Mark 13:14 - Who Said What?

          "But when ye see the abomination of desolation standing where he ought not (let him that readeth understand), then let them that are in Judaea flee unto the mountains."  Thus read the words of Jesus in Mark 13:14 in the Revised Version (1881). But in the KJV, NKJV, EOB-NT, MEV, and WEB, the verse is a bit longer:  before the word "then" is the phrase, "spoken of by Daniel the prophet," based on the words τὸ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ Δανιὴλ τοῦ προφήτου, which appears in the Textus Receptus and in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts (including A K M U Y Γ Δ Θ Π 157), as well as in the Peshitta, the Harklean Syriac, and six Old Latin copies (aur, c, e, k, l, q).   

          The basis for "spoken of by Daniel the prophet" is not supported by À (Sinaiticus) B D L W Ψ and  565 700 892.  Nor are the words found in the Old Latin copies d, ff2, i, n, and r1,  or the Vulgate (though the phrase is included in some copies of the Vulgate), or in the Sahidic version, the Armenian version, and the Old Georgian version (according to Wieland Willker, who covered this variant-unit in his Textual Commentary on the Gospels).

Codex Macedonianus (Y/034), shown here,
includes the words in Mark 13:14 that are
not included in the Alexandrian Text

    Neither the UBS Greek New Testament (4th edition) nor the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece (27th edition) mention this six-word variant.  That's right:  a six-word Byzantine variant goes entirely uncovered in the GNT and NTG, as if it never existed.

          What has happened here in Mark 13:14?  The editors of the Greek New Testament apparently felt that the Byzantine reading is a harmonization to Matthew 24:15.  The phrase in Matthew is similar; Matthew 24:15 has διὰ instead of ὑπὸ.  Some members of f1 read διὰ, and so do 28 579 and 1424.  It seems to me the theory that a harmonizer added τὸ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ Δανιὴλ τοῦ προφήτου is not very tenable, partly because a harmonizer would be unlikely to be so picky as to change διὰ into ὑπὸ.

          But how can the omission of τὸ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ Δανιὴλ τοῦ προφήτου be explained, especially considering that it missing not only in the Alexandrian?  Therein lies a tale:

          In the 200s, the authorship of certain portion of Daniel and Susanna in the Septuagint (LXX) were debated; Origen and his colleague Julius Africanus exchanged letters about Susanna.  In addition, the third-century pagan author Porphyry argued (as many interpreters still argue today) that the entire book of Daniel was composed in intertestamental times, during the reign of the Syrian ruler Antiochus Epiphanes.  No Christians seem to have objected to Christ's reference to Daniel in Matthew 24:15 as the source of Daniel 9:27.  But in the first centuries of Christianity, when copies of the Gospels were being circulated individually, a thoughtful copyist of the Gospel of Mark, seeing a reference to the book of Daniel coming from the mouth of Jesus, may have thought that source of the words τὸ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ Δανιὴλ τοῦ προφήτου was a marginal note that an earlier copyist, or an individual who supervised copyists, had inserted into the text ‒ and, satisfied with the thought that the phrase was not original, declined to include it in subsequent copies.  

          That this happened, and happened early enough to influence some Old Latin copies, the text of the Sinaitic Syriac, and the text of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, is more probable than the idea that someone creating the Byzantine text, selecting readings from the Alexandrian and Western copies, threw τὸ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ Δανιὴλ τοῦ προφήτου into Mark 13:14, especially considering that the words are not in Mark 13:14 in the earliest representatives of the Alexandrian or Western Greek text.

          This implies that the Alexandrian Text of the Gospel of Mark was not mechanically copied by scribes.  It implies that the Alexandrian Text of the Gospel of Mark was (slightly) edited by an editor who  removed features that appeared to him to run the risk of inviting objections from outsiders.  Lest this might seem to be a conspiracy theory, I leave you with the words of Bruce Metzger (from The Text of the New Testament, 4th edition, p. 312) that the Alexandrian Text is considered "on the whole the best ancient recension."

   

093: A Byzantine Fragment of Acts from the 500s in Egypt

            Today, let’s take a close look at part of 093 – a small fragment that contains text from Acts 24:22-26, and text from First Peter 2:22-3:7.  (I will focus here especially on the text from Acts.  093 is a palimpsest with an interesting history:  it was among the approximately 193,000 fragments that had been stored in the Genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo over the course of centuries.  (The story of how researchers Charles Taylor and Solomon Schechter discovered this immense collection of materials and, in 1896-1897, arranged for its transportation to Cambridge University for continued study, can be found online.) 

