Mary Shelley and Frankenstein

Mary Shelley, born in 1797 in London, completed her novel, Frankenstein, in 1818.   The lead character in her novel, Victor Frankenstein, succeeds at piecing together parts from dead corpses.  He sews them together and brings them to life with electricity.

In the original novel by Shelley, the words, “It’s alive!”, don’t appear.  They came into the public consciousness in the 1931 film adaptation of the novel.  In the book, when Victor first animates his creature, he is horrified by its appearance and immediately flees from it.  The scene is described with a sense of dread and regret rather than excitement or triumph.

Frankenstein was a fictional monster built from parts from various dead bodies.  The pieces don’t fit because they come from all different bodies.  In the same way, a Frankentext constructs a brand new text, using words plucked out from many different manuscripts.

Thomas Ross, Dwayne Greene, and the Frankentext

On a few different occasions, people used the term “Frankentext” to describe a brand new, diverse text from many varied sources.  In recent days, I’ve heard a man, Dwayne Greene, use it in a podcast.  He titled some of his episodes with the word.  Greene refers to a practice that Thomas Ross earlier pointed out in his debate with James White about the modern critical text of the New Testament.  The fifth of United Bible Society’s edition of the Greek New Testament, the same as the Nestle-Aland 28th edition, is a Frankentext.

I wrote in a post about Ross’s debate with White:

In his debate with White, Ross dismantled White’s position with evidence, point by point. White himself resorted to ad hominem style arguments by regularly pointing out how fast Ross talked and judged his motives. He never answered Ross’s primary argument against the underlying text of the LSB and other modern versions of the Bible. Ross showed plainly how that in hundreds of places, lines of underlying Greek text behind the LSB had zero manuscript evidence.

Talk about the Frankentext

I talk about this again in something else about the debate:

In every place the USB/NA has no extant manuscript support for its lines of readings (again, over 100), the TR has manuscript support. This should end White’s manuscript argument. Ross pointed this out in the debate in a very clear fashion. White would not recant of his position.

In a post to review the debate and explain how Ross won, I wrote:

White asserts no manuscript evidence for one NT reading, the one in Revelation 16:5. He says there is light evidence for one word in Ephesians 3:9 and the Comma Johanneum in 1 John 5:7. Ross shows there is no manuscript evidence for at least 41 separate lines of text in the NA, evidenced by Swanson in his New Testament Greek Manuscripts: Variant Readings Arranged in Horizontal Lines against Codex Vaticanus. None of this occurs in the TR. Based on the ratio of Matthew and Mark text to the rest of the New Testament, that would result in 191 total for the NT.

A Further Description from Me

In another post, referring to this, I wrote to describe this:

The other side, the critical text and multiple modern version position, does not follow scriptural presuppositions. It proceeds from naturalistic and relativistic ones. This is especially seen in the hundreds of lines of Greek text for its New Testament with no manuscript evidence. Critics pieced together lines of text that never existed in any copy anywhere and anytime.

The above is what I (and others) mean by a FrankenText.  Mark Ward in one of his recent podcasts interviews a friend of his getting his PhD in textual criticism, and he asks the man about this Frankentext problem, referring to Dwayne Greene.  He uses the term with the man.  In answer to the question, Ward’s friend says that all Greek New Testament texts are Frankentexts, including the Textus Receptus.  This is an outright, utter falsehood.  It isn’t true and it deceives or misleads people.

Lies Including the Textus Receptus As a Frankentext

The Textus Receptus does not contain hundreds of lines of text with absolutely zero manuscript evidence.  Those lines in the critical text of the New Testament (the UBS and NA) have no manuscript support in any manuscript.  That doesn’t occur with the received text of the New Testament, the basis of the King James Version.  Manuscripts actually have those readings.  There is minority support for certain words, but lines of text are found in manuscripts for the Textus Receptus.

A common line of argument today, people term, “Whataboutism?”  It is defined:

Whataboutism or whataboutery (as in “what about….?”) is a pejorative for the strategy of responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation instead of a defense against the original accusation.

Ward’s friend does this.  Instead of dealing with the problem of these lines of text with no manuscript evidence, he uses whataboutism.   In fact, even his whataboutism isn’t true, which sometimes is the case with this sort of argumentation.

CBGM

More Frankentexts are bound to arise because of a new method of modern textual criticism, given the shorthand CBGM.  It’s going to sound impossibly technical, but it means, “Coherence Based Genealogical Method.”  To try to put it simply, someone wrote this:

The computer application itself aggregates relationships between readings based on agreement with other readings as well as based on their disagreements. Basically, it compares Greek manuscripts, finds the similarities and differences, and then uses an algorithm to decide which is “probably” the right reading.

This same article said this about CBGM:

CBGM is a relatively new approach to textual criticism using a computer program in order to determine the validity of a reading (somewhere between 1997 and 2000). By “reading”, we are referring to anything from a single word of Scripture to a phrase, or even a more substantial section of the Scriptures. In this method, the computer becomes a tool in determining which readings are “most likely authentic”. Having said that, it should be noted that it still requires much interaction from the users.

Frankentexts will increase.  Is that a concern?  It looks like, not so much.  That criticism that your line of text has zero manuscript evidence doesn’t matter as much as it once did.  All of this sadly departs from a supernatural, divine presupposition about preservation of scripture, embracing instead a naturalistic, humanistic viewpoint about lost scripture in need of restoration.