Video Lecture 06: Some Important Manuscripts

Now at YouTube:

Lecture 06 - Some Important Manuscripts - in the series Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism. (24 minutes, but viewers are expected to explore the links and thus take longer)

Subtitles provide a basic outline and links to supplemental materials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SqzPnVlvWY

An excerpt:

            We are about to meet some manuscripts.  Some of these, you might encounter very often in the apparatus of the Greek New Testament.  Others are relatively small, but they are among the earliest witnesses to the readings they support.  

            In the course of this lecture, I will mention links to supplemental materials as we go. I hope that you will pause this video when a link appears, explore each resource, and then return to the lecture.   These resources include images of manuscripts that can be viewed in fine detail.

            Today I am going to refer to the Alexandrian Text, the Western Text, and the Byzantine Text.  Hopefully in a future lecture I will go into more detail about these terms.  For now, you can generally picture them as three forms of the text:  the Alexandrian Text was used in Egypt, and influenced the Sahidic version there.  The Western Text was used mainly but not exclusively in the Western part of the Roman Empire, and influenced the Old Latin text.  The Byzantine Text  was used in the vicinity of Constantinople, and is generally supported by the majority of Greek manuscripts.

 ● We begin with Papyrus 52.  This is perhaps the oldest manuscript that contains text from the New Testament.  It is small, about the size of a playing card.  It contains text from John 18:31-33 on one side, and on the other side it contains text from John 18:37-38.  Which is not a lot of text.  It was brought to light by Colin H. Roberts in 1935.  

The importance of Papyrus 52, which is at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England, is its age:  it is probably from about the first half of the 100s.   There is a nice description of Papyrus 52 (and other papyri fragments) by Robert Waltz at the Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism. In addition, Dirk Jongkind has a brief video about P52 on YouTube. 

● Papyrus 104 is another early papyrus fragment that is a top contender for the title “earliest New Testament manuscript.”  It was excavated at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt by Grenfell and Hunt, and was brought to light in 1997 by J. D. Thomas.  If Papyrus 52 is the earliest manuscript of John, Papyrus 104 is the earliest manuscript of Matthew.  The handwriting used for P104 was executed in a fancier style than what is seen in most other manuscripts; similar handwriting appears in some non-Biblical manuscripts excavated at Oxyrhynchus, including one in which a specific date, from the year 204 or 211, has survived. 

            Papyrus 104 contains text from Matthew 21:34-37 on one side.  The text on the other side is very extremely badly damaged.  But the surviving damaged text there probably contains text from Matthew 21:43 and 45.  This would mean that Papyrus 104 is both the earliest manuscript of Matthew 21 and also the earliest witness for the non-inclusion of Matthew 21:44. 

            Greg Lanier’s detailed analysis of Papyrus 104 can be found online in Volume 21 of the TC-Journal, for 2016.

● Papyrus 23 is a fragment of the Epistle of James, probably made in the early 200s.  It contains text from part of James chapter 1. 

            You can get a very good look at Papyrus 23 by visiting the website of its present home, the Spurlock Museum in Urbana, Illinois.

 ● Papyrus 137 received some fame, before its official publication, by being heralded as if it was from the first century; it was called “First Century Mark.”  It turned out to be not from the first century.  However, this manuscript – a very small fragment containing text from Mark 1:7-9 and Mark 1:16-18 – is the oldest copy of the text it preserves.  Like several other early fragments, it has made no impact on the compilation of the text of the New Testament.

● Papyrus 45 is much more substantial – but it is still very fragmentary.  When it was made in the first half of the 200s, Papyrus 45 contained the four Gospels and Acts.  The order of books, when the manuscript was made, is unknown.  Its surviving pages at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin contain text from Matthew 20 and 21,  Mark 4-9, Mark 11-12, Luke 6-7, Luke 9-14, John 4-5, John 10-11, and Acts 4-17.  A leaf in Vienna contains text from Matthew 25-26.  This is the earliest known manuscript that contains text from all four Gospels.

            Papyrus 45 has several readings that are especially interesting due to the impact they have on Hort’s Theory of the Lucianic Recension.  Hopefully we will take a closer look at this in a future lecture, but for now, we can just sum it up as the theory that the Byzantine Text – the text in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts – originated as the result of an editorial effort by someone in the late 200s – possibly Lucian of Antioch – who was combining readings from two earlier forms of the text:  the Alexandrian Text, and the Western Text.  Based on this theory, Hort rejected readings in the Byzantine Text that were neither Alexandrian nor Western, reckoning that they did not exist before the Byzantine Text was made.

But in Papyrus 45, which is assigned to the early 200s, there are some readings that are not supported by the flagship manuscripts of the Alexandrian Text or the Western Text.  Readings in Mark 7:35, Acts 15:40, and many other passages show that it is hazardous to assume that non-Alexandrian, non-Western readings should be rejected.

             The text of Papyrus 45 does not agree particularly strongly with Codex Vaticanus, and it does not agree particularly strongly with Codex Bezae either.  In the parts of Mark where Papyrus 45 is extant, its closest textual relative is Codex W – but Codex W’s text in those parts of Mark is not particularly Alexandrian or Western either.

            When Papyrus 45 was first studied, after it was brought to light in the 1930s, there was a tendency to call its text Caesarean, like the text of family-1.  But the late Larry Hurtado showed that whatever Papyrus 45’s text is, it is not closely related to the Caesarean Text.  And while it repeatedly agrees with the Byzantine Text, it is not consistently Byzantine either.

