More Combat: Papyrus 75 vs. Codex A

            The lopsided victory of minuscule 1324 over Codex Bezae in the previous contest has provoked some stunned members of the audience to clamor for more hand-to-hand combat – and I am pleased to say that a sensational heavyweight match awaits you today, ladies and gentlemen!  In the same arena, Papyrus 75 is about to face Codex Alexandrinus. 

            Papyrus 75 is undoubtedly the most textually significant Greek Gospels-manuscript to be discovered in the past eighty years.  When its text of Luke (most of chapters 3-24) and John (most of chapters 1-15) was first brought to light in 1952 as part of the Bodmer Papyri collection (XIV-XV), Papyrus 75 was assigned a production-date in the early 200’s (and even a production-date in the late 100’s was not considered out of the question). 

            Its discovery had a significant impact on English translations:  until the discovery of Papyrus 75, the majority of the small group of scholars responsible for compiling the base-text of the New Testament for the Revised Standard Version (first published in 1946) had been persuaded by Hort’s arguments about Western Non-Interpolations, and had therefore not included several phrases and verses in Luke 24.  The force of the early support that Papyrus 75 gave to those omitted phrases and verses – specifically

            ● the words “of the Lord Jesus” in 24:3,

            ● the words “He is not here!  He is risen!” in 24:6,

            ● all of Luke 24:12,

            ● the words, “and said to them, ‘Peace unto you’” in 24:36,

            ● all of Luke 24:40, and  

            ● the words, “and they worshipped Him” in 24:52 –

seemed too much to resist.  Rather than appear to refuse to let evidence get in the way of a good theory, the omitted portions of Luke 24 were restored to the text by the time the New Revised Standard Version was released in 1989.  (This may say something about the instability of the compilers’ text-critical method as much as it says anything about Papyrus 75.)  Today, in the English Standard Version, those passages all appear in the text without even a footnote to remind people that they were ever removed before Papyrus 75 was known. 

            Such is the hard-hitting power of our first combatant, Papyrus 75, which in 2007 became part of the collection in the Vatican Library.

            Facing Papyrus 75 in today’s contest is a manuscript that needs no introduction:  Codex Alexandrinus has long been hailed as one of the most important manuscripts of the New Testament.  Its production-date is generally assigned to the early 400’s.  Codex A, also known as 02, is not a complete New Testament (it is missing Matthew 1:1-25:6, and some pages in John).  Its Gospels-text is often described as basically Byzantine, and in Acts and the Epistles it is often described as basically Alexandrian, but there are quite a few divergent readings.  For the book of Revelation, Codex Alexandrinus is widely considered the best extant manuscript (far superior to Codex Sinaiticus). 

            Codex Alexandrinus was not available to European scholars until 1627, when it was presented as a gift from Cyril Lucar, the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, to king Charles I of England.  It immense value was soon recognized.  In the early 1700’s, when the innovative researcher Richard Bentley (1662-1742) was not exposing literary forgeries, editing classical works, preaching, or corresponding with Isaac Newton, he studied Codex Alexandrinus assiduously.  On one occasion (specifically, on October 23, 1731), he rescued the manuscript from a fire.  Bentley considered Codex A the best New Testament manuscript in the world. 

A replica of Papyrus 75's
text of Luke 8:19-25.
See the digital photo at the
Vatican Library's website.

  

            Papyrus 75 shall go first in today’s contest.  Here is a comparison between Luke 8:19-25 in Papyrus 75 and in the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, 27th edition: 

19 – no variants.

20 – P75 reads απηγγελλη instead of απηγγελη (+1)

20 – P75 does not have σου after μητηρ (-3)

21 – P75 reads αυτον after προς instead of αυτους (+1, -2)

22 – P75 does not have αυτος after the first και (-5)

22 – P75 reads ανεβη instead of ενεβη (+1, -1)

23 – P75 transposes to εις την λιμνην ανεμου (transposition) [The parchment is damaged here but there is no discernible reason to suspect a variant within the word λιμνην.]

24 – no variants.

25 – P75 does not have και υπακουουσιν αυτω (-18)

            Thus, the text of Luke 8:19-25 in Papyrus 75 contains 3 non-original letters, and is missing 29 original letters, for a total of 32 letters’ worth of corruption.  Removing minor orthographic variants from the equation, Papyrus 75 contains 1 non-original letters, and is missing 28 original letters, for a total of 29 letters’ worth of corruption.

