Julian

Emphasis mine.

Quote:

Now to the basics: Notice that Wieland makes a totally unwarranted presumption. "The group that comes nearest to the reconstructed autograph (NA)" Wow, of course if that is true, that we have a reconstructed autograph, then what is the point to the exercise ? The Pericope would not be able to be original, since it is not the - 'reconstructed autograph'.

Who cares? Well, who cares in regards to the scientific merits of the data. He could have said "The group that comes nearest to the pile of polish suasages (NA)," it is simply not important what his personal views are since the data can speak for itself.

Quote:

... Here is Wieland offering the analysis to the textcrit forum: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/textua...sm/message/262 "The group that comes nearest to the reconstructed autograph (NA) is the f1-text. This is a remarkable fact for f1"

Your issue is with Willker's personal views. Fine. I was talking about his data. I understand what you are saying but it is not pertinenet in this case.

Julian

Steven Avery

Julian, I realize you did not want to address a single aspect of what I shared and that the Willker approach to this study is undefendable. Fair enough. Even I did not expect the pages to be so strange and colored and useless as they seem to be.

However why not explain to us what the PCA study actually shows, to you, about whether the Pericope is original or an addition to the Gospel of John ?

Precisely how does it demonstrate evidence either for or against the Pericope belonging in John ?

Oh, one question to you - repeated.
Why are the data points given as group ID's if groups have
no relationship to the input ?

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

jgibson000

Yes, you should. But having said that, you proceed to once again mix us up. To wit:

Quote:

Mr. Wallack, as legal and rightful possessor of some intellectual property (Wallace's publicly published article, personally sent to him by the author for review), is certainly entitled to make copies for personal use, for protection from loss or damage, and to share with his friends and acquantances. Mr. Wallack has not indicated in any way that Mr. Wallace put any restrictions upon what Mr. Wallack does with his personal copies, including acquiring assistance to convert them into a more useable format for storage and viewing. I am only offering my services as a media expert in converting Mr. Wallack's scans into a more useful format for himself, so that we can discuss and review Mr. Wallace's arguments. Why else would Mr. Wallace give the article to Mr. Wallack, if he did not desire his opinion to be examined in a public forum and debated?

It was not to Joseph Wallack that Dan Wallace sent his article. It was to me, as message 4229668 shows. It is not Joseph Wallack who asked for help in converting Dan Wallace's article. It was me as, again, message 4229668.

One has to wonder in the light of this -- and in the light of what Juilan has shown regarding your claims about Weiland Willker's statements -- whether you ever read messages (or articles you are studying) carefully!

Moreover, you assumption that the explanation of why Mr. [sic] Wallace gave [his] article "to Mr. Wallack [sic!]" was that he (Wallace) desired his opinion to be examined and debated in a public forum, is not only a fine example of bifurcation, but petitio principii as well, especially since you don't know what it was I said to Dan when I wrote to him.

Besides that, Dan's article was published in a public forum -- NTS. Your not having online access to the journal does not change that fact.

JG

Nazaroo

Okay enough fun and games:


Willker's Belief

It seems quite clear what Mr. Willker thinks about how to catalog and group MSS.

PCA (Principal Component Analysis) is only one family of a set of techniques that can be classified under the rubric "Multivariate Analysis", which as a general category of mathematical tools and techniques is pretty vague, although more than adequate to function as a sub-group of general statistical techniques and methods.

But by Willker's choice and application of PCA, it is pretty clear that this is what he basically has in mind.




Willker's Purpose

Again from the above quotation, and indeed his application of PCA throughout the section extending from page 21-23 in the latest incarnation of his 'Textual Commentary' (5th ed. 2007 online), Mr Willker clearly intends to use the technique as a method of sorting MSS and defining 'groups'.


Willker's Method

Willker begins by quoting Plummer (1893) concerning the number of variants in this section. The purpose of this is to somehow distinguish the PA from other parts of John.

However, the actual data does not support Willker's claim that this "make s the PA that portion of the NT with the most variants". Plummer's out-of-date collations (now all but unavailable to modern readers) are all but useless, because (a) Plummer was working at a time when most MSS had not been collated, or even properly catalogued. (b) Plummer's sample collations were not selected on a scientific basis. (c) Plummer's raw data cannot be reworked either, since he did not provide enough detail to correlate his observations with modern MSS names and classifications of text.

Willker then quotes Maurice Robinson (1997) who estimates there are about ten different 'text-types' or groups for MSS containing the PA.


The 'M1' Group:

Willker then notes that two MSS (1071 and 2722) have been noted by textual critics (Lake and Robinson respectively) as belonging to the same family or group as Codex D. Yet the differences between between these two MSS and D are far greater than their differences between each other. (1071 and 2722 agree 9 times against D! versus 2 and 3 times against each other with D).

This little aside about the Group (D, 1071, 2722) should give the reader serious pause. On the one hand, both Lake and Robinson are seasoned expert textual critics very familiar with the text and issues. Against the appearance of the statistics, both critics group these MSS together rather than place 1071 and 2722 in a separate group from D.

Will Willker's PCA technique solve or illuminate this dilemma? Wait and see.


'Swanson', or just the UBS text?

Next Willker claims to base his PCA analysis from "Swanson's data". However there is a serious problem with this claim before we even get out of the starting gate.

The chart that follows, of the MSS Willker has chosen to analyse is actually a list of the principal MSS used by the editors of the UBS text (United Bible Societies under the guidance of Cardinal whatshisname and Metzger).

Similarly, the list of 'Important Variants" at the back of Willker's article is simply the list of the critical footnotes found in the UBS text (NA27), along with a few personal added notes.

If Willker has consulted Swanson at all, it is not apparent where or how, or why it would make any difference, since Willker has simply chosen the variation units opted by the UBS commitee as important for translators.

Willker shows no knowledge of any of the other variation units or individual variants of texts. (There are between 35 and 40 variation units clearly identifiable, which can be found in the apparatus/footnotes of Hodges/Farstad, Robinson/Pierpont, and Pickering online.)

In any case, consulting Swanson's detailed collations has not caused Willker to make any changes in the 9 variation units he has chosen to copy from UBS.

Consulting the UBS introduction is instructive. They warn the reader that many significant variants simply do not appear in the apparatus or footnotes at all, because the committee viewed these variants as 'not suitable for translators'.

Thus the UBS editors were actively 'guiding' translators by limiting their choices of text to translate and ignoring important textual variants that would be useful for evaluating MSS evidence. This practice is obviously cross-purposes to providing textual evidence useful for textual critical reconstruction.

Now we find Willker has simply adopted the UBS text and variants for his experiment.

This is also an important question in regard to what MSS to consider. The UBS editors chose a very small subset of the extant MSS, allowing in many cases only a handful of MSS to represent groups containing 300 or more MSS. In most cases, MSS were chosen *without* a proper collation of the MSS within a group. Instead, the previous groupings (circa 1900-1912) were simply adopted, even though many errors in groupings and collations have been noted from past critics and collators.

Likewise, Willker has simply adopted the small group of MSS favoured by the UBS editors. Is this a representative sample of extant groups of MSS generally? Not really. One of the remarkable things about the methodology of the UBS editors was their admission that they applied Claremont Profile Methods to many MSS, in order to group them, but not for inclusion in the apparatus, but actually to EXCLUDE them. Thus hundreds of MSS were rejected by the UBS committee because they were 'too Byzantine' in their text-type according to profiling.

Willker starts with the 'six groups' identified by UBS, and correlates them to the 'seven groups' of von Soden, but only using the MSS chosen by UBS.

Then he presents his own 'findings' using his application of PCA to this small sample of MSS. The result is he finds only 'four groups' (see chart).

We have thus moved from Swanson's collations of thousands of MSS, to von Soden's 7 groups, to Metzger's 6 groups, to Willker's 4 groups.

Clearly, detailed information about the MSS are being eliminated, groupings of the MSS previously made by experts is being ignored, and finally, a new grouping based upon PCA is being offered in place of the work previously accomplished.



Willker's Result




Here we have duplicated Willker's chart, but added the corresponding names of the groups identified by von Soden to show what Willker's results give.

Willker's method cannot distinguish between the two main groups, M5 and M7. This is a catastrophic failure of Willker's application of PCA to the MSS. It could be the result of not enough MSS, or not enough variants, but in either case the failure is startling.

Among the 1350 some odd MSS which have the PA, some 300 MSS display the M5 text, and another 280 have the M7 text. As von Soden noted, these are not just two clearly defined and easily identifiable groups.

(1) each group is well represented by a large number of MSS.