● Papyrus 46 is the earliest substantial copy of most of the Epistles of Paul, basically arranged in order according to their length, with Hebrews between Romans and First Corinthians.  There is some uncertainty about how many epistles the copyist intended to include in the codex.  Part of this manuscript is at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, and part of it is at the University of Michigan.  Its most likely production-date is around 200, give or take 50 years.  The text of Papyrus 46 tends to agree with Codex Vaticanus, but not as strictly as one might expect. For example, in Ephesians 5:9, Papyrus 46 agrees with the Byzantine Text, reading “the fruit of the Spirit” instead of “the fruit of the light.”

● Papyrus 66 contains most of the Gospel of John, with some gaps due to incidental damage.  It was found in Egypt in the early 1950s, and was published in 1956.  Its production-date was initially assigned to around 200, but a wider range is possible.  The copyist who wrote the text in Papyrus 66 made over 400 corrections of what he had initially written. 

● Papyrus 75 is also assigned to around 200.  It is a damaged but substantial codex that contains text from Luke and John.  Its surviving text of Luke begins in chapter 3; its surviving text of John ends in chapter 15.  The text of Papyrus 75 is close to the text found in Codex Vaticanus, but the two manuscripts are not related in a grandfather-and-grandson kind of relationship.  Page-views of Papyrus 75 can be found online at the website of the Vatican Library.

Each of the next three manuscripts was designed as a pandect, that is, a large one-volume collection of the entire Bible.  We tend to assume that it is not unusual to have a single volume that contains all of the books of both the Old Testament and the New Testament.  But that is because we are part of a post-printing-press generation.   In the world of manuscripts, Greek pandects of the Bible are rare.

● Codex Vaticanus is a very important manuscript of the Bible, housed, along with many other manuscripts, at the Vatican Library in Rome.  Its New Testament portion was not the subject of scholarly study until the early 1800s, and since then its reputation has grown.  Today it is generally regarded as the most important manuscript of the New Testament.

 Textually, Codex Vaticanus is the paramount representative of the Alexandrian Text.

Vaticanus was produced in the early 300s.  Its text, in the New Testament, is formatted in three columns per page.  This is usually its format in the Old Testament books too, although in the books of poetry the format is two columns per page.  Codex Vaticanus does not contain the entire New Testament; it has no text from First Timothy, Second Timothy, Titus, Philemon, or the book of Revelation; a text of Revelation is in the codex, written in minuscule lettering, but it is not really the same codex. 

Vaticanus also does not contain the text of the book of Hebrews after Hebrews 9:14.     

            The lettering in Codex Vaticanus has been extensively reinforced; that is, someone, long after the codex was made, traced over the lettering, except where, rightly or wrongly, he thought that the text was inaccurate.  The exact date when this was done is a matter of debate.  I suspect that Codex Vaticanus, before it ended up at the Vatican Library, was previously in the hands of an important character in the 1400s named Bessarion, and scribes working for Bessarion may have been responsible for sprucing it up a bit.  This did not materially affect its text.

The entire manuscript can be viewed page by page at the website of the Vatican Library.

● Codex Sinaiticus is the wingman of Codex Vaticanus.  Its text is not as good, but it is more complete.  The New Testament text of Codex Sinaiticus has survived in more or less the same form in which it left its scriptorium in the mid-300s.  “More or less,” that is, because a few centuries after its production, someone attempted to adjust many of its readings, but those attempts can be detected.  In addition to containing the text of every book of the New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus also contains the Epistle of Barnabas and part of the Shepherd of Hermas.

Most of the text of Codex Sinaiticus is Alexandrian.  However, in the first eight chapters of John, more or less, its text tends to be more like the Western Text.  It is as if the copyists were working from an exemplar of the Gospels that was Alexandrian, but in these opening chapters of John, their main exemplar was damaged, and so they used a drastically different exemplar as their back-up.

That would be consistent with a historical scenario that is mentioned by Jerome, who states that Acacius and Euzoius, at Caesarea in the mid-300s, labored to replace texts written on decaying papyrus in the library there with more durable parchment copies.  Whereas Codex Vaticanus does not have the Eusebian Section-numbers in its margins in the Gospels, Codex Sinaiticus does – but in a somewhat mangled form. 

            This indicates that Eusebius of Caesarea was not involved in the production of Codex Sinaiticus, because it is extremely unlikely that he would have allowed his own cross-reference system to be presented so carelessly.  At the same time, as the place where Eusebius was bishop until his death, Caesarea was one of the first places where the Eusebian Canons were used.

In addition, there are several clues embedded in the text of Codex Sinaiticus that suggest that it was made at Caesarea, during the time when Acacius, an Arian, was bishop there.  I think it is very probable that this is when and where it was made.

Details about the origin of Codex Sinaiticus, and the quality of its text, have tended to be overshadowed by stories about its discovery in the 1800s by Constantine Tischendorf at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai.  In this lecture I will not go into detail about all that, except to say, first, that the most generous interpretation of Tischendorf’s account of his first encounter with pages from Codex Sinaiticus is that he did not understand what he was being shown and what he was being told, and, second, all of the pages that Tischendorf took should be returned to the monastery from which they came.   

