Book Review: Textual Criticism of the Bible (Anderson & Widder)

            Seminary students unfamiliar with New Testament textual criticism may learn a lot from Textual Criticism of the Bible, by Amy Anderson and Wendy Widder, recently published by Lexham Press.  (The same volume includes an introduction to the textual criticism of the Old Testament – but since my research-specialty is in New Testament textual criticism, this review is not intended to address the portions about the Old Testament; this review does not cover the third chapter, which concentrates on the textual criticism of the Old Testament.)  Novices should be cautioned, however, that they would learn just enough to be dangerous if they were to stop with this book.

            In chapter 1, a scant eight pages are sufficient to define textual criticism, to describe the distinct goals of textual criticism, and to illustrate the need for its existence.  Readers will notice here the authors’ use of the novel term “Ausgangstext,” defined as “the ancient form of the text that is the ancestor of all extant copies, the beginning of the manuscript tradition.”         

Chapter 2, An Overview of Textual Criticism, includes a helpful tour of examples of different kinds of scribal corruptions, from the Old Testament and the New Testament.  Haplography, parablepsis, conflation, glosses, metathesis, and harmonizations are among the error-inducing mechanisms that are covered.  (Conflations are incorrectly described as “common” in the Byzantine Text on p. 117.)  

Readers who approach this chapter expecting to learn about the excellence of Codex Vaticanus may be surprised at some of the examples given:  although Alexandrian readings are favored in Mark 1:2, Luke 23:17, Luke 24:53 and I Tim. 3:16, readings found in Vaticanus in John 17:5, Mark 3:16, Acts 19:34, and First Thessalonians 2:7 are presented as examples of scribal errors.  (I think.  The authors seem undecided in some cases; in the discussion about Mark 3:16 on page 24, it is not easy to tell which reading is preferred by the authors.)  In most cases, external evidence is only frugally described; a paragraph on John 5:3-4, for example, fails to mention Tertullian’s support for the passage. 

Although several mistakes in the text of Codex Vaticanus are used as examples of scribal errors, the appeal to “the oldest and best manuscripts” is made repeatedly in this chapter, and “the oldest and best manuscripts’ can safely be understood to mean “Codex Vaticanus and whatever happens to agree with it.”  Readers might wonder how it is that the best manuscripts contain some of the worst errors.

Similarly some readers may feel misled by the following statement on pages 12-13:  “Those variation units that affect the meaning of a biblical text are found in the footnotes of any good English Bible.  Even these variants do not affect doctrine or theology.”  This is misleading on two levels.  First, it is misleading because the textual footnotes in most English translations are minimal:  consider that the NASB has only one textual footnote in Jude; the ESV has one; the CSB has five; meanwhile, the number of meaning-affecting textual differences between the Byzantine Text and the Nestle-Aland compilation in Jude is twelve.  Do the authors think that the NASB and ESV and CSB are not good English Bibles?  Second, it is misleading because textual variations that affect doctrine exist.  For example, the doctrine of inerrancy would be wrecked if the reading found in Matthew 27:49 in “the earliest and best manuscripts” were to be placed in the text.

The chapter concludes with a brief review of basic principles of textual criticism, and fortunately this includes the key principle that that the reading that best explains the origin of its rivals is to be preferred.  Unfortunately it also includes the idea that “The reading found in the oldest manuscripts” should be preferred; this canon should be reworded to include not only manuscripts, but all forms of external evidence, and it should be qualified by mentioning that this canon gives an edge to evidence found in Egypt, inasmuch as the low-humidity climate there allowed papyrus to survive longer than elsewhere. 

Worse than this, however, is the authors’ endorsement of lectio brevior (prefer the shorter reading).  Only readers careful enough to consult the footnotes will notice a heavy qualification that this principle has been challenged and empirically reversed in research on some early manuscripts by James Royse.  No means are offered by which to verify the authors’ assertion that lectio brevior is nevertheless a valid criterion for later documents; recent research by Alan Taylor Farnes indicates that the authors are wrong, and that even in later manuscripts neither the length nor the brevity of a reading should be used as an indicator of genuineness.

Chapter 4 – Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism – serves the same purpose as similar sections of Bruce Metzger’s The Text of the New Testament, describing early scholarship in the field (beginning with patristic writers, and continuing to the present day) and manuscripts, versions, and patristic evidence.  Some significant researchers, and some significant witnesses, have been left unmentioned.  Bengel and Griesbach are mentioned, but not Bentley and Scrivener.  Codices Π, Κ, and Σ receive no special attention. 