            That’s pretty good!  If minuscule 1324 were Papyrus 75’s opponent in today’s contest, 1324 would lose. 

            Now Codex Alexandrinus steps into the ring.  Let’s see how its text of Luke 8:19-25 – written down about 200 years after Papyrus 75 was produced – compares:

19 –  Codex A reads Παρεγένοντο instead of Παρεγένετο (+2, -1)

20 – Codex A reads Καὶ before ἀπηγγέλη instead of δὲ after it (+3, -2)

20 – Codex A reads λέγοντων after αὐτῷ (+8)

20 – Codex A reads σε θέλοντες instead of θέλοντες σε (transposition)

21 – no variants.

22 – no variants.

23 – no variants.

24 – Codex A reads ἐγερθεὶς instead of διεγερθεὶς (-2)

25 – no variants.

            Codex A thus has 13 non-original letters, and is missing 5 original letters, yield a total of 18 letters’ worth of corruption. 

            Winner:  Codex A.

Some Post-Fight Analysis:  Annual Corruption Rates

            Let’s step back from the individual combatants for a minute and see what the results of this little contest might say about the transmission-lines that they represent.

            On the basis of this small sample, let’s make some calculations with the following premises in play:
            ● The production-date of the Gospel of John is A.D. 90.
            ● The Gospel of Luke has 1,151 verses.
            ● The Gospel of John has 879 verses.
            ● Papyrus 75 was made in 225.
            ● Codex A was made in 400.
            ● The results in Luke 8:19-25 are typical throughout the text of Luke and John.

            With these assumptions in place, the annual corruption rate of each manuscript’s transmission-line can be calculated.  In the course of 135 years, the copyists in P75’s transmission-line introduced 29 letters’ worth of corruption in six verses.  Thus, on average (relying on this small sample), the copyists in Papyrus 75’s transmission-line introduced .215 letters’ worth of corruption each year, in each six-verse segment of Luke and John.  Since there are 338 six-verse segments in Luke and John, a total of 72.6 letters’ worth of corruption each year is implied.  At that rate, by the time Papyrus 75 was made, its text of Luke and John would be expected to contain 9,800 letters’ worth of textual corruption.

            Meanwhile, in Codex A’s transmission-line – the transmission-line which perpetuated Codex A’s essentially Byzantine text of the Gospels – only 18 letters’ worth of corruption was introduced in Luke 8:19-25 in the course of 310 years, yielding an annual corruption rate per six verses of .058 letters per year.  Calculating that much corruption in each six-verse segment of Luke and John, the copyists in Codex A’s ancestry introduced 19.6 letters of corruption in the text of Luke and John each year, on average, which means that by the time Codex Alexandrinus was made, its text of Luke and John would be expected to contain 6,077 letters’ worth of corruption.
            In other words, based on the performance of the copyists in these two manuscripts’ transmission-lines in this particular passage, the expectation that Codex A, rather than Papyrus 75, will have a more faithful text at any given point, is entirely justified, even though Codex A’s text’s transmission-line is over twice as long (310 years) as that of Papyrus 75 (135 years).

            Finally, it should be noticed that the non-inclusion of και υπακουουσιν αυτω in Luke 8:25 is attested not only by Papyrus 75 but also by Codex Vaticanus, which confirms (along with an abundance of other rare agreements) a rather close historical relationship between the two.  That is, they share the same transmission-line.  If the annual corruption rate of Papyrus 75’s transmission-line were extended to the year 325 (i.e., if the Alexandrian copyists continued to add 72.6 letters’ worth of corruption to the text of Luke and John each year, up to the approximate production-date of Codex Vaticanus), then by 325, the text of Luke and John in the Alexandrian transmission-line at the time when Codex Vaticanus was made would have contained 17,061 letters’ worth of corruption.  Thus, in the text of Luke and John, almost three times as much corruption would be in Codex B’s transmission-line when Codex B was made, as would be in Codex A’s transmission-line when Codex A was made.

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

Hand to Hand Combat: Codex D versus 1324

            It’s time once again for hand-to-hand combat!  Today’s combatants are Codex Bezae and minuscule 1324.  The arena is Luke 8:19-25.

