The Oxyrhynchus New Testament Papyri: “Not Without Honor Except in their Hometown”?

Abstract

The papyri offer us the most direct access we have to the experience of ordinary people in antiquity. -E. A. Judge1 A year and a half ago I presented to a distinguished NT scholar an offprint of an article I had just published on the Junia/Junias variation in Rom 16:7.2 A few weeks later, in his presence, I handed a copy also to another NT scholar. At that point, the first colleague said to the second, You must read this article. Can you imagine-something interesting written by a textual critic! This was meant to be a genuine compliment, yet it echoed a common and almost unconscious impression that biblical textual critics are dull creatures who spend their careers tediously adjudicating textual minutiae that only impede the exegete's work. Of course, critical editions are considered essential and therefore welcome, but must we really be bothered by that complex apparatus at the foot of the page? I. Introduction: Traditional and New Goals of Textual Criticism Naturally, textual critics will continue their tradition of establishing the earliest or most likely text, though now we use such a term, if we use it at all, with caution and even with reluctance, recognizing that original carries several dimensions of meaning.3 Indeed, ever since Westcott-Hort entitled their famous edition The New Testament in the Original Greek,4 we have learned that many a pitfall awaits those who, whether arrogantly or naively, rush headlong into that search ior the Holy Grail. Yet the aim to produce better critical editions by refining the criteria for the priority of readings and by elucidating the history of the text will remain; at the same time, however, textual criticism s other goals will be pursued in accord with significant changes that recent decades have brought to the discipline. example, emphasis has fallen on scribal activity, especially the purposeful alteration of texts that reflect the theology and culture of their times. One dramatic presentation was Bart Ehrman's Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, a work so well known that I need only summarize his main point: During the christological controversies of the first three centuries, proto-orthodox scribes, as he calls them, sometimes changed their scriptural texts to make them say what they were already known to mean.5 Hence, they corrupted their texts to maintain correct doctrine. Much earlier, textual critics had been willing to attribute such arrogance only to heretics, but Ehrman boldly and correctly turned this on its head. Though startling and unexpected, his thesis, as he recognized, issued quite naturally from text-critical developments of the preceding four decades.6 A second phenomenon, long troubling to textual critics, concerns multiple readings in one variation-unit that defy resolution, and attention has turned to what these multiple-often competing-variants might tell us about crucial issues faced by the churches and how they dealt with them. David Parker, whose small volume is at risk of being overlooked owing to its simple yet significant title, The Living Text of the Gospels,7 confronted the problem head-on, with fascinating results. instance, the six main variant forms of the so-called Lord's Prayer in Matthew and Luke show the evolution of this pericope under liturgical influence. This is well known, but my description of it is much too detached. What obviously happened, of course, was that the fervent, dynamic worship environment in early churches at various times and places evoked appropriate expansions of the shorter and certainly earlier forms that we print in our Greek texts of Matthew and Luke, including additional clauses such as Your Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us, but especially the lofty praise of the Almighty and Eternal God offered with grandeur and dignity and beauty in the famous doxology, For the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours forever and ever. …