Codex Sinaiticus has a secondary set of section-numbers in its margin in Acts that is, for the most part, shared by Codex Vaticanus.  This indicates that when these numbers were added, probably in the 600s, these two manuscripts were at the same place.

Codex Sinaiticus has its own website, CodexSinaiticus.org , and there one can find not only good photographs of the manuscript but also some interesting information about its background and how it was made.

● Next is Codex Alexandrinus.  This codex, from the early 400s, has undergone significant damage:  it is missing the first 24 chapters of Matthew.  The surviving Gospels-text of Alexandrinus is particularly important because it tends to support the Byzantine Text, unlike Vaticanus and Sinaiticus.  In Acts and the Epistles, its text agrees much more often with the two flagship Alexandrian codices, but this is a tendency, definitely not a two-peas-in-a-pod level of agreement.  For Revelation, Codex A is the best manuscript we have. The entire New Testament portion of Codex Alexandrinus can be viewed page by page at the British Library’s website.     

● The worst Greek manuscript we have is Codex Bezae, a diglot manuscript, with alternating pages in Latin, which was produced in the 400s.  It has undergone some damage, but it still contains most of the four Gospels, in the order Matthew – John – Luke – Mark, part of Third John in Latin, and most of the book of Acts.

More important than its production-date is the date of the readings that it supports:  many of them are supported by Old Latin witnesses, and by early patristic writers who used what is called the Western Text. 

 The high level of textual corruption in Codex Bezae makes the text found in relatively young manuscripts look excellent in comparison.  Codex D’s text demonstrates that what really matters is not the age of a manuscript, as much as how well the copyists in the transmission-line of a manuscript did their job. 

Once one comes to terms with the awful quality of Codex Bezae’s text, though, many of its readings are awfully interesting.  It echoes a time in the text’s history when copyists prioritized conveying the meaning of the text – or what they thought was its meaning – above the form of the text found in their exemplars.

 Codex Bezae can be viewed online page by page at the University of Cambridge’s Digital Library.

● Also from the 400s, and probably earlier than Codex Bezae, is Codex Washingtonianus.  Codex W was acquired by the American businessman Charles Freer in 1906.  It is the most important Greek Gospels-manuscript in the United States.  Part of what makes Codex W important is not only its age, but its attestation to different forms of the text collected in a single volume:  its text in Matthew is strongly Byzantine.  Its text in Mark 1:1 to Mark 1-5 is similar to Western Text.  Its text in the rest of Mark tends to agree with the surviving text of Papyrus 45, at least in the parts where P45 is extant.   In Luke, up to chapter 8, its text is Alexandrian, but the rest of Luke tends to agree with the Byzantine Text.  In the first four chapters of John, Codex W has supplemental pages, copied from a different exemplar than the rest.  In the rest of John, it tends to agree with the Alexandrian Text.

This has led some researchers to suspect that although most of Codex W appears to have been made in the 400s, it may be a copy of an earlier codex that was based on exemplars that had been partly destroyed in the Diocletian persecution, in the very early 300s, just before Codex Vaticanus was made.  Page-views of Codex W can be accessed at the website of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

● Codex Ephraemi Syri Rescriptus, also known as Codex C, is a palimpsest.  Its surviving pages contain text from almost every book of the New Testament, as well as pages from some of the books of Poetry in the Old Testament, and two apocryphal books.  It was made some time in the 400s.  Its text is somewhat Alexandrian, with significant Byzantine mixture.  It is one of the few Greek manuscripts that support the reading “six hundred and sixteen” as the number of the beast in Revelation 13:18.

The parchment of Codex C was recycled to provide material on which some of the works of Ephraem the Syrian were written; this accounts for the name of the manuscript.  Its Biblical text was established in the 1840s, after much effort, by Constantine Tischendorf, the same individual who brought Codex Sinaiticus to the attention of European scholars.   The text has undergone extensive correction.

● 0176 is a fragment, probably produced in the 400s, that contains text from Galatians 3:16-24.  This manuscript was excavated from Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, which is somewhat intriguing, because the text of this fragment is thoroughly Byzantine, not Alexandrian.

● The Purple Triplets is my pet name for three uncial manuscripts from the mid-500s:  Codex N, Codex O, and Codex Σ.      Codex N is also known as 022, Codex Petropolitanus Purpureus.  Codex O is also known as 023, Codex Sinopensis.  It contains text from the Gospel of Matthew.  And Codex Σ is also known as 042, Codex Purpureus Rossanensis, or the Rossano Gospels.  It contains text from Matthew and Mark.

            These are not the only Greek uncial manuscripts written on purple parchment.  What is especially interesting about these three is that they are related to each other like siblings, copies of the same master-copy.  Codex Σ is known not only for its mainly Byzantine text, but also for its illustrations, which can be viewed at http://www.codexrossanensis.it .

● Codex Regius, also known as Codex L, contains most of the text of the four Gospels.  It was probably made in the 700s, probably by an Egyptian copyist.  Codex L is one of six Greek manuscripts that attest to both the Shorter Ending and the Longer Ending of Mark.  Codex L also has a large distinct blank space in the Gospel of John where most manuscripts have John 7:53-8:11, the story of the adulteress.    

● Codex Pi, also known as Codex Petropolitanus, is a Gospels-manuscript assigned to the 800s.  Its text is a very early form of the Byzantine Text.

