Does one give more weight to documentary evidence or to internal consideration? Scholars such as Tregelles, Hort, and Colwell (see comments below) place more emphasis on the documents. The situation then becomes one of emphasis. Those who practice textual criticism know this all too well. When a manuscript is consistently presenting superior readings elsewhere, it should be preferred when it’s reading in a passage that seems, in some way, inferior to that of lesser manuscripts. We believe in looking at both internal and external evidence but give a slight weightiness to the manuscripts that have earned it. Andrews), and Wilkins and some others, we maintain that superior documentary evidence should prevail over internal unless internal evidence is extremely significant in overruling it. For Tregelles, Hort, Colwell, Comfort, myself (Edward D. In the minds of many or most textual critics, internal evidence should prevail over documentary when the two are in opposition. However, textual mixture or contamination is always assumed for modern-day textual scholars who have twisted reasoned eclecticism. Earlier manuscripts usually have better readings by this standard. Don Wilkins of the NASB is the Documentary Approach. Comfort writes about textual methods after the days of Westcott and Hort, “Left without a solid methodology for making external judgments, textual critics turned more and more to internal evidence.” For the textual scholar, generally speaking, all manuscripts are considered equal. Now, reasoned eclecticism is almost entirely looking at internal evidence, not paying too much attention to the external manuscripts. And maybe it mostly did up until about the 1990s. The most used and referred to is reasoned eclecticism, which is supposed to view all the evidence internal and external objectively. Wallace, professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, wrote in the Foreword of MYTHS AND MISTAKES In New Testament Textual Criticism, “The new generation of evangelical scholars is far more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty than previous generations.” (Bold mine) Modern-day scholarship and even the branch of textual studies should be deemed ‘the ambiguity and uncertainty of the modern Bible scholar.’ The uncertainty and ambiguity are of their own making by abandoning the objective documentary approach for a subjective reasoned eclecticism approach. This article may be somewhat controversial because many modern textual scholars are not certain (sure or confident) that we can get back to the original text. Andrews is the Chief Translator of the Updated American Standard Version (UASV). ANDREWS (AS in Criminal Justice, BS in Religion, MA in Biblical Studies, and MDiv in Theology) is CEO and President of Christian Publishing House.
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