| Sumario: | This book explores the relationship between the field of New Testament textual criticism and the biological sciences, beginning in the eighteenth century and extending to the present. The traditional goal of modern textual criticism is to reconstruct an “original text” from surviving manuscripts, adjudicating among all variant texts resulting from scribal hand-copying. Because of the way manuscripts circulate and give rise to new copies, it can be said that they have an “erotic” life: they mate and breed, bear offspring, and generate families and descendants. New Testament textual critics have used exactly such language to group texts into families and genealogies. These philologists were not pioneering new approaches but borrowing the metaphors and methods of natural scientists. This began with the classification of texts into “families, tribes, and nations,” which taxonomized variant readings and, furthermore, racialized them as “African” or “Asian,” with distinguishable “textual physiognomies” and “textual complexions.” The growing acceptance of Darwinian evolution in the twentieth century shifted the focus of textual critics to the development of texts over time. Modern genetics has influenced more traditionally minded textual critics in their analysis of text as genetic code for the production of evolutionary “trees.” While these metaphors have been powerful tools for textual critics, they also produce problematic understandings of textual “purity” and agency, with the use of scientific discourse artificially separating the work of textual criticism from literary interpretation. The conclusion of this study aims to propose new metaphors for the field.-- OUP
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