” that textual critics can reconstruct is what results from the application of internal and external criteria (Alands’ basic rule 2). If we don’t have manuscript evidence of predecessor text-forms, we cannot reconstruct them using the methods of textual criticism (hence Epp’s proviso). If we don’t have manuscript evidence of a text before it became canonical, then textual criticism can only really yield of the canonical text-form, not the autographic text-form. Interpretative text-forms are usually directly attested in manuscripts, so the scholar of such text-forms are more interested in what they witness about the people who produced and used them.
For the specific case of Galatians, I’m concerned that our external evidence only gets us back to an archetypal letter collection. If we cannot use conjectural emendation, then the form of Galatians that we are able to reconstruct is basically the canonical text-form of the archetype, not the autographic text-form of the individual letter. Perhaps there is hardly any difference between the archetype and autograph, but how can we tell?