Kurt Aland, Bruce Metzger, and the Lucianic Recension
Why was NA26/27 so negative towards the Byzantine text? Part of the answer lies with the theory of a Lucianic recension
This is an excerpt from my dissertation, where I discuss differing views on the Byzantine text in order to compare the Tyndale House Greek New Testament and Nestle-Aland 27. This is just to set the table; I don’t actually evaluate the Lucianic recension here.
The fundamental belief of the NA26/27 editors was that the Byzantine text was a recension (i.e., a deliberate editorial effort) which consulted and combined two earlier text-types (Alexandrian and Western) and therefore has little value for establishing the original text.
Westcott & Hort and the Byzantine (Syrian) Text
The NA26/27 had slightly different editorial committees, but the most published and active members of both committees were Kurt Aland and Bruce Metzger. Aland and Metzger still held the view of Westcott & Hort (WH), who argued for a view of the Byzantine (or “Syrian”) text that dominated text-critical scholarship for over 100 years after the publication of their The New Testament in the Original Greek in 1881.
WH’s argument for the secondary nature of the Byzantine text had three pillars:[1]
The Byzantine text had conflate readings that combined readings from the Alexandrian and Western text-types. WH gave eight examples: Mark 6:33; 8:26; 9:38, 49; Luke 9:10; 11:54; 12:18; 24:53.[2]
The Byzantine text is not supported by any patristic evidence of the second and third centuries. The Byzantine text does not seem to show up until Chrysostom in the fourth century.
By internal evidence of transcriptional and intrinsic probabilities, the Byzantine text shows itself to be secondary. The chief characteristics of the Byzantine text are:
[L]ucidity and completeness. [The authors of the Byzantine text] were evidently anxious to remove all stumbling-blocks out of the way of the ordinary reader . . . New omissions accordingly are rare, and where they occur are usually found to contribute to apparent simplicity. New interpolations on the other hand are abundant, most of them being due to harmonistic or other assimilation . . . [The Byzantine text] delights in pronouns, conjunctions, and expletives and supplied links of all kinds, as well as in more considerable additions.[3]
Furthermore, WH conjectured that the Byzantine text was a recension in the proper sense of the term, namely, a careful process of revision via the consulting of numerous manuscripts, usually with specific editorial principles.
In WH’s own words: “The Syrian [= Byzantine] text must in fact be the result of a ‘recension’ in the proper sense of the word, a work of attempted criticism, performed deliberately by editors and not merely scribes.”[4] WH believed that “(1) the growing diversity and confusion of Greek texts led to an authoritative revision at Antioch, which (2) was then taken as a standard for a similar authoritative revision of the Syriac text, and (3) was itself at a later time subjected to a second authoritative revision, carrying out more completely the purposes of the first.”[5]
WH conjectured that Lucian of Antioch led this effort based on Jerome’s testimony, but it was not critical to their theory that the specific reviser be Lucian. Although much of WH’s theory has been disproven by NT textual critics, Kurt Aland’s estimation of Westcott & Hort still stands true today: WH “provided a methodological basis which enjoyed almost canonical status for decades for a considerable number of scholars (and still does today for many).”[6]
Bruce Metzger and the Lucianic Recension
The NA26/27 editors embraced much of WH’s theory and resulting rejection of the Byzantine text. For example, Bruce Metzger writes: “readings that are supported by only Koine or Byzantine witnesses (Hort’s Syrian group) may be set aside as almost certainly secondary.
The reason that one is justified in discarding the Koine is that it is a later text type, formed on the basis of earlier types.”[7] The language here is quite confident and dismissive: the Byzantine text can be “set aside” and “discarded” because it is “almost certainly secondary.” This sort of dismissive attitude is not limited to the NA26/27 editors, but can be found in most other textbooks of NT textual criticism in the 20th century, such as Léon Vaganay & Christian-Bernard Amphoux,[8] and Harold Greenlee.[9]
Metzger & Ehrman give two arguments for the secondary nature of the Byzantine text: (1) it is late and (2) it was “formed on the basis of earlier types,” but they also reject the idea of a Lucianic recension in the 2005 edition of The Text of the New Testament.[10] However, their 2005 statement is at odds with Metzger’s earlier essay on the Lucianic recension in 1963, which made clear that he did indeed believe in a Lucianic recension as the origin of the Byzantine text type.[11]
I reviewed the first, second, and third editions of Metzger’s Text of the New Testament and discovered that Metzger himself did indeed believe in the Lucianic recension, while it was Ehrman who modified the fourth edition of Text of the New Testament to reject the Lucianic recension. In the first, second, and third editions of The Text of the New Testament, Metzger makes the same exact statement:
Readings which are supported by only Koine or Byzantine witnesses (Hort’s Syrian group) may be set aside as almost certainly secondary. The reason that justifies one in discarding the Koine type of text is that it is based on the recension prepared near the close of the third century by Lucian of Antioch, or some of his associates, who deliberately combined elements from earlier types of text.[12]
Thus, it should be clear that Bruce Metzger, one of the most influential members of the NA26/27 and UBS3/4 committees, believed in the Lucianic recension.
