Road To Ogre Land: Character Design 1

Concept art for the wizard. I followed Rob's main character designs and thought of a few variations for the hair.

For now, I chose Rod as this character's name.

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t is curious to note that the copy text (also known as a copy text), one of the fundamental devices of most classical textual criticism, doesn't even seem to be mentioned in most manuals of NT criticism. Simply put, the copy text is the starting point for an edition. An editor, after examining the various witnesses, picks a particular manuscript as the best source and then, in effect, collates against it looking for places where a better text presents itself. As G. Blakemore Evans puts it in the textual introduction to the Riverside Shakespeare, "an editor today, having chosen for what he considers sound reasons a particular copy-text, will adhere to that copy-text unless he sees substantial grounds for departing from it" (p. 37). This, we should note, does not mean slavishly following the copy text. Hort didn't follow B closely; a good editor will be open to good readings from any source. But the copy text is the starting point. One follows it in the absence of reasons to depart from it. So, for example, one would tend to follow the copy text spelling of various proper names, or on points of Attic versus non-Attic usage, or on inflected versus non-inflected Semitic names. And, of course, in the case of readings where the canons of criticism offer no clear point of decision, you follow the copy text. It gives you a fallback if you have no other grounds for decision. Note that this is in strong contrast to most methods of Eclecticism. Eclectics generally don't start anywhere; they have to decide everything -- even such trivialities as spelling variations -- from the manuscripts or from some external reference. It's a lot of work for slight reward -- and it arguably produces a rather inconsistent text. Now we should note that the Copy Text notion arose in situations with very few witnesses -- e.g Shakespeare, where there are never more than three independent witnesses, usually not more than two, and occasionally only one. However, the idea has been successful enough that it is now applied to texts with far larger numbers of witnesses -- e.g. Chaucer, where some passages have as many as 75 witnesses. There is no inherent reason why the method could not be applied to the NT as well. Of course, if one is to choose a copy text, there is the question of which copy text. This is rendered much more complicated by the nature of New Testament witnesses: Most of the important ones, the papyri and uncials, lack accents, breathings, punctuation, and spaces between words. Should one adopt a copy text which includes these features (in which case it will be much more recent than what are usually considered the best witnesses), or choose a text with the best text apart from readers' aides? Or even choose one text for the text and another for the aids?

kkk

Sep 7, 2008

Character Design 1

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