Here are some findings about the Gospels-text of Didymus
the Blind, based mainly on Bart Ehrman’s volume in the NTGF (New Testament in
the Greek Fathers) series, Didymus the Blind and the Text of the Gospels, published in 1986. Dr. Ehrman went through a
lot of effort, in the preparation for his Ph.D. thesis, to collect and analyze
the Gospels-quotation in the extant writings of Didymus, who worked in
Alexandria in the late 300s. Even though Ehrman's work has some
flaws, it pursues a worthwhile goal. Let's try to use it to
answer a simple question: was
Didymus’ Gospels-text more like Codex Vaticanus (the
flagship-manuscript of the Alexandrian Text) or
like the Robinson-Pierpont compilation of the Byzantine Text?
Book-by-book, let's sift through the data and find out. (“B” = CodexVaticanus and “Byz” = the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform, 2005
edition.)
In Matthew, Didymus
agrees with either B or Byz (but not both) 49 times.
Didymus agrees with B against Byz 24 times (49%).
Didymus agrees with Byz against B 25 times (51%).
Didymus agrees with Byz against B 25 times (51%).
In Mark – well, in Mark, the data
is too sparse to justify confidence that it reflects the affinities of Didymus’
text. Nevertheless: Didymus agrees with either B or Byz
(but not both) five times. However, in three cases where Ehrman
concludes that Didymus supports a reading in B, the grounds seem especially
questionable. Granting
every one of them, though:
Didymus agrees with B against Byz 4
times (80%).
Didymus agrees with Byz against B 1
time (20%).
In Luke, Didymus agrees with either B or Byz (but not
both) 45 times.
Didymus agrees with B against Byz 28
times (62%)
Didymus agrees with Byz against B 17
times (38%).
In John,
Didymus agrees with either B or Byz (but not both) 40 times.
Didymus agrees with Byz against B 23 times (57.5%).
Didymus agrees with B against Byz 17 times (42.5%).
So let’s
see here: figuring that
nothing comes close to representing the Alexandrian Text of the Gospels as well
as Codex B, and that nothing represents the Byzantine Text as well as the
RP-2005 compilation - and assuming that the Gospels-utilizations in the extant
writings of Didymus the Blind accurately represent the texts he actually used,
and assuming that De Trinitate was not written by Didymus the Blind (because
that would obviously affect the statistics quite a bit) - did the
Gospels-text used by Didymus resemble the Alexandrian Text, or the Byzantine
Text?
Didymus agrees with B against Byz 24 times in Mt., 4 times
in Mk., 28 times in Luke, and 23 times in John, which equals a total of 79
agreements with B against Byz.
Didymus
agrees with Byz against B 25 times in Mt., 1 time in Mk., 17 times in Luke, and
17 times in John, which equals a total of 60 agreements with Byz against B.
Thus, out
of 139 places in the Gospels-text used by Didymus where the text is either
Alexandrian or Byzantine (but not both), Didymus’ text was Alexandrian 79 times
(57%) and Byzantine 60 times (43%).
Normally we would call that a Mixed Text. Didymus’
Gospels-text – particularly in Matthew, where Didymus’ text had a couple more
Byzantine readings than Alexandrian readings – was very far from a pure
Alexandrian Text. Didymus’ Gospels-text should be
called Mixed Alexandrian-Byzantine. Instead, Ehrman calls it
the Secondary Alexandrian Text, which conveniently avoids acknowledgement of
the very influential presence of the Byzantine Text in the ancestry of the
text used by Didymus in Egypt in the late 300s.
Students might possibly get the impression that when someone
says that Didymus used a “Secondary Alexandrian” text, what is meant is that
Didymus used a text which was essentially Alexandrian, with some slight
secondary alterations. To use the term “Secondary Alexandrian” is to risk
giving students and readers such a false impression, accenting the slight
Alexandrian majority and pushing the strong Byzantine influence out of the spotlight.
A text which favors Byzantine readings in 4 out of
10 variant-units where B and Byz disagree should be called Mixed Alexandrian-Byzantine.
1 comment:
Great analysis and yeah the numbers themselves show a very different conclusion. Thank you for your scholarship and summary.
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