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.

---

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.

Book Notice: The Authority of the Septuagint

Over at his blog, Will Ross has an announcement about his new book with Greg Lanier titled The Authority of the Septuagint: Biblical, Historical, and Theological Approaches. Here’s Will’s explanation for the book:

This project is unique in a few ways. First of all, this book targets the issue highlighted in its title, namely probing whether and how “the Septuagint” has authority as a text. That is a loaded question, of course. In one sense, the answer is obviously no. Yet there are ways in which it is a little less obvious, especially when it comes to New Testament authors citing Septuagint-like texts in their writing. Greg and I addressed this issue in part in our book The Septuagint: What It Is and Why It Matters (Crossway), but this book takes things further.

Another unique aspect is that this is an edited volume. Greg and I each have chapters in the book, which cover relevant issues in the Old Testament canon and the text, respectively. But we also have a number of other scholars from neighboring disciplines who contributed chapters. These include perspectives from New Testament scholarship, Patristics, Reformation thought, and Protestant and Catholic dogmatic theology. We also have one or two shorter “excursus” chapters that address semi-hot-button/inside baseball issues like the “pure in all ages” clause in WCF 1.8 and so-called confessional bibliology.

This is one you won’t want to miss. Here’s the TOC. I am particularly interested in the chapters by Berntson and Fesko.

1 Introduction
Gregory R. Lanier and William A. Ross 

2 The Question of Old Testament Canon
Gregory R. Lanier 

3 The Question of the Old Testament Text
William A. Ross 

4 A New Testament Approach
Thomas Keene 

5 A Patristic-Historical Approach
Edmon L. Gallagher 

6 A Reformation-Historical Approach
Levi Berntson 

Excursus: “Kept Pure in All Ages”?
J. V. Fesko 

7 A Systematic-Theological Approach
Daniel J. Treier and Joshua McQuaid 

Excursus: The Septuagint and Confessional Bibliology
Mark Ward 

8 A Roman Catholic Approach
James B. Prothro 

9 Synthesis: The Septuagint and Authority
Myrto Theocharous 

Afterword
Karen H. Jobes 

You can read an excerpt here. 

Important Changes in ECM Revelation

The ECM Revelation came out last year and its changes will be included in the new UBS6/NA29. It’s the newest ECM volume to affect these hand editions. Having now spent some time with the edition, and having gone through all the listed changes, I thought I would give a brief report on them for the benefit of those who don’t have access to the print edition.

In all, the edition made 84 changes to the text of NA28 and now has 106 places with a split guiding line. These are places where the editors couldn’t decide between two readings (it is always two) and they are further marked by a diamond in the ECM and in the UBS/NA editions. 

You could roughly compare this to the 35 places in NA28 that used square brackets to mark text the editors weren’t completely convinced was original. In 9 places, the ECM has a split line that matches bracketed text from NA28. In 8 places they adopted the text in brackets (now without brackets) while in 15 places, they now prefer the omission of the bracketed text. (NB: the ECM list of textual changes misses the bracket in Rev 12.12/5.) 

All this means that there is quite a bit more editorial uncertainty in the ECM Revelation than there is in the NA28. Most of the split lines are not of great exegetical import. Sometimes you look at the two readings and wonder why the decision was so hard. It could be something about Revelation or could it be a result of the Rev editorial board being split between two institutions. I don’t know.

One thing that is certainly more robust in this volume is the textual commentary. It runs to over 170 pages! (All in German.) Some discussions span four or five pages. One new feature is that the comments are given labels to mark whether the variation is important for the printed history of Revelation, for the style of Revelation, its textual history, etc. The “SEM” label marks 48 variants of “semantic relevance.” Here are their addresses and the readings in question per the commentary:

