NT textual criticism and DNA mutations

The basic principle which underlies the process of constructing a stemma, or family tree, of manuscripts is that, apart from accident, identity of reading implies identity of origin. Often, however, difficulties hinder the construction of a stemma of manuscripts. A disturbing element enters when mixture has occurred, that is, when a copyist has had two or more manuscripts before him and has followed sometimes one, sometimes the other; or, as sometimes happened, when a scribe copied a manuscript from one exemplar and corrected it against another. To the extent that manuscripts have a "mixed" ancestry, the genealogical relations among them become progressively more complex and obscure to the investigator.

Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, pp. 156-159.

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Cladistics

Cladistics is a technique borrowed from biology, where it is used to determine the evolutionary relationships between different species. The text of a number of different manuscripts is entered into a computer, which records all the differences between them. The manuscripts are then grouped according to their shared characteristics. The difference between cladistics and more traditional forms of statistical analysis is that, rather than simply arranging the manuscripts into rough groupings according to their overall similarity, cladistics assumes that they are part of a branching family tree and uses that assumption to derive relationships between them. This makes it more like an automated approach to stemmatics. However, where there is a difference, the computer does not attempt to decide which reading is closer to the original text, and so does not indicate which branch of the tree is the "root"—which manuscript tradition is closest to the original. Other types of evidence must be used for that purpose.

The major theoretical problem with applying cladistics to textual criticism is that cladistics assumes that, once a branching has occurred in the family tree, the two branches cannot rejoin; so all similarities can be taken as evidence of common ancestry. While this assumption is applicable to the evolution of living creatures, it is not always true of manuscript traditions, since a scribe can work from two different manuscripts at once, producing a new copy with characteristics of both.

Nonetheless, software developed for use in biology has been applied with some success to textual criticism; for example, it is being used by the Canterbury Tales Project to determine the relationship between the 84 surviving manuscripts and four early printed editions of the Canterbury Tales.

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New Testament manuscripts can be classified according to certain major families or types. A family type is the name given to a group of texts with a common ancestor. These texts are discerned through the deviations common to a group of manuscripts. For example, some scribal errors made in copying the text in Alexandria were perpetuated in later reproductions of that text type. Classification according to "text type" is the basic point of departure in the actual work of textual reconstruction. For example, one reading of a text that represents a good family type may provide more support for the original text than a dozen readings from a poor family type. These text types are not represented by entire manuscripts but often only segments of them. The modern practice of copying an entire manuscript of the New Testament at once was seldom followed in antiquity. Four family "types" of texts have been sufficiently defined in biblical scholarship to merit listing below.

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Once a collection of characters has been described for a group under study, and the polarity of those characters has been determined, the characters are, in a sense, ‘added up’ to yield an estimate of the phylogeny as a whole, one that accounts for the observed distribution of character states among the descendants in the simplest manner (Fig. 4). When the number of characters and the number of taxa (organisms under study) is large, and when some of the characters conflict with one another owing to convergence, this can be a difficult task, as the number of possible trees that must be evaluated for their fit to the data becomes enormous.5 It is here that computer programs are of assistance, and several tree evaluation programs have been written and are in wide use in the systematics community (see Mayr and Ashlock 1991, 320–21 for a listing). These programs typically search through the range of possible trees, and determine the minimum number of character state changes that could have occurred on each tree, given the particular data supplied. The tree or trees on which the fewest changes overall are required (the ‘shortest’ or ‘most parsimonious’ tree or trees) are taken to be the best estimates of the true history of taxa under study.

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shernren said:

rmswilliams, why are you surprised? Do you think people actually come here to learn and to think?

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As the quote pointed out, compilation from multiple sources into a single work by copyists mucks up the cladistic analysis of texts immensely. I don't think biological cladistics has a big problem with this.

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