In spite of such opposition, however, the next two centuries (1633–1830) were an age in which scholars were busy collecting and studying every available manuscript in support of their contention that a text could be constructed which was closer to the original than was the received text.
A leader in this movement of gathering evidence against the received text was the Englishman John Mill. In 1707 he published his monumental edition of the New Testament. The text was substantially that of Stephanus’ third edition, i.e., the received text, but Mill’s edition included what may fairly be called the first critical apparatus. On the bottom of each page he listed the variants that he found in comparing seventy-eight manuscripts, a number of ancient versions or translations, and a considerable number of quotations from the Church Fathers. The claim made for this apparatus was that it listed over thirty thousand variants from the received text. However, the printed text had to remain the traditional one. The public would accept no other.
Mill, in fact, was violently attacked even for indicating in footnotes which variants he preferred.
One of the people genuinely disturbed by Mill’s thirty thousand variants was Johann Bengel, then a student at Tuebigen. He set out to check the evidence in the hope of reducing that number of variants. One of the very important discoveries he made was that variants tend to recur in distinct patterns in certain manuscripts.
By grouping together those manuscripts that contained similar variants he was able to construct several families of manuscripts, notably the “African family,” as he called one, and the “Asiatic family,” as he designated the other. When in 1734 he published his edition of the New Testament, he published the received text, but in his critical apparatus he listed the variants of the individual manuscripts not as independent witnesses but grouped them by families and considered the family as one witness. Thus he decreased significantly Mill’s total of thirty thousand variants. What Bengel had done was to take New Testament text study a long step toward uncovering the families of local texts, which, as we noted above, tended to disappear through the standardization brought about by Constantine after 325 A.D.
One of the names that dare not be omitted from any survey of men who contributed evidence against the received text is that of Johann Griesbach. In his three editions of the New Testament, published between 1774 and 1806, he followed Bengel’s lead of grouping variants by families. In fact, he enlarged the system to include three families, the Alexandrian texts, the Western texts, and the Byzantine texts. His great contribution is that he recognized that the Byzantine texts, represented almost exclusively by the minuscule manuscripts, were late and inferior. If there was to be any hope of moving closer toward the original wording of the New Testament, it would have to be on the basis of readings drawn from the older uncial manuscripts. This was, of course, a frontal attack on the received text, based as it was almost entirely on the minuscules. But Griesbach in his own editions dared not print any text other than the traditional received text. Any hardy soul who actually elevated a variant to the main body of the text was either condemned or ignored. We might thus characterize the years from 1633 to 1830 as a time of gathering an enormous amount of textual evidence, very little of which supported the traditional text, but it was nevertheless the received text that continued to be printed and early readings were relegated to the footnotes.
With the coming of Lachmann we have the first attempt at a true critical text, that is, a text not using the textus receptus as its starting point, but beginning from a study of the ancient manuscripts. In this way Lachmann constructed an entirely independent text, but he made a bad psychological blunder when he published his first edition in 1831. Instead of explaining fully the textual principles he had used for setting up his text, he merely referred his readers to an article he had written in a theological journal some time before.
Lacking a proper understanding of Lachmann’s principles, reader reaction was immediate and violent. In a second edition, prepared in the years 1842 to 1850, he sought to undo his former mistake by including a full explanation of his critical principles, but the damage had been done.
Lachmann’s new text, however, had broken the ice and it proved to be a springboard for the work of Tischendorf, culminating in his monumental eighth major edition of the New Testament. Of the biographical details of Tischendorf’s life (1815–1874) we perhaps need to give very little. It is his work that is important. A brilliant student at Leipzig between the years 1834 and 1838, he came under the influence of Johann Winer, the famous Greek grammarian. Winer instilled in Tischendorf the burning desire to reconstruct the purest possible form of the Greek New Testament on the basis of the oldest manuscripts. How thoroughly he got the point across to his pupil is reflected in one of Tischendorf’s letters to his fiancée. Instead of writing sweet nothings to her, he declared, “I am confronted with a secret task, the struggle to regain the original form of the New Testament.” There can be no doubt that Tischendorf was first, last, and always a textual critic. When he was only twenty-four years old, he set about publishing his first New Testament, a critical hand-edition. At the age of twenty-five he went to Paris, where he succeeded in doing what no one else had been able to accomplish. He deciphered the palimpsest Ephraemi. This manuscript is a filth century parchment of the Bible, which in the twelfth century was erased and written over with a series of essays on asceticism by one St. Ephraem. With the aid of chemicals and infinite patience, Tischendorf was able to read virtually all of the erased fifth century text.
