Maurice Arthur Robinson (born October 13, 1947) is an American professor of New Testament and Greek (retired) and a proponent of the Byzantine-priority method of New Testament textual criticism.

Background and education Robinson was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, to Arthur and Olga Robinson, but grew up in Bradenton, Florida. He earned his B.A. (1969) in English and secondary education from the University of South Florida, M.Div. (1973) and Th.M. (1975) from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. (1982) from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (dissertation: "Scribal Habits among Manuscripts of the Apocalypse"). Robinson married Renee Guscott in 1970.

Career Robinson served as assistant professor of biblical studies and languages at St. Petersburg Baptist College (1982–1984), associate professor of biblical studies and languages at Luther Rice Seminary (1985–1991), and then joined the faculty of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1991, where he served as associate professor (1991–1996), professor (1996–2002), senior professor (2002–2014), and research professor (2014–2016) of New Testament and Greek. Robinson also served as pastor of two churches during the years 1985–1991 and 1993–1997.

Robinson is best known as a proponent of the Byzantine-priority method of New Testament textual criticism. This method maintains that when differences appear among the manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, the best representation of the original text is usually found in the agreement of most manuscripts, that is, a "consensus text" which "reflects a unified dominance that permeates the vast majority of manuscripts."The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform 2005 (ed. Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont; Southborough, MA: Chilton Book Publishing, 2005) i.

Robinson is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society (1984–present) and has presented over 20 papers at its regional and national meetings (see below for a selected bibliography).

In 2014 on the occasion of Robinson being announced research professor of New Testament and Greek a Festschrift was published in his honor: Digging for the Truth: Collected Essays regarding the Byzantine Text of the Greek New Testament (Norden: FocusYourMission). Contributors included Timothy Friberg, Andrew Wilson, Paul Himes, Edward Gravely, Timothy Finney, James Borland, Mike Arcieri, et al.

Interesting facts In 1985–1986 Robinson created one of the first publicly-available digital editions of the Textus Receptus (TR) by manually typing out the entire Greek text of Robert Estienne’s 1550 edition over a 9-month period in his "spare time from teaching duties."Maurice A. Robinson, "Fifty Years behind the Text: Post-Retirement Reflections on a Career in NT Textual Criticism" (paper presented at the 68th annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, San Antonio, Tex., 15 November 2016), 6. It was this text, once thoroughly proofread and corrected, that Robinson in the late 1980s used to create the first free digital editions of Scrivener's TR, the Elzevir TR, Westcott-Hort's text (with notations of all variations from the text of Nestle-Aland [26th ed.]), and "the earliest continuous electronic rendering of the RP Byzantine Textform." During the years 1995–1998 Robinson's own spoken word format of the entire Greek New Testament in modified (American) Erasmian pronunciation was recorded and is available both in various Bible software platforms and online as a free download.

