I’ve just finished reading David Parker’s essay in the new book The Future of NT Textual Scholarship(more on that here). Even though I disagree with the main thrust of Parker’s work in the Living Text of the Gospels, there are few text critics I enjoy reading more than him. He always gets me thinking about things in fresh ways or from new angles. And very often he is asking the right question even when I don’t agree with his answer.Here is a case in point from the essay just mentioned, and I’d love to hear from people who are better versed in the history of Gospel scholarship than I am. On pages 398–399, Parker writes:
The result [of using 4th/5th c. manuscripts for critical editions] represented a huge change from the Textus Receptus. Gone were the Johannine Comma, the Pericope Adulterae, the Longer Ending of Mark. Gone too were so many harmonisations and alterations in the text of Mark that the new editions produced what by comparison with the Textus Receptus was a new version of the Gospel. A new approach to the Synoptic Problem and the influential theory of the Messianic Secret were just two developments that would never have been possible using the Textus Receptus.Now, I would not have thought that certain views of the Synoptic problem or Wrede’s messianic secret theory weren’t possible using the TR. But that could well be due to my ignorance. Even if that’s an exaggeration, it does get me thinking about the degree to which certain prominent views in NT studies over the last 150 years wouldn’t be possible (or would be far less compelling) if we were all still using the TR. What say our readers on this question?