Tow Ard Tee Clarification of Tee Term "Textual Variant"

Abstract

Professor Kilpatrick's text-critical studies, spanning more than thirty years and treating myriad New Testament passages and countless variations, have been particularly instructive and indeed provocative in their attention to the so-called internal criteria for deciding between or among readings in the New Testament manuscript tradition. All critics, whether they pay more attention to internal evidence or to external, are concerned with variants they are their stock in trade, and the careful definition of textual variant and its associated terms is not only important but fundamental to the entire discipline. Colwell and Tune classify readings that in their judgement were insignificant for purposes of isolating the original text, tracing the history of the text, or determining manuscript kinship and that for this and other reasons were to be excluded from the critical apparatus and, for the most part, excluded also from further text-critical tasks. Keywords: Ernest C. Colwell; Ernest W. Tune; George Kilpatrick; New Testament manuscript tradition;