● Codex K, also known as Codex Cyprius, is another Gospels-manuscript that was also probably produced in the 800s.  In the first 20 verses of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, compared to the text in Codex Sinaiticus, the text of Codex Cyprius is much closer to the original text.

● Minuscule 2474, the Elfleda Bond Goodspeed Gospels, from the 900s, contains an example of the text of the Gospels that dominated Greek manuscript-production in the Byzantine Empire.  This manuscript can be viewed page by page at the website of the Goodspeed Manuscript Library of the University of Chicago.

            There are also several clusters, or groups, of manuscripts, that share readings that indicate that they share the same general line of descent: 

            In the Gospels, the text of some members of a group of manuscripts that display a note called the Jerusalem Colophon is above average importance.

            Readings shared by the main members of Family 1 in the Gospels, best represented by minuscule manuscripts 1, 1582, and 2193, probably echo an ancestor-manuscript from the 400s.

            Members of Family 13 in the Gospels tend to echo an ancestor-manuscript with many reading that diverge from the Byzantine standard.

            Also, in the General Epistles, members of the Harklean Group echo a form of the text that has some unusual readings that are earlier than Codex Sinaiticus.

            Some other minuscules, such as minuscules 6, 157, 700, 892, and 1739, are as important as some of the uncials.  Their existence should remind us that when we ask how much weight ought to be given to a particular manuscript, the primary consideration should not be “How old is it”, but “How well did the copyists in its transmission-stream do their job?”. 

            No manuscript sprang into being out of nothing, and any manuscript, early or late, if it is independent from another known manuscript, has the potential to contribute something to a reconstruction of the text of the New Testament.

             To get some idea of the appearance of New Testament manuscripts, I encourage you to explore the online presentations of manuscripts at the following institutions:

            Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, the Vatican Library, the British Library, the National Library of France, the Walters Art Museum, the Goodspeed Manuscript Collection at the University of Chicago, the Kenneth W. Clark Collection at Duke University, and the  Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

    

Luke 11:33 - Don't Put Your Light Under a Bushel

            When someone asks, “What’s a text-critically interesting verse in the Gospels?” the typical answer is not likely to be “Luke 11:33.”  The differences between the meanings of the rival variants in this verse are not very consequential:  basically, some manuscripts have the phrase, οὐδὲ ὑπὸ τὸν μόδιον, that is, “or under a bushel-basket,” and some do not; also, near the end of the verse, in some Greek manuscripts the Greek word rendered “light” in English is φῶς, while in other manuscripts, it is φέγγος. 

            Yet it is probably safe to say that Luke 11:33 is a strong contender for the title “Verse Most Likely to Be Changed from One Critical Edition to Another.”  Here is how some recent Greek compilations have treated Luke 11:33:

            ● Nestle-Aland NTG 27:  brackets οὐδὲ ὑπὸ τὸν μόδιον and adopts φῶς.

            ● Robinson-Pierpont 2005:  includes οὐδὲ ὑπὸ τὸν μόδιον and adopts φέγγος.

            ● SBLGNT 2011:  includes οὐδὲ ὑπὸ τὸν μόδιον and adopts φέγγος.

            ● Tyndale House GNT 2017:  does not include οὐδὲ ὑπὸ τὸν μόδιον and adopts φῶς.      

           

            The vast majority of Greek manuscripts, including the two flagship representatives of the Alexandrian Text, Vaticanus (B) and Sinaiticus (ℵ), and the best Greek representative of the Western Text, Codex D, support the inclusion of οὐδὲ ὑπὸ τὸν μόδιον.  Exploring the evidence more closely, we see that ℵ A B C D K M W X Δ Θ Π Ψ and the Curetonian Syriac, the Peshitta, the Bohairic, and all Latin witnesses, are allies of the Byzantine Text; they all support the inclusion of οὐδὲ ὑπὸ τὸν μόδιον.  (The Gothic version, alas, is not extant for this part of Luke.)

 

Luke 11:33: at the end of col. 1
and the start of col. 2.

          The main witnesses for non-inclusion are Papyrus 45, Papyrus 75, L (019), Γ (036), Ξ (040), 070 (Greek-Coptic), 700*, 1241, family 1, 69, 118, and 788, and the Sinaitic Syriac, the Sahidic version, and the Armenian and Georgian versions.  While this array of witnesses may appear negligible in terms of quantity when set alongside the mountains of witnesses which favor the other reading, the age and diversity of its members are interesting:  P45 and P75 are the earliest manuscripts of this part of Luke, and the Alexandrian (P75, L, Sahidic), Western (Sinaitic Syriac) and Caesarean (f¹, Armenian) forms of the text are represented.                 

            Let’s examine the text nearby in search of similar arrays of variants supporting shorter readings.   

● (1)  In Luke 11:11, P45, P75, and B, 1241, and the Armenian version, along with the Sinaitic Syriac, support the non-inclusion of ἄρτον μὴ λίθον ἐπιδώσει αὐτῷ; ἣ καὶ ἰχθύν, which has very abundant support, with some slight variations, in A C D (which, with 124, adds αἰτήσει after ἰχθύν) F G Y K M U W X Γ Δ Θ Λ Π Ψ f¹ f¹³ 1 1582* 1424 (in ℵ, L, 28, 157, and 700, ἄρτον μὴ λίθον ἐπιδώσει αὐτῷ; ἣ ἰχθύν, lacking the καὶ) – “bread, will he give to him a stone? And if a fish.” 

