Two Recent Articles from Peter Rodgers

Peter Rodgers sends word that he has two new articles in Filología Neotestamentaria. I can’t seem to link to the specific issues or articles, but here are the titles and abstracts. (Update: I’ve added links to Peter’s Academia page where they’re uploaded.)

Mark’s longer ending

Among the theories as to how the Gospel of Mark ended is the proposal that a final page was lost early in its transmission. This article presents evidence to support that theory. Matthew appears to follow Mark closely until 16:8 when our authentic Mark ends abruptly. We may expect him to do so if he has access to Mark’s longer ending. Utilizing C. H. Turner’s article on Marcan usage, we explore several peculiarities of Mark’s style that appear in Matthew 28:9-20. These indicate that Matthew followed Mark as he reshaped the gospel in his own way, but distinctive traces of Mark survived.

The Origins of the Alexandrian Text of the New Testament

The Alexandrian text is generally regarded as the most reliable text form of the New Testament. However, there is reason to suspect that it did not originate in Alexandria. There is a total absence of references to Christians in the documentary papyri before the beginning of the third century. This article argues that the “Alexandrian” text actually originated in Ephesus, a major Christian center in Apostolic and sub-apostolic times. This proposal sheds further light on the text-critical issue at Eph. 1:1.

Just How Much Longer Is Codex Bezae’s Text in Acts?

Acts 1 in Bezae. (Photo)

It’s frequently reported that the text of Acts is longer in the Western text than in the Alexandrian. But just how much longer is it? The most commonly cited number is 8.5%. You’ll find this in Metzger’s Textual Commentary (p. 223 n. 3).

This number comes from F. G. Kenyon’s The Western Text in the Gospels and Acts published in 1939. But, interestingly, this number is not taken from comparing two manuscripts but rather two modern editions. Kenyon compared the text of WH in Acts with that of A. C. Clark. The former is taken as representative of the Alexandrian text and the latter of the Western.

One other comparison I found was in Pete Head’s article on the text of Acts. He compared the text of Codex Bezae with the NA26/UBS3 and found the former to have 800 more words than the latter.

Neither of these comparisons completely satisfied me though. In both cases, the comparison is made with a modern edition. I thought it would be better to compare manuscript with manuscript. To do that, I used two of the leading representatives of the Western and Alexandrian text: Bezae and Sinaiticus. I compared the text of their first hands in all places in Acts where Bezae is extant. (Bezae has lacunae in Acts 8.29–10.14; 21.2–10, 16-18; 22:10–20; 22:29–28.31) It turns out that the difference is minimal and Kenyon’s figures are about the same as mine.

I found that Bezae is about 7.9% longer than Sinaiticus in Acts. The raw numbers are Bezae: 71,872 characters; Sinaiticus: 66,594 characters.

One point about my method: I compared letters rather than words for reasons I’ll explain. The comparison is pretty straightforward. I took the transcriptions of both Sinaiticus and Bezae that are available for free in Logos Bible Software. These in turn come from INTF/ITSEE/IGNTP transcriptions which means their format is very similar. There’s clearly a lot of work behind both so a big thank you to those responsible.

I copied the text from Logos into Word and stripped out extra content like verse numbers, punctuation, quire numbers, running titles, parentheses, ellipses, nomina sacra lines (because Word counted those as characters), etc. Basically, I cut everything out but the letters.

The reason I counted characters is because these transcriptions are on the diplomatic end of the spectrum and that means that many individual words in Sinaiticus are split between lines. Putting all these back together did not seem like a good use of time. So instead I counted characters without spaces. I checked the count with charactercounttool.com.

It’s nice to know that Kenyon’s method didn’t put us far off the mark.

Bible Odyssey Featuring "Alexandrian Text" and "Early Versions"

A year ago or so I was invited to contribute to SBL's project Bible Odyssey which was launched about two months ago. I was told that this week my article on the "Alexandrian Text" is highlighted on the Bible Oddysey home page, together with an article on  "The Earliest Versions and Translations of the Bible" by Brennan Breed and a timeline of "The History of the English Bible" and a newly added videoclip on Early Christian Martyrdom featuring Candida Moss.

Just a week ago, John Kutsko of the SBL sent out a report about the two first months of the website, and it turns out that "People are very interested in ... 'life in first century Galilee' and 'how the Hebrew Bible relates to the ancient Near East,' as well as 'the binding of Isaac' and 'the woman caught in adultery.'” The last entry is written by my friend Jennifer Knust and we have worked a lot together on this topic for some years now. There is a related video clip in which Amy Jill Levine discusses the pericope adulterae, and another entry on the manuscript history of the passage (John 8:1-11) by another friend of mine, Chris Keith. Earlier this year, Chris, Jennifer and I contributed to a conference at SEBTS, the Pericope Adulterae symposium.

Kutsko continues his report on the Bible Odyssey webpage saying that many visitors come from North America and Europe, but that there is also strong traffic from Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Israel. Personally, Kutsko thinks the "Ask the Scholar" button (see the magnifying glass on the image above, or go here) is the coolest of all. Here they have received questions such as:

• Why does God speak in the plural in Genesis?
• Was John the Baptist an Essene?
• How many scholars believe that Q existed as a source for Matthew and Luke?
• Has the biblical figure of Satan evolved?
• Why is ‘almah in Proverbs 30:19 translated differently?
• How does domestic architecture vary in the Second Temple period?