Abstract
Robert F. Hull Jr. studied under Bruce Metzger at Princeton and has taught textual criticism for over 30 years. He has, it appears, used that time and experience to refine and focus his teaching of the subject, narrowing in on those essential elements that the student most needs to understand, emphasizing those things that truly matter, and avoiding those more tricky topics which could only be an obstacle to the beginner. All of that is now available to those outside of Hull's classroom in the form of his new book, The Story of the New Testament Text.
The book is organized into nine chapters that each cover a different stage in the discipline's development. Thus, for example, chapter 1 covers the beginnings of the text and the authorial process, while chapter 2 looks at the pre-critical age. These chapters are not, however, the dense, nitty-gritty historical tomes that the reader might expect from an introductory textbook on textual criticism. Rather, Hull has formulated five headings that allow him to organize the material thematically and focus on the ideas that are most essential to the narrative. These headings, as given in the subtitle, are as follows: movers, materials, motives, methods, and models. Not every stage of the text's history lends itself as neatly to all five of those categories, but Hull wisely does not attempt to follow them strictly, and instead allows them to serve simply as guides in a discussion driven by the story itself.
The history of textual criticism “proper” begins in chapter 3. Here Hull introduces the pioneers of the discipline and summarizes their main contributions. He also surveys the important manuscripts known during the period, as well as exploring the beginning formation of what are often called the “canons” of textual criticism: the principles that should guide textual decisions. Chapters 4 and 5 continue in a similar vein, covering the developing field as it moved into maturity under Westcott and Hort. As Hull narrates in chapter 6, however, mature did not mean staid, as the burst of papyri discoveries in the next era ushered in a new age of excitement. Hull surveys the more important papyri, as well as the developing critical texts of the church fathers.
Chapters 7, 8, and 9 are essentially about the modern era. First, “The Age of Consensus, The Age of Doubt” looks as the development of the modern discipline, discussing the models of text types and local texts, the rise of the eclectic method, and the debate about the majority text. This is the textual criticism that most students have typically encountered in New Testament Introduction classes. The next chapter, however, looks at relatively recent developments. This means primarily the new narrative model that sees variants as windows through which to see the historical developments that shaped and influenced the text. Hull here discusses Bart Ehrman's “orthodox corruption” of the text, but also looks at David Parker's “living text,” as well as Eldon Epp's “multivalent text.” The final chapter turns the focus to some of the decisions being shaped today, such as the distinction between scribes and readers, the study of manuscripts as artifacts themselves rather than just conveyers of readings, and some of the other physical perspectives now emerging. Hull finishes with a list of ten “future tasks” which he hopes will be taken up by the next generation of textual critics.
Whom is this book good for? Hull hopes it will serve a wide audience, writing,
To paraphrase what has been observed about many specialized studies, textual criticism is too important to be left to textual critics. Students and practitioners of exegesis, theology, church history, religious education, preaching, and Bible translation all have a stake in the work of textual criticism [p. 170].
Overall, he has certainly succeeded. The general reader would find this to be a very accessible introduction to the essential elements of the field. Theologians and exegetes would receive a welcome aid to setting their work on firmer textual grounds. Teachers and professors would find in it a good and useful textbook—though they would have to prepare their own examples, practice texts and manuscript readings to compensate for Hull's omission of these. Even experienced textual critics will enjoy reading this work, as Hull seems to have a special knack for supplementing the familiar story with new and interesting details. Many people read modern translations of the Bible, but as Hull notes, translation committees typically have great difficulty effectively communicating text critical issues (p. 107). This book will serve as an excellent bridge over that gap, and thus would be good for everyone who reads a Bible today.
By way of critique, one tendency worth noting is that the book suffers from a somewhat chrono-centric perspective. With three full chapters and around 60 pages devoted to the modern age, the emphasis on contemporary developments threatens to overshadow the work of previous eras. An example of this could be the space devoted to the nascent emergence of what has been called Narrative Textual Criticism—a school of thought that refuses to privilege any single “original text” and instead seeks to give equal hearing to the voices of all the different reading communities whose perspective is preserved in the variants they left in the text. Hull well describes this as “post-modern text-critical studies” (p. 159). He has been criticized, however, for this description, as if Foucault's fingerprints could not be found on the living text. Esoteric French philosophers may not have commented directly on the New Testament, but as a recent popular work on moral reasoning notes, such specialized work typically does not influence other fields until it first filters down to the popular level:
the 1980s and 1990s saw the widespread diffusion and powerful influence of the theories of poststructuralism and postmodernism in U.S. culture. These began as arcane academic theories among French literary critics … they were spread and were popularized. … All that belonged to ‘the modern’ was condemned: epistemological foundations, certainty, reason, universalism, the self, authorial voice. … All that was thought to be postmodern was celebrated: uncertainty, difference, fluidity, ambiguity, multivocality, self-construction, changing identities, particularity, historical finitude, localism, audience reception, perspectivalism, and more [Christian Smith, Lost in Transition (Oxford, 2011), p. 15).
The similarity of this popular version of postmodernism with Narrative Textual Criticism can easily be seen. The same work notes that the nascent rejection of a single, authoritative moral code is often fueled by “the difficulty, and even impossibility, it seems to them, of trying to sort out difficult moral issues” (Smith, 22). Compare that with Parker's “living text,” where the rejection of a single, authoritative original text is fueled by the difficulty and apparent impossibility of sorting out difficult variant units such as the text of the Lord's Prayer.
Hull's description is therefore appropriate, and he rightly notes some of the intrinsic problems with this perspective, pointing out, for example, that despite its rejection of an original text, it is nevertheless dependent on it as it tries to give voice to variants and alterations: “One cannot detect the alteration unless one can identify the original” (p. 154). Such problems bring the long-term viability of Narrative Textual Criticism into question. This, however, returns to the problem of Hull's chrono-centrism: the narrative school may be new and exciting, but if it is today little more than the latest fad and will be in a few generations little more than an interesting footnote, then why should the student spend so many pages learning about it now? In fairness to Hull, this is a common problem in the contemporary perspective: notwithstanding our biased preference for our own achievements, we simply cannot predict which current developments will one day deserve as many pages as, for example, Tischendorf's discovery of Sinaiticus, or Westcott & Hort's 1881 edition. This point of critique aside, the reader will do very well to pick up The Story of the New Testament Text.