Is GA 2021 Part of the Same Manuscript as GA 1848?

Working on a footnote for the forthcoming Textual Commentary on the Tyndale House Greek NT, I was doing a little digging into the manuscript collection of Paul Pétau. Mill used three manuscripts from this collection for his edition of the Greek New Testament, which he labels as Pet. 1., Pet. 2., and Pet. 3. 

Pet. 1. seems fairly clearly to be the same as, Nederland Leiden Universitaire Bibliotheken Voss. gr. Q° 77, GA 328, Diktyon 38184. Pet. 3. also seems to be fairly clearly the same as Vaticano Città del Vaticano Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) Reg. gr. 179, GA 181 + GA 2819, Diktyon 66348, a manuscript used by Zacagni for his edition of the Euthalian apparatus. 

Unfortunately, Pet. 2., the manuscript I actually wanted to identify, has proved rather harder to track down. By Tischendorf’s day, it had already disappeared. In the prolegomena to Tischendorf’s edition, written by Gregory, it is noted that “hodie latet” (now missing). Despite this, Tischendorf seems to have cited this manuscript from Mill’s edition, using the numbers 39 for Acts and the Catholics, 45 for Paul, and 11 for Revelation. The reading of greatest interest is, of course, Revelation 13:18, where Mill notes that Pet. 2. reads χιϛ, or 616. Unfortunately, I was not able to track down any manuscript with this reading. 

However, it was this research that lead me to GA 1848. This manuscript, which was also once part of the Petau collection, has been divided into a large number of individual volumes, now divided between the BNF and the Vatican. BNF Grec 108, 109, 110, 111 and BAV Reg. gr. 76 are all known to be a part of this same manuscript, which was copied by Georgios Hermonymus in the late 15th century. 

BAV Reg. gr. 68] (GA 2021) has the same copyist, also comes from the Pétau collection (according to Xavier Rincel’s dissertation). On examining the images side by side, they also share a number of distinctive formatting features, including a rubricated running title, large gaps for initials (mostly not filled in), and general mise-en-page.

According to the Liste, GA 1848 is a copy of GA 467, also copied by Georgios, and which has a very similar layout. Since GA 467 contains Revelation, if GA 1848 is a copy, it seems reasonable to suppose that it also would have contained Revelation. Given that GA 2021, in addition to all the other features, has been bound into the same miniature volumes as the different portions of GA 1848, it is very likely part of the same manuscript. If this is confirmed by other researchers, the two should be linked together in the Liste. 

When I initially discovered this, I had hopes that GA 2021 would prove to be the missing Pet. 2. However, a quick cross-referencing of of the Sonder- and Singulär- lesarten in the TuT of GA 2021 with the readings of Pet. 2. in Mill’s apparatus, as well as a few checks of the readings of Mill in GA 2021 itself, did not reveal any significant correspondences, leaving Pet. 2. “hodie latet” in our day, as it was in Gregory’s. 

Bates Reviews New Book on the Origins of Greek Minuscule

For those who don’t know Clark Bates, he wrote his ThM thesis under my supervision on the origin of minuscule script. I learned a lot from his research. He has gone on to finish his PhD at the University of Birmingham (UK) on catena MSS. In the latest issue of The Byzantine Review, he has a substantive review of a new book on that subject. Here is how the review starts:

It is not very often that one has occasion to review a work that disrupts,challenges, and refutes one’s own earlier research and suppositions. Neither is it often that such disruption is well-received. Nina Sietis’s recentmonograph on the origin of the ‘Studite Minuscule’ has provided me withboth opportunities.

Well, that got my attention! He goes on:

In this thoroughgoing and well-written book, Sietis offers readers an outline of the institution of the Studios Monastery andthe biography of its most influential abbot, Theodore, as well as a comprehensive analysis of the research related to the development of the literary minuscule script often associated with the same monastery and abbot. The historical and paleographical details of the first volume are accompaniedand amplified by a catalogue of Studite manuscripts in the second one. Because most researchers will probably engage with Volume I, I will devote most of my review to it but reserve some comments for the catalogue of Volume II.

Sietis’s book is in two volumes, the first of which is open access. But for those of us who can’t read Italian or can’t read it well, you will want to read Clark’s review to get a good sense of the book’s argument. I will be among those who need to update my lecture notes accordingly.

Updated Essential Works in New Testament Textual Criticism

I have just started to update our most popular blogpost ever, the bibliography on the Top Ten Essential Works in New Testament Texual Criticism. Yes, it has now surpassed Elijah Hixson's magnificent piece on First-Century Mark as well as Peter William's breaking news on the archaelogical discovery of Q (I am thankful to see that someone added a disclaimer "THIS POST IS A JOKE FOR APRIL FOOLS DAY!"). In any case, I just added in some few new entries to the bibliography, two of which got an asterisk (among the top ten). But there are many more to add. Do you have any suggestions? Leave them in the comments!

