Warring States Project

The New Testament (NT) is another area where text study and historical research mingle. We here consider some NT problems as extensions of our application of philological method to the classical Chinese texts. A focus of much previous NT research is the historical person of Jesus. Though the motive is perfectly intelligible, we think the experiment design is wrong. As a countersuggestion, we sponsor an investigation which we call the NT Quest, not to recover the truth about Jesus or any other specific person, and not to support or refute any specific doctrine, but simply to see what the texts, when left to themselves, have to tell us about those or any other subjects. The Quest is distinguished by its focus on the texts, and by its unconcern about what results the systematic application of philological method to the texts may produce.

Among the standard methods, which have been shown to be effective with text problems from Caesar to Confucius, we especially emphasize the recognition of inconsistencies, the detection of interpolated material, and, where the evidence so suggests, the separation of strata. More generally, we point out that besides being corrupted by later scribes, a text may also grow while still in the possession of its author or proprietors, and before being copied for wider circulation. With P as the point where a text goes public, and begins to exist in many copies, we have this general model:

Authorial growth process > P > Scribal corruption process

One famous example of the study of the growth process of a text is Wellhausen's analysis of the interwoven narratives of the Books of Samuel and Kings. This sort of thing used to be called the "higher criticism" (with text criticism, the correction of scribal errors, as the "lower criticism"). To avoid imputations of greater and less importance, we prefer the term "text philology" for what we do. By whatever name, that approach is the hallmark of the present effort.

Following standard methods, we begin with the earliest firmly datable NT texts, which are the Pauline Epistles. Famous in the NT field is the Synoptic Problem: to define the literary relationship between the first three Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. That question comes up in the later course of the investigation, and when it does come up, we find that the order of these texts is Mk > Mt > Lk, but with complications (Mark has a long period of text growth before becoming available to the two later Synoptists, and Luke was composed in two stages, only the latter of which was influenced by Matthew). No hypothetical lost Gospel such as "Q" seems to be required.

The NT Quest study group is our outreach mode: a continuing E-Mail discussion among NT scholars worldwide, with occasional in-person sessions at meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature.