It has been more than half a century since the last edition of Kenyon's Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts was published. Students who want a good textual manual that covers both Greek and Hebrew Bibles have been waiting ever since for a replacement.

They'll have to keep waiting.

When I became aware of this book, I was deeply interested, since there really is need for a new manual, and one of the authors, Amy Anderson, has done work on an important family of New Testament manuscripts. It seemed like a good sign.

Talk about having one's hopes dashed! This is, I think, the most slapdash, inaccurate, out-of-date book on textual criticism I have ever seen. (Well, other than Wilbur N. Pickering's. But that only pretends to be about textual criticism.)

There is one small but genuine positive about this book: It doesn't assume you know Greek or Hebrew. You can't actually do textual criticism unless you can at least read enough Greek to tell an αλφα from an ωμεγα (or, perhaps more important, a λαμψαι from a λαμψει -- a change in verb tense). But you can learn something about how the discipline works. Offering explanations in English was a useful feature of Kenyon's work, too. But there are so many things here that are oversimplified or misleading or just plain wrong that I think they destroy the slight benefit derived from the English-ness of this book.

That's the entirety of the real review, so if I've convinced you, you can stop there. What follows is a sampling of problems with the book -- not a comprehensive list, but an attempt to help you understand what you're up against if you do come across the book. This isn't a list of every misleading passage; these are the ones that got me irritated enough that I took notes on them. I didn't even start until I got to about page 75....

Page 77: "Three modern critical editions of the Septuagint are noteworthy." The statement is right, but the list of the three editions is wrong. The three that are listed are Rahlfs, Swete, and the ongoing Göttingen edition. But Swete is not a critical edition of the Septuagint; it is a (somewhat defective) diplomatic edition. Rahlfs has only a short apparatus and is really only semi-critical. And there is no mention of the Brooke and McLean edition that remains the real critical edition of the Septuagint for those books not covered by Göttingen.

Page 78: "Three English translations of the Septuagint are relevant to the study of textual criticism." No. No English translations are relevant. All that is relevant is the Greek text -- Göttingen, Rahlfs, and Brooke and McLean. English translations are indeed often useful to critics -- the Greek of the Septuagint is often so peculiar that a crib can be a great help if your Greek is shaky. But even that doesn't make them actually relevant. Plus, two of the three translations listed -- Brenton and LES -- are not based on critical texts. Only the NETS translation can be trusted.

Page 89 discusses the Latin vulgate -- but mentions only the Stuttgart hand edition, not the Wordsworth/White major edition, even though WW is the only comprehensive critical edition of the Vulgate.

Page 90 is a list of "canons of criticism" (rules for how to do textual criticism) for the Hebrew Bible -- several of which don't even apply for Hebrew Bible criticism. "Prefer the reading found in the majority of manuscripts," for instance, means to always prefer the reading found in the Masoretic Text, which isn't criticism, it's mindlessness. And "Prefer the shorter reading" really doesn't apply in the Hebrew Bible at all. It's a very weak canon -- a last resort, not a first resort -- that the book gives too much attention in both Hebrew and Greek criticism.

Pages 94-95 offers a discussion of how to examine a Hebrew Bible variant. But the example chosen is a passage that doesn't even exist in the Septuagint. But Hebrew Bible criticism fundamentally consists of comparing the Masoretic Hebrew with the Septuagint. If the Septuagint is absent, that is the issue the critic should be examining, not putzing around worrying about the formal equivalences of the vulgate, Peshitta, Targum, etc.

In discussing the text of translations of the Hebrew Bible, the list includes the 1917 Jewish Publication Society edition, but not the Tanakh, the current (and vastly better) Jewish edition. And the most important British versions, the New English Bible and the Revised English Bible, are omitted both here and in the discussion of New Testament editions.

The discussion of New Testament criticism, which starts on page 116, goes straight to a mention of text-types, without any discussion of transmission or how text-types arose. What's more, it simply accepts the four text-types that people believed in c. 1940 (Alexandrian, Byzantine, Cæsarean, Western), without paying any attention to work done since then except to admit that there is some doubt about the Cæsarean text (in fact, few scholars believe in it any more. And there is good reason to think that there are other text-types that the authors don't mention, such as P46-B and Family 2138. What's more, the current ECM edition claims to have gotten rid of text-types -- a dubious procedure, but surely worthy of a mention!).

Pages 120-122 describes the history of Greek New Testament editions, but omits the vital edition of Tregelles, mischaracterizes von Soden, gives a very inaccurate impression of what Gregory did with Tischendorf's edition, and gives Metzger far more praise than his actual work deserves.

Page 134 claims that Tischendorf used chemical reagents on the important manuscript known as C. The best evidence is that the chemicals were used on C before Tischendorf ever saw it.

Pages 136-137 claim that the reason there are more surviving manuscripts in minuscule form than in uncial is that more of them were copied. Odds are that fewer of them were copied; the Byzantine Empire was shrinking at the time the minuscules were copied. There are more of them because they were copied more recently and didn't have as much time to be destroyed.

Pages 130-131, 135-136, 139-140 are tables of "important" manuscripts, but the tables don't tell us why they're important, and many of these "important" manuscripts aren't described in the text. Without knowing the characteristics of the manuscripts, we can't use them for criticism -- "important" is not meaningful in this context.

Page 138 claims that the minuscule 33 -- the "Queen of the Cursives," one of the most important of the minuscule manuscripts -- is most associated with the Byzantine text in Acts and Paul and least Byzantine elsewhere. This, as anyone who has studied its text can tell you, is flat-out backwards. Except for Romans, which was copied from a different original, 33 is least Byzantine in Paul and is most Byzantine in the gospels. This matters, because one of the most important aspects of New Testament criticism is sorting out Byzantine from non-Byzantine texts.

Page 138 talks about the "Cæsarean" minuscule 565 -- but never mentions Θ or 700, the former being the most important ally of 565 (and an earlier and better manuscript of the type); 700 is also an ally. To mention the second-best manuscript of a type but not the best is to distort the textual pattern entirely.

Page 149: "To evaluate variants... textual critics need a critical edition of the biblical text with a critical apparatus and a dictionary (or lexicon) of NT Greek." If one reads Greek, one does not need the last of these, and even a critical edition can bias the editor. Only the apparatus is needed -- and even there, one should be prepared to seek additional data. None of the hand editions is sufficient by itself.

Pages 152-153 offer a single example of New Testament criticism (there are more later, but they are split off in a way that this sole first example can seem as if it's supposed to teach you all you need to know). This example is the inclusion or exclusion of the words "in Ephesus" in Ephesians 1:1. This is a major issue that has been subject to heavy discussion over the last two centuries. But the only commentator cited is F. F. Bruce; the discussion ignores the many other critics who have had more to say. And the discussion doesn't make it clear how overwhelming is the evidence against the words -- a reading found in P46 ℵ* B* 6 424** 1739 can be assumed to be original unless there are very strong reasons to think otherwise.

That's a pretty obsessive list of problems with this book, and even so, it's not complete. I grant that you have to know a lot of textual criticism to even understand what I just wrote. But that's the whole point: If you know textual criticism, this book won't teach you anything -- and if you don't know textual criticism, it will teach you a whole bunch of stuff you will have to laboriously un-learn if you want to do TC right. ( )