Biblical Textual Criticism for Pastors
BITH 609
Summary
Explore the Biblical Textual Criticism for Pastors course and what you can expect to learn through the semester.
Course Overview
This course provides the student with an overview of the discipline of textual criticism of both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament.
This course enables a student to become knowledgeable about the various ways that scholars sought to determine the earliest form of the text and the various tools available for the student today.
The student will also become familiar with strategies to explain the appearance of some of the later readings.
Textbooks
- See the current booklist.
Professor: Dr. James Sedlacek
Intended Outcomes
Knowledge
- The historical developments of textual criticism in both OT and NT.
- The main methodologies in vogue today for both OT and NT.
- The range of scholarly opinions over methodologies and specific goals for textual criticism.
- The general outline for the way in which the writings of both the OT and NT were historically preserved in the manuscripts.
- Key terms and schools of thought in the discipline.
- Becoming familiar with the content and strategies used in the critical apparatus in both testaments.
- The principles that each model of textual criticism is based upon.
- The base text that major English translations used for their translation, especially the difference between Bezae 1598, or Textus Receptus, and UBS 5 or NA 28
Appreciate
- Appreciate the role and significance of textual criticism for interpretation. Textual Criticism is a necessary step for doing Biblical Theology, and for evaluating Historical Theology, and Systematic Theology.
- Appreciate the available tools for doing textual research (print sources, software, and online tools).
- Value the goals and results of several methods of doing textual criticism.
- Appreciate the range of strategies to determine the earliest reading.
- Appreciate the care that recent schools of textual criticism use to select the underlying text.
- Value the available eclectic editions used today for translations globally.
Ability
- Apply a range of text-critical skills on a small piece of text that has several available textual variants.
- Demonstrate rudimentary skill in balancing the range within the variants against known common scribal errors and apply logic and reasoning to determine the best variant.
- Demonstrate some proficiency in using the footnotes of the GNT, and both footnotes and marginal notes of the BHS.
- Trace a textual problem to theological outcomes
- Recognize the text-critical nature of the text that underlies our recent English translations.
- Create informed positions on the nature of our older and newer English translations
- Respond to uninformed positions regarding the text including but not limited to KJV- only views. Other myths from the Hixson – Gurry book are just as important.
- Reception history – using available manuscripts to detect instances of scribes trying to solve problems such as the pendant nun [ן] in Judges 18:30, or the insertion of longer Gospel material into shorter sections.