Confession: I may not have grasped the difference between textual criticism and source criticism until well into graduate school. Now as a professor, I find that my own students struggle to discern the difference. While students tend to grasp source criticism because they are already oriented towards questions of authorship and composition, textual criticism requires a creative approach on my part. I have found it effective to use multimodal, embodied activities to reinforce this difference. Since textual criticism is analysis and comparison of physical manuscripts, the topic lends itself to a material activity which I will describe here. Ideally, the students come into class having a foundation in the day’s topic from assigned materials, and then the class lesson proceeds to explore and reaffirm those materials.
I structure each lesson in three parts: Contextualize, Analyze, and Embody. To contextualize a lesson, we explore a concept, its historical context, and any helpful literary or methodological frameworks. Then, I invite the students to analyze examples that exhibit the concept we are learning; often this is samples of text passages or artifacts of material culture. Finally, we participate in an activity that allows them to embody what we are learning in a multi-sensory way, through something like playing a game, crafting an artifact, writing their own text, or reenacting an event. At the end of class, we discuss these embodiment experiences, and students nearly always reflect back to me the very information I shared in the contextualization portion. Years later, students will share with me that they remember these activities far more than anything else we did in their class.
As a point of contrast to textual criticism, here’s how I teach source criticism as the basic idea that source texts could be edited and reedited together over time to serve different communities’ purposes. I assign some readings as well as a podcast to introduce the motivations, context, and methodology of this approach. In class, we first spend time synthesizing key points of source criticism and clarifying any unclear facets of the assigned material (Contextualize). Next, we take time individually and in small groups to analyze part of the flood narrative according to this method (Analyze). Finally, we listen to two songs that have different versions of a source text (the Beatles’ and Aretha Franklin’s versions of “Eleanor Rigby” work for this) to use further sensory means of thinking through how and why people would adapt earlier source material for their purposes (Embody). In the end, we reflect on how and why hypothetical sources may have been brought together to eventually become the Bibles that exist today.
Manuscript created by Naomi Nakasone
For textual criticism , I decided to find a multimodal means of emphasizing the fact that textual criticism is the study of physical manuscripts, rather than the hypothetical sources of source criticism. Here’s the breakdown of this process:
READINGS: I assign some very short readings from Soulen and Soulen’s Handbook of Biblical Criticism, which define textual criticism and each of the manuscript corpora in question.
CONTEXTUALIZE: In class I talk through when and how textual criticism developed as a discipline (including connecting it to the spread of western empires, archeological discoveries and colonization, and modernist notions of textual authority), the function of textus receptus, and an overview of scribal practices and manuscript variations. At this point, I briefly introduce the embodiment exercise detailed below, break the class into small groups, and assign each group a manuscript corpus, before I verbally talk through each of the main manuscript corpora that provide evidence for development of biblical texts. I introduce this exercise at this time so that each group can listen most closely for details of their assigned texts, as they will be using this information to develop their manuscript later. For purposes of my classes that touch on both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, I introduce the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Vulgate, the Masoretic Text, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Vaticanus.
ANALYZE: I show the class some detailed images of a few of the manuscripts that we are discussing (often something from the Dead Sea Scrolls and something from the Masoretic Text), and have the groups make observations about the scribal practices and material characteristics they see in the images. Even though most of them do not read the languages of the manuscripts, they can note elements like margins, corrections, scribal hand, materials, effacements, lacunae, damages, etc. After groups have collected their observations and written them on the board to share, I lead them through a discussion that ranges through differences in writing technologies, questions of stability in textual identification, and categories of “biblical” texts. This conversation often helps students to approach their own assumptions regarding transmission of biblical literature.
EMBODY: At this point, I invite the small groups to each create a manuscript whose content describes and whose form imitates their assigned manuscripts. The more budget-friendly version is to provide two colors of paper and label one color as “parchment” and the other as “papyrus.” For smaller classes I purchase fake parchment and papyrus for them to experience different textures. I then give these instructions on the screen:
Pick the appropriate material for your assigned corpus (parchment or papyrus)
Create the appropriate technology for your assigned corpus (scroll or codex)
Choose a scribe or a couple of scribes in your group
The remainder of the group will dictate to the scribe(s) a summation of what is included in your manuscript corpus:
What literature, and how much of it, is included in it? (i.e., which parts of the Hebrew Bible and/or New Testament?)
Which language(s) is it written in?
When is/are the manuscript(s) from?
Where were they found? Who wrote them? Who used them?
Include manuscript variations (physical & scribal): smearing ink, ripping lacunae out, tearing off fragments of the document, staining the document, crumpling or rolling up the document, crossing out words, adding corrections in the margins, misspelling words, repeating words, mixing handwriting styles
Manuscript created by Ainsley Cecil
After manuscript creation is completed, each group shares with the class their artifact and the information they included on it. Depending on the size and context of the class, sometimes I’ll have the groups tour around the room to view the other groups’ work and read them for themselves, or other times they have a spokesperson verbally explain the artifact either to the whole class or to small groups.
This lesson plan has been an effective means of reinforcing the physical, manuscript-based analysis of textual criticism, over against the theoretical texts of source criticism. Ultimately, this activity leads to a discussion about transmission of texts in the ancient world, the materiality of those texts, the nature of variants and textual stability, questions of textual authority and canonization, and the presuppositions students specifically bring to “biblical” texts.