Abstract
J.K. Elliott’s collection of essays renders an indispensable service to the discipline of NT textual criticism. Spanning nearly a half-century of scholarly output, the essays afford readers an opportunity to accompany Elliott on his lengthy and arduous text-critical journey and track the thinking of one of today’s premier practitioners of ‘thoroughgoing eclecticism.’ More than a series of text-critical exercises, Elliott’s essays articulate trends in the field and disclose the necessary mettle to undertake such endeavors. The volume is an exemplar of the indefatigable industry and patience required of textual critics, but particularly of Elliott himself, where he is often the sole advocate for an approach that privileges the NT author’s observable language, style, and theology over every other criterion for reconstructing the text.
Elliott’s collection of essays consists of fifty-seven articles divided among four major sections: (1) Methodology; (2) Manuscripts; (3) Studies and Praxis; and (4) Reviews of Recent Critical Editions. The contributions under Methodology tackle one of the thorniest problems for NT textual critics, the text of the NT in the second century, and they introduce readers to the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of ‘thoroughgoing eclecticism.’ For thoroughgoing eclectics, readings that accord best with the characteristics of an author’s writing will most likely reflect the ‘original’ (a beleaguered term now abandoned by Elliott). Knowledge of individual manuscripts, the history of the text, and even the broad lines of textual divisions are considered but not decisive for the task of reconstruction. The authors of the NT rather than later scribes will demonstrate the greater degree of stylistic consistency according to this approach and provide a baseline for text-critical judgments. The privileging of such ‘internal criteria’ will no doubt be contested, but they never come across as purely arbitrary.
The volume covers an immense amount of data. Select Greek papyri, the codices Vaticanus and Bezae, a Greek-Coptic fragment, and the manuscript heritages of the book of Acts and John’s Apocalypse are examined in the Manuscript section. The Studies and Praxis section comes in two parts, ‘Textual Variation’ and ‘Exegesis and Textual Criticism,’ and constitutes the lengthiest portion of the book. Here Elliott’s judgments on particular textual variants are on full display over nearly 300 pages. The influence and legacy of G.D. Kilpatrick looms large and the themes for which Elliott has become well known are enunciated (and updated) throughout. The most visceral contribution, however, surfaces in the final section, Reviews of Recent Critical Editions, where Elliott relates the agonizing saga behind the production of IGNTP-Luke and its ill-fated reception. No other essay elucidates so tellingly what must have been a formative experience for Elliott. It is this precisely this experience that makes Elliott’s reviews of the ECM volumes such a rare gem and one that enables readers to understand his tenacious and unforgiving scrutiny of nearly every text-critical publication to have surfaced over the past fifty years. These are not reviews but a reckoning.
Some claims, of course, will give readers pause. The claim that thoroughgoing eclecticism is ‘by no means subjective’ (p. 19)—indicating that decisions are not made on a whim but on the basis of clearly established criteria—overlooks the fact that the very selection of any criteria is a subjective enterprise. The statement that ‘all varying text-types…go back to forms already in existence in the second century’ (p. 22; cf. p. 275) is far too generalized. The traditional argument has been that Alexandrian and Western text-types go back to the second century and that even some Byzantine readings may as well. But the idea that the Byzantine text-type, as a coherent and identifiable entity, goes back to the second century is contested. Indeed, the very nomenclature of ‘text-type’ is decried in some quarters. To this we might add that the presumption of an author’s consistency as a reliable criterion precludes that a human author could be inconsistent or perhaps even confused and confusing (p. 48; cf. p. 277-78). The recent adoption of the German term Ausgangstext to identify the goal of our text-critical reconstructions only erodes our confidence further. As for scribal activity, claims about whether scribes operated under the influence of the Attic movement or harmonized in the direction of the LXX or of a particular gospel must be established on the basis of comprehensive studies of the scribal habits of particular scribes in specific manuscripts rather than on a generalized notion of what scribes must or might have done.
The volume is nonetheless a veritable gold mine of information. The work is copiously detailed and exhaustive in its scrutiny, breadth and precision. Seasoned practitioners, text-critical junkies, and the next generation of budding textual critics will uncover a treasure trove of material and seasoned judgments to pore over for years to come. The collection is worth its weight in gold.