            Codex Bezae, also known as Codex 05 and as Codex D, is named after Theodore Beza, an important Protestant theologian and textual researcher of the 1500’s who owned the manuscript, and who donated it to Cambridge University in 1581, where it resides to this day.  (Because it is at Cambridge, it is also known as Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis.) 

            Readings from Codex Bezae were cited, albeit inaccurately, in the footnotes of Stephanus’ 1550 edition of the Greek New Testament.  This poses a problem for those who claim that the Textus Receptus was compiled using only late manuscripts, because Codex D is not late.  It has been assigned to the end of the 300’s or early 400’s by David C. Parker (though earlier researchers considered it a century younger).  It is the primary Greek support for what has been called the “Western” text of the Gospels. 

            Codex Bezae is a Greek-Latin manuscript; it contains not only the Greek text of (most of) the Gospels and Acts, but also the Latin text, on alternating pages, so if one opens the codex to any undamaged portion, the Greek text of a passage will be on the page to the reader’s left, and the Latin text of approximately the same passage will be on the page to the reader’s right.  (Also, a Latin page containing a snippet of text from the end of Third John survives, testifying that the codex originally had more books than it does now.)

            Minuscule 1324 is a Greek Gospels-manuscript from the 1000’s, and is part of the collection held by the Jerusalem Patriarchate; it is catalogued as Panagios Taphos 60.  Before the text of the Gospels begins, 1324 has the Eusebian Canon-tables, elaborately decorated, and before the canon-tables is Ad Carpianus (a letter from Eusebius to Carpian, which serves as a manual on how to use the canon-tables to find parallel-passages in the Gospels).

            Notably, the text of Ad Carpianus is framed within a quatrefoil, similar to the same feature in minuscule 157, and also like the empty framework found in minuscule 1191 (a Gospels-manuscript at Saint Catherine’s monastery), and like the format of the Armenian text of Ad Carpianus in Walters MS 538 – but especially reminiscent of the cut-out framework of Ad Carpianus in minuscule 2812 (the Zelada Gospels).

            Miniscule 1324 is a beautiful manuscript, neatly written and finely illustrated.  Each Gospel in Codex Bezae begins with red text (see Matthew, John, Luke, and Mark), and its lettering is sufficiently neat, but the artistry in 1324 is far more impressive; each Gospel in 1324 has a full-page illustration of its author, and an intricately detailed headpiece (see Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).  (In these pages, by the way, notice the use of a metobelus-mark (÷) to signify the beginning of a section of text, rather than a textual variant.)  In addition, the parchment of the pages on which the chapter-lists for the Gospels are written has been dyed purple – a rare and sumptuous feature.

            But how will the text of 1324 perform in the ring against an opponent that is 600 years older?  Let’s find out by comparing the text of Luke 8:19-25 in each manuscript to the text of the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.     

            First, the rules of the ring:  each non-original letter in a manuscript’s text is counted as a point, and each original letter that is absent in a manuscript’s text is counted as a point; the winner will be the manuscript with fewer points.  Transpositions are mentioned but not counted if no text is lost.  Contractions are not considered variants.  Itacisms, iota adscript/subscript, and movable-nu variants will be listed and counted, but a separate calculation will be made which does not take them into consideration. (These inconsequential variants are indicated by underlined verse-numbers.)  

            Here is a comparison of 1324’s text to the text of NA27: 

19 – 1324 reads Παρεγένοντο instead of Παρεγένετο (+2, -1)

19 – 1324 reads αυτωι instead of αὐτῷ (+1)

20 – 1324 reads Καὶ before ἀπηγγέλη instead of δὲ after it (+3, -2)

20 – 1324 reads λέγοντων after αὐτῷ (+8)

20 – 1324 reads σε θέλοντες instead of θέλοντες σε (transposition)

21 – 1324 reads αὐτόν at the end of the verse (+5) [This Byzantine reading is not noted in NA27.]

22 – no variants.

23 – 1324 reads ἀφύπωσε instead of ἀφύπωσεν (-1)

23 – no variants.

24 – 1324 reads Καὶ before προσεθόντες instead of δὲ after it (+3, -2)

24 – 1324 reads ἐγερθεὶς instead  of διεγερθεὶς (-2) [This Byzantine reading is not noted in NA27.]

