Since the actual uncial detail is only available with Text und Textwert, rather than the NA apparatus, it would be helpful to have the paper give the uncial count, and, even better, also include a line for the uncial details for each variant. The differences will be in "only begotten Son" where many of the uncials are "second order" and thereby omitted from the NA apparatus.
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(Is this apparatus rigging? A point where I may disagree with some friends in emphatically saying yes.)
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There is often a real close uncial split on variants that are, overall, ultra-minority Alexandrian CT vs. Byzantine-TR. And this will be emphasized by the CT side. When the uncials are massively (e.g. 85%-90%) for the Byz text, the apparatus apparatchiks and the commentary writers will omit this, as well as the overall 98.5% type of number.
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Thanks!
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Let us switch to Letis. James, I would venture to say, is very close in agreement with Letis, without the benefit of having seen his analysis.
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"The prologue of John and the Egyptian manuscripts : John 1:18 as a case study in the canonical approach"
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Published in: "The ecclesiastical text : text criticism, biblical authority, and the popular mind" 1997 and 2nd edition, 2000, p. 107-132
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It is hard to do extracts, I am tempted to do page after page. Anyway. (For the techie details he uses McReynolds and UBS, and Abbot is referenced as well, more on the doctrinal aspect.)
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Steven Avery .
The question arises, if the Egyptian reading fell out of use in the Greek texts produced from about the 4th century on (after the ascendency of Nicene christology) how is it that the reading was revived in the 19th century, thus prompting Ezra Abbot, the Unitarian, to crusade against the Egyptian reading, which one would expect him to be defending if it had a history of offering support for a heterodox, or indeed, an heretical, non-Trinitarian christology? (p. 120)
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SA: Letis is the only writer who notes the ironies here!
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VII. The Nineteenth-Century Debate Regarding John 1:18 (p. 120)
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SA: p. 120-125 is a masterful discussion of Tregelles, Abbot, Drummond and Hort, with more on the Valentinians, a sidestep to Ehrman's dismissal of the "neutral text", and a bit about Büchsel, Bubb, Harnack and others. Burgon comes in on p. 125.
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In the introduction, Letis made an important point:
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"I will then offer an history of exegesis of the passage in question, which should provide a much greater insight into the how and why of contemporary text critical consensus on the possible variants at this place (a method, I might add, not always employed in a traditional text critical study)." (p.107)
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And to that understatement and assessment, I give a hearty amen.
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Returning to Burgon, after pointing out that Alford, Wordsworth and Scrivener resisted the move to the Egyptian reading:
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"Burgon, in fact, so far as I can tell, was the first English scholar to suggest openly the connection between the Egyptian reading and the Valentianians" (p. 125)
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"These few voices were silenced by the epochal edition of Westcott and Hort .. B. B. Warfield, brought the Egyptian reading acceptance among the orthodox in America" (p. 126)
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(However, Burgon's actual major writing on the verse actually came by Edward Miller after Hort and Warfield.)
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VIII - The Contemporary Discussion
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UBS, Metzger . etc.
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"Allen Wikgren ... one of the very few minority notes in the Textual Commentary" (p. 126)
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Letis goes into very different accounts of the discussion, when he tried to learn more, given by Metzger and Allen Wikgren.
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"And so we see the twentieth-century debate has lost none of the heat from the original nineteenth-century discussions" (p. 127)
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A bit of an overstatement, since, except for Letis and the recent efforts here, and earlier related articles and discussions involving Tim Dunkin and Tim Warner and James Snapp, we are largely in pablum-land.
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VIII - John 1:18 and the Canonical Approach
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Brevard S. Childs .. "Burgon sensed that a theological dimension of the textus receptus was not being handled in the critical approach of Hort. .. (p. 128) SA: Then, we have the perfunctory criticism by Childs of both Burgon and Majority Text and TR advocates, mentioning Hodges, Pickering, Fuller. (p. 129)
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That is all I will extract from the Letis-->Childs summary
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Conclusions (p. 130-132).
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Nicely done. For now I am only going to include the final footnote, since it is a part of the Snapp-Avery dialog.
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"D.A. Fennema has made a gallant effort to give the Egyptian reading an orthodox interpretation that Tregelles would have applauded.
"For the theme of the Prologue, summed up in 1.18 and explicated throughout the Gospel, proves to be this: He who has revealed God the Father is none other than 'God the only Son,'" ....
But this smacks of reading Nicaea back into the text of the Gospel and ignores the Arian use and interpretation of the phrase. Furthermore, if the early church had seen that the phrase bore such a meaning, effortlessly in tenor with Nicaea, surely the Egyptian reading would have triumphed and not the "received" reading instead.
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SA: While the final sentence is unsound as overdone conjecture, the basis thought-wave is sound. And notice above, similarly, I challenged James to find any ECW who used μονογενὴς θεός as a Deity defense verse.
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And I am going to make a point, once again, that is always missed by the many modern non-logicians who write on textual matters. The Valentinians could have ran with the "only-begotten God" reading by pouncing on even one little corrupted ms. Accidental and deliberate are not neatly divided by a Chinese Wall. A minor corruption becomes a viable variant by a specific doctrinal favoring as a textual flavoring. Wake up, Wallace, Ehrman et al.
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