MetaCatholic

Michael Bird offers a response to a recent article by David Parker on textual criticism and theology (Expository Times (118.12 [Sept 2007], pp. 583-89 – I provide the link for those who have online subscription access). . There are four major points in the essay which also offer the four areas for Michael Bird’s interaction.

1. The futile and inappropriate search for the original text
2. The theological motivations of textual variants
3. The mistaken view of a linear development of orthodoxy
4. A theology of the scriptures that pays no attention to nature of the text and its transmission

In one sense the primary issue at stake seems to me to be encapsulated in Michael Bird’s remark:

In addition, an original text is significant historically for reconstructing first century Christianity and it is significant theologically if we are to ask what it actually was that God-breathed out.

Among all the other arguments, for Parker the lack of an original text, the practical futility of recovering it are theological data that undermine any doctrine of inerrancy and plenary verbal inspiration. For Bird (he qualifies this later), the nature of the original autographs as inspired must drive the textual critic to reconstruction as its fundamental goal. Under the debate about textual criticism is a debate about inspiration, authority and the doctrine of scripture. Parker’s and Bird’s doctrines of scripture both encourage and are encouraged by their approaches to textual criticism and vice versa.

Likewise, reconstructions of the early church, and the role the development of the textual tradition within it, both mutually inform each other. Those who, like Parker, wish to stress diversity and the later and retroactive emergence of Orthodoxy, also make more of theologically motivated alterations in the text. Those who hold, however cautiously, like BIrd, to a continuing central line of biblical orthodoxy throughout the period wish to minimise intentional alteration in favour of accidental emendation.

In my view, the nature of the evidence is more ambiguous than either allow, which is, perhaps, precisely why it is so possible to develop quite different ambitions for and accounts of textual criticism. This is a doctrinal debate interplaying with a methodological one: the balance of scripture and tradition both determines and is determined by the picture of the emerging reconstruction of the textual history.

Finally, I note Bird’s assumption that the original (?) text is what God breathed out.. This is, at best, only one possible exegesis of 2 Timothy 3:16. (And see Bob MacDonald’s comments on this.) If anything inclines me more in Parker’s direction, it is this: what a strange view of inspiration to assume that God should take such care to actually breath out the exact right wording, and then show no interest in guiding a process of transmission, or appear to care whether these precious original words are lost, preserved or recovered.

Now here, in fact, despite this assertion of an etymologizing exposition of theopneustos, Bird is fairly sympathetic to Parker.

I opine the fact that few books on the doctrine of Scripture take serious account of textual criticism. There are some doctrines of Scripture that would fall apart if they ever came into contact with the Septuagint. If one is really fixated on the original autographs and assumes that the first Christians were too, then one was to explain why the early church sought to use a translation of the Old Testament that often did some very creative things with the Hebrew text. My point is not that the autographs are insignificant, but there are a whole host of issues about canon and reception that need to be brought into the mix.

On this he  is absolutely right in his main thrust, and in a large measure of agreement with Parker – if in apparent contradiction of his earlier assertion. But perhaps there is a Freudian slip in that initial verb. One cannot “opine the fact”. That is an oxymoron. And, I fear, this view cannot be placed alongside asking the question “what it actually was that God-breathed out” without being if not oxymoronic, then at least inconsistent. I don’t think a view of inspiration that takes full account both of the nature of the scriptures, and the process of their transmission can settle easily for a once-for-all God-breathed-ness. This etymologizing transliteration is theology masquerading as translation, and it continues to lead even careful thinkers astray.