I have good news to report today. For years I’ve looked in vain for an affordable used copy of Harry Sturz’s The Byzantine Text-Type & New Testament Textual Criticism. It looks like that will not be a problem anymore as Energion Publishers is producing a reprint of the original with a new preface by David Alan Black.
I first learned about Sturz’s book from my course on NTTC with Dan Wallace at Dallas Seminary and then again in reading through Klaus Wachtel’s work on the Byzantine text in the Catholic Letters. Here’s some sense of the book’s argument from the new publisher:
Should the Byzantine text-type be considered valuable in determining the original text of the New Testament? Does it bear independent witness to ancient readings? Dr. Harry Sturz, in a book published in 1984, maintained that it should be valued and that it could help with finding older readings and thus contribute to our knowledge of and confidence in the text of the Greek New Testament. His position, that the Byzantine text-type should be weighed along with other witnesses to the ancient text, differs from those who dismiss Byzantine manuscripts, which were largely copied later, but also from those who hold that the Byzantine text has priority or even is determinative of what the final reading should be. He uses carefully laid out arguments and numerous specific examples in making his case. This book is divided into two parts. The first outlines the positions both for relying on the Byzantine text and for largely ignoring it. Part two examines the evidence and outlines an argument that neither side of this debate should win the field, but rather that the Byzantine text should be valued, but not made exclusive.
This is an especially good time to reprint the book given the renewed interested in and esteem for the Byzantine text from the folks producing the ECM. My advice? Go get the book.