22. Textual Criticism

This ambitious first book proposes a new method for analysing the transmission of the text of the Pauline corpus as it is preserved in manuscripts copied up to and including the fifth century. The method is devised to measure the ‘uniformity’ of the text during this period and to identify where variation exists within the tradition. Stevens’s ultimate goal is to argue for the consistency of the Pauline corpus in this period. To do so, he adopts the units and rank scale of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as the basis for delineating variation. Although not designed to reconstruct an Ausgangstext, this approach offers a new framework for comparing texts, even though his evaluation of witnesses using SFL is applied in such a way that a high level of agreement is bound to be found within the corpus. For example, he omits differences in spelling, prepositions, articles, particles, word order and conjunctions from his calculations because they are the result of scribal error, not different lines of transmission. The relationship between scribal activity and textual transmission is not as nuanced as it could have been. Overall, the book makes a novel contribution to the discussion by providing a new vantage point from which to compare texts and a new approach for delineating variants. However, in addition to the issues with the weighted percentages of agreement, the book is highly polemical, critiquing the entire spectrum of modern text-critical approaches as insufficient. Proposing new methods is always positive, but these new approaches need not compete with existing models that may ultimately have different critical goals.