THE TEXT TYPE "FAMILIES" ARE ARTIFICIAL FABRICATIONS
Many modern scholars now admit that text type "families" are "artificial" inventions and do not actually represent "science". Merrill M. Parvis acknowledges:
"We have reconstructed text-types and families and sub-families and in so doing have created things that never before existed on earth or in heaven. ... when we have found that a particular manuscript would not fit into any of our nicely constructed schemes, we have thrown up our hands and said that it contained a mixed text."15
Colwell asserts:
"The major mistake is made in thinking of the 'old text-types' as frozen blocks, even after admitting that no one manuscript is a perfect witness to any text-type. If no one MS is a perfect witness to any type, then all witnesses are mixed in ancestry (or individually corrupted, and thus parents of mixture)."16
A.F.J. Klijn, after doubting "whether any grouping of manuscripts gives satisfactory results",17 continued:
"It is still customary to divide manuscripts into the four well known families: the Alexandrian, the Caesarean, the Western and the Byzantine. This classical division can no longer be maintained. ... If any progress is to be expected in textual criticism we have to get rid of the division into local texts."18
Hence, neither "Syrian", "Alexandrian", "Neutral" nor the "Western" testimony as an entity actually exists. These so-called families are merely the synthetic, artificial products of Westcott's and Hort's imaginations which were fabricated in order to utilize the genealogical method - which allowed them to lump 80-95% of all individual witnesses as one voice. The reality is that there is only the testimony of individual manuscripts, "Fathers", and versions - not the voice of four families.
Thus the Byzantine or Syrian is not merely one witness. In any given verse it represents the voice of hundreds or even several thousand testimonies as to the true text. Furthermore, the evidence is that only few of the Byzantine mss have been copied from any of the remainder. They differ amongst themselves in many unimportant particulars.19 In other words, all read so nearly alike that
1 M.M. Parvis, "The Nature and Task of New Testament Textual Criticism", The Journal of Religion, XXXII (1952): p. 173.
2 E.C. Colwell, "The Origin of Texttypes of New Testament Manuscripts", Early Christian Origins, ed. Allen Wikgren, (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p. 135.
3 A.F.J. Klijn, A Survey of the Researches into the Western Text of the Gospels and Acts; part two 1949-1969, (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill Pub., 1969), p. 36. This author has learned via personal correspondence (13 May, 1989) from Dr. Theodore P. Letis that Klijn, a well-known textual scholar, has been widely recognized as having attained to the first chair as the world's leading authority on the "Western" Text. With respect to a "pure" or "original" Western Text, Klijn himself acknowledged that "such a text did not exist" (Ibid., p. 64).
4 Ibid., p. 66.
5 Burgon, The Traditional Text, op. cit., pp. 46-47. John William Burgon was an Anglican Priest and Dean of Chichester at Oxford from 1876 until his death in 1888. His biographer called him "the leading religious teacher of his time" throughout England [E.M. Goulburn, Life of Dean Burgon, 2 Vols., (London: John Murray, 1892), Vol. I, p. vii]. Burgon's index of the Fathers is still the most extensive available, containing 86,489 quotations from 76 writers who died before 400 A.D. Although high Anglican in doctrine and theology - and somewhat chiding in his presentation - his work is the fountain. All other works published on this subject from the conservative view point continually quote and/or refer to John Burgon's books, especially to The Revision Revised. A contemporary of Westcott and Hort, he vigorously opposed both their text and theory and is generally acknowledged as having been the leading voice of the opposition. Dean Burgon has often been maligned and his contribution demeaned by liberal detractors "because of his learned defense of the Traditional New Testament text in most of the handbooks on New Testament textual criticism; but his arguments have never been refuted" since he published in 1883 (Hills, The King James Version Defended, op. cit., p. 139). This book remains the classic reference to this day; it is not light after dinner reading as it is replete with hard factual refutations to the W-H theory.
85
continued...