It was an honor to present a paper last week at the Editio Critica Maior (ECM) session at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in San Diego that celebrated the contributions of Klaus Wachtel to the field of New Testament textual criticism. I had the pleasure of getting to know Klaus during my sabbatical year in Münster last year and he is an incredibly humble, learned, and meticulous scholar who went out of his way to be welcoming. At the end of the session, Klaus was presented with a surprise Festschrift with 30 contributing authors (due for official release in January). Our contribution to the session was a paper on the efficacy of the 9 Teststellen used in Text und Textwert for identifying Byzantine manuscripts of 1 Timothy. My co-authors were Stephen M. Young (tireless in his processing of the collation data) and Valerie H. Smith (the SAS programming wizard behind our excellent graphs and charts). Our paper (titled "Great Expectations: Teststellen Efficacy for Byzantine Manuscripts of 1 Timothy") represents the first time full collations of a large number of Byzantine manuscripts have been utilized for an ECM project. Our paper abstract:
So, did our study find the Teststellen to be efficacious for 1 Timothy? In short, not as much as was expected. We had far more data than could be presented and discussed during a paper presentation, so we will seek publication of the full paper to make that information widely available.
Photo credit: Conrad Thorup Elmelund. Pictured (L to R): Hugh Houghton, Georgi Parpulov, Holger Strutwolf, Klaus Wachtel, Stephen Young, Andrew Smith.