Stephen Carlson wrote:As pointed out in the ἄν thread, this lexicon is keyed to an obsolete text of the NT. So it's not just being out of date with regard to the papyri that's a problem but also with regard to the text of the NT.
I realise that you've written this on the fly, and at the risk of leading others to believe that the main point you were making was the one I will speak to, let me take the opportunity to labour just one point of detail, which is probably of little or no interest to anyone anyway.
As I've said previously, I'm not sold on the idea of a new single authoritative or standard text to replace an older standard. The eclectic
text is a conjectural composite of
texts and textual traditions. I think that the discovery - realisation - that there were so many variants in the manuscripts was a great opportunity to expand on the idea of a single standard and authoritative text approach to reading the New Testament. Back in the age of paper and ink perhaps the costs of reproducing parallel column variants of the New Testament would have been prohibitive, but now, perhaps not.
I have alluded to my feelings about this in a previous discussion we had some time ago. Let me speak more fully about it. It is like someone who lived in a small little room for a long time, who suddenly went out to see the world, then collected a lot of pictures of different scenes of beauty and insight that he found. When he got back to his little room, he realised that there was not enough space on his walls to fit what he had found, so he created a
photomontage, which captured many of the interesting features and points of detail that he had seen along the way in his travels, the downside of his cut and paste was that he couldn't leave them within their contexts due to the demands of space. In some cases, notes were written (on the floor) under the text, but not all readers or people reproducing the new scene in his room noticed, paid attention to or even reproduced that part of his room.
I really appreciate some of the older lexicons - after this Robinson, Duncan and Negris one we are discussing - that listed which manuscripts had which readings. This Robinson, Duncan and Negris was as you say too early to do that, and BDAG doesn't do that either (their reasons to depart from that practice are given on page X of the preface). That practice of citing actual manuscripts for their variants, rather than citing a text created from is one step less removed from the diversity of manuscripts that exists from the period after the autographs and before the eclectic reconstruction. Overlooking the diversity by talking about
a text, or basing a lexicon, or a vocabulary learning guide (Trenchard) on a single text doesn't reflect the way Christianity has been throughout its history. I like to keep a distinction between what is real manuscript, and what is hypothetical scholarly reconstruction.
I realise that you didn't mean so much by your comment as could be inferred by what I have built up in seeming contradistinction to it, and I hope that noone takes it that I think you did mean a lot by it. I also hope that noone takes my continued writing about this lexicon as that I greatly support it for other than the reasons that I have previously stated, for its assumption of some reading ability in Classical Greek that was imaginable in the 19th century, and for its references to school level classical texts. It has been noted that at the time of its writing it was considered by some as one of the best available, as with most things even the best of the best are eventually improved.