COMMERCIAL EDS. + CRIT. EDS.

[Dominik Wujastyk]

David Lorenzen said:
> 
> ... in the case of living traditions, or even traditions
> that lived for some time and then died out, the texts that come to be
> accepted as authentic by the followers of those traditions are at least as
> important than any reconstruction of the original author's text.  
> Ideally, of course, we need both texts.  

Surely this begs the question of what we mean by "importance".  If we want
to know what the contemporary followers think and do, then of course
the contemporary printings of the works they read are important.  If we 
want to know what the founder of the tradition thought and believed, then
we come back to the "importance" of critically editing what he wrote.  

This distinction of "importances" itself raises very interesting
questions.  In general, I don't like to think of ideas in nationalistic
or regional terms, and would therefore disagree with your attribution
of special historical interest in critical editing to Europeans.  But I
have often wondered whether the urge to discover the oldest historical
stratum of thought isn't connected at some subliminally deep level with
the central idea in Christian culture of a *historical* messiah.  It
has always been important to Christian theologians and church teachers
to point out that Christ came at a particular moment in *real* time,
i.e., in *our* time, a timeline we share, that includes our daily
life.  Therefore, historical research -- at least into Christian
culture -- can be seen as becoming coterminus with soteriological
progress, or can at least be equated in some way with drawing closer to
the source of salvation.

If the redeeming figure is not part of "our" history, if she or he
inhabits a different, perhaps narrative or mythic timeline, then
perhaps strictly historical research would seem to have less to
recommend it.

Your points, David, about editing fluid, quasi-oral traditions are well
taken.

Dominik