The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological SciencesSince the New Testament's inception as written text, its manuscripts have been subject to all the dangers of history: scribal error, emendation, injury, and total destruction. The traditional goal of modern textual criticism has been to reconstruct an "original text" from surviving manuscripts, adjudicating among all the variant texts resulting from the slips, additions, and embellishments of scribal hand-copying. Because of the way manuscripts circulate and give rise to new copies, it can be said that they have an "erotic" life: they mate and breed, bear offspring, and generate families and descendants. New Testament textual critics of the eighteenth century who began to use this language to group texts into families and genealogies were not pioneering new approaches, but rather borrowing the metaphors and methods of natural scientists. Texts began to be classified into "families, tribes, and nations," and later were racialized as "African" or "Asian," with distinguishable "textual physiognomies" and "textual complexions." The Erotic Life of Manuscripts explores this curious relationship between the field of New Testament textual criticism and the biological sciences, beginning with the eighteenth century and extending into the present. While these biological metaphors have been powerful tools for textual critics, they also produce problematic understandings of textual "purity" and agency, with the use of scientific discourse artificially separating the work of textual criticism from literary interpretation. Yii-Jan Lin shows how the use of biological classification, genealogy, evolutionary theory, and phylogenetics has shaped-and limited-the goals of New Testament textual criticism, the greatest of which is the establishment of an authoritative, original text. She concludes by proposing new metaphors for the field. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Part I Collection and Theorization | 19 |
Part II Historicization and Innovation | 67 |
Excerpt of Interview with Gerd Mink and Klaus Wachtel Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung Münster March 10 2011 | 173 |
Marcus Niebuhr Tod by Maurice Bowra | 182 |
| 185 | |
| 201 | |
Other editions - View all
The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the ... Yii-Jan Lin Limited preview - 2016 |
The ^AErotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the ... Yii-Jan Lin Limited preview - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
Aland ancestor Bart Bart D Bart Ehrman Bengel Biblical Literature biological Brill Brooke Foss Westcott Byzantine Cambridge University Press Canterbury Tales CBGM century cladistics classification codices coherence Coherence-Based Genealogical Method copy corruption cyborg Darwin David degeneration discourse Early Christian Editio Critica Maior edition Eldon Essays evolution evolutionary example gene genetic Gerd Mink Greek New Testament human Ibid initial text interpretation Johann Albrecht Bengel Lachmann Leiden letter literary living text Majority Text manuscripts metaphor Metzger and Ehrman narrative textual criticism natural selection Novum Testamentum Graece Origin of Species original text Oxford University Press Parker Peter Robinson Philology phylogenetic Phylogeny present race racial relationships scholars Scholarship scribes Society of Biblical SplitsTree stemma stemmata Stemmatology Streeter Studies Testament Textual Criticism Testament Tools text types text-type textual tradition textual transmission Textus Receptus Theological theory tion tree tual criticism University of Münster variant readings Westcott and Hort καὶ