responding to the Elijah Hixson comments

[Steven Avery]

Elijah Hixson is a notch or two scholastically above most of the authenticity defenders. He writes coherently, occasionally makes good inquiries, and tries to avoid the stupid stuff.

(Such as Jacob Peterson's "demonstrably untrue" fabrication, or James Snapp dancing around multiple theories without understanding the Sinaiticus history, or Tommy Wasserman simply ignoring major issues totally.)

However, Elijah tends to post on forums where I can not respond. Thus, I will mirror some of his posts here, and respond. First we will take from Nerdy Language Majors and NT Textual Criticism, on Facebook.

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[Steven Avery]

Elijah Hixson
Nerdy Language Majors - begin July 23, 2018
https://www.facebook.com/groups/NerdyLanguageMajors/permalink/1396694177099914/


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Elijah Hixson
NT Textual Criticism - begins July 13, 2018
https://www.facebook.com/groups/NTT...2056357024451287&comment_tracking={"tn":"R2"}

Elijah Hixson

Peter Bilmer I'll agree with Bill Brown here. You say "why many are so skeptical", but I don't know a single person who regularly works with ancient manuscripts who doubts that it is ancient. Not one.

Now you could say that it's because we're all so narrow-minded that we can't see outside of the small bubble of textual criticism, but I don't think that's the case for two reasons. 1. Textual criticism itself requires a decent grounding in a lot of sub-areas, if you're going to do it right. 2. Across the discipline, not everyone fits the mold of "Bible undergrad, then seminary, then NT studies or NT textual criticism". There are also textual scholars with backgrounds or side areas of competence/expertise in art history, classics, linguistics, patristics, Copticology, papyrology, Hebrew Bible, music, horticulture, statistics, chemistry, IT, law, and mathematics, off the top of my head. Not every text critic was raised by academics in an ivory tower, either. One text critic told me that he grew up milking cows on a dairy farm. Another is the son of a trucker in the Midwest. Another is the son of an auctioneer in the rural South. A lot of people who are now manuscript scholars worked for years in very different professions (or continue to have non-manuscript day jobs). I know manuscript scholars who were once a high school math teacher, a forklift driver, a lab technician, a piano teacher, a lawyer, a career missionary (a few of those, if I recall), a helicopter mechanic, a pilot in the US Air Force, an English teacher and others. There are even a few 'cat people.'

Surely, given that we are all coming to Codex Sinaiticus from a wide array of backgrounds and specialties, rather than all raised in a narrow-minded tunnel vision of textual criticism, at least one of us would have noticed that something was 'off', and it wouldn't take a handful of non-specialists with a theological agenda to undermine critical text editions of the New Testament—most of whom cannot read the manuscript itself—to help us finally understand the 'truth' about the manuscript.

Elijah Hixson
Sometimes I think people forget that even if we never had Sinaiticus, we'd still have a critical, non-Byzantine Greek New Testament. See the edition by S.P. Tregelles, for example.