Textual uniformity and diversity in the NT, Qur'an, etc.

LARRY HURTADO: Textual Criticism, the New Testament, and the Qur’an.

As to results, Small repeatedly notes that the Qur’an manuscripts exhibit a remarkable stability in the text across many centuries, from the earliest to the latest. In general terms, not much more than orthographic variants (vowel differences in the consonantal script) and other minor variants are found. There are occasional copyist mistakes, but no major differences involving whole clauses or sentences. This accords with traditional, popular Muslim beliefs/claims about the stability of the text of the Qur’an.

But Small also notes that the other evidence (especially palimpsests and reports from early centuries) suggest strongly that there was, in the earliest period, a considerably greater diversity in the text of the Qur’an than is reflected in the extant manuscripts studied. Moreover, as is widely accepted, in the late 7th century, disturbed by the diversity in the text of the Qur’an, the Caliph Uthman organized a standardization of the consontantal text (early Arabic, like ancient Hebrew, was a consonantal aphabet with no written vowels), suppressing variant versions.

The development of the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible is similar: the surviving manuscripts show a remarkable textual uniformity, but earlier, pre-Masoretic evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint shows that an earlier textual diversity had to be suppressed to achieve the uniformity of the MT. This appears to be a fairly common pattern as texts achieve a greater or lesser level of canonicity or authority. In my work on the Hekhalot Literature it has become clear that the later manuscripts of the complete major texts (albeit themselves often highly corrupt) come from a tradition edited into uniformity by the Haside Ashkenaz in the thirteenth century. The earlier fragments of these texts from the Cairo Geniza show considerably more textual diversity.

As Hurtado notes, the New Testament also reached a high level of textual uniformity in time, but no one seems to have had any interest in suppressing the earlier manuscripts that preserved a greater diversity.