The critical edition, as the primary interface through which specialist textual critics shape the interpretations of historians and literary scholars, is an indispensable tool of philology and its successor disciplines. In this introductory essay to a special issue of Philological Encounters, we offer an approach to analyzing the role of the critical edition in the history and ongoing practice of scholarship on ancient texts, and explain the circumstances in the field of biblical studies from which this issue emerged. We argue that the niggling failures of critical editions can productively spark an infrastructural disposition in scholars who work with ancient texts-a renewed attentiveness to the labor, material affordances and constraints, technological capacities, and institutional structures oriented around the mediation of the past for the present. The Critical Edition in the Infrastructure of Philology illustrates the analytical value of such a disposition through a collection of compelling case studies.
This article explores J. N. Epstein's call for a critical edition of the Mishnah, delivered in his 1925 inaugural lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Framing textual criticism as a national imperative, Epstein envisioned "Talmudic Philology" as foundational to the rebirth of Jewish life in the Land of Israel. By examining Epstein's early academic trajectory, his role in Berlin's circles of Jewish intellectuals and scholars, and his collaborations with Hayim Nahman Bialik, the article reveals how Zionist ideology increasingly shaped his philological goals. Special attention is given to the conception of the Mishnah as a national text and to Epstein's understanding of it as having had a written Urtext, recoverable through critical methods. The study situates Epstein at the intersection of nationalism and philology, showing how his work responded to Christian scholarly challenges and aimed to build a Hebrew-language academic tradition rooted in the perceived needs of the Jewish people.
Before they hosted successive meetings of the Society for Biblical Literature, Denver and San Antonio were stops on the wild ride of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Tailgating papers from panels in those venues, this afterpiece scrolls jaggedly through other scenes of urban philological encounter, telescopinghorizons of critical editingbetween Christian late antiquity and western modernity, from the eve of the Reformation to the aftermath of World War II. There is a main text of travel, with minimal baggage of secondary reference. There is also, beginning a few pages in, an intermittent infratext that engages more directly with themes and issues from the SBL panels and offers links to related scholarship. Having run its course through cities and times, the travelogue dwells for a moment on the keywords of the hour ("infrastructure," "technology") and another of longer date ("criticism"), before seconding a contemporary critic's modest claim for the continuing utility of public works of philology such as these.
A New Testament apparatus criticus orders a vast material history within an array placed below a text that either prints a desired referent in the upper register or gestures toward that referent, conceptually. Relegating manuscripts to the role of data and extracting their variants, textual criticism masters past corruption while promising an ever-advancing present that never quite arrives. The apparatus therefore testifies not only to textual difference but also to extractive resource hoarding and the progress-at-any-cost epistemologies of modernity. Focusing on the International Greek New Testament Project's "new Tischendorf" and the expeditions it prompted, this essay tracks the direct involvement of government, corporate, and intelligence entrepreneurs in "saving the New Testament" or, more accurately, advancing the Cold War interests of, among others, the Library of Congress, the United States State Department, Gulf Oil, and institutions like the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis.
Riffing on the "radical philology" of Sean Gurd, this article challenges generalized accounts of the edition, and its entanglement in ideologies of print culture, as an object of representation that fixes the text, by analyzing the editio princeps of 3 Corinthians in its intellectual and technological context of production. As this article documents the controversy and new editions prompted by Wilkins's pamphlet, it argues that the ensuing textual multiplicity exemplifies key characteristics of the early-eighteenth-century Republic of Letters identified by Paul Dibon, Anne Goldgar, and others: a concern for communication, not only of new content but the manner in which that communication occurred. Rather than seeing the print edition as a fixing or stabilizing of text, this article shows how textual multiplicity is achieved through the edition's performance of communication.
