Silverhair
Well-Known Member
Well, assuming Pickering is mistaken about f35. Greek New Testament text. That a reading identical in the TR, W-H, NU, MT and F35 Greek New Testament would be such a text.
Without agreeing with Pickering's view, can you state how and why he came to his view? What do you understand his evidence to be? Again, without agreeing with his conclusion.
From what I have read he came to his conclusion based upon his understanding of the F35 texts but also considering that he dismissed the relevance of other textual methods.
"The ruling paradigm at the time, and still, which is the eclectic approach, is based on the false presumption that the original wording was lost and beyond objective recovery."
He also used what he called quotes from ECF as being from the F35 text line but this was shown to be false.
"Gordon D. Fee, who is probably the best patristic text-critical scholar alive today, has said that there are NO ante-Nicene fathers who quoted the Byzantine text.
As well, there is a recent article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society that deals just with Burgon’s approach. The author found that it was terribly faulty."
But if anything called into question the view of Pickering it would be his comment:
"This includes the position that the precise original wording has been preserved to our day, and that we can know what it is."
It is the evidence that I have read from various scholars that has made me question Pickering's conclusions.
"In place of this use of both internal and external evidence, or ‘reasoned eclectism’, Pickering and van Bruggen call for the adoption of a strictly numerical approach: that reading supported by a majority of Greek manuscripts is to be accepted as original.50 Pickering attempts to set forth a system of ‘weighing and counting’ manuscripts, based on a restatement of Burgon’s seven ‘notes of truth’, but this is misleading, since he explicitly rejects the use of internal criteria. Thus the only way to ‘weigh’ a manuscript is in comparison with the original, which is determined by counting—a circular procedure. Fee’s evaluation of Pickering’s seven criteria as only seven different ways of counting seems correct.51 Fee further points out that the proposal only to count manuscripts ‘simply eliminates textual criticism altogether”52"
50 Pickering, Identity, p. 138; van Bruggen, Ancient Text, p. 38.
51 “Fee, ‘Critique’, p. 423.
52 Ibid.
I have asked a number of times for reviews from scholars that support Pickering's conclusions. None have been forth coming. All I have had is out of hand dismissal of scholars that have disagreed with Pickering and or the conclusions he has drawn.
You ask me why I disagree so I will ask you why you agree considering that other scholars do not?
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