Readers will learn on page 116 that the early papyri demonstrate a “careful scribal tradition” but when they read page 127 they will also learn that in the early papyri, “errors and changes” may be “fairly common.”  This might confuse beginners who may not understand how the best manuscripts can be riddled with mistakes. 

It was a little disappointing that Amy Anderson, who has done some detailed research about family-1, did not say more about this cluster of manuscripts; there is not even a list of its core members.  Its text has received a slight chronological upgrade, although the confidence with which it is made has not:  whereas Metzger described it as a text which appears to go back to the third and fourth centuries, here the agreements of minuscules 1 and 1582 are considered likely to be the text of the archetype of the group, which is thought to represent a text from the third century.

Very little is said about lectionaries, and nothing is said about amulets, and nothing is said about conjectural emendations – just the opposite of what should have happened, considering the significant research on these subjects that has occurred since Metzger wrote his introduction. 

Versions are given surprisingly little attention – so little that one can only imagine that the authors foresee that their readers are likely to have Metzger’s book about versions on the shelf; otherwise they will not learn anything about the Gothic, Armenian and Georgian versions, or the Peshitta, in this chapter, except that they exist.  The description of the Sinaitic Syriac and Curetonian Syriac should be changed, lest readers conclude that these manuscripts, rather than the texts they contain, are “possibly dating back to the early third century.”

In a brief review of modern editions of the Greek text of the New Testament, a bias in favor of the Nestle-Aland compilation is not entirely concealed; the Nestle-Aland compilation is called “eclectic” even though it is very heavily Alexandrian.  Metzger’s chapter From Griesbach to the Present is superior to the too-concise review here in all respects except one:  Anderson is up-to-date, and includes sections on the Byzantine Textform compiled by Robinson and Pierpont, the SBLGNT compiled by Michael Holmes, and the Tyndale House edition of the Greek New Testament.  (It is only via a quotation from the preface to the Tyndale House compilation that Samuel Tregelles is mentioned at all in this book; he (like Scrivener and Burgon) was completely passed over in the section on New Testament textual criticism in the late seventeenth century to the present.) 

The Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform is mistreated in this book.  First, the authors associate it with KJV-Onlyism, even though Dr. Maurice Robinson, co-editor, has plainly dismissed KJV-Onlyism as a flawed position.  Second, rather than utilize statements from advocates of Byzantine Priority (except for a 24-word quotation from Hodges and Farstad), the authors have turned to Philip Comfort and Daniel Wallace to describe it.  This is patently unfair (especially because the essays by Wallace on the subject – mentioned in a footnote – contain more than their fair share of specious reasoning and mistakes). 

It did not go unnoticed that the authors mention, on page 148, that in the Tyndale House edition (2017), the books of the New Testament are arranged in the order Gospels-Acts-Catholic Epistles-Pauline Epistles – Revelation.  Why was this not also said about the 2005 Byzantine Textform, which also arranges the text this way?  I cannot help wondering, Did the authors not bother to read the Byzantine Textform enough to notice? Similarly, the authors mention that the SBLGNT is online – but so is the Byzantine Text; why was this not mentioned?

Continuing:  readers are told (p. 121) that the discovery of the papyri “provided scholars with new evidence to confirm or refine Westcott and Hort’s findings.”  Perhaps a more candid description would add, “and refute,” inasmuch as Hort’s assumptions that distinctly Byzantine readings are all late, and that conflations imply lateness, and that some shorter readings in Codex D (Western Non-interpolations) are original, were opposed by the data from the early papyri (see Sturz, The Byzantine Text-type and New Testament Textual Criticism, for details).    

 As chapter 4 concludes, the authors take readers on a tour of selected variant units, and this section serves (as its sub-title indicates) as a lesson in How To Do New Testament Textual Criticism.  Along the way, readers are introduced to the various symbols that can be found in the Nestle-Aland compilation (such as º and ^□ and ^┬).  The main variant-units covered are in Ephesians 1:1, John 3:32, Mark 1:2, First Thessalonians 2:7, Luke 4:4, Revelation 1:8, and Romans 5:2. 

This section is unsatisfactory in several ways:

● First, lectio brevior continues to be used as if it is a valid premise. 

