bird's text critical insanity

Michael Bird offers some musings on writing commentaries based on a single extant manuscript witness to a New Testament document rather than the normal approach of focusing on a critically reconstructed text of the document such as UBS4 or NA27:

I have this insane idea for biblical studies. Why is it when scholars write a commentary on a NT book that they inevitably use either UBS4 or NA27? The fact is that no extant manuscript conforms to the text of UBS4 or NA27 so they are writing a commentary on a manuscript that does not physically exist.

It's an excellent question. I put the following comment on his blog, and I thought I'd reproduce it here, my own rambling thoughts on the matter:

The goal of most modern exegetical commentaries is to offer a historical/theological reconstruction of the world behind the original text in order to illuminate the meaning of the original text itself, thus it needs a parallel text critical reconstruction of the original text to do so. Of course, as you point out correctly, this is only a reconstructed text, not any actual extant manuscript. But that doesn't invalidate that textual reconstruction any more than the historical/theological reconstruction is invalid. It just means we always must remember that, as Crossan said, everything is reconstruction.

If you focus on one extant manuscript, you are inevitably focusing on one precise historical situation beyond the time of the original text, because that version of the document reflects the way in which the document was read at that later time and situation. Again, this is not an illegitimate undertaking, but it should not be confused with offering an exegesis of a reconstructed original text in view of a historically/theologically reconstructed world behind that text. In this approach you are moving into Wirkungsgeschichte.

This distinction is, I think, especially true with the Gospels, which underwent some significant changes as they were transmitted in the first couple centuries (see D. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels). This distinction may not be as helpful with the Pauline epistles.

My two pence, for what it's worth!

Update: Just to clarify, particularly in light of a comment by Michael Bird on the ETC blog and loosely quoting my own reply to Michael's comment there, any given extant manuscript is not necessarily closer to the original autograph than a critical textual reconstruction. In fact, if the canons of traditional textual criticism are at all correct, it is likely further from the original autograph than a critical textual reconstruction. Thus, if you want to do traditional exegesis of a Pauline document (based on reconstruction of the original historical/theological situation), then it seems to me you should use a critically reconstructed text as this has a stronger claim to representing the original document. (This, by the way, is profoundly different from source criticism where hypothetical source reconstructions should always be only supplementary to extant documents--but that's another post...) And, if you focus on a particular later manuscript, you should keep the orientation of the exegesis to matters of Wirkungsgeschichte, or reception history.