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An Introduction to the Mss of the New Testament

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2011

R. V. G. Tasker
Affiliation:
King's College, University of London

Extract

Last year there was published in New York a Revised Standard Version of the New Testament. This version, in the words of the title-page, is “translated from the Greek being the version set forth in 1611, revised 1881 and 1901, and compared with the most ancient authorities and revised 1946.” In effect this Revised Standard Version is a revision in the light of the Greek text of the English and American Revised Versions. It is not my business in this lecture to discuss the merits and demerits of this new Version as a translation. What I wish to point out, however, is that such a new version has been rendered necessary not only for linguistic but for textual reasons. The discovery of additional MSS and the very considerable achievements of textual critics since the publication of Hort's theory of the text in 1881, a theory which exercised considerable influence upon the framers of the English Revised Version, have, quite apart from any other considerations, made a fresh revision desirable.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1948

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References

1 A lecture given to the Vacation Term of Biblical Study at Oxford, August, 1947.

2 The only exceptions are Lachmann's two editions based on the oldest Greek MSS and the Vulgate; the first three editions of Tischendorf in which he followed Lachmann; and Tischendorf's editio (octava) major in which he followed Codex Sinaiticus. Tregelles, the immediate predecessor of Hort, also followed Lachmann.

3 1.118.131.209.

4 22. 1582.

5 13.69.124.346.

6 By addition of 543.788.826.828.983.1689. (See Studies and Documents vol. xl. 1941. K. and S. Lake.)

7 The Western element in the Sinaitic Syriac may however have come into it, as Burkitt maintained, through Tatian's Diatessaron, which if written when Tatian was in Rome would naturally have a Western text.

8 Studies and Documents, (vol. xi. pp. 7.8.)

9 B disagrees with א more frequently in the Pauline Epistles than in the Gospels; and Hort did not follow B in such disagreements to the same extent as he did in the Gospels. The suggestion that 1739 was probably evidence for a type of text similar to the Caesarean text of the Gospels was first put forward by K. Lake in Six Collations of New Testament Manuscripts (Harvard 1932) where a collation of the MS is given.

10 Burkitt e.g. maintained that the agreement of B. k. and the old Syriac should usually be regarded as decisive.

11 Some of them may just as well be called “Neutral Interpolations.

12 xxii. 19b–20.

13 xxii. 43–44.

14 xxiii. 34.

15 xxiv. 12.

16 xxiv. 51.