            Charles Taylor published a transcription of the text from Acts in 093 in 1900, along with a short summary of the text from First Peter, and some other texts.  He also noted that the upper writing on the palimpsest consisted of Hebrew extracts from the Bereshith Rabbah (ch. 45, 47,and 98). The lower writing contains most of Acts 24:22-26 on one page in two columns of 24 lines each.  The text on the verso is mostly illegible but Taylor made out words from the tops of the two columns:  from Acts 24:26, οτι χρηματα / δοθησεται, and from Acts 24:27, ελαβεν διαδο / χον ο Φηλιξ  / Πορκιον Φη / στον.  (This manuscript is identified in the catalog of Joseph van Haelst as item 487; in the Taylor-Schechter Collection it is in Collection 12, 189 and 208.  For a while, 093 was identified with the siglum ﬥ.)

Green lines:  093 disagrees with Alex.
Red lines:  093 disagrees with Byz.

            The smattering of text on the verso does not allow much insight regarding the type of text of Acts that 093 contains, inasmuch as the Alexandrian Text and the Byzantine Text are in exact agreement in those parts of Acts 24:26 and 24:27.  When we turn to the much more extensive text on the recto, however, there can be no doubt:  093’s text of Acts is Byzantine:  except for its inclusion of the contracted sacred name Ιν after Χν in verse 24, and the reading λαβων instead of μεταλαβὼν in verse 25, the text from Acts in 093 agrees perfectly with the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform.  (The Textus Receptus differs from RP2005 in this passage in two places; the TR includes αυτου after γυναικι in 24:24, and reads δε between αμα and και in 24:26.)

            Meanwhile, 093 disagrees with the Nestle-Aland compilation at the following seven places:
● 1.  In verse 22, there is a word-order variant:  ανεβαλετο αυτους follows Φηλιξ, instead of the Alexandrian reading in which ανεβαλετο δε αυτους precedes ὁ Φηλιξ.

● 2.  In verse 22, after οδου, 093 reads ειπων, not ειπας.

● 3.  In verse 23, before τω, 093 reads τε. 

● 4.  In verse 23, after τηρεισθαι, 093 reads τον Παυλον instead of αυτον.

● 5.  In verse 23, before αυτω, 093 reads η προσέρχεσθαι.

● 6.  In verse 24, before γυναικι, 093 does not read ιδία. 

● 7.  In verse 25, after μέλλοντος, 093 reads εσεσθαι.

            Two points are illustrated by this evidence. 

            First, contrary to the much-repeated claim that the Textus Receptus is a late medieval compilation (as opposed to an essentially early form of the text with a relatively small stratum of late medieval readings), 093 confirms that the Byzantine Text of Acts – at least, Acts 24:22-26 – existed in the 500s, around a thousand years before Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza made their compilations.

            Second, there is some reason to suspect that apparatuses in some widely used Greek New Testaments cannot be trusted to present evidence in an even-handed way in cases where Byzantine readings receive early support:  

                 ● Of the seven reading in Acts 24:22-26 that are supported by 093 and the majority of Greek manuscripts, the Nestle-Aland apparatus (in NA27) fails to record four of them (#2, 3, 4, and 6). 

                 ● In the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament (4th ed.) only one variant-unit is covered in the verses that are extant in 093:  the contest between Ιν Χν and just Χν in 24:24.  In this case the theoretical mechanics of the “expansion of piety” have been rejected in favor of strong early support (including support from 093) for the longer reading. 

                 ● In the apparatus of the Tyndale House edition of the Greek New Testament, only one textual contest in the passage that is extant in 093 is mentioned:  the contest in Acts 24:24 between the inclusion or non-inclusion of ιδια before γυναικι, and the inclusion or non-inclusion of αυτου after γυναικι.  The reading found in 093 is mentioned as a reading supported by C* L P 1424, but 093’s support is not mentioned.  The compilers of the Tyndale House edition of the Greek New Testament apparently never looked at 093.  (A list of consulted witnesses in an appendix of THEGNT does not mention 093, although over a dozen manuscripts younger than 093 are listed.)   

