Tonight 6/27 at 7:30 we will hold the sixth lecture of series three on “A Theological Grounding for a Standard Sacred Text — The Unquantifiability of Manuscript Transmission and Canonical Collation.”
The process by which the words of the Canon were collated cannot be classified, categorized, or easily referenced because, as we have seen, all external criteria for canonicity fails, which also includes the effects of divine providence are only seen after the fact. The product, or Canon, does not divulge how the words were identified as canonical other than that they were immediately inspired and show the evidence of that inspiration as surely as does the presence of light. The question of the truth of Matt. 5:18, for example, then deals with the inspired character of a product brought about by a historically unquantifiable process. Unquantifiable means unspecifiable or unidentifiable. That is, the historical collating process of the canon is not bound to a system based on a text type, a neutral text, an older, shorter, harder to read text, a text from which another text would derive its origin, is not based on majority readings, is not part of a genealogical system by any name, is not part of any system. This assessment is not theological, dogmatic or of a religious nature. It is undeniable, that after 140 years of failed attempts to recover the words of the canon, the unquantifiable aspect of the canon’s formulation is no longer in question and is now settled science. Work continues in the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method [CBGM][1] project, but its trajectory is not canonical, rather more like linguistic archeology, reaching back only to the “initial” text.[2] To deny the unquantifiability of the historic canonical collating process is therefore unscientific. Nevertheless, though all external scientific criteria have failed, vestiges of the defunct system persist now by scholarly momentum.
[1] Tommy Wasserman, Peter J. Gurry, A New Approach to Textual Criticism: An Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2017), 162 pages.
[2] See Wasserman and Gurry, A New Approach, 12: “From this definition its follows that the initial text may refer to the author’s text or to something later.”
Don’t miss the study of the unquantifiability of the Canon tonight at 7:30.
Standard Sacred Text.com 