I am tremendously honored to discover that Dr. Maurice Robinson, Senior Professor of New Testament and Greek at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (Wake Forest, NC) reads my blog, though, I realize, it may just be that someone forwarded the current blog entry to him for his comment (I’ll hope for the former, but expect the latter). Anyway, Dr. Robinson is one of the foremost proponents of the priority of the Byzantine text type in the US today (the Robinson-Pierpont text is included in the BibleWorks Bible program which we highly recommend here at aomin.org). His published work is titled The New Testament in the Original Greek: According to the Byzantine-Majority Textform. I had the pleasure of being in contact with him a decade ago now while I was writing The King James Only Controversy.
In any case, Dr. Robinson wrote to suggest a different way of looking at the textual variant I commented on this morning in 2 Cor. 11:32 (which I had picked simply because I was looking for something that involved an infinitive, and that due to the comments I made about needing to work harder on bringing my grasp of the syntax of infinitives up to the level of my darling participles). I realize that textual critical discussions do not prompt cries of joy and excitement from the large portion of the Christian community—I have always been rather odd in truly enjoying the examination and discussion of textual variants. So I promise not to fill the blog completely with this discussion. I’ll break it up. But for those of you who are serious about these things, you might well find the discussion useful.
If you are one of those who find the discussion challenging because of the vocabulary used, you might want to consider picking up some basic resources, such as:
The Nestle-Aland 27th Edition Greek New Testament, Novum Testamentum Graece. A library in one hand once you master the notation system.
The King James Only Controversy. Yeah, yeah, I know, I wrote it. But it is used as a text all across the land for the simple reason that it introduces the key issues in an understandable and interesting fashion. Humor me!
The Text of the New Testament by Bruce Metzger. The classic introductory text.
Rethinking New Testament Textual Criticism, David Alan Black, ed. This work includes Dr. Robinson’s essay, “The Case for Byzantine Priority.”
In our next installment I’ll summarize Dr. Robinson’s argument. Also, you may wish to download bwgrkl.ttf from www.bibleworks.com so that the Greek in these blog entries — well, looks like Greek.
