Majority Text The True Power of the Probability Argument

(continuation of previous post)

(7) Access to the basic apparatus was hardly 'impossible'. Between John Mill, Bengel, and Wetstein, one had a very clear picture of what had been collated by the end of the 17th century, and also access to quite thorough discussions of most important variants. Michaelis considered Mill and Wetstein indispensable, but certainly adequate for purposes of research. Even after many more MSS were collated, as accomplished later by Griesbach and Scholz, most experts acknowledged that the textual situation had not greatly been altered. It was more of the same.

(8) Here Vincent implies that all the texts so far published (Erasmus, Mill, Wetstein, Griesbach) were somehow not constructed on the basis of MSS evidence. But this is ridiculous. Every textual critic was concerned with the same question, and used the same approach: MSS readings.

(9) No distrust of the weight of numerical evidence for this period can really be shown. What instead appears is rather a lack of a solid grasp of the value of any criterion or aspect which could be used to evaluate readings. Textual critics of the period were making guesstimates, and trying to construct a methodology. They confronted a complex situation, but had no solid grounds or technique for weighing conflicting evidences.

(10) As Vincent here confesses, most critics understood well the preliminary stage they were in, and exercised due caution as to any alterations in the traditional text at hand. He calls this reasonable caution a 'superstitious hesitancy', but this is an anachronistic back-projection, due to his impatience with earlier scholarship.

(11) The essential text, the 'Received Text' continued to 'prevail', well into the 1870s, almost a hundred years beyond Vincent's suggestion as to when it was 'visibly weakened'. The subsequent critical texts of Griesbach and Scholz continued well into the 19th century, and are essentially the same as the TR. What is visibly weakened, is Vincent's credibility as a historian, due to his bias in favor of the W/H type text.

(12) Wetstein did make some strong statements against using the early Uncials, which he had observed were alarmingly at variance with both the Traditional Text, and each other. He also was highly suspicious of key Uncial readings which conformed to the Latin Vulgate. But the prevalent opinion (cf. Michaelis and others), was that here Wetstein was acting in an overly paranoid fashion toward both the Latin text(s) and Uncials sourced from Roman Catholics. It seems clear that Wetstein's views here actually had in fact very little influence upon other textual critics of the period. Like the opinions of the "Purists" 100 years earlier, Wetstein was hardly able to affect the progress of TC. Such claims appear to be ad hoc but inadequate explanations for why most textual critics up until 1830 (Lachmann) strongly disagree with the results of modern TC.


Nazaroo