Spurred on by this success, Tischendorf traveled all over Europe searching for and examining manuscripts both new and old. He traveled to Holland, London, Cambridge, Oxford, back to Paris, Basel, and Rome where he spent a whole year in the Vatican library.
In 1844 he set out on a journey to examine manuscripts in the Near East. On this journey he made a discovery that affected his whole life and work. While staying at the monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai, he happened to see a wastebasket full of parchment leaves intended for starting the fire in the monastery’s oven.
With his keen eye for manuscripts Tischendorf noticed almost at once that these were pages from the Septuagint. As he was in the process of retrieving some forty-three of these pages, he was casually informed by a monk that two basket loads of such parchment had already been burned. Tischendorf excitedly warned the monk that such papers were far too valuable to be burned, an estimate that proved to be absolutely true. A study of the forty-three pages, which Tischendorf was allowed to keep, proved them to be portions of Chronicles, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, and Esther.
In 1853 Tischendorf returned to the monastery of St. Catherine, prepared to buy the beautiful uncial manuscript of which he had gained only a small portion, but his previous conduct had tipped the monks off as to the value of their codex, and he could learn nothing more of its whereabouts.
In 1859 Tischendorf again traveled to St. Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai, hoping to learn something of the precious manuscript housed there, but again he was stymied—until the day before he was scheduled to leave.
As he was presenting to the steward of the monastery a handsome copy of the Septuagint recently printed in Leipzig, the steward remarked about another Septuagint that he had. He then proceeded to show Tischendorf the manuscript that he had so long been looking for. This time concealing his feelings, Tischendorf casually asked to be allowed to look at the manuscript at his leisure that evening. He took it to his room and stayed up all night reading it. In his diary, which he kept in Latin, he stated, Quippe dormire nefas videbatur (It really seemed a sacrilege to go to sleep). Tischendorf soon realized that he had before him more than he could have hoped for.
This ancient manuscript contained most of the Old Testament, all of the New Testament, plus the Epistle of Barnabas and most of the Shepherd of Hermas. The next morning Tischendorf tried to buy the manuscript but was unsuccessful and had to leave without it. By working through a monastery of St. Catherine in Cairo, however, he gained a working agreement with the Mt. Sinai monastery whereby they loaned him a quire (eight pages) at a time so he could copy it. In Cairo Tischendorf contacted two Germans who knew some Greek, a druggist and a bookseller. These two copied and Tischendorf carefully checked their work. In two months they transcribed over 110,000 lines of text. In this way Tischendorf acquired what has to be considered perhaps the most valuable manuscript for New Testament criticism. Its only competitior is Codex B, also known as Vaticanus.
Armed with the text of Codex Sinaiticus, or ) as it is designated, plus many lesser manuscripts, Tischendorf returned to Leipzig and incorporated this wealth of new information into successive editions of his New Testament. His greatest accomplishment is his Eighth Major Edition of the New Testament published in eleven parts between 1864 and 1872. Perhaps its text relies a bit too much on his prized manuscript Sinaiticus, but its critical apparatus constitutes a veritable gold mine of information and evidence. To form some idea of current opinion about Tischendorf’s work we might quote some modern scholars. Greenlee, for example, writing in 1964, says, “His eighth major edition contains a critical apparatus which has never been equaled in comprehensiveness of citation of Greek manuscripts, versions, and patristic evidence. A century later it is still indispensable for serious work in the text of the New Testament.”
Of his writings in general, and they are voluminous, totaling over one hundred and fifty books and scholarly articles, Bruce Metzger in his The Text of the New Testament writes, “The man to whom modern textual critics of the New Testament owe most is without doubt Constantin Tischendorf who sought out and published more manuscripts and produced more critical editions of the Greek Bible than any other single scholar.”
