Chris Coldwell (NaphtaliPress) has published Presbyterian & Reformed books since 1987. He is the editor of The Confessional Presbyterian journal, an annual publication containing scholarly articles from a Confessional Presbyterian perspective by men from the many conservative Presbyterian & Reformed denominations today. He has a particular interest in the text of the Westminster Standards, and a critical text of the Larger Catechism is running serially in the journal beginning with the 2007 issue.
A Critical Text of the Westminster Larger Catechism 1: Introduction
Posted 09-10-2007 at 01:54 PM by NaphtaliPress
To perhaps drum up interest in CPJ, I will be running extracts from “A Critical Text of the Westminster Larger Catechism: Q. 1–50,” which will appear, D.V. in The Confessional Presbyterian 3 (2007) due off the press October 1st. As the work is quite extensive, the full catechism will be presented seriatim across several issues, again Lord willing.
A Critical Text of the Westminster Larger Catechism: Q. 1–50
Introduction
It is true what a recent study has noted: “Despite playing such a prominent role in the Assembly’s proceedings, the text and textual history of the Larger Catechism has received surprisingly little attention.”[1] This article presents the first part of a critical text of the Westminster Larger Catechism beginning with the first fifty questions and answers, tracing the textual errors and variants as precisely as possible to the source that brought them into the traditional text. The editions that make up the lineage of the traditional text, those popular editions which subsequent printers relied upon to set their own printings which in turn were relied upon by others, were traced in a previous article.[2] For this present work, the different American versions and editions of the standards have also been collated, and notes made on the different scripture proof texts adopted by those denominations which altered the originals. Following the critical text is a table of the American proof sets for easy comparison, with some remarks appropriately repeated or expanded upon regarding textual errors.
This work was originally undertaken as part of a publication project to produce a new edition of the Confession and Catechisms based upon the early printed texts. In the process of working up and completing a new critical text of the Confession of Faith, it became clear that Dr. Carruthers’ original critical work with that text could be improved upon and a more accurate tracing made as to the origins of the variant readings and changes in the text. This took the project in a significantly more ambitious direction, and well over a hundred volumes were collected for collation. As noted above, the resulting corrected lineage of the traditional text was presented in “Examining the Work of S. W. Carruthers.”
Providentially, there were others who were doing work at the same time which proved very beneficial to this research. In gathering editions to use in the collation, and in searching for any possible surviving manuscripts for the larger catechism, the author came into contact with Chad Van Dixhoorn who was completing his dissertation on the Westminster Assembly and was also in the process of forming The Westminster Assembly Project. He had not discovered any surviving manuscripts, but some months later he reported the significant news that he had found two surviving originals amongst the collections of the Bodleian Library. Dr. Van Dixhoorn arranged for a microfilm to be made of these two manuscripts and kindly passed along the information needed to obtain copies. Subsequently, at his request, a first draft transcription of the two texts was undertaken. Except for some later corrections made during the collation, these were completed in January 2004.[3]
Later in 2004, John Bower began working on a critical text of the catechism for a Master’s thesis, which he completed in 2006. That work is a thorough critical text, collating multiple examples of the two authoritative editions as well as the two surviving manuscripts. Bower’s collation has served as a useful check for the current work with those particular texts.
Mr. Bower correctly notes that one of the evidences for proof reading during the printing process, not covered in the Carruthers article, was the stop press variant. Tracing these requires checking multiple printings of the same edition.[4] As this collation was a lengthy one across three hundred and sixty years of printing and between 130 and 150 editions, it was simply not feasible to attempt to collate multiple examples, and this has been done only in rare instances. Doing so might show that some textual changes may be more precisely traced to a variant of an edition prior to the edition assigned in this study, or it may explain some singular variants not reproduced later if corrected in subsequent examples of the same edition. As it is, the stop press variants Mr. Bower discovered in the text of the early authoritative editions are not many, the preponderance of them occurring in the Scripture proofs of Edition Four, which very soon received attempts at correction.[5]
The discovery of the manuscripts, and subsequent work with them in creating transcriptions, did raise the question of whether the manuscripts or the earliest editions should be treated as the authoritative text. The research on this question was presented in part one of the article on Carruthers’ work, and the conclusion was that both were important to collate for a critical text.[6]
Continued: The Authoritative Editions
Notes:
The Author: Chris Coldwell is the editor of The Confessional Presbyterian. For several years he has been working on critical texts for the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms. Previous research appeared in the 2005 volume of this journal. 1. John R. Bower, “The Westminster Assembly’s Larger Catechism. A Critical Edition. A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Theology” (2006) 1.