1. 1,3/4-12 a/b
2. 1,5/48-52 a/d
3. 1,13/12-16 a/b
4. 1,15/20 a/c
5. 2,7/52-54 a/b
6. 2,9/34-38 a, f
7. 2,13/48 a/d
8. 2,20/17 a/b
9. 3,14/44 a/b
10. 4,3/22 a/b
11. 4,3/30—1,4/2 a/g
12. 4,11/55 a/b
13. 5,10/22 a/b
14. 6,8/40-42 a/c
15. 6,9/47 a/b
16. 6,11/32 a/b
17. 6,14/14 a/b
18. 6,17/18 a/b
19. 9,4/38-40 a/an
20. 11,4/10 a/b
21. 11,12/4 a/b
22. 11,16/12-20 a/b
23. 12,2/9 a/b
24. 12,18/4 a/b
25. 13,3/38-44 a/b/e
26. 13,7/2-22 a/g
27. 13,8/6 a/b
28. 13,10/6-10 a/c/f
29. 13,10/20-30 a/c
30. 13,18/44—48 a bis h
31. 14,4/48 a/b
32. 14,13/32 a/b
33. 14,14/22-28 a/c
34. 14,19/44-54 a
35. 15,3/72 a/b
36. 15,6/30-32
37. 16,5/18-32 a/c/g
38. 17,5/30 a/b
39. 18,2/32-54 a/b/o
40. 19,6/48 a/b
41. 19,13/8 a/b
42. 20,5/1 a/c
43. 20,8/26-32 a/b
44. 21,3/46 a/b
45. 21,6/8-10 a/e
46. 22,14/6-12 a/b
47. 22,21/14-18 a/f
48. 22,21/20 a/c

To give a point of comparison, I counted 44 Revelation variants discussed in Hugh Houghton’s excellent new Textual Commentary for the UBS6. (The two lists overlap, but only a little.)

In addition to the list above, the introduction to the ECM’s textual commentary gives a sample list of changes that are said to be especially relevant to the content of Revelation. I list those here with my summary [followed by my comments]. Text with an asterisk is in the RP2005.

Ref.	Change	Reading(s)	Comments
Rev 1.5	Split line	λύσαντι / λούσαντι*	λούσαντι may reflect early baptismal theology
Rev 1.13	New reading	ὅμοιον ὑιῷ ἀνθρώπου*	Relevant to Christology [I’m not sure I get this one]
Rev 2.13	Split line	ἀντίπας* / ἀντεῖπας	Is it a personal name (Antipas) or a verb? The former has dominated translations in the past. (NB: ECM Mark and Rev do not capitalize proper names.)
Rev 6.17	New reading	αὐτοῦ*	Relevant to Christology since it transfers the day of wrath to Jesus [seems like it does that with the old reading too though]
Rev 12.2	New Reading	Omit καί*	May impact the interpretation of the woman who gives birth [not sure I understand this]
Rev 12.18	Split line	ἐστάθη / ἐστάθην*	Changes who is standing on the shore, John or the dragon
Rev 13.10	New reading	εἴ τις εἰς αἰχμαλωσίαν ὑπάγει, εἴ τις ἐν μαχαίρᾳ ἀποκτενεῖ, δεῖ αὐτὸν ἐν μαχαίρᾳ ἀποκτανθῆναι,	A number of options are possible with this new reading. [I think this one is pretty noteworthy.]
Rev 18.3	New reading	πεπτώκασιν*	People have “fallen” rather than “drunk”
Rev 20.5	New reading	Omit οἱ λοιποὶ τῶν νεκρῶν οὐκ ἔζησαν ἄχρι τελεσθῇ τὰ χίλια ἔτη.	A key line about the millennium is omitted [This may be the most significant change to my mind as it removes what has proven to be a very difficult phrase for Amillennialism]
Rev 21.3	Split line	λαοί / λαός*	How many people groups does God dwell with in the New Jerusalem? One, or more?
Rev 21.6	New reading	γέγονα ἐγώ	Introduces an element of “becoming” into God’s self-description [part of the commentary on this change is quite loaded theologically, and I’m a bit more cautious on its significance]
Rev 22.21	New reading	πάντων τῶν ἁγίων. Ἀμήν.*	The request for grace is more strongly related to the church than in NA28 which just reads πάντων here [I agree]

To my mind, the most important change overall is the significant reduction in solecisms and grammatical oddities. I don’t think I saw a single change that resulted in a more difficult grammatial construction. This has real significance for how we think about the Greek of Revelation. But that topic deserves a post in itself. I’ll leave it here for now.