Re: Style analysis

From: Mark O'Brien (Mark_O'Brien@dts.edu)
Date: Wed Sep 13 1995 - 16:13:22 EDT


Original message sent on Wed, Sep 13 12:55 PM by WINBROW@aol.com :

> The person that I know of who used style as a criterion in textual
> decisions was G.D.Kilpatrick. About all that he published in the area
> was an occassional journal article. Several were in Novum
> Testamentum. His student J.K. Elliott at Leeds in England does a lot
> of reviews in Novum Testamentum, but I do not know of anything he
> has published. Kilpatrick often made his textual decisions on
> stylistic considerations alone. I heard him say several times that the
> only thing he used the manuscripts for was to isolate the variant
> readings, but that they were all equally untrustworthy. For instance
> in his Diglot on Mark at Mark 1:14 he preferred KAI META over
> META DE in spite of the overwhelming mss support because the
> former was more in keeping with Markan style.

Interesting! I do not, however, wish to pursue the rigorous eclecticism
proposed by Kilpatrick and Elliott. As I understand it, no one has ever put
together a clear and consistent methodology for dealing with internal evidence
in the same way that Westcott and Hort did with external evidence. The aim here
is to try and come up with a reasonably (again, whatever that means!) accurate
method of evaluating internal evidence along with external evidence, without
neglecting one or the other (a suitably simple task, no doubt!).

However, your example raises the question: How did Kilpatrick arrive at the
conclusion that KAI META was more in keeping with Markan style? Was there some
objective method for deducing this?

Mark O'Brien



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