● Second, parts of this section just restate what has already been stated:  compare for example page 45 – “The reading that best explains the origin of the other readings is probably original” – with page 158 in this section:  “If you can explain how one variant led to the occurrence of the other variants, that variant is the most probable Augsgangstext.” 

● Third, the section is not really a lesson in how to do textual criticism; it is a lesson in how to let Bruce Metzger posthumously do your textual criticism.  For example, in the portion about Mark 1:2, witnesses that are not mentioned in the Nestle-Aland or UBS apparatuses are treated as if they do not exist.  Variants that are not mentioned in the Nestle-Aland or UBS apparatuses are treated as if they do not exist.  An appeal is made (on behalf of the Alexandrian reading) that “the citing habit of ancient times” account for the reading “in Isaiah the prophet,” without anything to verify that ancient citation-habits actually do this.  The authors attempt to excuse the reading “in Isaiah the prophet” by theorizing that Mark “may not have had any access at all to copies of OT books.”  Seriously?  Finally, the authors propose that “It is much more difficult to imagine a later scribe changing τοῖς προφήταις to τῷ Ἠσαΐᾳ τῷ προφήτῃ” – but there is an abundance of evidence that copyists tended to make citation-sources more specific, not more generalized – supplying a prophet’s name (and in some instances the wrong name) when the reference in the original text was non-specific.

● Fourth, the authors misrepresent some witnesses as if they are members of textual groups to which they do not really belong.  For example, as the authors discuss the variant-unit in Luke 4:4 they state that the reading chosen by the Nestle-Aland editors is “supported by the Syriac Sinaiticus, Sahidic, and part of the Bohairic.  This group is mainly related to the Alexandrian textual stream.”  The Sinaitic Syriac (I do not know why they described it as the “Syriac Sinaiticus,” which is correct but old-fashioned) is, however, not Alexandrian; as Metzger states in The Text of the New Testament, “In general the Old Syriac version is a representative of the Western type of text.”  This error is compounded when the authors proceed to argue that “only one textual group is represented” in favor of the shorter reading.

● Fifth, although the authors recommend consulting Metzger’s Textual Commentary and commentaries in which the commentators give special attention to text-critical issues, there is no special mention of Wieland Willker’s superior (and free) Textual Commentary on the Greek Gospels, nor of Reuben Swanson’s multi-volume New Testament Greek Manuscripts, in which the exact words of important Greek manuscripts are lined up horizontally and compared line by line, giving readers access to much more data than what is presented in the Nestle-Aland and UBS apparatuses.  Robert Waltz’s online Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism and Alan Bunning’s Center for New Testament Restoration have also gone unmentioned.   

           

            Readers may find useful the inclusion of a list of Resources for Further Study at the end of each chapter.   Strangely, David Alan Black’s New Testament Textual Criticism:  A Concise Guide and Philip Comfort’s Encountering the Manuscripts are in the list in chapter two and in chapter four – with two different descriptions.  J. Scott Porter’s 1848 Principles of Textual Criticism is in the list for chapter 2; readers may find it interesting that J. Scott Porter was also the author of Twelve Lectures on Unitarianism, in which he attempted to use textual criticism as a weapon in his battle against the doctrine of the deity of Christ; meanwhile Scrivener’s A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament has gone unmentioned.    

The glossary at the end of the book is helpful, but it would be more helpful if it included a few more entries, and did not display a slight bias in favor of the Alexandrian Text.

In closing:  while Anderson and Widder’s book is ten times better than the recently escaped Fundamentals of New Testament Textual Criticism by Porter and Pitts, it may serve readers best as an update to Metzger’s Text of the New Testament than as a stand-alone introduction, generally echoing the same pro-Alexandrian approach and assumptions.  New Testament researchers with access to Metzger’s Text of the New Testament and the online materials by Wieland Willker and Robert Waltz may consider it superfluous.       

P.S.  The word “critic” is missing in line 10 on page 43.  Also, contrary to the list on page 140, minuscule 1424 is no longer housed in Chicago; it was returned to Greece in 2016.

Glossary of Textual Criticism: A-C

“Understandest thou what thou readest?”

That was Philip’s question to the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:30, as rendered in the KJV.  Every field of scientific study involves some specialized terms, or jargon, which might initially be difficult to understand, and New Testament textual criticism is no exception.  It is easier when you know the jargon.  Gary Dykes has made a very thorough dictionary of terms that pertain to textual criticism and manuscript-production that can be read at http://www.biblical-data.org/TC_stuf/definitions.html .  (You might have to cut-and-past the address in your browser.)  The website of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library offers a helpful multi-part review of terminology relevant to the study of Latin manuscripts.  The British Library’s online glossary of terms used in its descriptions of illuminated manuscripts is also informative.  Robert Waltz’s Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism includes a very thorough review of the terminology used in this field.  Here is the first of several parts of a concise introductory list of some of the technical terms used in New Testament textual criticism, with their definitions.   

