Page 304 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

284 THE HISTORY OF THE QUR'ANIC TEXT

4. TheByzantine Text
Working in Syria during the early 4th century, Lucian of Antioch
compared various readings of the NT to produce a revised, critical
form of the text. For this he relied consistently more on the Western
than the Alexandrian text type, and resorted to harmonisation and
interpolation as needed. The end result soon achieved great popu-
larity throughout the Mediterranean, becoming the favoured text
of the Greek Orthodox Church; it underwent further revisions for
the next four centuries until it was standardised."

So the most widespread of these, the Byzantine, relied heavily on what
is acknowledged to be the least trustworthy of the four, the Western. It
seems inevitable that Lucian must have incorporated into his text at least
some of the interpolations, from traditional and non-biblical sources, which
form a hallmark of the Western type. In fact the overall influence of this
Western text is baffiing; even the originator of the Caesarean text adul-
terated the relative purity of the Alexandrian with popular elements from
the Western, though ostensibly aware of the latter's inferiority.

ii. Dates of Recensions

Recension is the process of scrutinising all available forms of a document,
and selecting the most trustworthy among these as the basis for a critically-
revised text. Naturally the later the date of the first attempted recension,
the more likelythat the manuscripts being collated willharbour corruptions.
George D. Kilpatrick of Queen's College, Oxford "declares that by about
A.D. 200 the great majority of the deliberate changes had been introduced
into the [NT] textual stream, and that thereafter scribes transmitted the
several forms of text with great fIdelity."27 Modern scholars agree that
there is no substantial evidence to prove any recensions even during the
3rd century." As this indicates that the vast majority of theological alter-
ations slipped into the text before any attempt at recension.t? we can say
that many of these changes have lodged themselves permanently into the
NT. And as we shall see in the case of the Comma ]ohanneum, a deliberate
and major theological corruption was to take place even as late as the
16th century.30

26 Comfort, pp. 13-14.
27 Metzger, p. 177.
28 Comfort, p. 9.
29 ibid, p. 15.
30 See this work pp. 290-1.