Seminar On The "True Text" - Lesson Nine - The Alexandrian Edit Principle

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SEMINAR ON THE “TRUE TEXT”

LESSON 9 – THE ALEXANDRIAN EDIT PRINCIPLE

AKA “BLOWING THE ALEXANDRIAN MANUSCRIPTS OUT OF THE WATER!”

Copyright July 8, 2005 12:03 AM CST

By Dr. Michael J. Bisconti

Advisory: This may be a difficult lesson for some of you. Also, we are developing this page gradually; so, our discussion is incomplete at this point in time.

The “Alexandrian Edit Principle” states:

The Alexandrian manuscripts exhibit seven characteristics consistent with “edition” (editing) of earlier manuscript forms. These characteristics are “emerging characteristics”; that is, they have only been discovered within the past ten years and are not yet common knowledge in the biblical textual criticism community. These characteristics are:

1. Aphitism

2. Communicity

3. Abatement

4. Catastrophicity

5. Logical Inversion

6. Inverse Symmetry

7. Atametric Intensity

If only one or two of these characteristics had been present in the Alexandrian manuscripts, we could not have established the fact of the edition (“editedness”) of the Alexandrian manuscripts. Any four of these characteristics would have established the edited nature of the Alexandrian manuscripts. The fact is that ALL SEVEN characteristics have been found in ALL of the Alexandrian manuscripts.

APHITISM

Aphitism is “the property of a linguistic form that reveals its ‘extension’ throughout history.” A linguistic form is a “ word, phrase, clause, or sentence.” Here are some linguistic forms:

Word

“The”

Phrase

“The house on the hill”

Clause

“The house on the hill is red”

Sentence

“The house on the hill is red but it isn’t a bright red.”

“Extension” is “the cumulative duration of the existence of a linguistic form.” In other words, the total amount of time that the linguistic form has been used throughout recorded history. We have volumes of documentation to prove the extensions of all of the linguistic forms in the New Testament (see the Trillion Pages: Quadrant III: Textual Criticism & TC VSA&S [not available yet on-line to the general public]). Using our examples above, here is the extension (in “transyears” [we will explain this term later…for now just think of a “transyear” as a year]) for each of the linguistic forms above:

LINGUISTIC FORM		EXTENSION (transyears)
CLASS	EXAMPLE	EXTENSION (transyears)
Word	“The”	1000 t-years

Phrase	“The house on the hill”	500 t-years

Clause	“The house on the hill is red”	300 t-years

Sentence	“The house on the hill is red but it isn’t a bright red.”	100 t-years

Here is the Extension Table for the (transliterated [Greek letters to English letters]) “BA” variant “paraphero” (this is actually the root of the variant [a “root” is “the parent form of a word, a word from which the word stems”]) in Jude 1:12 (see below…we have inserted blank rows for future entries):

LINGUISTIC FORM		EXTENSION ---------- alpha transyears	EXTENSION ---------- beta transyears	Aphitism
CLASS	EXAMPLE	EXTENSION ---------- alpha transyears	EXTENSION ---------- beta transyears	Aphitism
Word	paraphero	2000 t-years	2010 t-years	Negative

The key thing to note here are the two “t-year” values. The variation between the “t-year” values tells us that the aphitism (the property of a linguistic form that reveals its ‘extension’ throughout history) for this variant is “negative.” “Negative” is a verbal index (a word corresponding to an index [a numerical rating]) used to tell researchers that there is a 90% or better probability that a word has replaced another word or other linguistic form. (We use the negative index to guide us in where to focus our research.) In this case, we established a 90% probability, which later became a 100% certainty, that the word “paraphero” was a “replacement word” for another word, the original word of the text.

We will pick up this discussion as soon as possible.

Immediately following the passage from the book of Jude is an explanation of the conventions used in our Greek text. The following graphic may take a second or two to load.

This passage from the Book of Jude is taken from a compilation of the Greek New Testament that has variants identified and tagged for reference to source of transmission and schools of emphasis.

Verse Numbers

For ease of reference, the verse numbering scheme has been made to conform closely to that found in most standard English versions of the New Testament, following the Authorized (King James) Version of 1611. Where considerate verse numbering differences occur, they are added to the text in brackets.

Breathings, Accents, And Diacritical Markings

All breathings, accents, capitalization, punctuation, and diacritical markings have been omitted. These are primarily a product of modern editorship and are lacking in ancient manuscripts.

Book Titles And Colophons

Book titles do not appear. The Greek closing colophons to the epistles that appear in the English of the Authorized Version have been placed in brackets [] wherever they occur in the Stephens 1550 edition (only).

Variant Tagging Method

The following tags have been applied to those words peculiar to one stream of transmission or scholarly group that emphasizes a particular variant word. Those words with no tag do not differ in the various printings of the Greek.

^T = Stephens 1550 Textus Receptus.

The text used is George Ricker Berry's edition of "The Interlinear Literal Translation of the Greek New Testament." This text is virtually identical to Erasmus 1516, Beza 1598, and the actual Textus Receptus: Elzevir 1633. Berry states, "In the main they are one and the same; and [any] of them may be referred to as the Textus Receptus." (Berry, p. ii)

These early printed Greek New Testaments closely parallel the text of the English King James Authorized Version of 1611, since that version was based closely upon Beza 1598, which differed little from its "Textus Receptus" predecessors. These Textus Receptus editions follow the Byzantine Majority manuscripts, which was predominant during the period of manual copying of Greek New Testament manuscripts.

^S = Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus

The text used is "h Kainh Diaqhkh: The New Testament. The Greek Text underlying the English Authorized Version of 1611" (London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1977). This is an unchanged reprint of Scrivener's "The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text followed in the Authorized Version" (Cambridge: University Press, 1894, 1902).

Scrivener attempted to reconstruct the Greek text underlying the English 1611 KJV for comparison to the 1881 English Revised Version. In those places where the KJV followed the Latin Vulgate (John 10:16), Scrivener inserted the Greek reading, as opposed to back-translating the Latin to Greek--which would have produced a Greek word with no Greek manuscript evidence. Scrivener's work follows the Byzantine Majority texts, and in many places matches the modern Alexandrian-based editions.

^B = Byzantine Majority

The text is that identified by Freiherr Von Soden, "Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments in ihrer altesten erreichbaren Textgestalt" (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1911) and Herman C. Hoskier, "Concerning the Text of the Apocalypse" (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1929). This technique of Byzantine identification and weighting was utilized by Hodges and Farsted in "The Greek New Testament according to the Majority Text" (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982; 1985). It was subsequently utilized by Robinson and Pierpont, resulting in 99.75 percent agreement between the two texts.

The Byzantine Majority text is closely identified with the Textus Receptus editions, and well it should with greater than 98% agreement. As Maurice Robinson pointed out in his edition of the Byzantine Majority: "George Ricker Berry correctly noted that 'in the main they are one and the same; and [any] of them may be referred to as the Textus Receptus' (George Ricker Berry, ed., The Interlinear Literal Translation of the Greek New Testament [New York: Hinds & Noble, 1897], p. ii).

^A = Alexandrian

(Some of the comments that follow will be confusing to anyone learned in the “Alexandrian dispute.” We will clear up this confusion at a later stage in the “text building” process.) The differences are those identified by the United Bible Society, 3rd edition, and utilized by modern translations such as the NIV and the NASB. While these variants come from manuscripts with less textual evidence than the Byzantine Majority, many of the differences are exactly the same as those identified by the Byzantine Majority and Scrivener. The percentage of variants is quite small and occurs mainly in word placement and spelling. Many of the variations identified are omitted or bracketed words, which is not surprising due to a significantly smaller base of text from this stream of transmission.