The Russians Are Coming! 091 and Much More

As Katie Leggett recently reported, the Russian Library of the National Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg has released a collection of 35 manuscripts and made a collection of most of them available to view online.   The oldest along them is 091, a fragment of the Gospel of John from the 500s.   The minuscules are GA 1338, 1826, 1858, 2159, 2267, 2269, 2273, 2274, 2275,  2311, 2500, 2534, 2535, 2536, and 3003.  The lectionaries are l 623, l 840, l 844 (from 861) , l 1431, l 1432, l 1481, l 1483, l 1484, l 1485, l 1485 (900s), l 1486, l 1487, l 1488, l 1488, l 1841, l 1842, l 1843 (1000s), l 1844, l 1845, l 1846, l 2344, l 2344.

Let’s meet the new image from 091 today.  091’s text is officially a representative of the Alexandrian text-type (“Category II” according to K. Aland).  Let’s test that with this portion.  Transposing the Byzantine Text of John 6:38-42 over the fragment, its text looks very Byzantine!  091 reads εκ, not απο, in v. 38.  But it agrees with P66 P75 B A D L W in the non-inclusion of πατρός after πέμψαντος με in v. 39.  (Sinaiticus is something of a train wreck here due to the scribe’s parableptic mistake skipping from the πέμψαντος με in v. 39a to the same words at v. 39b.) 

If this fragment were all of 091 we had, it could be classified as Byzantine as readily as Alexandrian.