            The minuscules 69 and 788 (along with 565) do not include the second part of the verse, that is, they have ἄρτον μὴ λίθον ἐπιδώσει αὐτῷ but not the rest of the verse, as if they echo an ancestor-manuscript in which the copyist’s line of sight drifted from this occurrence of ἐπιδώσει αὐτῷ to the recurrence of the same words at the end of the verse, skipping the words in between.

            Upon comparing the witnesses for the main shorter reading in 11:11 and 11:33, we see that several of them are the same:  P45, P75, 1241, Sinaitic Syriac, Sahidic, Armenian.  And a couple of witnesses for the other shorter reading in 11:33 (69 788) also support the shorter reading in 11:33.

            It should not be overlooked that 157 omits all of 11:12, and 579 omits everything before μὴ.  Also in 11:12, where the normal reading is ᾠόν (egg), P45 reads ἄρτον (bread).

● (2)  In Luke 11:14, P45 P75 ℵ B A* L 1 33 157 788 1241 1582* Sinaitic Syriac and the Armenian version are among the group of witnesses that support the non-inclusion of καὶ αὐτὸ ἧν (and it was).

● (3)  In Luke 11:44, P45 P75 ℵ B C L 33 f¹ 157 579 and the Sinaitic Syriac, Curetonian Syriac, and the Armenian, Georgian, and Sahidic versions do not include γραμματεις καὶ Φαρισαιοι, υποκριταί (Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites).  Most manuscripts (such as A K M Γ Δ Θ Π Ψ 69 157 565 579 700 788) include the words, but D omits υποκριταί.

● (4)  At the end of Luke 11:48, P75 ℵ B D L 579 do not include αυτων τα μνημεια (“their tombs”).  Family 1 and 157 read instead τους τάφους αυτων.  (P45 is not extant for this verse.)

● (5)  In Luke 11:53:

            P75 reads Κακειθεν εξελθόντες αυτου

            ℵ B C L 33 69 579 788 1241 read Κακειθεν εξελθόντος αυτου

            P45 reads Κακειθεν εξελθόντος (apparently without αυτου); Willker mentions that the manuscript is damaged but space-considerations rule out the inclusion of αυτου.

            A K M Π W Γ Δ Ψ f¹ 565 read Λέγοντος δε ταυτα προς αυτους, which is supported by most manuscripts. 
            D Θ 157 agree with A but continue with ενωπιον παντος του λαου; this reading has considerable Old Latin and Armenian support; especially interesting is that this reading is also supported by the Curetonian Syriac and the Sinaitic Syriac. 

            Meanwhile 69 and 788 simply read Και before ηρξαντο.

● (6) and (7)  In Luke 11:54:

            P45 P75 B L f¹ 579, with Coptic support, begin the verse with ενεδρεύοντες αυτον before θηρευσαι.

            ℵ begins the verse with ενεδρεύοντες before θηρευσαι.

            Most manuscripts, including C K Π M  f¹ 157 565 700, with support from the Vulgate and the Peshitta, read ενεδρεύοντες αυτον ζητουντες at the beginning of the verse, and read ινα κατηγορήσωσιν αυτου at the end of the verse.  A W* Δ f¹³ differ only slightly at the end of the verse, reading ινα κατηγορήσουσιν αυτου. 

            D’s text is quite different:  ζητουντες αφορην τινα λαβειν αυτου ινα ευρωσιν κατηγορησαι αυτου.  This is supported by the Sinaitic Syriac and Curetonian Syriac, and is imperfectly supported by the Old Latin.

            Θ reads ενεδρεύοντες before τι θηρευσαι at the beginning of the verse; it agrees with most manuscripts at the end of the verse.

            Without attempting to offer a full analysis of all seven of these textual contests here, I offer brief explanations vindicating the longer reading in six cases:

● (1)  In Luke 11:11, the shorter reading originated when a copyist skipped a line of text but nevertheless produced a coherent sentence; the reading of P45 in verse 12 (ἄρτον instead of ᾠόν) is a vestige of the scribe’s recollection of the original longer reading.  Harmonization to Matthew 7:9 was limited to the addition of αυτου after υιος mainly in Caesarean witnesses.

● (2)  In Luke 11:14, the shorter reading in P45 P75 ℵ B 1241 et al is a slight stylistic refinement; as Metzger noted, καὶ αὐτὸ ἧν  κωφόν “appears to be a Semitism in the Lukan style.  The chance seems low that a scribe would sense a need to shift from “He was casting out a dumb demon” to “He was casting out a demon and it was dumb,” and happen to fit Lukan style.  

● (3)  In Luke 11:44, the shorter rreading – that is, the removal of the explicit identification of the scribes and Pharisees – originated when a scribe wondered why the lawyers would feel that they were being criticized by a rebuke specifically aimed at others. 

● (4)  At the end of Luke 11:48, the Byzantine reading makes explicit what is implied without an object.  Family 1 and family 13 do likewise, but their wording is different.  The shorter reading here is original. 

