The grace of the Lord, and the love of the God, and the sharing of the sanctified spirit [be] with every [one] of you
Ahh. The plot thickens….Thanks Robin for spotting this. 
Very interesting. I await what others have to say.
That was why I went into so much detail about how the meanings compare with one another, whether {kata} is by itself, or in an accusative prepositional phrase, or a genitive one. The different meanings have fairly clear common roots as metaphorical applications of the original meaning.
It would be a further metaphorical deployment, not related to the original word, for {kata} to mean a comparison of competing ideas, although logically that could happen. However, I don’t see how that could apply in the case of Gal 5:23. “These things are comparatively against no law”?? “…comparatively not against the law”?? I think the negative term makes more sense with the meaning of direct opposition, or rather as denying there is opposition between the law and such things.
It’s always worth trying out a meaning and seeing how well it fits, though.
Except that following ideologically neutral reasonable principles of internal and external evidence, balanced by historical and transmissional factors, results in minimizing the weight of the Byzantine class, as the authors seem well aware or they wouldn’t immediately try to introduce an ideological factor against the standard reconstructions:
“Eclectic speculation” vs. inspired authoritative transmission. “Heterodox scribes” vs. inspired authoritatively orthodox transmission. (Who are these heterodox scribes supposed to be?? Scribes who don’t agree with later official Byzantine declarations about what the text shall say–the evidence otherwise has exactly no reason to regard them as being particularly heterodox.) “A more genuine text than the orthodox” vs. inspired authoritative orthodox transmission. Merely probabilistic “uncertainty” vs. the certainty of inspired authoritative transmission. Standard scholarly understandings of the history of transmission (accepted by the highest authorities of the Roman Catholic side of Christianity now, by the way), are described as “floundering without an understanding [of the] history of transmission”.
I’m away from my office materials right now, so I’ll have to wait for the subsequent discussions. I think it’s pretty obvious that Prof. Wallace is counting “source-from” as a slight metaphorical adaptation of the physical meaning of “down-from”, similar to the accusative form’s metaphorical application of “down-by” to then mean a source reference, “according to” as we would say in English.
The grace of the Lord, and the love of the God, and the sharing of the sanctified spirit [be] with every [one] of you
The grace of the Lord, and the love of the God, and the sharing of the sanctified spirit [be] with every [one] of you
eirEnopoiEsas
Call me Dave. Edith is my dear, but dead dog.
Thanks for that post, very enlightening!
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Yeah, I couldn’t think of any examples either, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there: kata plus a genitive noun is a common construction. Maybe [tag]Paidion[/tag] can opine on that…?
(Incidentally, Dan Wallace teamed up with Credo House Ministries to help them put together a whole semester’s worth of textual criticism classes, which I pre-ordered several months ago though the DVDs and assorted extras haven’t arrived yet – editing problems apparently. I’ve read a lot of text-crit books already, but I liked the plan and wanted to have the DVDs available for my family. )
Like, I vow according to this thing? 
Genitives (in Greek) have a pretty standard meaning when by themselves; it’s only when explicit prepositions are attached to them that their meaning necessarily changes (replacing the tacit meaning of “of” with something implied by whatever preposition is added explicitly to the noun).
As to why hairs have to be so finely cut over a word needing to be read so very differently: don’t ask me, ask the authors who were writing in Greek. Sometimes it’s just impossible to interpret something as “in accord with” or “against”, and even “in accord with” doesn’t strictly mean “according to” although the meanings are naturally related. “With” and “against” don’t mean the same thing.
Why not just be consistent with the word “kata”, just reading it as “down”, and let the chips fall where they mentally will, based upon the context?
Because if an author writes down-nounformone in one case, and down-nounformtwo in another case, he probably means something different or he wouldn’t be using two noun forms. Greek is very annoying like that. (As are most languages other than English.)
But if you’re going to reach for purity of consistency in a unified underlying meaning, I recommend you use “down”, which is a much simpler notion than “according to”. Because that’s how the usage actually developed into the forms we see today. (Which is why I went to some trouble to talk about how the various meanings developed from literally physical or metaphorical applications of “down”.)
I would need to read Westcott and Horts’ “Introduction” to check what kind of “anti-Byzantine” qualifications they make (I’ve only read modern authors, who have progressed beyond W&H), but I’m somewhat doubtful that the principle of weighing early texts against later ones would favor Byzantine priority. Reading majority texts against minority ones would, possibly also reading difficult wording against smoother wording (except where scribal error seems reasonably explicable).
Text crit principles were developed (by Origen originally, btw) for inferring the most likely original reading in scriptural variations, but textual scholars on other literary topics routinely use the same principles to reconstruct the most probably original reading of other variant texts where autographs aren’t available. (Shakespearean studies for example.) What “anti-Byzantine qualifications” cripple those projects??
Moreover, if the authors really felt so secure in appealing to mere text-critical principles, they wouldn’t have felt like they needed to make an ideological appeal in favor of special Byzantine authority to sell their case. Supposing for purposes of argument there were specific anti-Byzantine bias in the standard criterias, neutralizing the biases should be enough to sell the analysis as superior.
