When entering the field of NT textual criticism, it is easy to make the mistake of overestimating the value of the papyri. They certainly are important. But how many new readings have been adopted from the papyri -- readings that no one had ever adopted into printed Greek New Testament before the discoveries of the major New Testament papyri in the 1900s? Somewhere very close to zero, iirc. The thing to see is not that the papyri are unimportant. Its that the other kinds of evidence are also important. A text does not magically become more important by being written on papyrus. The document shown here illustrates this lesson: it is a papyrus! So it must be of great significance, right? Well, its a papyrus from the 600s with part of one of Augustines sermons written on it. One could conclude that this papyrus has no more value than a printed edition of Augustines sermons (and maybe even less, if the printed edition was prepared via a judicious comparison of multiple copies). But from another point of view, one could conclude that a printed edition of Augustines sermons has as much value as a papyrus from the time of Augustine, when and where it contains clear quotations of the New Testament text. It is easy to get the impression that because papyri get listed first in apparatus-entries that they are automatically the most important kind of text-critical evidence. That is an illusion. Perhaps it would be better to list all witnesses in the approximate order of their age.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 04:56:40 +0000
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