● (5)  In Luke 11:53, the Alexandrian Text has non-Lukan wording; κακειθεν appears only here in Luke, and εξελθόντος appears elsewhere in Luke only in 11:14 (contested by εκβληθέντος in A C L f¹³ 69) where a demon’s departure is being described.  Willker suggests that the Byzantine reading was introduced because it avoids raising the question of where was the “there;” the exact location being unmentioned in the lection that begins at 11:47.  However, the Byzantine reading raises a question of its own, that is, who is the “them” – for at 11:46, Jesus begins criticizing not the scribes and Pharisees, but the specialists in the Law.  The Alexandrian way around this problem was to rewrite the introductory phrase, which happens to correspond to the beginning of Mark 9:30.

            The Western Text’s inclusion of ενωπιον παντος του λαου echoes Luke 8:47; this reading must be extremely early (as demonstrated by support from the Sinaitic Syriac and Old Latin Codex Vercellensis), and shows that some copyists had a tendency to expand later parts of the Gospel with verbiage taken from earlier parts.     

           

● (6)  In Luke 11:54a:  the shorter reading originated when an early copyist’s line of sight drifted from the letters –οντες in ενεδρεύοντες to the same letters in ζητουντες.  In most copies descended from the exemplar that contained this mistake, it is partly corrected (via the addition of αυτον – but 28 and 1424 read instead αυτω) but not in ℵ and Θ.

● (7)  In Luke 11:54b, the shorter reading originated when an early copyist’s line of sight drifted from the αυτου after στόματος to the same word after κατηγορήσωσιν, accidentally skipping the words in between.

            The inclusion of ευρωσιν in D’s text here is interesting; D thus echoes (albeit inexactly) the end of Luke 6:7.  This again illustrates some scribe’s tendency to expand later parts of a book by introducing elements they had encountered in earlier parts.

 

Luke 11:33 in GA 1241.

           Having reviewed the above seven textual contests, and  having seen that in six out of the seven, the longer reading is reasonably defensible, we return now to Luke 11:33.  This is Luke’s record of a saying of Jesus very similar to the one in Matthew 5:15, where the μόδιον is mentioned; a closer parallel, however, is in Luke 8:16, where the reference is to hiding the lamp under a σκεύει (“vessel”), rather than a μόδιον (bushel-basket).  In 28 there is a clear attempt to conform 11:33 to Luke 8:16; minuscule 28 reads καλυπτει αυτον σκεύει η before εις κρύπτον.  In 579, the text is conformed to Matthew 5:15 toward the end, reading και λάμπει πασιν τοις εν τη οικια.  And in 118 f¹³ 69 788, at the end of the verse, the words are transposed so as to correspond to the end of Luke 8:16.   

            In short, except for minuscule 28, the harmonizations that appear in Luke 11:33 look like they have been based on Luke 8:16, not Matthew 5:15.  If a copyist were to introduce “under the bushel-basket” into a form of Luke 11:33 that did not have the phrase, the natural place to put it would be before the reference to putting the lamp in a secret place, thus corresponding to the gist of Mark 4:21 and the gist of Luke 8:16; I mean that in both Mark 4:21 and Luke 8:16, the reference to the lamp being covered precedes whatever else is said.

            If οὐδὲ ὑπὸ τὸν μόδιον is not a partial harmonization to Matthew 5:15, it is original – in which case, how does one account for its absence in P45 P75 L 788 et al, while also accounting for its presence in ℵ B A C D K Π W?  There are two factors which do this:  (1)  Scribes’ recollection of Luke 8:16, in which τίθησιν is followed immediately by αλλ’ επι λυχνίας.  (2)  A simple homoioteleuton error.  Single-letter homoioteleuton is rare but it does sometimes happen:  all that is needed for οὐδὲ ὑπὸ τὸν μόδιον to disappear is for a scribe’s line of sight to drift from the ν at the end of τιθησιν to the ν at the end of μόδιον.  Adding to the ease of such an occurrence is that the scribe would have written τίθησιν αλλ’ επι λυχνίας  (or, τίθησιν αλλ’ επι λυχνίαν) a few chapters earlier.  

            There is still the other variant-unit in Luke 11:33 to consider:  φως or φέγγος?  Φως looks like a harmonization to Luke 8:16, especially in 118 f¹³ 69 788.  Φέγγος is the rarer word, and considering the presence of φως in the parallel-passages, there would be little impetus to replace φως with φέγγος; meanwhile familiarity with Luke 8:16 would tend to elicit a harmonization from φέγγος to φως.  The reading of P45, φέγγος, should be adopted.  Here we have an ancient reading which is not Alexandrian (for P75 ℵ B 33 read φως) nor Western (for D also reads φως) nor Caesarean (for f¹ reads φως and f¹³ also reads φως, transposed).  The Byzantine Text, and the Byzantine Text alone (but with support from the back-up team of L, Γ, 124, 565 and 700), besides the usual Byzantine witnesses Α Κ Μ W Δ Λ Π etc,, displays the original reading here, defying the theory that it is merely an amalgamation of the other text-forms, and supporting the theory that the Byzantine Text contains a stratum of ancient and independent readings. 

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

Papyrus 45 vs. Codex K in Luke 12

P45 - the fragment in Austria

It’s time for some text-critical hand-to-hand combat!  Which manuscript has the more accurate text of Luke 12:23-33:  Papyrus 45 or Codex Cyprius? 