Doesn’t matter whether his appeal comes sooner or later, he’s still selling his case on the strength of that appeal.
You’re welcome to provide an actual internet address for the work of Robinson et al. I have no particular concern about whether the Byzantine set is textually superior or not (if anything I’m a little fond of Eastern Orthodoxy); but I’m not going to accept a theological appeal without judging a valid theological case being made, which is quite different than text critical principles.
(Actually, modern text criticism, also W&H’s, is based on the criteria of Karl Lachmann, the classics historian, who applied his criteria for deciding among textual variations of non-scriptural Greek and Latin manuscripts. I just recalled that that came first, in the early modern period, and was subsequently applied to scriptural text criticism, not the other way around, although refinements made through study of the scriptural variations which are richer broadly in geography and language, and deeper across time, than any other pre-modern texts, have been subsequently applied back to recovery efforts on non-scriptural texts. So the two fields of study have mutually improved each other.)
I should clarify before I start that there are two different though somewhat related disputes about “Byzantine priority”. One dispute is about a broad family of related texts related to and (eventually) including the Byzantine standardization attempt (a family of texts sometimes called “Antiochan” or “Syrian” instead, although there is also another small family of Syrian texts); and another dispute is about the standardization attempt itself, which claims special theological privileges. By “Byzantine” I typically mean the late Imperial standardization project, not the many important texts preceding it which are also considered (by type) part of the family often called “Byzantine”, but which were not themselves part of the official standardization project.
The standard criteria, with qualifications, are:
1.) An earlier textual witness weighs more than a later one. This is similar to the canon criteria of earlier compared to later texts.
(Metzger adds a potentially circular criteria here which I routinely ignore, appealing to the “date and character of the type of text it embodies” being of greater importance than date, i.e. if someone already thinks the Alexandrian text superior to the Western or the Byzantine/Antiochian – or vice versa! – then they would appeal to that criteria more strongly than to the relative dating of sources. But that begs the question of what criteria were used to grade various broad textual families against each other, which theoretically ought to be conjunctions of the other principles including this one. Obviously this qualification could be abused to presuppose against or for a text family, against or for the Byzantine text family for example: if the Byzantine family has already been judged on prior grounds to be generally superior to another text family, then on this qualification that would be of greater weight than an earlier reading; similarly a later Alexandrian family text might be prejudiced by family connections against an earlier reading of the Byzantine group.
However, if the qualification means only a reminder that the total sum of a case may weigh against an earlier textual variant, i.e. early doesn’t always decisively weigh toward more accurate, that I can agree with. Notice that such a formulation is exactly the opposite of being inherently prejudiced against the later Byzantine family of texts: it protects the possibility of later texts retaining the original reading, while keeping the caution about all the various kinds of deviations, accidental and intentional, that can creep into a text over time.)
2.) Broad geographical distribution of a witness weighs more than restricted distribution, including in tracking the persistence of a witness over time. This is similar to the canon criteria of how widely and how long a text was used by the Church. An important qualification to this criteria is that widely diffuse sources may not actually be independent of each other.
3.) Repetitions of a witness should count neither for nor against a reading being original.
Obviously repetitions cannot count against being the original reading, since any original reading outside the autograph must survive through a copy, and hopefully through thousands of copies (and hopefully thousands of years); just as obviously, a deviation might survive through repeated copying, too. (One famous example relevant to Christian universalism is the wording of Mark 9:49. One way or another, a phrase or its deletion has survived across many repetitions, of close enough equal weight.)
The Byzantine family of texts represents a specially authorized attempt at creating an official standard, which is why apart from internal variations they are treated as effectively one witness (previously with a fancy B sigil, now with a fancy M for Majority since after all they are technically the majority.) The whole selling point of the Byzantine family was (and still in places is) that readers are getting one standardized witness across multiple texts with special attention to uniformity. But that means the similarities can only count as one text among others for text critical tracing. (The same would be true of any edition of scripture printed with a press, from Gutenberg on.) The same principle should be, and typically is, applied where special efforts to reproduce a particular standard text are known: direct copies of a known particular Unical only count for their differences, if any, not as multiple witnesses to the same readings. It’s just that those examples are fairly rare and much smaller in number than the mass of standardized texts representing a specially authorized Byzantine exemplar.
That isn’t a specifically anti-Byzantine principle. It counts for other sets, too, where the same conditions apply: the goal is to prevent popularity of a witness from weighing against evidence of deviation by proportional weight of the popularity. In one infamous case, a relatively recent Pope trying to standardize the Latin text pronounced an anathema against anyone using a different text than the one he commissioned to be printed; and then had to recant the anathema when so many definite printing errors were discovered that the text had to be re-commissioned! Hundreds or thousands of Bibles had come off the presses by then, but they counted for nothing by weight. The special strengths of a standardized mass printing project cannot be counted as special strengths in some other regards.