            Third – provisionally accepting the classification of the fragmentary text from First Peter 2:22-3:7 as Alexandrian – it was possible for a Byzantine text of Acts to appear in the same manuscript as an Alexandrian text of First Peter in Cairo, Egypt.  While it cannot be demonstrated that 093 was produced in Egypt, the presence of an Alexandrian text of First Peter in the manuscript favors this possibility, and the presence of 093 among the genizah’s fragments also indicates that the Byzantine Text of Acts in the 500s was used in a broad range of territory. 

            093 is not the only manuscript with texts from the New Testament that was discovered in the Cairo Genizah.   A few palimpsests were discovered to have material from the New Testament in their lower writing, in Palestinian Aramaic; these texts were studied, and published, by the scholarly sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, with assistance from J. R. Harris – including a palimpsest-fragment with Palestian Aramaic text from John 14:25-15:16.  The Syriac specialist G. H. Gwilliam published the contents of five palimpsest-fragments (assigned to the 700s) in 1893, containing text from chapters 4 and 5 of Numbers, and from Colossians 4:12-18, First Thessalonians 1:1-3 and 4:3-15, Second Timothy 1:10-2:7, and Titus 1:11-2:8.  Michael Sokoloff and Joseph Yahalom brought such investigations up to date in 1979, and expanded upon them, in a detailed essay in Revue d’Histoire des Textes, “Christian palimpsests from the Cairo Geniza.”  (Fragments of manuscripts of the Hexapla from the Cairo Genizah, by the way, can be viewed at the Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism website.)

            A few other palimpsest-fragments in the Cairo Genizah contain some New Testament passages.  (One fragment contains Syriac text from Second Corinthians 3:2-15; another fragment contains Syriac text from chapters 3 and 4 of First Thessalonians.)  The lower writing on yet another fragment consists of the remains of an early (600s or 700s?) Greek uncial lectionary, now catalogued as lectionary 1276, a.k.a. Taylor-Schechter 16.93, containing excerpts from Matthew 10:2-15 and John 20:11-15.  We may take a closer look at lectionary 1276 in a future post.

Readers are invited to double-check the data in this post.

Review: Jongkind's Intro to the Tyndale House GNT

            Today, let’s take a look at An Introduction to the Greek New Testament, by Dirk Jongkind, a researcher at Cambridge (Ph.D. 2005, Cambridge).  The Greek New Testament that is referred to the Tyndale House edition of the Greek New Testament.  Very little is said about any other edition of the GNT.

            This volume measures just 7¾” inches tall and 5¼” wide – approximately the same dimensions as the Tyndale House edition of the Greek New Testament.  It is not long:  only 124 pages, including (at the back) acknowledgements, a glossary, and indices, and (at the front) several brief reviews, front matter, the table of contents, an analytical outline, and an illustrations-list.  The actual book, from the first page of the first chapter to the last page of the last chapter, is just 93 pages long, but considering that  pages 40, 86, and 92 are blank, and that illustrations fill parts of several pages, and that each of the book’s eight chapters begins halfway down the page, the actual amount of used pages is something like 80.  This is a short book.    

            Jongkind presents the Tyndale House edition of the GNT as a compilation which the editors consider “the most accurate edition of the Greek New Testament published so far.”  He also states (p. 35), “we do see it as our task to reflect the earliest manuscript tradition.”  Readers of the Tyndale House GNT may reasonably expect, therefore, to find a filtered form of the Alexandrian text in the pages of the Tyndale House GNT.  

            A chapter-list may shine some light on what Jongkind covers (and does not cover):

            1.  Your Greek New Testament and the Manuscripts

            2.  Practicalities [i.e., how to read the GNT apparatus]

            3.  Manuscripts

            4.  How Decisions Are Made (and Some Important Variants)
            5.  Why Not the Textus Receptus?
            6.  Why Not the Byzantine Text?

