About the Book
Since the New Testament's inception as written text, its manuscripts have been subject to all the dangers of history: scribal error, emendation, injury, and total destruction. The traditional goal of modern textual criticism has been to reconstruct an "original text" from surviving manuscripts, adjudicating among all the variant texts resulting from the slips, additions, and embellishments of scribal hand-copying. Because of the way manuscripts
circulate and give rise to new copies, it can be said that they have an "erotic" life: they mate and breed, bear offspring, and generate families and descendants. New Testament textual critics of the
eighteenth century who began to use this language to group texts into families and genealogies were not pioneering new approaches, but rather borrowing the metaphors and methods of natural scientists. Texts began to be classified into "families, tribes, and nations," and later were racialized as "African" or "Asian," with distinguishable "textual physiognomies" and "textual complexions." The Erotic Life of Manuscripts explores this curious relationship between the field of New
Testament textual criticism and the biological sciences, beginning with the eighteenth century and extending into the present.While these biological metaphors have been powerful tools for textual
critics, they also produce problematic understandings of textual "purity" and agency, with the use of scientific discourse artificially separating the work of textual criticism from literary interpretation. Yii-Jan Lin shows how the use of biological classification, genealogy, evolutionary theory, and phylogenetics has shaped-and limited-the goals of New Testament textual criticism, the greatest of which is the establishment of an authoritative, original text. She concludes by proposing new
metaphors for the field.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Collection and Theorization
Chapter 1: Bengel and the Classification and Racializiation of Texts
Chapter 2: Lachmann and the Genealogy and Corruption of Texts
Part II: Historicization and Innovation
Chapter 3: Darwin, Streeter, and Narrative Textual Criticism
Chapter 4: Philology and Phylogeny
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Excerpt of Interview with Gerd Mink and Klaus Wachtel, Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung, Münster, March 10, 2011
Appendix 2: "Marcus Niebuhr Tod," by Maurice Bowra
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Yii-Jan Lin is Assistant Professor of New Testament at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. She received her PhD in religious studies from Yale University and an MA in English literature from the University of Chicago.
Review :
"With her research, Lin has provided a valuable service to New Testament textual criticism. With the benefit of this outside analysis, the hope is for an increased self-awareness within the discipline that seeks opportunities to shed any restraint imposed by the adopted biological metaphor and to leapfrog into new theories and methodologies of its own." -- Steve Young, Reading Religion
"[A] fascinating read for biologists, shedding light not only on the relations between the 'two cultures,' but on the nature and limitations of cladistic reasoning...[Yii-Jan Lin] does a very competent job in presenting the nuances of 'speciation' in the study of manuscripts and how her field both resembles and differs from what evolutionary biologists do."--The Quarterly Review of Biology
"One of the strengths of her analysis is her even-handed approach...Another valuable contribution is the extensive quotation of sources...[T]he distinctive approach of this volume provides a new and potentially more creative way of approaching the question of self-definition...[T]his engagingly humorous account of an alternative text of the Ten Commandments serves to assure the reader that, despite moments of earnestness of the preceding discussions, there is
also a place for levity. Indeed, perhaps these verses should be read as a first step towards returning to a broader recognition of textual criticism as both an art and a science."--Bryn Mawr Classical
Review
"Lin's unique description and insightful analysis of New Testament textual criticism breaths fresh air into our discipline by paralleling textual criticism and the biological sciences in their often similar nature, history, and methodologies-something genuinely innovative. Her clear focus on the bifurcation of text-critical methods during recent decades-the traditional but still contemporary approach, and the recent 'narrative textual criticism'-highlights the
advances of both, but the latter has the edge in treating the text as an 'organic, living being." --Eldon Jay Epp, Harkness Professor of Biblical Literature and Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Emeritus, Case Western Reserve University; frequent adjunct professor, Harvard Divinity School (2001 to 2016)
"For nearly three hundred years, scholars engaged in New Testament manuscript studies have imagined that their work is theoretically innocent, objective, and untouched by the epistemological trends of their time. Yii-Jan Lin's book shows in compelling terms why this self-congratulatory objectivity is a complete myth. The goals, tools, and terms of textual analysis from the beginning have been thoroughly entrenched in broader ideological debates, particularly in
relationship to the biological sciences. This smart, insightful, and altogether groundbreaking book is essential reading for anyone interested in textual studies." --Bart D. Ehrman, James A. Gray
Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"This fascinating book explores the untold story of the relationship between New Testament textual criticism and the life sciences, from Linnaeus and Bengel, through Darwin and Hort, to the use of phylogenetic software today. Written from the standpoint of the history of ideas, it offers insightful and challenging critiques of the language and conceptual framework of textual scholarship. This book is necessary reading for every philologist." --David Parker,
Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology, University of Birmingham