2. Chris Coldwell, “Examining the Work of S. W. Carruthers: Justifying a Critical Approach to the Text of the Westminster Standards & Correcting the 18th Century Lineage of the Traditional Scottish Text,” The Confessional Presbyterian 1 (2005) 43–64.
3. Chris Coldwell, [Unpublished] Draft Transcription of The Larger Catechism MSS (The Westminster Assembly Project, 2004).
4. ”When looking for evidence that a sixteenth or seventeenth century text was actually proof read, one of the most useful measures is the book itself. One such internal marker for proof-reading, not specifically addressed by Coldwell, is the presence of stop-press variants. These variants arose when an error was recognized after an impression was already underway. Correction required removal of the forme to reset the erroneous portion of type. Afterwards, the forme was replaced and the printing continued. Sheets already printed were still utilized unless the error was particularly egregious. Stop-press variants not only reflect evidence of active proofing, but they also represent variant readings that need to be considered when compiling a critical edition. Hence, identification of these variants requires collation of multiple copies of the same edition.” Bower, 40–41.
5. Mr. Bower, in his collation of five examples of the first edition produced for the Assembly’s use, noted only the addition of an extra title page in one example, and the dropping of an italicized Adam in Question 92 (Bower, 54–55). This latter variant is interesting as it indicates the convention desired for the Catechism was not to italicize names throughout, which was a common style at the time, and this figures in some notes in this critical text where the italic face was later introduced. Mr. Bower’s collation of Edition Four, the Assembly’s private edition with the Scripture proofs added, also yielded only some minor variants in the text, and an explanation for a textual error in the answer to Question 185. However, his collation did reveal “numerous errors and ambiguities among the proof-texts and reference letter apparatus.” “For many of the minor errors that occur in the proof-texts, the meaning is clearly discernable. However, there are at least two dozen errors where the meaning is obscured …” (Bower, 59). Mr. Bower provides an appendix illustrating these errors, and the subsequent dissatisfaction over the proofs lead to attempts in later editions to correct them, such as the attempted corrections made in the 1656 Latin edition, which he calls the best attempt, and the attempts by the editor of the Rothwell editions (Bowers, 136–137). Examples in the first fifty questions occur at Q45 (396), though it was corrected in at least one early edition, Q7 (5) and Q18 (152).
6. See “Examining the Work of S. W. Carruthers,” 44–50. “The conclusion of all the forgoing is that the coupling of what is generally known about the printing practices of the period, with what is known about the Westminster Assembly’s manuscripts and their printing, and the suppositions which can be drawn from this, all support taking a critical approach toward the texts. The existing manuscripts do not necessarily represent the final texts intended by the Assembly, but may be useful in possibly clarifying or correcting any actual incidental or substantial errors that could have survived the proofing process. But even with the few substantial differences, a critical approach is appropriate, since, with no printer’s proofs, and so few surviving manuscripts of those likely to have existed, it cannot be verified whether a change was a mistake in printing, a mistake in the surviving manuscript, a correction to an error discovered in the proofing process, or at exactly what point and for what reason the change occurred.” While the MSS have been collated for this text, text or text portions of the catechism in the Minutes of the Assembly have not been consulted, as they are considered preliminary to the MSS. A study of the Minutes does offer “unique insight into the deliberative and editorial activities of the Assembly and its committee” as it worked on the catechism, for which see Bower’s thesis (21–37).§
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