It makes unison reading in a church almost impossible when everybody has a different translation. It makes memorization of passages within a church context almost impossible for the same reason. And since most people try out various translations over time it interferes with our individual ability to memorize verses too. And it makes it very difficult to look up verses in online Bibles or in the concordance when you have a mixture of half a dozen different versions of the verse in your head. I personally find it very jarring when I hear a sermon on the radio based on some translation I'm not familiar with when I would like to be able to read along.
OK.
But I'm not the only one saying so ...
OK, let me restate my position: scholarship involves weighing all the evidence rather than ignoring some of it because Faith and her pals say so.
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Look, textual criticism is difficult. You and Westcott and Hort have a common method for making it easy: elevate some MSS, cast all other MSS down before them, and make your recension on that basis. Hoorah!
The problem is that this doesn't actually make textual criticism easy --- it makes it
seem easy, but what it actually achieves is to make it impossible.
For on what basis are you to elevate some MSS and deprecate others? Well, the good MSS are the ones with more good readings in, the bad MSS are the ones with more bad readings in. So to compare our MSS, we need to establish which of the various readings are better in each particular case.
For this, we need scholarship, and lots of it.
If, instead, we declare that the good readings are the ones to be found in the good MSS, and the bad readings are those that occur the bad MSS, then we have certainly found a way to make our lives easier. But you will observe that we have also committed ourselves to a chain of reasoning so perfectly circular that at some point we are going to have to toss a coin to discover which MSS we are going to call good.
This is idiotic. So, scholarship it is, then. But this means beginning with
all the MSS on the table and taking the job reading by reading.
Now,
after you've got as far as you can with this, you can use your decisions to form an estimate of the merits and defects of the MSS, and you can then use this information
as a tie-breaker when faced with readings of otherwise equal merit. But to
start by deciding the worth of the MSS, whether by saying "The Alexandrians are better because older" or "The Byzantines are better because more numerous" is not textual criticism at all; the particular points of merit and demerit in the MSS is what textual criticism is meant to
discover.
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Imagine a company which sells various wines at various prices according to how they are rated by their expert wine taster. One day the owner of the company visits the wine taster in his office. To his surprise, he sees no corks, bottles, corkscrews, glasses, etc. "Aren't you busy?" he asks the taster. "Oh, very busy", says the wine taster, glancing up from the large catalog he's perusing. "But you aren't tasting any wine?" "No," he says, "the fact is that I don't like
any wine and have no interest in drinking it. Possibly this stems from the fact that I have no sense of smell." "Then how," asks the owner "do you establish the merits of the wine?" The taster replies "That's easy, I look up the prices of the wines in our company catalog; naturally the most expensive ones must be the best."
At this point, the manager should sack his employee and appoint in his place someone with a good palate and the intention of actually doing the job.
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