Textus Receptus vs. Byzantine (Majority) Text

On Willker's textual criticism list (Yahoo Groups) James Snapp Jr. recently posted an excellent summary of the relationship between the Textus Receptus (TR) and the Majority Text (Byzantine text-type).

Re: [textualcriticism] Comparing Byz and TR in the Gospels

Msg #6251
  02/04/2011

 "The Textus Receptus was the collation-base for many collations. The exact identity of which TR (Stephanus or Elzevir), and of which edition, may vary among collators; nevertheless, it's still the TR. And those collations are still useful. The idea has probably occurred to a lot of textual critics, though, that it would be better to compare the text of a specific MS to the Byzantine Text itself, instead of to the TR, so that one can immediately see how Byzantine or non-Byzantine a MS' text is, instead of seeing how similar it is to the TR.

  But are the differences between the TR and the Byzantine Text really so great that remarkably different results will be obtained if one uses Byz, instead of the TR, or the TR instead of Byz, as a gauge of a MS' text's normality?

 

These are actually pretty good numbers, and I think it makes the case *FOR* using a Byzantine like RP2005.   Here is a summary of the comparison for the Gospels:

  In Matthew, there are 159 differences between RP2005 and Scriv1881. But 109 of those differences are either the kind of mistakes that two copyists could make copying from the same exemplar (involving itacism, orthography, word-division, and parableptic error), or, in four cases, occur where Byz is divided. 46 are distinctive disagreements.

  In Mark, there are 142 differences between RP2005 and Scriv1881. But 69 are either the kind of mistakes that two copyists could make copying from the same exemplar (involving itacism, orthography, word-division, and parableptic error), or, in 11 cases, occur where Byz is divided. 73 are distinctive disagreements.

  In Luke, there are 221 differences between RP2005 and Scriv1881. But 67 are either the kind of mistakes that two copyists could make copying from the same exemplar (involving itacism, orthography, word-division, and parableptic error), or, in 15 cases, occur where Byz is divided. 140 are distinctive disagreements.

 In John, there are 158 differences between RP2005 and Scriv1881. But 51 are either the kind of mistakes that two copyists could make copying from the same exemplar (involving itacisms, orthography, word-division, and parableptic error), or occur where Byz is divided. 107 are distinctive disagreements.

  So in the Gospels as a whole, Scrivener's TR varies from R-P's Byzantine text 680 times, and in 366 of these cases, the TR contains a distinctly non-Byzantine reading (i.e., a reading that implies non-Byzantine ancestry). So when you collate, you are looking at only the differences. If R-P is a good representation of the  typical Byzantine tradition, then your analysis says that the typical Byzantine manuscript will likely have about 700 differences between it and the TR, of which roughly 1/2 will be TR specific.

  How big a difference is that? Well, between NA25 and NA27, there are 115 differences in Mt., 82 differences in Mk., 97 differences in Luke, and 114 differences in Jn. -- 408 in all. But I'm pretty sure that the textual character of any MS could be identified confidently whether it was collated against NA25 or against NA27. So the 680 differences (or, the 366 distinct differences) between Scrivener's TR and R-P's Byz in the Gospels probably are not big enough, collectively, to obscure the textual character of complete Gospels-MSS collated against the TR." 

Yours in Christ,

James Snapp, Jr.

 

Bob Relyea replied to James' post with the following observation:

"There's no question that the TR is in the Byzantine family, and certainly a TR collation will determine if a given manuscript is Byzantine or not, but that is not always the question we want to answer. For non-Byzantine manuscripts the 360 odd TR specific differences are not likely to be significant (compared to heir differences to the Byzantine base text), but for Byzantine manuscripts, they introduce unnecessary noise into trying to classify manuscripts in their subfamilies."

bob 
textualcriticism (Yahoo Groups)
Msg #6261  Feb 6, 2011

The concept of "noise" is apt, in textual transmission.  We have already had an engineer posting here on that subject.   There should actually be a way to quantify the Signal/Noise ratio in accurate engineering terms, for comparison purposes.  How about it, Joe?

Another interesting point here is that these variants may or may not make a difference, depending upon the task at hand, and the type of text being compared.   It is surely worth observing that when doing a more subtle operation, like classifying a manuscript among groups within its own text-type, problems or inaccuracies might arise.

We saw a similar phenomenon when people tried to apply Principle Components Analysis (PCA) techniques to MS grouping.  The methods were unable to focus the picture tightly enough to actually improve the picture or the classification of MSS into sub-groups or families.

Principle Components Analysis Examined  <- - - Click here.


peace
Nazaroo