Gordon Fee argues that this tradition did not stem from an intentional attempt to standardize the text (a recension). The text of □ 75 is exceptionally close to the corresponding text in the mid-fourth-century Codex Vaticanus, making two conclusions necessary.įirst, we must suppose that these manuscripts had a very early, common ancestor and, second, that this line of transmission was executed with remarkable consistency. But the discovery of □ 75 (containing most of Luke and John), written in the late second or early third century, has debunked this notion. Yet our present evidence does not point in this direction.įor generations it was thought that the excellent texts of Sinaiticus (א) and Vaticanus (B) were the result of a late third- or early fourth-century recension in Alexandria. Some scholars have theorized that there was already a major attempt by about the middle or the end of the second century to produce a standardized edition or “recension” of New Testament books. The scribes responsible for □ 46 (Paul) and □ 66 (John) appear to have made corrections to their copies by comparison with a second exemplar. What we now call “textual criticism,” a process of comparing manuscripts in order to determine the original reading, was probably practiced on a small scale throughout the early period by scribes and Christian scholars who had access to multiple copies of a New Testament work. Early Attempts to Standardize the New Testament Text
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