(2) each group is clearly defined by a rigid profile using the Claremont Profile Method.

(3) each group is utterly stable, with the majority of MSS in each group keeping a 95% agreement in text to the group-text.

(4) each group is a DOMINANT text, these being the ONLY two text-types seriously competing for dominance throughout the Middle Ages.

(5) each group has a body of unique readings not found in other groups or significant MSS.

This is why every other textual critic who has examined these verses is in agreement that at least M5 and M7 are clearly identifiable and distinguishable groups, even when they differ on the existance or borders of other less plain groups in the MSS base.

Next, we note that Willker's PCA (WPCA) fails to distinguish M4 from M6, and blurs M1, M2, and M3. The only reason WPCA manages to separate out Codex D is its incredibly high number of peculiar abberant readings.

Thus we find that WPCA is no substitute for proper collation, careful evaluation of individual variation units and readings, and the tried and true criteria for grouping MSS into useful and realistic clusters.

By his own results, Willker's method is a failure, a very crude measure of the affinity between MSS and the clustering of groups. His results are unambiguous, but plainly at variance with known MSS groups and the criteria which define them.

As to the discrepancy between WPCA and that of over 100 years of textual critical analysis, Willker responds:


Yet Willker does not even show his results of the 'new test' he has allegedly carried out. There is no second chart or table of results for us to compare. We only have Willker's word for it.

But even if this were provided, how does performing the same technique on similar data confirm the conclusion or the result? It can't.

What WOULD have supported Willker's results and conclusions would be the application of an entirely different technique, with the same result, i.e., four groups instead of seven.

But even in that hypothetical case, no answer to the established and proven criteria for identifying and defining groups or text-types has been offered.

The criteria are pretty much self-evident, and while there will always be 'poorly defined' groupings in real cases of sloppy copying or mixture, this is not a fault of the standard criteria for groups but rather a proof of their value.

In response to his contradiction with von Soden's classifcations, Willker says this:

Willker finds von Soden's results 'strange', but apparently doesn't understand the detailed collations which led von Soden to distinguish these groups.

We find then that Willker doesn't even rely upon von Soden, but is relying upon Hodges & Farstad's brief summary of von Soden's work in their introduction.

So Willker has never read von Soden (its a massive two Volume German treatise on the Greek text, with over 100 pages on the PA alone, and has never been translated into English.).

Yet Willker is free to dismiss von Soden's work and slag it (an admittedly popular pastime among English-speaking critics, see for instance Streeter's performances.) as untrustworthy, "partly wrong and misleading".

We have to ask, who is really doing the misleading?


The bottom line

Willker's technique here (WPCA) simply fails to identify the known groups of MSS, established upon independant and reasonable criteria by many other investigators.

Its not really von Soden that Willker has to contend with, but rather already known well-established and reasonable features expected and actually found, which distinguish MSS groups among the extant NT manuscripts.

I initially only complained about Willker's failure to provide his data and a clear explanation and justification for his method. But now that we have examined it in detail, it can be seen to be full of holes, both in its content and its methodology.

Further, the results are all but useless. Willker has not usefully sorted the NT MSS into groups according to their text-type. And his insistence that his method is "THE TOOL" is unconvincing.

This is only one fault (2-3 pages) of a 40 page performance, a subjective and disorganized mess.

Nazaroo

This notice is again peculiar. Here Willker is affirming his use of Swanson.

Yet the data in the chart show he is using the UBS critical apparatus, with its limited number of MSS.

If Willker used Swanson, he did not use ALL of Swanson, namely all the collated MSS that Swanson documented. This is clear from the number of actual MSS plotted on his chart.

Again, he says he used "57 readings". From this it remains unclear whether he means 57 actual independant variation units, or simply 57 variants (you can divide that number in half if most of the variation units are binary in nature = 28 units, or if triple readings are being counted, less than 20 units).

The currently known count of significant variation units is about 35-40 at most.

Its another case where simple documentation could clear up just exactly how and what Willker was measuring.

It would have been trivial to simply post his 'Excel' spreadsheet file online.

Steven Avery

Hi Nazaroo,

It looks like I did ok explaining the general problems and you handled the technical end. This PCA-PA horse is pretty beat up.