4.) Texts found to be reliable in clear-cut cases should be given special competency weight in an obscure or ambiguous case. If the Byzantine printing project exemplar, for example (or a reconstruction of it from subsequent copies, which is a text critical project in itself!), is found to be reliable in clear-cut cases, its competency weight of testimony in obscure or ambiguous cases should be included (although only as one text due to its special printing situation). If the exemplar is found to have clear problems, its special competency weight is reduced in proportion. (A text infested with clear problems doesn’t accrue a special decompetency weight compared to other texts, though.) I think the modern standard text critical projects behind the N-A and UBS editions treat the Majority text as having as much special competency weight as any other respected single text standing at the head of its subfamily of direct copies, despite its late composition. (They call it a “major witness”.) But it doesn’t have extra-super-special competency weight compared to other texts, and that was the intention of its founders (generally also of its apologists). Notably, even though “fancy M” only counts as one set, textual critics also regard the following pre-Byzantine standardization project texts as important: A E F G H K L P S V W (for GosMatt and the vast majority of GosLuke) Pi Psi Omega 046 (for Rev) 049 (for Acts and the Epistles) 051 (for Rev) 052 (for Rev) and most pre-Byz miniscules. These are all texts the later standardization project confirmably or most likely worked from, and they happen to be REALLY IMPORTANT. Anyone even slightly familiar with the apparatus will recognize a ton of those texts appearing again and again, not only for respectable variations but as testifying to the inferred original. But the fancy-M set of miniscules isn’t more important than they are, and isn’t counted as inherently more important than other text type families; it’s counted as one equivalent respected text among others.
5.) Witnesses that would be regarded as a more difficult reading by scribal standards, weigh more than easier readings, where a clear reason for scribal error isn’t available. Between two textual variants, which one would a scribe (or the leader of a set of scribes) more likely think was an error that needed correcting? Of course, the alteration might also truly fix the reading, so this criteria only counts where the difference of the purported fix seems shallow (itself a cautiously subjective estimate), or more usually where the purported error is hard to explain by the accident of a previous copyist. (It might be an error of the autograph, poor grammar or a mis-spell, or an original spelling outdated at the time of the copy, or mistaking one town for another, etc.) This criteria also applies to cases of an unfamiliar word vs a familiar one, or unrefined to refined grammar especially by the standard of the language outside the text at the time of copying.
6.) A shorter reading, unless otherwise clearly explicable, should weigh a little more than a longer reading. One qualification would be if the longer reading might be offensive to a previous scribe, thus explaining its absence. The idea here is to avoid scribal explanatory glosses, such as when one scribe adds a marginal comment that a subsequent copyist mistakes for material accidentally omitted that the first scribe was trying to correct. Since however that sort of thing could also happen, this criteria shouldn’t be given much weight in itself: it’s more of a supplementary criteria.
7.) A witness which harmonizes verbally with attested scripture elsewhere, should be given less weight than an otherwise coherent witness which verbally differs from a parallel saying elsewhere. The idea here is that it’s usually easier to explain a verbal concordance by harmonization efforts than to explain an otherwise coherent variation. For example if there are two versions the GosMark saying about the sin against the Holy Spirit, and one of them matches exactly with its parallel in GosMatt while the other has quite different but still coherent wording, it’s easier to explain the difference by a scribe deciding to bring the non-apostolic Mark into agreement with the apostolic Matthew, than to explain how the other version got there.
8.) There are rather more nebulous criteria which some critics may regard as more important than others. Does one variation match the style of the author of the book more than another variation? – and if so, should that weigh in favor of authorial consistency or in favor of a scribe trying to fix a mistake he thought entered the text by someone who didn’t know the author as well as he does? Does a variant fit immediate context better than another? – and does that represent well-intentioned scribal improvement? Does a variant fit a presumed Aramaic background of Jesus and His teaching better than the copyist would expect, or does an Aramaic variant in a cosmopolitan scene reflect a scribe’s own Aramaic influence trying to make the saying fit Jesus (perhaps against the original author’s translation smoothing Jesus linguistically for his audience)? What does the history of the passage in the Christian community before and during the copyist period, perhaps in the special community of the copyist, tell us about how they would prefer to read it, or about controversies over the verse? Sometimes these criteria can play a decisive role, other times they may only add a little further weight for or against an option.
Decisive roles by any criteria are fairly rare, though. More often it’s an inductive judgment weighing various factors. If there are inspired authoritative judgments about variations (whether original or not!), for settling what should be decisive readings, that’s a whole other question than textual criticism, although the two topics can naturally be combined. But the theological case has to be presented and gauged on its own merits.
eirEnopoiEsas
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Jason, I’m not going to opine, but I will state some facts. I checked out every verse in Matthew which contains “κατα” followed by the genitive. There are 7 of them. In one of the seven the word has been rendered as “down” by the ESV translators. In the other six, it has been translated either as “against” or by another word which could have been translated as “against.”
Mt 10:35 (ESV) For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
Mt 12:32 (ESV) And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.
Mt 20:11 (ESV) And on receiving it they grumbled at [against?]the master of the house…
Mt 24:7 (ESV) For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places.
Mt 26:59 (ESV) Now the chief priests and the whole Council were seeking false testimony against Jesus that they might put him to death,
Mt 26:63 (ESV) But Jesus remained silent. And the high priest said to him, “I adjure you by [against?] the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.”
Mt 27:1 ¶ (ESV) When morning came, all the chief priests and the elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death.