Kurt Aland and the Lucianic Recension
Chief editor of the NA26/27, Kurt Aland, also made clear that he believed in the theory of a Lucianic recension, although Aland believes that there was also earlier freedom in copying before Lucian. Aland writes: “Lucian created the ‘Antiochene text’ in the exegetical school at Antioch at the end of the third century during the forty-year period of freedom from persecution.”[13]
Aland also seems to endorse a softened version of Westcott & Hort’s conflation theory when he says, “when Lucian was editing the ‘Antiochene text,’ he had before him a manuscript (or manuscripts) that incorporated many elements of the ‘Majority text,’ but also extensively represented the original text, the text of the early period.”[14] I say “softened” version of Westcott & Hort’s conflation theory because Aland does not explicitly name Alexandrian and Western texts as Lucian’s exemplars, but rather speaks of “the text of the early period.”
Aland then describes the spread of Lucian’s recension: students of the Antiochene school “were called to serve as bishops of the numerous sees of Asia Minor and elsewhere . . . They brought ‘their’ text with them and naturally ordered its exclusive use in the scriptoria of their provinces, so that a tidal wave of manuscripts with the Antiochene (= early Byzantine) text flooded the Greek-speaking church.”
Yet Aland also clearly believes that the Byzantine text had stages and developed as a process; the Byzantine manuscripts “did not immediately supplant the earlier forms of text . . . this process was to take generations (most of the Byzantine manuscripts must have been introduced in churches as replacements of earlier manuscripts of different textual traditions).”[15]
Softening Westcott & Hort’s anti-Byzantine bias
However, the NA26/27 also softened WH’s firm rejection of the Byzantine text by opening the door for rare cases where the Byzantine text might preserve the original text. The main reason for this softening was the 20th century discovery of NT papyri. WH developed their theory without the papyri, but numerous papyri have been found to preserve readings that were previously thought to be distinctively Byzantine (i.e., no Alexandrian or Western support).
Günther Zuntz and Harry Sturz were particularly important in demonstrating these “Byzantine-papyri alignments,” which suggested an early date for readings previously thought to be distinctively Byzantine (i.e., only supported by Byzantine witnesses).[16] An early date for these readings did not automatically mean they represent the original text, but the early date meant that these Byzantine-papyri alignments deserved a careful consideration.
On the whole, despite the papyri softening their anti-Byzantine viewpoint, Aland and Metzger still believed in a Lucianic recension as a conflation of the two earlier text-types (Alexandrian and Western). This belief reinforced their view that Byzantine readings were secondary and led to an anti-Byzantine bias in their decision making.
[1] Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort, eds., The New Testament in the Original Greek, Volume 1: Introduction and Appendix (London: Macmillan and Co., 1881), 93–119.
[2] What made WH’s point here somewhat extreme is the statement that scribes “wrote with documents of both classes before them, or wrote from documents of one class which had readings from the other class written in the margin, or wrote from documents of one class while carrying in their own minds reminiscences from documents of the other class of which they had had knowledge at some previous time” (New Testament in the Original Greek, vol. 1, 106). WH never identified specific manuscripts that might actually support these scenarios.
[3] Westcott and Hort, The New Testament in the Original Greek, Volume 1, 134–35.
[4] Westcott and Hort, The New Testament in the Original Greek, Volume 1, 133.
[5] Westcott and Hort, The New Testament in the Original Greek, Volume 1, 137.
[6] Kurt Aland, “The Text of the Church?,” Trinity Journal 8 (1987): 134. Emphasis added.
[7] Metzger and Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 306. Emphases added.
[8] The Byzantine text “is a kind of ‘plenior’ text, one which is longer but also full of major faults. That does not make it entirely without value. Here and there, in one witness or another, there are a fair number of readings known to the Syrian communities of the first centuries. So there are some valuable elements in this mixture; they simply need to be decanted.” Léon Vaganay and Christian-Bernard Amphoux, An Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism, trans. Jenny Heimerdinger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 109.
[9] The Byzantine text is “a late text which is inferior to the other text-types. Of course, many Byzantine readings are supported by other evidence and are good readings. It is likewise possible that in some instances the true reading has been lost from the MSS of the other text-types and is preserved only in the Byzantine text. For this reason Byzantine readings must not automatically be rejected without examination. At the same time, the general impression given by readings that are characteristically Byzantine is that they are inferior and not likely to be original.” J. Harold Greenlee, Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1995), 86. As to the nature of the Byzantine text, Greenlee says: “Byzantine readings are characteristically smooth, clear, and full. . . . One of the most common characteristics of the Byzantine text is the harmonization of parallel passages” (pp. 86–87).
[10] Metzger and Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 279. They say the Byzantine text’s “final form represents a slow developing tradition, not one that sprang up immediately at one time and place. It was not, in other words, a textual recension created by a single person or community.”
[11] Bruce M. Metzger, “The Lucianic Recension of the Greek Bible,” in Chapters in the History of New Testament Textual Criticism, NTTS 4 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), 1–41. This chapter was a revision of an earlier journal article: Bruce M. Metzger, “Lucian and the Lucianic Recension of the Greek Bible,” New Testament Studies 8, no. 3 (1962): 189–203. The Lucianic recension theory is also found in Vaganay and Amphoux, An Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism, 109.
[12] Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 212; Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 212; Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 212.
[13] Aland, “The Text of the Church?,” 142.
[14] Aland, “The Text of the Church?,” 143.
[15] Aland, “The Text of the Church?,” 142–43.
[16] Harry A. Sturz, The Byzantine Text-Type and New Testament Textual Criticism (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1984), 55–69, 145–59; Günther Zuntz, The Text of the Epistles: A Disquisition upon the Corpus Paulinum (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 49–57.