From reasoned eclectic to Byzantine priorist Robinson's move away from reasoned eclecticism, to which he still held in writing as late as 1975,Maurice A. Robinson, "Textual Interrelationships among Selected Ancient Witnesses to the Book of Acts" (Th.M. thesis, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1975), conducted his investigation within the framework of reasoned eclecticism. is traced directly to the influence of noted New Testament textual critic Kenneth W. Clark, who guided Robinson in a mentored program of study from 1971 to 1977 and was guest-supervisor for his Th.M. thesis.Pertinent here are Maurice A. Robinson, "Eclectic Observations regarding the Current Critical Text" (paper presented at the 60th annual meeting of the ETS, Providence, R.I., 19 November 2008), esp. 1-5; ibid., "Fifty Years behind the Text: Post-Retirement Reflections on a Career in NT Textual Criticism" (paper presented at the 68th annual meeting of the ETS, San Antonio, Tex., 15 November 2016). Clark's influence on Robinson focused on a skepticismThe same skepticism is also apparent in Eldon J. Epp, with whom Robinson shared a meeting and lunch in Cleveland at the urging of Clark and whose following articles he found "strongly influential" (Robinson, "Fifty Years," 5): Eldon J. Epp, “The Twentieth Century Interlude in New Testament Textual Criticism,” Journal of Biblical Literature 93 (1974) 386–414; “The Eclectic Method in New Testament Textual Criticism: Solution or Symptom?” Harvard Theological Review 69 (1976) 211–57; “New Testament Textual Criticism in America: Requiem for a Discipline,” Journal of Biblical Literature 98 (1979) 94–98; and, “A Continuing Interlude in New Testament Textual Criticism?” Harvard Theological Review 73 (1980) 131–51. of the necessarily "subjective and tendentious" nature of reasoned eclecticism, the need for a "critical history of transmission,"Kenneth W. Clark, "Today's Problems with the Critical Text of the New Testament," in Transitions in Biblical Scholarship (ed. J. Coert Rylaarsdam; Essays in Divinity 6; Chicago: University Press, 1968), 166. and the proposition that reasoned eclectic procedure should accept "a stronger role for the Byzantine Textform coupled with a strong transmissional historical view."Robinson, "Fifty Years," 3. At least the first two of these come out clearly in Robinson's Th.M. thesis, where he opined, "Eclecticism reigns, and it has left textual criticism in a state of fluidity. ... [O]ur objectivity has been surrendered to the whims of individual critics. ... Our feet have become mired and mudbound in the trenches of subjectivity."Robinson, "Interrelationships," 14. He advocated that critics must determine the "history of the transmission of the New Testament text viewed in its total chronological perspective," and that the "primary value of texttypes is their utilization in reconstructing the history of textual transmission."Robinson, "Interrelationships," 10, 12. In contrast to his current Byzantine-priority stance, Robinson stated at the time that "it is more likely that the original text itself was what we today would term 'mixed, that "[a]ll known texttypes proceeded from this original 'mixed' [form], coming into existence as types primarily from local-text situations," and even that "the uncontrolled, popular text of the second century ... corrupted the original [Textform] with its own scraps of oral tradition and theologically motivated alterations."Robinson, "Interrelationships," 124, 131. Even then Robinson expressed that "the Alexandrian text [could] have arisen as the first attempt to produce an alternative controlled text against the multiplicity of wild texts which characterized the Western groups,"Robinson, "Interrelationships," 131. a view to which he still holds more than 40 years later.Robinson, "Fifty Years," 5. Robinson's obsession with constantly evaluating "all pertinent transmissional and transcriptional factors ... in relation to the various aspects of external and internal criteria" before making any final decisions regarding the text to be established may be summarized in how he describes his method: "reasoned transmissionalism."Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, eds., The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform 2005 (Southborough, Mass.: Chilton Book Publishing, 2005), xiv.

As mentioned above, the genesis of Robinson's career dedication to "reasoned transmissionalism" essentially goes back to Clark and is best expressed in Robinson's own words: Clark’s views, written and oral, laid the basis for my shift away from reasoned eclecticism to a transmission-based hypothesis; this ultimately led to my Byzantine-priority position. Clark’s hints and allegations in his published material were enhanced by his private tutelage, where he lamented over much of his previous career, having focused on reasonable internal and external principles that nevertheless led to faulty conclusions. As he expressed to me in the mid-1970s, had he been 30 years younger, he would chart a new course, predicated on transmissional probabilities, including the strong view that the autograph text of any New Testament book would more likely be preserved within a single existing texttype rather than amid an eclectic conglomeration drawn from multiple sources. Clark suggested that the question of which texttype should be dually established from (1) the likelihood of its archetypal reconstructability, and (2) the quantitative and qualitative evidence relating to the transmission and perpetuation of that archetype. Clark’s final conclusion shocked my reasoned eclectic viewpoint: he suggested that the Byzantine Textform — to the extent that such could be established in its archetypal form — was the most likely candidate for autograph originality against all rival claimants, whether favored Greek manuscripts, other texttypes or subjective internal factors. As Clark told me then, "I am now too old to explore and delineate this position; but you are young, and should pursue it." That has been my endeavor since approximately 1975.Robinson, "Eclectic Observations," 4-5.

Magnum opus