As both quotations show, Tischendorf’s chief claim to fame rests on his industry in assembling textual evidence. Constructing a text that would be universally accepted by the scholarly public was not to be one of his accomplishments. That remained for two Cambridge scholars, Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort. After twenty-eight years of joint labor Westcott and Hort in 1882 published their edition, The New Testament in Original Greek. Actually, it came out without a critical apparatus, since it relied so heavily on Tischendorf’s foregoing work. It was readily accepted because the editors carefully and convincingly laid out the principles whereby they had arrived at their text; principles that incidentally still stand and are universally applied today. Another factor favorable to the acceptance of the Westcott and Hort text was the fact that it served substantially as the text that underlay the new translation into English, The Revised Version of the New Testament, prepared between 1881 and 1885.
With the work of Westcott and Hort we enter into the age of the modern critical text. The Westcott and Hort text is still sold as one of the standard editions. In addition there have been quite a number of other modern critical texts published. There is, e.g., Von Soden’s expensive and disappointing edition in 1913, Souter’s text in 1910, Hoskier’s text of Revelation in 1929, and three Catholic texts by Vogels, Merk, and Bover.
Two texts, however, deserve a bit of comment. Since 1898 there have been twenty-five editions of the series begun by Eberhard Nestle. This text is constructed by taking the majority reading of Tischendorf, Westcott and Hort, and Weiss. It has a critical apparatus that is concise but helpful. Recent editions are under the supervision of Professor Kurt Aland of Muenster University. Hence it has been entitled The Nestle-Aland Text.
Closely connected with the name of Kurt Aland is the other edition of which we wish to speak briefly, namely The Greek New Testament published by the United Bible Society. In 1955 American, British, Scottish, Wuerttemberg, and Dutch Bible Societies began work on this joint project. Using the Westcott and Hort text simply as a starting point, they attempted to set up a new text using the best twentieth century scholarship. The editorial committee consisted of four men. Two were from Europe, Kurt Aland of Muenster, Germany, and Matthew Black of St. Andrews, Scotland. From the United States there were Bruce Metzger of Princeton and Allen Wikgren of the University of Chicago. The edition that resulted from their work and which first appeared in May of 1966 was described by Kurt Aland in a recent article of the Journal of Biblical Literature as a “translator’s text” rather than a scientific text for the specialist.
The difference between a “translator’s text” and a “scientific text” shows itself primarily in the critical apparatus. Whereas the Nestle-Aland edition cites on the average twenty variants per page, the United Bible Society text averages only 1.6 variant per page. It restricts itself to only the most significant variants, about eight thousand in the New Testament. It attempts, however, to document these more fully than Nestle-Aland does. It gives the evidence both for and against the reading adopted in the text rather than using Nestle-Aland’s method of citing only the main manuscripts that disagree with the adopted reading, thereby implying that all other manuscripts favor the reading of the text.
In 1968 a second edition of the United Bible Society text was brought out. The two most important changes appear immediately on the title page. One is the addition of a fifth name to the editorial staff, that of Dr. Carlo M. Martini, S.J. Dr. Martini is a professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. Hence Catholic scholarship, so long a bitter foe of the Bible Societies, has now entered in on the joint venture.
The other change is the information that the editorial committee of this second edition worked under the direction of the Institute for New Testament Textual Research located at Muenster. Professor Aland is a prominent member of this Institute. As was noted above, Professor Aland serves both as an editor for the Nestle-Aland text and on the editorial committee of the United Bible Society text. It will therefore surprise no one that the stated goal of the Institute is to bring the text of these two editions into conformity. The text of the third edition of the United Bible Society text is to conform to the text of the twenty-sixth edition of Nestle- Aland, both to come out in 1970. The differing purpose of the two editions will be maintained, however. The United Bible Society text is to be a “translator’s text.” The Nestle-Aland text is to remain the scholar’s tool.
Professor Aland in the Journal of Biblical Literature says of it, “In comparison with earlier editions, the new Nestle-Aland will have a considerably higher standard, its aim being to provide the specialist working on the New Testament text with all the material he might need.” Whether we choose the Nestle-Aland edition or the new United Bible Society text, we cannot but be impressed by the tremendous amount of work that has gone into their preparation and we need to thank God for the work of dedicated men who have brought to us the text in a form that we can be confident conforms closely to the original. The material for solid New Testament study is before us. It remains for us only to be faithful in using it.
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