            7.  Biblical Theology and the Transmission of the Text

            8.  Where Do We Go From Here?

            As a user’s guide to the Tyndale House GNT, Jongkind’s book is an adequate manual, but as an introduction to the issues involved in the study of the text of the New Testament, it is very uneven, and Jongkind’s treatments of specific passages are so thin as to be superficial.  His presentations of evidence regarding Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11 are terribly one-sided; there is no mention of Irenaeus’ use of Mark 16:19 in Against Heresies, and there is no mention of Jerome’s declaration that he had seen the story of the adulteress in may manuscripts, both Greek and Latin.  Jongkind’s treatment of the evidence pertaining to Luke 22:43-44 is even worse; he informs his readers that the passage is found “as early as the fourth century,” as if the abundant patristic support for Luke 22:43-44 does not exist.

            Conscious avoidance of the use of patristic testimony repeatedly mars Jongkind’s comments, just as it mars the apparatus of the Tyndale House GNT.  As Jongkind describes the apparatus of the Tyndale House GNT, one might sense that he is not so much explaining its frugality as apologizing for it.  On page 48, Jongkind acknowledges that the Tyndale GNT does not cite any lectionaries.  On the following page, he states that there is also no versional evidence mentioned in the apparatus.  And there is no patristic evidence in the apparatus either.  Thus three of the four forms of evidence for the text of the New Testament – patristic works, versions, and lectionaries – are withheld from readers of the Tyndale House GNT’s apparatus.  After explaining (on p. 66) that is is useful to detect how evidence is distributed, Jongkind offers an apparatus which is so lightweight that it guarantees that this is impossible for its readers to do.

            In the segment “Some Important Variants,” Jongkind mentions evidence from lectionaries, and evidence from patristic writings, and evidence from versions.  One should pause and wonder, if these forms of evidence do not matter, why are they factors in these arguments, and if they matter, why aren’t they in the apparatus?

            For two chapters, Jongkind detours from his main goal in order to explain why the Tyndale House edition of the GNT is not identical to the Textus Receptus or the Byzantine Text. Regarding the Textus Receptus, his reasoning will persuade the already-persuaded, but it offers very little against the argumentation of what has come to be known as a “Confessional” approach to the subject.  Regarding the Byzantine Text, Jongkind does his readers a disservice when he makes it seem as if “There are two big differences between the Byzantine Text and the Textus Receptus,” minimizing all the differences outside of Acts 8:37 and First John 5:7-8.  In real life, there are oodles of differences.   

            In addition, on pages 98-99, Jongkind seems to contradict himself regarding the date of the earliest evidence for the Byzantine Text:  at first he asserts that in the fourth century (i.e., the 300s), “none of the individual pieces of evidence suggest the existence of anything like the Byzantine Text.”  Yet in the very next paragraph he says, “It is only from the late fourth century onward that the Byzantine Text appears in citations from the church fathers, and from the fifth century onward, we see the first real manuscripts, though limited to the Gospels at first.”  Which is it:  is there “nothing like the Byzantine Text” in the 300s, or does the Byzantine Text appear in patristic writings in the 300s?
            Those familiar with the textual affinities of the text used by Gregory of Nyssa (335-395) need not wonder.  “Virtually all of the evidence,” wrote James Brooks in 1991, “indicates that Gregory’s quotations from the NT have their greatest affinity with the Byzantine type of text” (p. 264, The New Testament Text of Gregory of Nyssa).  Bruce Metzger stated that Wulfilas, in the mid-300s, translated the Gothic version from “the early Koine [i.e., Byzantine] type of text” (p. 82, The Text of the New Testament).  How can this be harmonized with Jongkind’s claim that there is nothing in the 300s to suggest the existence of anything like the Byzantine Text?  

            In addition, while Jongkind’s question about why the Byzantine Text does not appear in second-century and third-century manuscripts is a valid question, there is a valid answer:  papyrus rots.  The manuscripts that circulated throughout Greece, Turkey, and Syria in the 100s and 200s cannot be reasonably expected to do impossible things such as survive in high-humidity locales.  But when patristic writings and copies of Scripture in that territory began to be preserved on parchment (in the mid-late 300s), we see an essentially Byzantine form of the Gospels dominating the landscape there – not because the Byzantine text was new, but because, thanks to the use of parchment codices, the materials on which it was written were suddenly much more durable.       

