An Amusing Anecdote about the State of Textual Criticism

I’d like to sum up my posts so far on the state of New Testament textual criticism – my original field of scholarship – when I entered into the field of student as a graduate student in the early 1980s by telling an anecdote. It has always struck me as rather amusing. (I am basing all this on memory, and as I’ve just written a book on memory, I am acutely aware of how frail this particular human function is. But this is exactly as I remember it!)

I was attending, for the second or third time,...