William Thomas Whitley on the canons of textual criticism

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Charles Johnson

Puritan Board Junior
In "A Study in Textual Criticism", from Princeton Theological Review 1.1 (1903), William Thomas Whitley demonstrates conclusively that the canons used to redacted critical editions of the New Testament are simply incorrect.
"A dozen intelligent Christians were desired to copy exactly two passages: eight of these were theological students and knew something of the theories of textual criticism; all were urged to be scrupulously precise, were interested in the subject-matter, and had abundance of time. The result was to show that additions were absent, omissions frequent, alterations nearly always for the worse. Is it not high time that these canons were subjected to a thorough testing?"
 
I'll look forward to reading this later. I did a similar experiment back in 2009 after first learning about textual criticism. I had folks copy down text in Latin and then others make copies of the other's text and then tried to reconstruct he original using basic principles of textual criticism. Some folks from this Board helped. There were a lot of variants introduced by the 3rd generation, but it was possible to reconstruct the original. I'll admit I was a teenager and the method used wasn't airtight, but I'm interested to see where the experiment broke down in this 1903 study as it seems like a somewhat similar setup to what I did.
 
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