Eldon Epp

Eldon Jay Epp (born 1930) is an American New Testament scholar and textual critic.

Epp studied at Wheaton College (Bachelor of Arts, 1952), Fuller Theological Seminary (Bachelor of Divinity, 1955), Harvard University (Master of Sacred Theology; 1956; Doctor of Philosophy, 1961). He taught at the University of Southern California from 1962 to 1968, and at Case Western Reserve University from 1968 to 1998.

According to Jennifer Wright Knust and Tommy Wasserman, Epp has "tirelessly devoted himself to the careful reconstruction of ancient texts and their histories as well as to the transmission of knowledge about how to undertake this crucial task."

Epp is also well known for arguing in his Junia: The First Woman Apostle (Fortress Press, 2005) that Junia in Romans 16:7 was a female apostle. Epp's monograph has been influential in shifting the consensus of New Testament scholarship on this point.

Epp served as President of the Society of Biblical Literature in 2003.


Career

At Case Western Reserve University, Epp held the Harkness Professorship of Biblical Literature and served as dean of humanities and social sciences. He retired in 1998 as emeritus in both roles. After his retirement he returned repeatedly to Harvard Divinity School as a visiting professor of New Testament, where he taught the textual criticism course over many years. His research was supported by a Guggenheim fellowship in 1974โ€“1975 and by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 1988.

Epp gave long service to the Society of Biblical Literature and to its publications. He was the New Testament book review editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature for twenty years and editor of the Critical Review of Books in Religion for four years. He also chaired the Society's textual criticism section at the annual meeting for fourteen years. He also served for twelve years on the editorial board of the SBL Centennial Publications Series and sat on the North American executive committee of the International Greek New Testament Project, whose history he later wrote. From 1993 until 2007 he edited the Brill series Studies and Documents, and he later co-edited its successor series with Bart D. Ehrman. Among his doctoral students was Larry Hurtado, whose PhD he supervised and who remained a close colleague.

Scholarly work

Codex Bezae and theological tendency

Epp's Harvard dissertation was published in revised form as The Theological Tendency of Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis in Acts (1966). Against the prevailing view, stated by J. H. Ropes, that the Western reviser showed no trace of a special theological point of view, Epp argued that the variants of Codex Bezae in Acts display a pronounced anti-Judaic tendency that heightens Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus and for the persecution of the apostles. Ehrman calculates that some 4 percent of the variants in A. C. Clark's edition of Acts were implicated in this bias. The book treated textual variants as historically significant evidence in their own right rather than as chaff to be discarded on the way to the original text, and it placed the tendencies of scribes at the center of text-critical inquiry.

The thesis was debated from the start. C. K. Barrett argued that one should speak not of a deliberately imposed tendency but of an exaggeration of elements already present in the story line of Acts. Epp returned to the question in "Anti-Judaic Tendencies in the D-Text of Acts: Forty Years of Conversation" (2003), accepting that the monograph might more accurately have spoken of a theological tendency in the broader D-text rather than in Codex Bezae alone, while judging that its place in a continuing conversation was "perhaps legacy enough". As late as 2017 he was still refining the method for isolating a distinctive D-text in Acts.

Theory, method, and the original text

Epp's 1973 Hatch Memorial Lecture, published as "The Twentieth Century Interlude in New Testament Textual Criticism" (1974), judged that the twentieth century had amassed manuscript evidence and produced critical editions without matching the nineteenth century's advances in the theory and history of textual transmission, so that scholars still worked within the framework of Westcott and Hort or settled for eclecticism at the level of the individual variant. The judgment drew a vigorous response from Kurt Aland, and Epp restated his position, in his own word "unrepentant", in a sequel published in 1980. In "New Testament Textual Criticism in America: Requiem for a Discipline" (1979), he pronounced a requiem over the discipline's place in American scholarship. Ehrman observes the irony that the field's later revival owed much to Epp himself.

In "The Multivalence of the Term 'Original Text'" (1999), described by Elliott as arguably his most influential article, Epp showed that the term "original text" carries several distinct senses and urged critics and exegetes to use it self-consciously and to place meaningful variants in their historical and theological contexts. In the introduction to the second volume of his collected essays, he stated the discipline's "unitary goal" as establishing the earliest attainable text as a baseline while at the same time assessing the variants that emerge from it, "so as to hear the narratives of early Christian thought and life that inhere in the array of meaningful variants".

The papyri

Epp insisted that the earliest papyri are the key evidence for any history and theory of the New Testament text, and he complained that they had had little direct effect on the text of modern critical editions. Studying the papyri in their Roman-era setting, he drew on the evidence for the rapid circulation of texts and letters around the Mediterranean world to argue that the textual complexions preserved in Egypt could represent text-types from the entire region. In place of the traditional text-types he proposed the more cautious language of textual clusters, identifying among the pre-300 papyri a "B" group related to Codex Vaticanus and a "D" group with an affinity to Codex Bezae, and he concluded that identifiable text-types were already in existence by about 200. A further cluster, represented among the papyri by ๐”“45 and later reflected in Codex Washingtonianus, stood apart from both. His presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature in 2003 took the Oxyrhynchus New Testament papyri as its subject and argued for their importance to the study of early Christianity.