            Another shortcoming:  the Byzantine Text is not consistently cited in the apparatus.  The expansions and harmonizations in the Byzantine Text that Jongkind briefly describes may justify avoiding the adoption of the Byzantine Text in toto, but the same kind of expansions and harmonizations can be identified in Alexandrian manuscripts (see the post Challenging the Expansion of Piety Theory).   Yet the Alexandrian manuscripts, despite the steady stream of non-original readings they contain, appear in the apparatus constantly.  The Byzantine Text is frequently not mentioned, and this prevents readers from easily discerning how Byzantine or non-Byzantine the text in the Tyndale House GNT tends to be.  Why was the testimony of the Byzantine Text hidden? 

            Also, Jongkind did not adequately impress readers with the minimalistic nature of the apparatus in the Tyndale House GNT.  The apparatus not only avoids telling readers about lectionary evidence and patristic evidence and versional evidence, but very frequently has no entry whatsoever where significant textual variants exist in Greek manuscripts.  Consider Luke 17:36:  this verse is not in the text and there is no entry about it in the apparatus.  Consider Luke 24:53:  instead of addressing the “blessing and praising” variant, famous as one of Hort’s proposed conflations, the apparatus only covers the question of whether “Amen” should be included.  Consider John 7:39:  only part of the textual evidence is covered; the apparatus avoids mentioning B’s testimony.  Consider Acts 13:33:  no textual variant is mentioned.  Many more examples could be supplied in which major translatable variants receive no attention whatsoever in the Tyndale House GNT’s apparatus.    

            When one turns to the Introduction to the Tyndale House GNT that appears as an appendix in the GNT itself, one finds a statement that “the limited apparatus is designed primarily to illustrate the decision-making process.”  Jongkind should have emphasized this point more often and more adamantly than he did, perhaps via repeated statements such as “It should constantly be kept in mind that the apparatus, besides saying absolutely nothing about patristic evidence, versional evidence, and lectionary evidence, is extremely incomplete,” or, “Readers should keep in mind that most textual contests in which the majority of manuscripts disagree with a relatively small cluster of manuscripts are not mentioned at all in the apparatus.”

            Perhaps someday this fault will be repaired by the emergence of a textual commentary which, instead of only covering a sparse representative sample of variant-units, will provide more adequate treatment.  Until then, what one has in Jongkind’s Introduction and the Tyndale House GNT, compared to past Introductions and GNTs, is less, not more.

           

Points of note:

● On p. 18, Jongkind states that the Greek New Testament has been published “since the invention of the printing press.”  However, inasmuch as the printing press was invented in the 1450s and the first GNT to be printed appeared over 50 years later, this is not quite right.

● Jongkind repeatedly states (p. 20, p. 24) that modern chapter and verse-numbers originated in the sixteenth century; however, while this is true of verse-numbers, the chapter-numbers originated in the early 1200s with Stephen Langton.

● A table (2.2, on page 34) states that replacement-pages are given a special sigla:  “Such sections are indicated as coming from a supplement.  However, in Jongkind’s discussion of Mark 16:9-20, when ℵ is mentioned, there is no indication of the fact that its pages containing Mark 15:54-Luke 1:76 are replacement-pages.  Possibly the editors did not consider replacement-pages added in the initial production-process to be truly replacement-pages; if so, however, this should have been mentioned.

● A footnote on page 68 says that “about nine other late manuscripts” have the extra Alexandrian material in Matthew 27:49 (which inexplicably and somewhat shockingly is not mentioned in the apparatus!); a simple consultation of Willker’s Textual Commentary on the Greek Gospels would have shown that the number of late Greek manuscripts that support this reading is closer to 34.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind

● Jongkind seems sympathetic to the redating of three important manuscripts: P66 may be as late as the early 300s; P75 may be as late as the early 300s, and Codex W might have been produced in the 500s.  However, as recently as 2017, Jongkind described P66 and P75 as third-century manuscripts.  What is the basis for this shift?  The only evidence or argumentation that Jongkind mentions:  “voices have argued” for the later dates.  That’s all:  voices.  Footnotes should have been provided in order to give readers the means to test the bases for the new proposals.