24 – 1324 reads ἐπετίμησε instead of ἐπετίμησεν (-1)

24 – 1324 reads ἀνέμωι instead of ἀνέμῳ (+1)

24 – 1324 reads τωι instead of τῳ (+1)

24 – 1324 reads μεγάλη after γαλήνη (+6)

25 – 1324 reads ἐστιν after ποῦ (+5)

25 – 1324 reads τωι instead of τῳ (+1)

25 – 1324 reads αυτωι instead of αὐτῷ (+1)

            Thus, in these six verses, 1324 has 37 non-original letters, and is missing 9 original letters, for a total of 46 letters’ worth of corruption.  When inconsequential orthographic variants are removed from the equation, 1324 has 32 non-original letters, and is missing 7 original letters, for a total of 39 letters’ worth of corruption.  

            Now let’s compare Codex Bezae’s text of Luke 8:19-25 to NA27, and see how well “one of our oldest witnesses” (as described by Bart Ehrman) performs:

19 – D reads αυτου after μήτηρ (+5)

19 – D reads οτι after αυτω (+3)

20 – D reads εξω εστήκασιν instead of εστήκασιν εξω (transposition)

20 – D reads ζητουντες instead of ιδειν θέλοντες (+5, -9)

21 – D does not have προς after ειπεν (-4) 

21 – D reads αυτοις instead of αυτους (+1, -1)

21 – D reads οι before αδελφοι (+2)

22 – D does not have και after ημερων (-3)

22 – D reads αναβηναι αυτον instead of αυτος ενεβη (+6, -3, assuming a transposition)

23 – D reads λελαψ instead of λαιλαψ (+1, -2)

23 – D reads πολλη after ανεμου (+5)

24 – D reads κε κε (i.e., κυριε κυριε) instead of επιστατα επιστατα (+4, -16) [This could fairly be counted as +10, -16.]

24 – D reads ἐγερθεὶς instead  of διεγερθεὶς (-2)

24 – D reads επετειμησεν instead of επετιμησεν (+1)

24 – D does not have του υδατος (-9) 

25 – D reads εστιν after που (+5)

            Thus Codex D has 38 non-original letters in Luke 8:19-25, and is missing 49 original letters, for a total of 87 letters’ worth of corruption.  When inconsequential orthographic variants are removed from the equation, Codex D has 36 non-original letters, and is missing 47 original letters, for a total of 83 letters’ worth of corruption. 

            Let’s go to the scorecards.  When accretions are compared, 1324 wins:  it has only 32, whereas D has 36.  (Even if itacisms and such were considered, 1324 still wins by one.)  And when omissions are compared, 1324 virtually knocks Codex Bezae out of the ring:  1324 omitted 7 original letters but Codex D omitted 47!  The clear winner:  minuscule 1324! 

Some Post-Fight Analysis

            This comparison, though anecdotal, suggests that a few common axioms should be challenged or significantly adjusted:

            ● The oldest manuscripts should be preferred . . . right? 

            It seems perfectly reasonable to think that the older a manuscript is, the better its text is likely to be.  Every time the text was copied, there was a risk of the introduction of new corruptions.  The older a manuscript is, the fewer generations of copies are likely to be between it and the autograph. 

            However, the force of this mere likelihood shrinks when one observes the liberties that were taken by the copyists in the Western textual tradition in the second and third centuries.  Situated in locales where Greek and Latin competed to be the lingua franca, Western copyists prioritized the meaning of the text, and were not averse to replacing original expressions with different expressions that seemed to them to be more precise, more reverent, and less vulnerable to misunderstanding. 

            An example:  in Mark 7:19, Jesus says that after a man has eaten food, what remains – that is, dung – “goeth out into the draught,” as the KJV puts it.  The “draught” (Greek ἀφεδρῶνα) is a latrine or toilet.  Some English translators, softening Jesus’ earthy reference, translate this as “sewer” (see for example the MEV, NET, NLT, and NRSV).  Some others are yet more evasive, simply saying that the food is eliminated or expelled from the body (see for example the NKJV, ESV, CSB, NIV, and NASB).  Just as our modern English translators have tended to avoid Jesus’ reference to a latrine or toilet in Mark 7:19, so did the person or persons responsible for the Western Text:  Codex D replaces the latrine with a sewer, reading οχετον (i.e., “sewer”). 