What Willker does is not so surprising. Whatever it is that he is trying to show. All this mishegas looks to me as simply a backdoor method to highlight as better those manuscripts or groups which are closer to the pristine and approved, original largely Vaticanus and Sinaiticus-derived 'reconstructed autograph'. Oh what a sad world. Does anyone even have a better or alternative explanation of what he is trying to show ?

What is amazing is that something like this passes for scholarship in modern textcrit. (Ok, layman scholarship.) Is it a conspiracy of silence ?

Anyway, can you regive Jeffrey Gibson and Joe Wallack a nice full oopsie and excuse me for name mixing up. Generally names should not be either mangled (a Joe Wallack ruse, often done to insult) or mixed up.

Also Jeffrey is basically right on the Daniel Wallace material. We can't insist that such-and-such must or should be in public domain. It is nice when it is, and there is a lot of legal liberty to copy for review purposes (more than simple fair use) for sure. Wallace is often an easy target but I have no complaints about how he handles his material. Maybe you can email him a request for a copy to be posted verbatim on the web site.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Nazaroo

Well you bring up a good point.

Its my belief that Willker really is sincere as far as it goes. He is obviously a clever chemist as well, so it disturbs me that he doesn't apply the same critical judgement and careful scientific method for his hobby (textual criticism) which he obviously is capable of doing in his chosen career.

In part I think this can be chocked up to inexperience in this field.

Here I think Willker is making a mistake. He is a friendly fellow and a nice person. However this field is really a mine-field of special interests, dogma and bias, as well as hidden agendas.

Willker may think he will make friends in this field by his concilliatory manners. But this is simply not the case. This pool is full of sharks, and all that politically correct posturing is just that: calculated surface presentations for the purpose of promoting vested interests and carefully crafted propaganda.

It may actually do him some good to get burned a little on this, so that his next edition or project will be able to stand up to the inevitable onslaught of criticisim that will ensue.

The simple fact is, people will be kind to Willker insomuch as he tows the 'party line' of his chosen side. But there is no such thing in this field anymore of a 'friendly neutral' position. He will simply be trampled on the battlefield.

Willker's strategy probably works well for him in the fields of chemistry and engineering, where people are more scientific and less political. Here in the field of NT textual criticism, trying to be a nice guy is just a waste of time.

I personally like Mr. Willker, although he may not believe it. I would love to see him apply his real scientific talents enthusiastically to textual criticism, instead of the high-school level shlock he has been handing in.

Many people have probably refrained from criticism on TC-List, mainly because he runs it, and partly because it doesn't cost them anything to let him ramble on about areas of textual criticism that are not 'pet interests' of key scholars right now.

Others may have backed of telling the Emperor he has no clothes simply because they have seen what happened to Mr. Scrivener who only offered a a few points of moderate constructive criticism of Willker's work. Willker was heavyhanded. I don't think Scrivener cared, but others might be just a bit shyer now.

The thing is, all I would like is to see Mr. Willker actually do some science.

In the absence of that, I guess I will just fill in the gap.

Doug Shaver

Your sarcasm is badly misdirected. I didn't even suggest that my survey was clinical in any sense. I referred to atheists and agnostics with whom I was acquainted without any hint that they representative of atheists and agnostic in general.

If you could put up one quotation from an atheist or agnostic expressing the opinion that you attribute to "many" of them, then we could have some credibility for it.

Nazaroo

Your comments are on a statement that was beaten to death about 3 pages of messages ago.

The statement was retracted after it caused the split-off of two threads and wasted alot of time.

You are not obligated to follow the history of a thread or read all the posts, but it helps.

If you are interested in the OP topic, by all means read, comment and ask questions pertinent to the current discussion, which has settled into the question of the authenticity of John 7:53-8:11.


Regards,
Nazaroo

Nazaroo

Petersen's article (from Sayings of Jesus, 1997) has been cited by us in the thread already.

While Petersen is weak in regard to the textual evidence as we have shown, his main purpose in his article is to bring to our attention the surprising evidence found in the Protevangelion of James (PJ).

Petersen has a soft, but postive case that the author that book (Protevangelion of James) knew and used John's Gospel as and inspirational source for his own work.

While the evidence concerning John 7:53-8:11 is obviously very weak and fragmentary, the fact is that it becomes stronger when taken together with other evidence that the Protevangelion of James (PJ) knew of and used John's Gospel.




Petersen goes on to show other evidence that the PJ knew about John: