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Kishkumen,

I was watching a video on New Testament textual criticism by Dan Wallace. He teaches at a really conservative school, but he is generally very fair. Here's the video (only around 3 min):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiHei3R_ ... re=related

In the first half of the video he compare New Testament textual criticism to textual criticism on classical texts. His main point is that classical text criticism relies heavily on conjectural emendation to produce coherent documents. However, because of the large numbers of New Testament manuscripts, there is hardly ever any need for conjectural emendation. Could you please comment on the veracity of what he is saying regarding classical texts?

Hello, Snoopy-

It depends entirely upon the text in question. Some texts are better represented, i.e., there are more manuscripts, than others. In some cases, there is only a single manuscript for a text. Fronto's correspondence comes close to being this poorly represented. Obviously editing a corrupt text that exists in only a single manuscript will necessitate more conjecture. There are a couple of anecdotes/jokes that I think well illustrate the problem in Ciceronian scholarship. One is that Cicero looks more Ciceronian every year, meaning that people tend to homogenize in their conjectures by emending those lexical choices that strike the reader as unusual for Cicero. Another, which is more of a story, is that Shackleton-Bailey, the recently deceased (2005) authority on Cicero, used to edit the author while drinking hard liquor and watching game shows on t.v. Shackleton-Bailey is stilly highly revered, but I think everyone agrees that he made some questionable choices. Was he distracted by a tense moment on Wheel of Fortune? I guess we'll never know.

Sooooooooo Snoopy. What is your interest in this?