Before we find out, let’s consider each manuscript’s background:  Papyrus 45 was produced in the 200s.  Papyrus 45 has undergone extensive damage, but enough has survived to show that when it was in pristine condition, it contained all four Gospels and Acts (if not more).  For much of its text, P45 is the earliest extant manuscript, particularly for the Gospel of Mark and the parts of the book of Acts that it contains.

After the initial publication of P45’s text of Mark, it was classified as “Caesarean” or “Pre-Caesarean” but these categories were shown to be inaccurate in a study undertaken by Larry Hurtado, who contended that P45’s text of Mark does not have strong affinities with any known text-type and is instead related most closely to Codex W’s text of Mark.  Almost the whole manuscript resides at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland, and can be viewed at the website of CSNTM, except for a fragment in Austria (see picture).       

            Codex Cyprius (K, 017) resides in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.  It contains all four Gospels.  It can be viewed (and downloaded) at the Gallica website (search there for “Grec. 63”). Its production-date has been assigned to the 800s.      

           

            In the following comparison, the same ground rules will be applied to the text of both competing manuscripts:  first, deviations from the text of Nestle-Aland (27th edition) are noted, and then filtered.  Transpositions are noted but not counted as variants that cause an adulteration of the text.  Variants involving different formats of nomina sacra are not counted as variants.  Itacisms, cases of movable-nu, and benign consonant-exchanges are counted in the initial total, but the totals are then recalculated without them.  (The three uses of iota-adscript in P45 – τηι, δόξηι, and αγρωι in verses 27-28 – are not counted either.)  

            Let’s look at Papyrus 45 first:

23 – P45 omits γαρ before ψυχη (-3)

24 – P45 adds τα πετεινα του ουρανου και before τους κόρακας (+22)

24 – P45 reads αποθήκαι instead of αποθήκη (+2, -1)

24 – P45 reads αυτα instead of αυτους (+1, -3)

25 – P45 transposes:  προσθειναι επι την ηλικίαν αυτου

25 – P45 does not read ενα after πηχυν (agrees with NA27)

26 – no variants

27 – P45 does not read δε after λέγω (-2)

27 – P45 does not read πάση (-4)

28 – P45 transposes:  σήμερον τον χόρτον οντα

28 – P45 reads αμφιέζει (agrees with NA27)

28 – P45 reads ουν after πόσω (+3)

29 – no variants

30 – P45 reads επιζητει (agreeing with Byz against B and À) instead of επιζητουσιν (+2, -5)

31 – P45 reads του Θυ (agreeing with Byz against B and À) instead of αυτου (+5, -5)

32 – P45 reads ηυδόκησεν instead of ευδόκησεν (+1, -1)

33 – P45 reads ανέκλιπτον instead of ανέκλειπτον (-1)

33 – P45 reads ενγίζει instead of εγγίζει (+1, -1)

Sub-totals:  P45 contains 37 non-original letters, and is missing 26 original letters. 

Total amount of letters’ worth of alterations:  63.

Totals (without orthographic variants in the equation):  P45 contains 33 non-original letters, and is missing 22 original letters.  Total amount of letters’ worth of alterations: 55.

Luke 12:24b-25 in Codex K
(with verse-numbers added)

            Now let’s compare the same passage in Codex K:

23 – K omits γαρ before ψυχη (-3)

23 – K reads εστι instead of εστιν (-1)

24 – K reads τρεφη instead of τρεφει (+1, -2)

24 – [In K, the ι in πετεινων appears to have been added as a correction.]  (-1)

25 – K transposes:  προσθειναι επι την ηλικίαν αυτου

25 – K reads ενα at the end of the verse (+3)

26 – K reads ουτε instead of ουδε  (+1, -1)

27 – no variants

28 – K transposes and adds:  σήμερον εν τω αγρω οντα (+2)

28 – K reads αμφιεννυσι instead of αμφιεζει (+5, -3)

29 – K reads η instead of και (agreeing with P75) (+1, -3)

30 – K reads επιζητει instead of επιζητουσιν (+2, -5)

31 – K reads του Θυ instead of αυτου (+5, -5)

31 – K reads παντα after ταυτα (+5)

32 – no variants

33 – no variants

Sub-totals:  Codex K has 25 non-original letters, and is missing 24 original letters.  Total amount of letters’ worth of alteration:  49.

Without itacisms and benign consonant-exchanges in the equation, K’s text contains 23 non-original letters, and is missing 20 original letters.  Total amount of letters’ worth of alteration: 43.  (The total drops to 42 if we don’t include that correction in verse 24.)

            Codex K wins:  the score is 63 to 49 with all variants considered, and the score is 55 to 43 with accommodation given to orthographic variation.  (Each point is one letter’s worth of deviation from the original text; the lower score wins.)

            This tells us some things about the relative rates of variation in the transmission-lines that produced P45 and Codex Cyprius.  If we put the production-date of the Gospel of Luke in A.D. 62, and the production-date of P45 in 225, then the copyists in P45’s transmission-line introduced .3 letters’ worth of deviation every year, not counting merely orthographic changes.  In comparison, positing the production-date of Codex Cyprius at 850, the copyists in K’s transmission-line introduced .055 letters’ worth of deviation every year, not counting merely orthographic changes.  In other words, the copyists in K’s transmission-line introduced 5.5 times fewer deviations each year, on average, than the copyists in P45’s transmission-line.

