The Erotic Life of Manuscripts
New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological Sciences
“This book is necessary reading for every philologist.” —David Parker, Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology Emeritus, University of Birmingham
“"Lin's unique description and insightful analysis of New Testament textual criticism breaths fresh air into our discipline … genuinely innovative.”— Eldon Jay Epp, Harkness Professor of Biblical Literature and Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, Emeritus, Case Western Reserve University
“This smart, insightful, and altogether groundbreaking book is essential reading for anyone interested in textual studies.” —Bart D. Ehrman, James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“…exceptionally significant…a skillfully executed challenge to an established disciplinary paradigm.” - Werner Kelber, Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, Rice University
“[Lin] makes cladistics comprehensible to humanists rather better than many of us do in introductory biology classes.” - Arthur M. Shapiro, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, UC Davis College of Biological Sciences
Since the New Testament's inception as written text, its manuscripts have been subject to all the dangers of history: scribal error, emendation, injury, and total destruction. The traditional goal of modern textual criticism has been to reconstruct an "original text" from surviving manuscripts, adjudicating among all the variant texts resulting from the slips, additions, and embellishments of scribal hand-copying.
Because of the way manuscripts circulate and give rise to new copies, it can be said that they have an "erotic" life: they mate and breed, bear offspring, and generate families and descendants. New Testament textual critics of the eighteenth century who began to use this language to group texts into families and genealogies were not pioneering new approaches, but rather borrowing the metaphors and methods of natural scientists and European theories of race. Texts began to be classified into "families, tribes, and nations," and later were racialized as "African" or "Asian," with distinguishable "textual physiognomies" and "textual complexions." The Erotic Life of Manuscripts explores this curious relationship between the field of New Testament textual criticism and the biological sciences, beginning with the eighteenth century and extending into the present.
While these biological metaphors have been powerful tools for textual critics, they also produce problematic understandings of textual "purity" and agency, linked to European anxieties over racial purity and degeneration. Yii-Jan Lin shows how the use of biological classification, genealogy, evolutionary theory, and phylogenetics has shaped-and limited-the goals of New Testament textual criticism, the greatest of which is the establishment of a pure and authoritative “original text.”