Alexandrian Text:  The form of New Testament text which was dominant in Egypt in the early church, displayed most accurately by Codex Vaticanus and the early Sahidic version.  Since papyrus tends to naturally rot away except in low-humidity climates such as the climate of Egypt, almost all surviving papyrus manuscripts – especially the ones found as the result of excavations in or near Oxyrhynchus, Egypt – support the Alexandrian Text.  Where Alexandrian readings deviate from the Byzantine Text, the Alexandrian reading frequently has internal characteristics that commend it as original.  In some cases, however, Alexandrian variants can be plausibly attrributed to scribal carelessness and conscious editing.  The Nestle-Aland compilation of the Greek New Testament, the primary basis for most modern English versions (the ESV, CSB, NIV, NLT, etc.) is mainly based on the Alexandrian Text.    

 

Yellow arcs (added) accompany
Section-numbers and
 Canon-numbers  in the margin
of this Gospels-manuscript.

Ammonian Sections:  The segments into which the text of the Gospels was divided for identification in the cross-reference system developed by Eusebius of Caesarea.  There are 355 sections in Matthew, 234 in Mark, 343 in Luke, and 232 in John – at least, these are typical.  This system of text-segmentation is named after Ammonius of Alexandria, who, according to Eusebius in his letter Ad Carpianus (which often precedes the Canon-Tables), developed a cross-referencing method in which the text of Matthew was supplemented by the parallel-passages, or the numbers of parallel-passages, in the other Gospels.  It was Eusebius, however, who developed the Sections as we know them, for they cover passages in Mark, Luke, and John that are not paralleled in Matthew.

            In very many Gospels-manuscripts, the Section-numbers appear in the margin alongside the text, accompanied by the canon-number (written below it, separated by a horizontal line).  The numerals are typically written in red.  It is not unusual to see that in the text itself, the first letter on the first line after the beginning of a Section is given special treatment – either by being written larger, or by being written in different ink (often red) slightly to the left of the left margin, or both.    

Bifolio:  A sheet of writing-material (whether parchment, or papyrus, or paper), vertically folded in the middle so as to form four pages upon which text could be written.  Typically, groups of four bifolium were combined – picture a stack of four flat sheets; then picture them vertically folded, all at once, so as to form a small blank 16-page book.  Such a 16-page book is called a quire, or quaternion.  (Quires could take other forms – consisting of different numbers of sheets – and could be supplemented and repaired in a variety of ways.) 

Another way to picture a quire is as a booklet consisting of eight leaves, or folios, each leaf consisting of the front (recto) and back (verso) of half of a bifolio.  To prepare books large enough to contain all four Gospels, or large enough to contain the book of Acts and the Epistles, or even the entire New Testament, quires were sewn together to make a multi-quire codex.  Not all quires consisted of only four sheets – for example, Papyrus 45 is a single-quire codex; all its sheets were laid flat in a single stack before being sewn together.      

Breves:  chapter-summaries, especially those that appear in Latin manuscripts.  Some forms of breves appear to have originated very early in the Old Latin transmission-line, including one form – developed in the mid-200s or slightly thereafter – that includes a reference to the pericope adulterae (John 7:53-8:11, which is absent from most early Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of John) in its usual location in the text of John.   

Byzantine Text:  The Greek text of the New Testament that is supported by a strong majority of manuscripts, as represented in the Byzantine Textform compiled by Robinson and Pierpont.   This form of the text was dominant in Constantinople and its environs (i.e., Byzantium) from the 400s onward.  Many Byzantine readings are supported by patristic testimony from the 300s and earlier; the Gothic version and the Peshitta version also provide strong (but not uniform) support for the Byzantine Text. Compared to the Alexandrian Text, the Byzantine Text tends to be longer and easier to understand.  This is, however, a general description; there are variant-units in which the Alexandrian reading is longer.

