…the first question a student of philology should answer is whether a manuscript edition can be achieved without interpreting the text itself.
…a second question to be answered by our virtual student of text editing is the following: should we construct/re-construct a text every time after having interpreted it? The question is not so far off the mark as it might seem to be at first glance. Looking at the edition of fragments of lost works, every scholar would agree that every further interpretation presupposes a new edition….
A third question should, therefore, be addressed by the virtual student of text editions: is the original text what we imagine as being such, or, perhaps, rather the beginning of a tradition or, indeed, both?
Giuseppe Veltri, “From The Best Text To The Pragmatic Edition: On Editing Rabbinic Texts”, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino García Martínez, Didier Pollefeyt, Peter Tomson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 65, 66, 67.