Dr. Jac Perrin on Family 13

Jac Perrin has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Family 13 in Saint John’s Gospel,” submitted to the University of Birmingham, and written under the supervision of Prof. D. C. Parker and examined by Profs. Ulrich Schmid and Paul Foster.

Abstract
To date, the single criterion of Family 13 constituency has been the relocation of the Pericope Adulterae from its traditional location in John 7:53. This dissertation demonstrates why this criterion is inadequate and proposes a new criteria.

After an overview of the history of research, potential Family 13 witnesses are classified by means of a methodology originated by Dr. David Parker’s use of Text und Textwert. This process identifies 8 witnesses inappropriately nominated as Family 13 members, thus establishing GA 13, 69, 124, 346, 543, 788, 826, 828, 983, and 1689 as valid members. Each of these 10 witnesses is then described palaeographically as a discrete artefact.

Phylogrammatic software, originally designed for DNA analysis, is then adapted to exhaustively study these Johannine Greek texts. The by-product of this novel process complements and validates the earlier Text und Textwert process. Also available as a result of this study are original witness transcriptions (available at http://www.iohannes.com/family13/), a Critical Apparatus of Family 13 in St. John’s Gospel, an exhaustive description of the contents of 18 potential witnesses, and a description of the computer analysis process used in the study.

As Perrin points out in his thesis, all the 10 valid members of Family 13 are of Calabrian provenance as Abbé Martin has asserted, despite the fact that his specific attempts to localise them are problematic.

Further, Perrin concludes that one of the family members has the Pericope Adulterae in its traditional location in John 7:53 (1689), and not in Luke as other family members, so this cannot be the single criterion for filiality.

Perrin traces three different subgroups of F13 (in concord with Lake’s study of F13 in Mark).  The image below (fig. 63), reproduced with permission, is one way to depict the final stemma (“splits tree cladogram”).

Congratulations to Dr. Jac Perrin!

Update: I have removed reference to a point Perrin makes which seems to be erroneous that “the PA of several other witnesses was in Luke, but their textual content was much closer to the TR than to any F13 member” (p. 277); I cannot find the data to back this up. Perrin’s main point, however, is valid, that the relocation of the PA to Luke (after 21:38) cannot be the single criterion of F13 membership.