            When Westcott and Hort issued the 1881 Revised Text, Hort maintained that all distinctly Byzantine readings (which he described as “Syrian,” reckoning that the core of the Byzantine Text had previously been developed at Antioch, in Syria) should be rejected, on the grounds that the Byzantine Text as a whole was the product of a recension, that is, a carefully edited form of the text made by someone – perhaps Lucian of Antioch – whose editorial work consisted of selecting variants from exemplars drawn from Alexandrian and Western transmission-lines.  Readings that deviated from the Alexandrian and Western variants, Hort theorized, must have originated in the mind of the editor who produced the Antiochan text.  Since Hort proceeded to reject the Western Text as having been thoroughly contaminated by expansions, the 1881 Revised Text was almost 100% Alexandrian at points where these three major forms of the text disagree – and distinctly Byzantine readings, despite being supported by almost all surviving Greek manuscripts, were very few and far between.

            Hort’s theory, however, was greatly weakened by the discovery – in papyrus manuscripts which had been excavated in Egypt, and which appeared to have been produced before or during the lifetime of Lucian of Antioch – of readings which did not agree with the flagship manuscripts of the Alexandrian Text, nor with the Western Text.  This implied that whatever the origins of every distinctive Byzantine reading might be, they could not all have originated during the undertaking of a recension made in the late 200s or early 300s, because at least some distinctive Byzantine readings already existed at that time.  If the Lucianic recension ever happened, it had to involve the consultation of not only Alexandrian and Western exemplars, but also exemplars containing at least some Byzantine readings – in which case, Hort’s basis for rejecting all distinctive Byzantine readings falls to the ground. 

            Nevertheless, even after the discovery of distinctive Byzantine readings in Egyptian papyri, the heavily Alexandrian Revised Text continued to be promoted, especially in Nestle’s Novum Testamentum Graece, and in the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament, which are the primary base-texts currently used by most translators.  In A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, author Bruce Metzger – a member of the UBS compilation-committee – defended over 1,000 rejections of Byzantine readings that have an impact on translation.

Caesarean Text:  The form of the text of the Gospels displayed in manuscripts 1582, 1, and some Armenian and Georgian manuscripts.  The testimony of manuscripts 1 and 1582 is augmented by support from an assortment of other manuscripts including 118, 131, and 209).  Researcher Kirsopp Lake established that the distinct readings shared by 1, 118, 131, and 209 descend from a shared ancestor in 1901 in the volume Codex 1 of the Gospels and Its Allies.  (The recognition of 1582 as a member of the same family – and as its best Greek representative – came later).  This cluster of Greek manuscripts is called family 1,  and is generally (but not always) characterized by its members’ unusual treatment of the pericope adulterae:  the passage is put after the end of John 21, having been uprooted and transplanted as the note in 1 and 1582 explains: 

“The chapter about the adulteress:  in the Gospel according to John, this does not appear in the majority of copies; nor is it commented upon by the divine fathers whose interpretations have been preserved – specifically, by John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria; nor is it taken up by Theodore of Mopsuestia and the others.  For this reason, it was not kept in the place where it is found in a few copies, at the beginning of the 86th chapter [that is, the 86th Eusebian Section], following, ‘Search and see that a prophet does not arise out of Galilee.’”

            The Caesarean Text is also notable for referring to “Jesus Barabbas” in Matthew 27:16-17.   Advocates of the genuineness of this reading argue that early Christians suppressed it, considering it to be embarrassing that a criminal such as Barabbas had the same name as the Messiah.  Others have noted that appearance of the name “Jesus in this passage may have originated when an early scribe accidentally repeated the letters ΙΝ at the end of the word ϒΜΙΝ in verse 17, and this was misunderstood as the contraction for the word Ιησους (that is, “Jesus”). 

            It is evident that a Caesarean Text exists for all four Gospels.  It is less evident that there is a Caesarean Text of Acts and the Epistles; however, minuscule 1739 represents a distinct transmission-line, and it was copied by the same copyist who made minuscule 1582, so this should not be ruled out.  

Cancel-sheet:  a parchment sheet, folded in the middle and written on both sides, so as to constitute four pages of a manuscript, made to replace the work of the main copyist.  The most well-known examples of cancel-sheets are in Codex Sinaiticus, including the bifolium that contains Mark 14:54-Luke 1:76 (without Mark 16:9-20).       

Catena:  A commentary consisting of a series of comments by patristic authors who accompanies the Biblical text.  Unlike commentaries written by a single author, a catena combines extracts from the writings of several authors, forming a chain (Latin:  catena) of comments.  The identity of the writer being quoted is sometimes, but not always, written in the vicinity of his comments.  The earliest known Greek catena is in Codex Zacynthius (040, Ξ), an incomplete copy of the Gospel of Luke.

