[B-Greek] Westcott-Hort GNT
Wieland Willker
wie at uni-bremen.de
Thu Apr 17 13:39:08 EDT 2008
I think that anyone who is interested in textual criticism
should own a Westcott-Hort text.
I have done a little analysis of the evidence as it appears
in my online commentary.
You can read this text here:
http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/TCG/WH-evaluation.pdf
Excerpt:
"This commentary now features a complete evaluation of all
variants where the WH text deviates from NA27. Still, the WH
text is in wide use today, and it is generally considered to
be the next best thing to NA.
It might therefore be in order to analyze the results a bit.
Such a comparison is of course a little unfair, because
since WH's times (1881) a lot of new evidence came to light.
Nevertheless it will turn out that there is a surprisingly
high number of variants, where WH is possibly right against
NA."
...
"Coming to a more subjective evaluation, the application of
a rating system gives the following results:
In 7 cases (2%) I consider the WH reading clearly superior
over the NA reading. In 75 cases (17%) the WH reading is
possibly superior. In 40 cases (9%) I consider the WH
reading clearly wrong, and in 115 cases (25%) possibly
wrong. 214 cases (47%) are left undecided."
"Conclusions:
One will probably not agree with my estimation of the
evidence in all cases, but I think it is clear that the WH
text still has its value today. It is slightly inferior to
NA, but one cannot say that it is wrong in all cases. About
60% of all differences are so difficult to evaluate, that
there is a strong possibility that NA is, to some extent at
least, wrong.
In light of the manifold criticisms of WH's opinions
regarding the transmission of the text, it is astonishing
that their text is so good still today. This is on the one
hand probably primarily due to the fact that their basic
result, to follow B wherever possible, is not so bad as it
is normally accepted today, and on the other hand, that
their opinions regarding the textual history are, with some
qualifications, probably also basically correct."
Best wishes
Wieland
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Dr. Wieland Willker, Bremen, Germany
mailto:willker at chemie.uni-bremen.de
http://www.uni-bremen.de/~wie
Textcritical Commentary:
http://www.uni-bremen.de/~wie/TCG/index.html
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