            One might say that if the text of the Gospels were translated into English using a “dynamic equivalence” technique, occasionally resorting to paraphrase, and then translate the resultant English text back into Greek, the result would be similar to the Western Text.  Very many alterations to the form of the text resulted as copyists attempted to maximize what they perceived to be the meaning of the text – and this was happening in the 100’s and 200’s (not, as far as the Gospels-text is concerned, as a one-time revision, but as an ongoing process).  There is thus no reason to expect that manuscripts fished out of a transmission-stream heavily contaminated by Western corruptions will have fewer corruptions than  manuscripts from some other transmission-stream, regardless of their ages.

            If the editors of the Textus Receptus had trusted their earliest available manuscript in the 1500’s, then instead of introducing 33 letters’ worth of corruption (working from the premise that NA27’s compilation of Luke 8:19-25 is completely correct), they would have introduced 83 letters’ worth of corruption.

            ● Scribes tended to add rather than omit . . . right? 

            In Luke 8:24, 1324 displays a harmonization:  “great” (μεγάλη) was added to “calm” (γαλήνη), which brings the passage into closer agreement with the parallel-passage in Matthew 8:26 and Mark 4:39.  Yet, on balance, when compared to Codex D – a manuscript 500 years older – 1324 has slightly fewer accretions in Luke 9:19-25.  If (as Daniel Wallace has claimed) copyists were applying “If in doubt, don’t throw it out” as a basic principle, and were thus expanding the text for 600 years (from 400 to 1000), how is it that the Byzantine manuscript from the 1000’s has a text of Luke 8:19-25 with fewer accretions than a text from the early 400’s?       

            The more the text-critical canon, “prefer the shorter reading” is tested, the more its wrongness is demonstrated.  Yet the critical text of Nestle-Aland/UBS still agrees quite closely with the Westcott-Hort 1881 compilation, for which this canon was constantly in play.            

            ● The Western Text of the Gospels is characterized by expansion and elaboration . . . right?

            The Western Text, according to the late Bruce Metzger (see p. 213, The Text of the New Testament) “is usually considered to be the result of an undisciplined and ‘wild’ growth of manuscript tradition and translational activity.”  I draw your attention to the word “growth.”  A better term might be “change,” because it is not unusual at all to find readings in the Western Text that are shorter than their rivals.  In the six verses studied here, inasmuch as Codex D’s text has 36 non-original letters, and is missing 47 original letters, its text is 11 letters shorter than the original text (using NA27 as the basis of comparison). 

            In one variation-unit in this passage, the text of D is shorter because of the excision of perceived superfluity:  in verse 24, the phrase “of the water” has disappeared, and one can picture a Western copyist thinking, “There’s no need to say that the waves were made of water.”  The same phenomenon is observable in modern paraphrases; look in the CEV, the Easy-To-Read Version, the God’s Word translation, the hyper-paraphrase known as “The Message,” and the New American Bible for examples.    

            Therefore, when encountering a Byzantine reading that is longer than its Western rival, we should consider the intrinsic character of the Byzantine reading, and ask, “Could a translator consider the content of this variant superfluous?” and if the answer is “Yes” then the Western reading should be considered suspect.  Perhaps one could go further and say that the same approach should be in play when comparing Byzantine and Alexandrian readings – and it does not seem absurd to suggest that when Alexandrian and Western witnesses support the non-inclusion of a superfluous-seeming word or phrase, we may be seeing the effects of the same scribal tendency in both transmission-streams.

           

            ● The Textus Receptus is essentially a late medieval text . . . right? 

            Setting aside itacisms and other such variations, the Textus Receptus reads just like 1324 in Luke 8:19-25, with a few exceptions:
            22 – TR reads Καὶ εγένετο instead of Ἐγένετο δε (+3, -2)

            24 – TR reads προσεθόντες δὲ instead of Καὶ προσεθόντες (agreeing with NA27)

            24 – TR does not read μεγάλη after γαλήνη (agreeing with NA27)

Which means that the Textus Receptus is slightly more accurate in Luke 8:19-25 than 1324’s text.  If one were to select any medieval Byzantine manuscript at random, its text of Luke 8:19-25 would very probably trounce the text of Codex D in a direct comparison.  

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