2 - The nature of the Western text of Acts

Summary

The Western text and the book of Acts

The first task to be tackled in attempting to discuss the textual peculiarities of Acts is to decide what the ‘Western text of Acts’ is. At the time that Blass wrote, for instance, it was still possible to assume that Codex D was, to all intents and purposes, the Western text. Discoveries of new MS material since that time, as well as a more sophisticated understanding of the processes by which the text types emerged, have made such a view rather obsolete. Even at the time of Blass, it was evident that a ‘Western text’ existed elsewhere in the New Testament, and that this fact would have to be taken into account in any satisfactory description of the Western text of Acts.

The problem today in seeking to analyse the Western text of Acts is, therefore, twofold. On the one hand there is the problem of locating the Western text of Acts: if the Western text is not merely the readings of Codex D, then where is it to be found? Is there, indeed, any homogeneous entity to be recognised as ‘the Western text of Acts’, or have we to do rather with ill-defined collections of readings which have been misleadingly called ‘Western’? On the other hand there is the problem of relating the Western text in Acts to the Western text in the rest of the New Testament: is the Western text of Acts so distinctive as to deserve separate treatment?