Junia and Romans 16:7

The Junia monograph grew out of a long article published in 2002 in a Festschrift for Joรซl Delobel. Its argument turns on a single Greek accent. The unaccented accusative form of the name in Romans 16:7 can be accented as the feminine Junia or as a supposed masculine Junias, and Epp surveyed the accenting of the name in the manuscripts and showed from the lexical and patristic evidence that the feminine name is widely attested in the Greco-Roman world while the masculine name is attested nowhere. He also traced the decisions of the modern critical editions, which printed the masculine form until their recent editions restored the feminine. Elliott judges Epp's meticulous survey, "leaving no palaeographical, historical, or textual stone unturned", to be convincing, and accepts his conclusion that Junia was an apostle prominent among the apostles. The book also drew critical responses, among them a published reassessment by Michael H. Burer.

Reception and legacy

A special session of the Society of Biblical Literature's 2010 annual meeting, "Honoring the Work of Eldon Jay Epp, Octogenarian", assessed his contributions, and the assessments were collected a decade later in TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism. Knust and Wasserman introduced the collection by calling him the doyen of New Testament textual criticism, and Elliott called him "clearly the doyen of the trade". Ehrman judged that, although Epp had predecessors in the study of scribal tendencies, "it was his major study that made all the difference", and that much of the field's present work descends from the intervention of 1966. Hurtado identified the recurring disposition of Epp's work as a commitment to "the bigger picture", using the history of the discipline to press for a fully informed theory and history of the earliest transmission of the text. Epp also encouraged the approach, named by David C. Parker, of narrative textual criticism, on the premise that all variants have a story to tell.

Selected works

Most of Epp's articles are gathered in the two volumes of his Perspectives on New Testament Textual Criticism (2005 and 2020), which also print a bibliography of his books and of the articles not reprinted there.

Books

  • The Theological Tendency of Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis in Acts (Cambridge University Press, 1966)
  • Junia: The First Woman Apostle (Fortress Press, 2005)
  • Perspectives on New Testament Textual Criticism: Collected Essays, 1962โ€“2004 (Brill, 2005)
  • Perspectives on New Testament Textual Criticism, Volume 2: Collected Essays, 2006โ€“2017 (Brill, 2020)

Edited volumes

  • New Testament Textual Criticism: Its Significance for Exegesis: Essays in Honour of Bruce M. Metzger, edited with Gordon D. Fee (Clarendon Press, 1981)
  • The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters, edited with George W. MacRae (Fortress Press, 1989)
  • Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism, edited with Gordon D. Fee (Eerdmans, 1993)

References

  1. 1 2 "Eldon Jay Epp, PhD, Presented with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who's Who". Marquis Who's Who. Retrieved 18 November 2024.
  2. โ†‘ Knust, Jennifer Wright; Wasserman, Tommy (2020). "In Honor of Eldon Jay Epp: Nonagenarian and Doyen of New Testament Textual Criticism" (PDF). TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism. 25: 85. Retrieved 18 November 2024.
  3. โ†‘ Westfall, Cynthia Long (2024). "Paul and Gender". The State of Pauline Studies: A Survey of Recent Research. Baker Books. p.ย 47. ISBNย 978-1-4934-3817-4. Retrieved 18 November 2024.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Petersen, David L. (2004). "Introduction to the Presidential Address". Journal of Biblical Literature. 123 (1): 3โ€“4.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Knust, Jennifer Wright; Wasserman, Tommy (2020). "In Honor of Eldon Jay Epp: Nonagenarian and Doyen of New Testament Textual Criticism". TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism. 25: 85โ€“88. doi:10.15699/tc.25.2020.03.
  6. 1 2 Epp, Eldon Jay (2005). Perspectives on New Testament Textual Criticism: Collected Essays, 1962โ€“2004. Leiden: Brill.
  7. โ†‘ Elliott, J. Keith (2016). A Synopsis of the Apocryphal Nativity and Infancy Narratives (2ndย ed.). Leiden: Brill.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Hurtado, L. W. (2010). "Going for the Bigger Picture: Eldon Epp as Textual Critic". TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism. 15: 1โ€“8. doi:10.15699/tc.15.2010.02.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Ehrman, Bart D. (2020). "The Theological Tendency of Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis at Age Forty-Four: In Commemoration of Eldon Epp's Eightieth Birthday". TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism. 25: 89โ€“95. doi:10.15699/tc.25.2020.04.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Elliott, J. Keith (2020). "Eldon Jay Epp's Exegesis: A Paper Honoring the Exegetical Work of Eldon Jay Epp". TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism. 25: 97โ€“101. doi:10.15699/tc.25.2020.05.
  11. โ†‘ Epp, Eldon Jay (1974). "The Twentieth Century Interlude in New Testament Textual Criticism". Journal of Biblical Literature. 93: 386โ€“414. doi:10.2307/3263386.
  12. โ†‘ Epp, Eldon Jay (1979). "New Testament Textual Criticism in America: Requiem for a Discipline". Journal of Biblical Literature. 98: 94โ€“98.
  13. โ†‘ Epp, Eldon Jay (1999). "The Multivalence of the Term "Original Text" in New Testament Textual Criticism". Harvard Theological Review. 92 (3): 245โ€“281. doi:10.1017/S0017816000003394.
  14. โ†‘ Epp, Eldon Jay (2004). "The Oxyrhynchus New Testament Papyri: "Not Without Honor Except in Their Hometown"?". Journal of Biblical Literature. 123 (1): 5โ€“55. doi:10.2307/3268548.
  15. โ†‘ Burer, Michael H. (2008). "Reassessing Junia: A Review of Eldon Epp's Junia: The First Woman Apostle". Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. 13 (1).