           

Codex (plural:  Codices):  A handmade book. 

Colophon:  a note added to the text of a manuscript.  The contents of such notes can vary; the most useful colophons are those which mention the year and location where the manuscript was produced.  They may also convey the name of the scribe, the name of the patron who sponsored the manuscript’s production, and even declare a curse against whoever might think about taking the manuscript away from the library to which it was entrusted. 

Commentary manuscripts:  A manuscript in which the text of a commentary by one individual accompanies the Biblical text.  Such material is similar to a catena, especially since although a commentary may be written by a single individual, that individual may make free and generous use of the works of other commentators, sometimes acknowledging his source and sometimes not.  As Robert Waltz mentions in his article on Commentaries in the online Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism, manuscripts with commentaries tended to have one of two forms:  one in which the commentary frames the text, and one in which segments of the text and segments of the commentary alternate.  Frame-commentaries were capable of accompanying texts unrelated to the commentary itself; alternating-commentaries, meanwhile, were always copied at the same time as the Scripture-text they accompany.  For this reason, whenever the same alternating-commentaries accompany the same text, their testimony should be “boiled down,” so to speak, to the testimony of their shared ancestor.

            Some commentaries were more popular than others.  For the Gospel of Matthew, John Chrysostom’s commentary was most popular; for Mark, the Catena-Commentary of Victor of Antioch (a.k.a. the Catena in Marcum) was widely disseminated (and sometimes wrongly attributed to other authors/compilers such as Cyril of Alexandria or Peter of Laodicea).  The commentary of Titus of Bostra was the dominant commentary on Luke.  And for the Gospel of John, copies of both the commentary by John Chrysostom and the commentary by Theophylact are abundant; the latter appears mainly in the alternating format.  Among the other commentators whose work accompanies the New Testament text in some manuscripts are Andreas of Caesarea (in specially formatted copies of Revelation), Andreas the Presbyter (in some copies of Acts and the Epistles),  Oecumenius, and Euthymius Zigabenus.        

Conflation:  a reading which is a combination of two earlier readings.  The presence of conflations implies that the text containing them emerged later than the text that contains its component-parts.  Eight apparent conflations in the Byzantine Text of the Gospels, comprised of component-parts that appear to be combinations of component-parts consisting of Alexandrian and Western readings, were a major part of Hort’s case against the Byzantine Text. 

            However, conflations appear in major representatives of all text-types, not just in the Byzantine Text.  In Codex Sinaiticus, in John 13:24, where the Alexandrian Text reads και λεγει αυτω ειπε τις εστιν and the Byzantine Text reads πυθεσθαι τις αν ειη, Sinaiticus’ text appears to combine those two phrases, reading πυθεσθαι τις αν ειη περι ου ελεγεν, και λεγει αυτω ειπε τις εστιν.  A conflation also appears in Codex Vaticanus at Colossians 1:12:  the Western Text reads καλεσαντι, the Byzantine Text reads ικανωσαντι, and Vaticanus reads καλεσαντι και ικανωσαντι, a combination of the Western and Byzantine readings.  And in Codex D, a conflation appears in John 5:37:  the Alexandrian Text (supported by Papyrus 75) reads has εκεινος μεμαρτυρηκεν, and the the Byzantine Text (supported by Papyrus 66) reads αυτος μεμαρτυρηκεν; the reading in Codex Bezae is εκεινος αυτος μεμαρτυρηκεν and this is precisely what would be produced by a copyist wishing to preserve two different readings in two different exemplars.

            Researcher Wilbur Pickering, in Appendix D of his book The Identity of the New Testament Text, investigates several more cases of apparent conflation in non-Byzantine manuscripts; while some of his examples are capable of more than one explanation, it seems sufficiently clear that the appearance of conflations in a manuscript or text-type cannot validly condemn the entire text-type as late or as posterior to other text-types.

Conjectural emendation:  A reading which is proposed as original but is not supported in any extant Greek manuscript.  The apparatus of the 27^th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece mentioned many of these from a wide variety of sources, but only one was adopted in the text (in Acts 16:12).  In the 28^th edition, all mentions of conjectural emendations were removed from the apparatus – and one conjectural emendation was adopted into the text of Second Peter 3:10, altering the meaning of the sentence.   

[Continued]