You can find more materials from Dr. Jongkind online:

A lecture on the GNT delivered by Dr. Jongkind (55 minutes)

Greg Pritchard interviews Dirk Jongkind on New Testament textual criticism (45 minutes)

Dirk Jongkind describes the Tyndale House GNT (under 5 minutes)

Dirk Jongkind describes the earliest evidence for the NT text (21 minutes)

Dirk Jongkind reviews some of the major uncial manuscripts of the NT (23 minutes)

Production Notes for the Tyndale House GNT
Errata List for the Tyndale House GNT

Glossary of Textual Criticism: N-Z

Nomina sacra (singular:  nomen sacrum):  sacred names which were usually written in contracted form by copyists.  Usually the contractions consist of two letters – the first letter of the word and the final letter – but in some manuscripts the contractions have a three-letter form.  The terms Κυριος (“Lord”), Θεος (“God”), Ιησους (“Jesus”), and Χριστος (“Christ”) are almost always contracted, with a horizontal line written over them.  References to the three Persons of the Trinity – Πατηρ (“Father”), Υιος (“Son”), and Πνευμα (“Spirit”) – are also contracted in most manuscripts.

            With less uniformity, terms that were associated with titles of Christ are also contracted, such as “Man” (due to the title “Son of Man”), “David” (due to the title “Son of David”), and “Savior.”  Most copyists also contracted the words “Israel,” “Jerusalem,” “Mother,” and “Cross.” 

   

Novum Testamentum Graece:  A compilation of the Greek text of the New Testament equipped with (a) symbols in the text which convey specific kinds of textual variants, and (b) a basic textual apparatus listing the main support for the adopted reading, and for rival readings.  Eberhard Nestle published the first edition of NTG in 1898, drawing on three independent, but similar, compilations by other scholars (specifically, Tischendorf, Westcott & Hort, and Weymouth).  In 1927, Eberhard Nestle’s son, Erwin Nestle, took over the task of editing the thirteenth edition of the compilation, changing the textual apparatus so as to include a more detailed presentation of evidence, listing manuscripts, versions, patristic writers, compilations by earlier editors, and theoretical recensions that had been posited by researcher Hermann von Soden.

            Kurt Aland was given supervision of the compilation in 1952, and its textual apparatus was expanded considerably.  The NTG achieved relative stability in 1979, and was now known as the Nestle-Aland NTG.  The text of the 26th edition was basically retained in the 27th edition, although the textual apparatus was changed (and some Byzantine witnesses were removed from the apparatus) and miscitations were corrected.  In the 28th edition (2012), only about 35 textual changes were introduced, all confined to the General Epistles.

            The 28th edition of NTG, though technically an eclectic compilation, has a very strong Alexandrian character, differing only slightly from the 1881 compilation of Westcott and Hort.       

Nu ephelkustikon:  The Greek letter nu (ν) placed at the end of a word before another word that begins with a vowel, and at the end of sentences.  Also called moveable nu.

Overline:  A horizontal line added above characters to signify that the letters underneath it are to be read as numerals or as a nomen sacrum.   An overline at the end of a line of text represents the letter nu.

Paratext:  Features in a manuscript other than the main text, such as illustrations, notes, canon-tables, chapter-titles, arabesques, and marginalia. 

           

Paleography:  The science of studying ancient handwriting and inscriptions.  Paleography is useful for estimating the production-dates (and in some cases the locale) of manuscripts by making comparisons between the handwriting they display and the handwriting of dated documents.  Paleographers also study inks and paratextual features of manuscripts.  Paleographically assigned production-dates should generally be given a range of 50 years both before and after the assigned date, on the premises that (a) copyists tended to write in basically the same script throughout their careers, (b) a typical copyist’s career lasted 50 years, and (c) we cannot determine if a copyist wrote a specific manuscript at the beginning, or end, of his career. 

Palimpsest:  A manuscript which has been recycled, and contains two (or more) layers of writing.  The parchment of a palimpsest has been scraped once, in its initial preparation, and later scraped again, when someone scraped off, or washed off, the ink, in order to reuse the newly blank parchment to hold a different composition.  (The word is derived from Greek:  palin, again, and psaw, scrape.)  The text that was written first on a palimpsest is called the lower writing; the more recently written text is called the upper writing.   The application of ultraviolet light (and multi-spectral imaging) can in some cases make the lower writing much more visible than it appears to be in normal light. 

Papyrus:  (plural:  papyri)  Writing-material made from tissues derived from the inner layer of papyrus plants.  Papyrus-material tended to rot away in high-humidity climates, which is why practically all surviving New Testament papyri were found in Egypt, where the humidity-level is lower.  Manuscripts made of papyrus (such as Papyrus 5, part of which is shown here) are also called papyri.

