‘The Most Beautiful and Glorious Task of Learned Men’

“The most beautiful and glorious task of learned men” — that may be the best description of textual criticism I’ve ever come across. It’s from the sixth-century Roman senator, Christian writer, and monk Cassiodorus. In his book Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, he has an entire section on the importance of correcting biblical manuscripts as part of the proper study of the Bible. 

Ezra in Amiatinus (source)

He closes his section on the three ways the Scriptures have been divided (by Jerome, Augustine, and the LXX) by saying, “Now it remains for us to say how we ought to correct scribal errors in Holy Scripture.  What use is it to read through many texts and not to know what should properly be corrected in them?” (XIV.5). His next section (XV) gives 16 points on how to do it properly. Here is his first one:

1.  You, therefore, who have a good knowledge of divine and secular letters and the understanding to discover what is not in harmony with common usage, read through sacred literature in the following manner; for the few who are learned must prepare material for the simple and less educated community. Therefore, first read carefully and correct the errors of the writers in such a way that you do not deserve criticism for trying to correct others without due deliberation; this kind of correction is, in my opinion, the most beautiful and glorious task of learned men.

And here are his last two.

15.  I pray also that you who presume, nevertheless, to emend, make the letters you add so beautiful that they appear to have been written by the scribes.  For it is wrong to find in that beauty anything foul which afterwards may shock the eyes of scholars. Consider, therefore, the sort of case entrusted to you, your service to Christians, the treasury of the Church, the enlightenment of souls. See carefully to it, therefore, that no error is left in the truth, no falseness in the purity, and no scribal mistakes in the corrected text. 

16.  First, with the Lord’s aid, we have listed the nine volumes of the law and detailed the introductory writers with their commentaries as carefully as we could. Next we touched on the three divisions of the whole divine law which our ancestors have given us. Then we included a section on the rules covering emendation of texts of divine authority to prevent disruption as well as the transmission of troublesome confusion in the text to posterity because of excessive liberty with the text.  Now we must discuss in all respects the excellence of divine reading so that each passage may abound in its own sweetness.

The whole thing is worth reading, and it’s online here courtesy of James W. and Barbara Halporn. 

Among the reasons Cassiodorus is important is that he is thought by some to be the inspiration behind the famous depiction of Ezra the Scribe in Codex Amiatinus. The nine books in Ezra’s bookcase do match Cassiodorus’s description of the Bible into nine parts.

Now the next time someone tells you textual criticism is boring, you just tell them it’s actually the most beautiful and glorious task of learned men!

Review of UBS6 in Themelios

The latest issue of Themelios is a special issue dedicated to D.A. Carson and the influential NSBT series he edited for three decades. The bulk of the issue is taken up by key authors from the series who summarize and reflect on their volumes. If you’ve never heard of the NSBT series, this would be a great way into it.

But this is not a blog about biblical theology so we’ll save that for another place. Instead, this blog post is to alert you to my review of UBS6 that is also in this issue. I am thankful to the editors who let me go a little longer than the typical Themelios review. Here’s the introduction

First published in 1966, the UBS Greek New Testament hits its 60th birthday this year. It has long been the preferred hand edition for its intended audience of translators, students, and pastors. The arrival of this new, sixth edition is a major publishing event, especially as it is accompanied by a completely new textual commentary (reviewed separately). So much has changed with this edition that it can fairly be called the most significant update to the UBS edition in fifty years (when the third edition was first linked with the Nestle-Aland). By way of review, we can highlight the salient changes under the following headings: editors, format, text, and apparatus.

And part of the conclusion: 

I expect this edition to increase the UBS’s already loyal fan base, especially among those new to the Greek New Testament. If I have an overriding concern, it is that the apparatus surrenders too much in the process so that those of us accustomed to leaning on the UBS for its extra detail will now have to go elsewhere, perhaps all the way to the ECM. But all editions have their limits, and this one is no different. It makes for an excellent hand edition, one that is well conceived and well executed, and promises to carry on the UBS legacy for many years to come—perhaps another sixty.

The only thing I would add is that I’ve now been using the UBS6 since I picked it up at SBL in November and I have really enjoyed it. I love the thinner size, the better typeface, the much cleaner page, and the simplified introduction. I would dare to say that the changes make this a true competitor to the THGNT in terms of simplicity and easy of use—especially for new students. I am myself a proponent of the NA, so I won’t be abandoning that any time soon. But I have adopted the THGNT for my first year Greek students the last few years and I am now thinking carefully about switching to this. I like that it has the visual benefits of THGNT, but with a better apparatus. Personally, I have been using UBS6 whenever I want to enjoy the simple pleasure of reading without distraction.