Introductions and surveys

• *Crawford, Sidney White, and Tommy Wasserman, eds. The Oxford Handbook on Textual Criticism of the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025.
• *Quarles, Charles, New Testament Textual Criticism for the 21st Century: A Practical Guide. Peabody: Hendrickson, 2025.
  

Current trends views and debates

• Holmes, Michael W. "New Testament Textual Criticism in 2020." Early Christianity 11.1 (2020): 3–20.

Working with manuscripts

• Lied, Liv Ingeborg and Brent Nongbri. Working with Manuscripts: A Guide for Textual Scholars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025. [This is a general guide, not focused on biblical manuscipts]

Current trends in dating NT papyri

• Nongbri, Brent. God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. [A provocative monograph summarizing Nongbri's several challenges to narrow and too early dating of the papyri].
• Wasserman, Tommy. “Beyond Palaeography: Text, Paratext and Dating of Early Christian Papyri.” Pages 151–162 in The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri at Ninety:Literature, Papyrology, Ethics (open access). Edited by Garrick V. Allen, et al. Manuscripta Biblica 10. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2023. [This chapter contains a response to some of Nonbgri's challenges and emphasizes the continuity between Christian and Jewish scribal cultures.]

Scribal habits

• Hixson, Elijah. Scribal Habits in Sixth-Century Greek Purple Codices. NTTSD 61. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
• Malik, Peter. P.Beatty III (P47): The Codex, Its Scribe, and Its Text. NTTSD 52. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
• Mugridge, Alan. Copying Early Christian Texts: A Study of Scribal Practice. WUNT I.362.  Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016.

Practice of NT textual criticism

• *Houghton, H. A. G. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament: A Companion to the Sixth Edition of the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2025.

Conjectural emendation

• Kamphuis, Bart L. F. New Testament Conjectural Emendation in the Nineteenth Century: Jan Hendrik Holwerda as a Pioneer of Method. NTTSD 56. Leiden: Brill, 2018.

Update: I have added Charles Quarles new introduction under Introductions and surveys and marked it with an asterisk.

Ancient Books Website

My thanks to Drew Longacre for drawing my attention to a new web resource on ancient books from William A. Johnson and Nicholas Wagner at Duke. As the website explains:

The Ancient Books Website (ABW) joins a long tradition of open- access tools for papyrological research. The website provides data complementary to those in tools like the Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB), now part of Trismegistos (TM), and the Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri (DCLP). The data captured here are focused on two areas: (1) reconstruction of the physical details of each literary papyrus, and (2) analysis of the scribal features.

Currently, they have two main datasets online that give detail on the physical features and scribal features of bookrolls. Again, from the website:

Physical features. The website provides measurements for width and height (measured or calculated) for features like column, intercolumn, roll, letters, and vertical spacing. 

Scribal features. So far, the website provides synoptic analysis of the punctuation, and of scribal usage for nu-movable and iota adscript. We will be adding to these data over time. 

Datasets for early codices is said to be coming in 2026. 

Darrell Post: Which Sister Sent for Jesus in P66?

The following is a note from Darrell Post on the text and correction of P66 at John 11.3. —Ed.

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One of the more interesting corrections found in P66 came from John 11:3, απεστειλεν ουν μαρ[.]α προς αυτον λεγουσα (“Then Mar[.]a sent to him saying”) written first, then changed to the reading familiar to us, απεστειλαν ουν αι αδελφαι προς αυτον λεγουσαι (“Then the sisters sent to him saying”). 

Which sister was penned in the first writing? The initial mu and alpha are barely visible and the rho is clearly visible. The final alpha was not erased but instead incorporated into the correction as the second alpha in αδελφαι. Elizabeth Schrader Polczer has argued that the original name was “Maria” and this nicely fits her theory that Martha was a second century interpolation. 

But the space between the partially erased rho and the final alpha would be unusually wide for the iota, and in fact is exactly the same width as the space between the same two letters in Martha’s name as written in 11:5. The INTF’s Manuscript Workspace has the best images available for P66, and in the animation below, there are two images that flip back and forth. One is the original image where the theta appears to be hiding behind the phi, and the second is the same image except I have digitally removed the theta. 

The back and forth action between the two enables one to see the place where the theta crossbar started at the left and continued through to touch the alpha on the right. Several portions of the forward slanting oval from the theta are still clearly visible. Furthermore, the later phi was written with a flat top to the circle, suggesting it was inked this way to cover a previously written crossbar. Below the animation is a clip of Martha’s name written in John 11:30 where the style of theta written is a match to the theta in 11:3. These observations might explain why NA28 affirmed the first writing was Martha, whereas prior editions had proposed Maria.

μαρθα at John 11.3 in P66. Images used by permission of the Martin Bodmer Foundation, Geneva.

Update (9/9) from Darrell: The image shown below includes every phi written in John 1 and John 11, surrounding the one in 11:3 (shown within a red box). This enables one to see how the phi was written in a way to conceal a previously written theta crossbar.