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The following reassessment of present-day NT textual criticism requires, by its very nature, a brief statement of the circumstances that occasioned it. Seven years ago, in the W. H. P. Hatch Memorial Lecture at the 1973 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, I attempted in fifty minutes an adventuresome—if not audacious— assessment of the entire scope of NT textual criticism during the past century. Though this was an instructive exercise for me and one that others report as instructive also for them, it was inevitable that so bold an undertaking would elicit sharp criticism. The first hint of this came from Münster in 1976, but more clearly within the past year or so in an invitation to subscribe to a Festschrift for Matthew Black containing an article by Kurt Aland of Münster with an announced title—appearing as it did in English—that had a highly familiar ring: “The Twentieth-Century Interlude in New Testament Textual Criticism,” obviously the title of the Hatch Lecture, which, following its presentation, had been published in the 1974 volume of JBL When the Festschrift itself appeared, it seemed obvious from Professor Aland's article that some reassessment of the course and significance of twentieth-century NT textual criticism was in order. Late in September 1979, Aland's article was reprinted in the annual report of his Münster foundation for NT textual research, now under the title of “Die Rolle des 20. Jahrhunderts in der Geschichte der neutestamentlichen Textkritik.” |