Parablepsis:   The phenomenon which occurs when a copyist’s line of sight drifts from one set of letters to an identical or similar set of letters, skipping the intervening text.  This may occur due to homoioarcton, homoeoteleuton, or simple inattentiveness.

Provenance:  The place from which a manuscript came. 

Quire:  A collection of bifolia (usually four) which have been stacked and folded together in the process of codex-production.

Recto:  The side of a leaf in a manuscript that is viewed when the outer margin is to the viewer’s right.

Rubric:  Text written in red, usually found in the margins, mainly serving to label portions of the main text.  Rubrics may include chapter-titles, the lectionary apparatus, and miscellaneous notes.

Ruling:  Horizontal lines and vertical borders added to writing-material as guidelines for the text which was intended to be written upon it.  Hundreds of different ruling-patterns have been identified.  They vary in complexity, depending on how much supplemental material was intended to accompany the main text.       

Scriptorium:  A manuscript-making center, usually located in a monastery.

Stichometry:  A calculation of the number of standard lines (about 15 or 16 syllables), or stichoi, of text in a book or book-portion.  The conclusions of New Testament books are sometimes accompanied by notes mentioning the book’s length, in line-units.   This suggests that such manuscripts were copied by professionals who were paid on a per-stichos basis. 

Singleton:  a single folded bifolium in a manuscript – a quire consisting of a single sheet. 

Staurogram:  A combination of the Greek letters tau and rho, thought by some researchers to be a pictogram of Christ’s crucifixion.

  

Textual Apparatus:  Notes in a compilation, listing variants and the witnesses that support them.  Witnesses are usually listed in the order of uncials, minuscules, versions, and patristic references.  In the textual apparatuses of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece and the UBS Greek New Testament, Byzantine witnesses tend to be presented collectively.

Textus Receptus:  This term is generally used to refer to the base-text of the 1611 King James Version.  It is also used to refer to any of the compilations of the Greek text of the New Testament published in the 1500s and early 1600s, beginning with Erasmus’ first edition in 1514, continuing with the Complutensian Polyglot, several editions by Stephanus, several editions by Beza, and the 1624 and 1633 editions by the Elzevirs, the last of which was declared to be “the text received by all.”  These compilations were not entirely identical but all contained a basically Byzantine text influenced by readings selected from the editors’ materials, which included important witnesses such as minuscule 1, minuscule Codex Bezae (D), Codex Regius (L), and Codex Claromontanus.  

            The 1551 edition issued by Stephanus is notable for the introduction of verse-numbers, essentially the same enumeration still used in most English New Testaments.

UBS Greek New Testament:  A compilation of the Greek text of the New Testament prepared by a team working for the United Bible Societies.  Now in its fifth edition (2014), the UBS Greek New Testament contains the same text presented in the 28^th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.  The textual apparatus of the UBS Greek New Testament covers far fewer variant-units (about 1,400), but in far greater detail.  Bruce Metzger (1914-2007), a member of the UBS compilation-committee, wrote A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, explaining the committee’s text-critical general approach and specific decisions.   

Uncial:  A manuscript in which each letter is written separately and as a capital.  These are also known as majuscules.  Many uncials, are identified by sigla (singular:  siglum) such as the letters of the English alphabet, letters of the Greek alphabet, and, for Codex Sinaiticus (À), the Hebrew alphabet.  All uncials are identified by numbers that begin with a zero. 

Verso:  The side of a leaf in a manuscript that is viewed when the outer margin is to the viewer’s left.

Watermark:  In medieval paper, a design embedded in the fibers of the paper, visible when a page is held up to light.  Watermarks often indicate where the paper was made.

Western Order:  The arrangement of the four Gospels as Matthew, John, Luke, and Mark.  This order is found mainly in representatives of the Western Text, such as the Old Latin Gospels and Codex Bezae.

Western Text:  A text-form, or forms, characterized by expansion, harmonization, and simplification in comparison to other text-types.  Codex Bezae and the Old Latin version are the primary and most extensive witnesses to Western readings, but several early patristic writers frequently utilize Western readings as well. 

Zoomorphic Initial:  An initial which takes the shape of an animal or bird.

            If readers would like to suggest other terms that should be considered for inclusion in this glossary, you are welcome to do so in the comments.