A New Word from a Non-word in Your NA28?

At 2 Peter 2.14, the majority of Greek witnesses describe a group of people “having eyes full of an adulteress” (ὀφθαλμοὺς ἔχοντες μεστοὺς μοιχαλίδος). Charles Bigg concluded in his ICC commentary that the majority of manuscripts “are certainly wrong” since the sense “absolutely requires μοιχείας [adultery]” (p. 283). I suspect that some scribes agreed with Bigg and that explains why we find μοιχείας in 044 and 2344. “Adulteress” (μοιχαλίδος) is certainly the lectio difficilior and should be preferred as it is in most editions (NA28, SBLGNT, WH, Tischendorf).

This is all straightforward enough. But there is a third reading involved here which is μοιχαλίας, a reading which Metzger’s commentary will tell you is unknown elsewhere. A look at LSJ and a search of TLG basically confirm this. LSJ has nothing and, aside from two quotes of this verse from Ephrem, TLG only turns up a single example of μοιχαλίας which is from a first century copy of an astronomical text. Surprisingly, this unattested word has some hefty manuscript support in 01, 02, 33 and about half a dozen minuscules.

What I can’t figure out is why the NA28/UBS5 have changed the spelling from the NA27/UBS4 so that it now reads μοιχαλείας. We know the ECM doesn’t list spelling differences involving ει-ι interchanges (p. 27*), but this appears to be a case where they have changed the spelling as it is found in our extant witnesses. I checked about half of those cited in the ECM and they all attest μοιχαλίας (see below).

I can’t figure out any rationale for this change. Any ideas?

2 Peter 2.14 in 01, 02, 33, 436, and 621

Thomas Kraus on Luke 14.5 and What We Need in Our Critical Editions

The March issue of Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses has an article from Thomas Kraus exploring what text critics need in their critical editions with an interesting example from Luke 14.5. The article is “Kritische Ausgaben des Neuen Testaments und Textkritik: Anmerkungen anhand von Lk 14,5 als Testfall?” ETL 91.1 (2015): 111-130.

In the first part of the article, Kraus raises the following four questions which are then explored by way of Luke 14.5.

1. What kind of data and how much do we need in our critical editions? Here he mentions the Internet Greek NT Project which “intends to collate and transcribe all extant manuscripts of the New Testament”—an ambitious goal to be sure!
2. Must someone working on the text have all available variant readings? What about nonsense readings and how should such be determined?
3. What role does the plausibility of the origin and development of a reading play in relation to the quantity and quality of witnesses that attest it? 
4. Will the many possibilities of the internet make these first three questions obsolete? (I’m not sure I grasped how this relates to #3.)

Luke 14.5 is a good choice because Kraus discusses the possibility, suggested by Martin and Kasser in the editio princeps of P75, that the majority reading υἱὸς ἢ βοῦς (“a son or an ox”) was originally ὗς ἢ βοῦς (“a pig or an ox”). Martin and Kasser suggested that the original reading could have been corrupted by way of the supralinear line such that υϲ became the nomen sacrum υ̅ϲ̅. The problem with the reading, as Kraus acknowledges, is that none of our witnesses attest υϲ without the supralinear line.

Luke 14.5 in P75

How Many TC Errors in This Statement?

We’ve played this game before. Someone submits a statement about TC from the BBC or some other news media, and we count how many errors are contained therein. But this time, it comes from a Hendrickson publication entitled, Formation of the Bible: The Story of the Church’s Canon  (Lee Martin McDonald). Extra credit points if anyone can help me understand how the statements could possibly be right,

As a result of the more recent discovery of many more ancient biblical manuscripts, all early translations, namely those produced before 1993, are essentially out of date—an unfortunate consequece of reassembling a text closer to the biblical original than was possible earlier. With the publication of the most recent editions of critical scholarly texts of the New Testament—the United Bible Society’s 5th Edition of the Greek New Testament  (2013) and the soon to be published Nestle/Aland 28th edition (2012) of the Greek Testament—we draw closer yet to the original text of the New Testament, but it would be a mistake to believe that we have reached that goal. There are some challenging and difficult passages to unravel, to which biblical scholars can offer very tenuous, possible solutions, but certainty is not yet available.

Since almost all modern translations of the New Testament depend on these two modern texts of the Greek New Testament, translations dating before these editions are not as reliable or as accurate and do not accurately reflect the latest understanding of what the biblical writers wrote....  p. 134.

JML