            Interesting though it may be to thus see that a manuscript from the 800s has a better text of Luke 12:23-33 than a manuscript from the 200s (using the Nestle-Aland text as the basis of comparison – if the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform were used for the comparison instead, Codex K’s text would be nearly identical to it), some other data may be even more intriguing: 

● P45, K, and Byz (i.e., the Byzantine Text) do not include γὰρ in v. 23.

● P45, K, and Byz all transpose to read προσθειναι ἐπὶ τὴν ἡλικίαν αὐτου in v. 25.

● P45, K, and Byz all read ἐπιζητει instead of ἐπιζητουσιν in v. 30. 

● P45, K, and Byz all read του Θεου (or του Θυ) instead of αυτου in v. 31.

Thus, in these eleven verses, the Byzantine Text is allied with an early papyrus in four places against the Alexandrian reading.  In three of these four cases, the Byzantine reading is not in agreement with the Western reading in Codex D either.  This data implies that Hort’s approach, which was based on the theory that non-Alexandrian, non-Western readings did not exist before the late 200s or early 300s, was fundamentally flawed.  As of the publication of the text of Papyrus 45, it was no longer tenable.  Yet virtually the same compilation that Hort made in 1881 (with only about 660 differences) continues to be the standard New Testament base-text for modern versions such as the NIV, ESV, CSB, and NRSV – largely because the implications of the readings of the papyri discovered in the 1900s have not been clearly thought through.      

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

Mark 9:29 - Conclusion: "and fasting" is Original

From this review of the evidence, it seems clear that the text of Mark 9:29 with και νηστεια was read throughout the early church, even in Egypt, as far as can be confirmed by the external evidence.  It also seems clear that a theological impetus can readily be provided for the excision of these two words:  orthodox copyists with a high Christology would be taken aback by the implication, real or imagined, that Jesus needed to fast in order to successfully exorcise a particular kind of demon.  It would not be hard to foresee that an unbelieving critic of the faith, coming into possession of a copy of Mark with και νηστεια in 9:29, would raise the question, “Why did Jesus, the Son of God, if he is superior to angels, need to fast in order to get some fallen angels to do as he told them?”  A bold copyist with an apologetic agenda could convince himself that the words must be a corruption, and on that basis decline to perpetuate them.

A slightly more complex apologetic rationale for scribal excision also may have existed:  in parts of the early church represented by the tradition expressed in Apostolic Constitutions, regular fasts were to be observed on Wednesdays and Fridays, and fasting was to be avoided on Mondays, Thursdays, and Sundays.  The fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays were said to commemorate Christ’s betrayal and His sufferings.  But this may have provoked a question:  what regular fasts did Jesus observe, before His betrayal and sufferings?  Without the words και νηστεια in Mark 9:29, there is no evidence in Mark that Jesus regularly fasted during His ministry.  The question would thus be rendered superfluous.

A copyist driven by a similar apologetic motive could remove the words in order to lower the risk that an unbelieving critic might pose a question such as the following:  Jesus affirmed in Matthew 11:19 that he came eating and drinking.  How, therefore, did he cast out a demon which can only be exorcised with prayer and fasting?

A much simpler explanation is also at hand:  και νηστεια could be lost via a parableptic error elicited by homoeoteleuton.  That is, an early copyist who was not familiar with the text accidentally skipped from the και in Mark 9:29 before νηστεια to the και at the beginning of Mark 9:30, thus carelessly losing the two words in between.  The possibility of this kind of mistake might not naturally occur to readers of printed texts in which Mark 9:30 begins with κακειθεν, but when reading Codex W (from Egypt), in which Mark 9:30 begins with the non-contracted και εκειθεν, the possibility must be acknowledged. 

The very same kind of careless mistake has caused the loss of και ανεσθη at the end of Mark 9:27 in Codex W, in Old Latin k (which, besides being the only Latin witness for the non-inclusion of και νηστεια in 9:29, is probably the most unreliable extant manuscript of the Gospel of Mark in any language), and in the Peshitta; according to the NA-27 apparatus this is also the likely reading of P45, which suggests that at this point Codex W and P45 echo an ancestor.

In a contest between the early church’s Christology, and the early church’s customs regarding fasting, the former had a much heavier impact on scribal habits.  Copyists were far more likely to remove a short phrase which (they reasoned) risked giving the impression that Jesus was unable to exorcise certain demons without fasting previously, than they were to insert a short phrase which would risk giving readers exactly that impression. 

If και νηστεια was not accidentally lost (or, if it was, and subsequent copyists in Egypt faced exemplars with rival readings in Mark 9:29), the perceived scandal at the thought that the King of angels needed to fast in order to exorcise a certain kind of demon, was enough to convince an early copyist in Egypt that the responsible thing to do was to protect readers from misinterpreting the text by removing the problematic words (or, if the words had already been accidentally lost, and a copyist faced rival readings in his exemplars, this line of reasoning would be a major basis for the adoption of the shorter reading). 

I would also draw attention to the reading of Codex B in the subsequent verse, 9:30.  Instead of παρεπορευοντο, B* reads επορευοντο.  (So does D.)  B*’s reading was adopted by Hort and Tregelles, but their judgment has been rejected by subsequent textual critics.  Figuring that παρεπορευοντο is indeed the original text in 9:30, the reading in Codex B may be considered evidence that the text of B in this passage has undergone editing, which may have included theologically motivated editing.