Most of my teaching concerns Indian humanities, but I also sometimes teach courses in the academic study of religion that are global in scope. This term I am teaching “Methods in the Study of Religion” and we just finished a unit on textual criticism. Since these are undergraduates and the course is exclusively in English, we started with this mock exercise I devised to give the students a taste of what it’s like to do the work we will be reading about. As it turns out, the Hafiz poem’s translation went through all sorts of twists and turns and “translators” and transmitters who did not know Persian before it came to us. Alas, it is quite far removed from the original. That’s a lesson in philology in itself.
Anyhow, we read A.E. Housman’s famous article “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism” next, along with Arie van der Kooij’s “Textual Criticism” article on the Hebrew Bible, as a step toward our main book for the unit, Bart Ehrman’s 2005 book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. We also considered Sheldon Pollock’s “Future Philology” and, as a counterpoint to all this focus on texts, Carol P. Christ’s article “Toward a Paradigm Shift in the Academy and in Religious Studies.” To make a long story short, I found it a very rich set of readings and the students managed to stay engaged…a success! Thanks are due to Harunaga Isaacson, who introduced me to several of these articles at Uni Hamburg.
My impetus to tell the world about these last few weeks of the class is just how strikingly common it is for most authorities writing on textual criticism to make serious mistakes—just as Housman describes over a century ago. In fact, Housman still shines as a pristine and utterly reliable guide.
Bart Ehrman’s explanation of New Testament textual criticism is, on the whole excellent. It gives the reader a great overview of the development of the discipline, and gives many well-reasoned examples of prominent places the text of the New Testament was altered by scribes for various reasons. He gives a lot of great advice on methods, the focus for my course. His reasoning is usually solid, but in some cases, I found statements that were not sufficiently thought through. For instance, Ehrman tells us that in his view the most important external criterion that scholars follow is that an original reading is normally found in the best manuscripts and the best groups of manuscripts (130). This is surely true as a statistical fact, but then what use is it? Since it is just “normally” the case, the textual critic who really cares to recover the original wording cannot rely on it in any given instance, because you never know if that instance is going to be the “normally” or the exception!
Housman made essentially the same observation in response to a scholar who said “Interpolation is, speaking generally, comparatively an uncommon source of alteration, and we should therefore be loth to assume it in a given case.” Housman flags this as a non-sequitur, since every case is a given case and yet interpolation occurs. He helpfully puts it in concrete terms to show how ridiculous it is: “A bullet-wound is, speaking generally, comparatively an uncommon cause of death, and we should therefore be loth to assume it in a given case.” Yet bullet wounds occur, so we have to consider it in every case where the context makes it possible. In the case of Ehrman’s claim, the point Housman would make is that sometimes the original reading is not in the so-called best manuscripts, so we cannot dispense with all those other witnesses so lightly. There were several other “principles” in this section where I found Ehrman’s reasoning suspect. But he is smart enough to avoid the language of hard and fast rules, unlike another author in this unit, who presented textual criticism as a “science” with reliable rules and one that “can be carried out only by trial and error.” Housman slaps his hand to his forehead and shakes his head in dismay!