This same issue of Themelios also has reviews of the accompanying textual commentary by Thomas Haviland-Pabst and Kruger’s new volume on miniature codices by Ched Spellman. I will also be reviewing the commentary for JTS and have just been approved to present a combined review of UBS6 and the textual commentary at ETS this fall in Denver. If you are a glutton for reviews, come along.

Lanier on UBS6

Over on his new YouTube channel, Greg Lanier has posted a long, 45-minute review of UBS6. I haven’t watched it all yet, but what I did watch was in-depth and thorough. Overall, he seems to like it but recognizes that it will not supplement the NA edition the way it has in the past given the reduction in the apparatus. My own review is forthcoming in Themelios, and I’ll post it here when it's out. Until then, give Lanier’s video a watch.

New Blog on NT Critical Texts

Greg Paulson and Katie Leggett have a new website that ETC readers will be interested in. It’s called Critical Texts and is described as “the personal academic blog of Dr. Gregory S. Paulson and Dr. Katie Leggett, offering a creative space for reflection on critical texts in the field of Greek New Testament textual criticism.” 

Students new to the subject will find links to some helpful articles from other sites answering question like “What is the Kurzgefasste Liste?,” or “What is the NTVMR?,” and, everyone’s favorite, “What is the latest tally of NT manuscripts?” (answer: 5,711 as of 2 days ago). Of course, we have addressed that question here before. Greg has also put together a video introducing the new UBS6. 

This may also be a good time to note that their website reminded me that a third edition of the printed Kurzgefasste Liste is scheduled for later this year. We’ll look forward to that. In the meantime, add this new website to your reading list, or just check out the blogroll in the right column of this website—yes, we still have a blogroll. Who says blogs are dead?

Was Romans Partly “Performed” by Phoebe – Not Just Written by Paul?

UPDATE: Happy April Fool's Day!

It is best to indicate here that it is a joke (since on of our previous jokes written by P.J. Willliams some years ago, that archaeologists have found Q, has spread like a fire). At the same time, it is true that Phoebe likely delivered Romans and that she may have read it and been able to clarify its contents. 

 _________________________________________

Recent discussion among New Testament scholars has highlighted a startling and almost revolutionary aspect of ancient letter delivery — one that could fundamentally change how we think about the earliest receptions of Romans.

Building on the work of Oxford scholar Peter Head — particularly his detailed study of named letter‑carriers in ancient documents — some commentators have playfully suggested that early letter carriers did far more than merely deliver letters: they may have actively shaped how these letters were understood, interpreted, and even performed.

As Head demonstrates in several publications, ancient letter carriers were far from passive couriers. In his “Named Letter‑Carriers among the Oxyrhynchus Papyri” (JSNT 31.3, 2009, pp. 279‑299), he shows that the person physically carrying a letter often added oral context when presenting it to the recipient — essentially functioning as an authorized live interpreter, capable of clarifying, emphasizing, or dramatizing key points.

On the subject of Pauline letters, Head observes (p. 298):

Perhaps the crucial point for our thinking about the delivery of Pauline
letters is the understanding that the trusted letter-carrier often has an
important role in extending the communication initiated by the letter. 

[...] 

This model suggests that the earliest reception of specific Pauline
letters would have been accompanied by a Pauline representative who
could relate the specifics of the letter to the general Pauline tradition
known to him (or her). But I leave that for another day. 

Today, we may finally take up that challenge — and perhaps push it even further.

In a forthcoming article in TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism (for which I am editor), the authors have examined the Corpus Paulinum alongside thousands of papyrus letters from Greco‑Roman Egypt, comparing named letter carriers across contexts. Their findings suggest that couriers not only supplemented written messages with oral interpretation, but may have effectively performed them, mediating meaning in ways that could radically shape early audiences’ understanding. In other words, early Christian letters might have functioned less like static texts and more like scripts staged for live performance.

Taking up Head’s suggestion, the authors provocatively propose that Phoebe — the female co‑worker commended in Rom 16:1–2 and widely identified as the letter carrier of Romans — may have done far more than deliver the letter: she may have clarified Paul's arguments, answered follow-up questions on the spot, and even expanded or dramatized difficult passages in real time. One can almost imagine Phoebe “directing” the reception of Romans like a seasoned stage director, shaping the audience’s understanding as she went.

Given the complexity and density of Romans, this leads to an intriguing possibility: what if parts of the letter’s meaning were always intended to be mediated through the person delivering it? After all, if the carrier could supply additional information beyond the written text, how much of what was understood depended on Phoebe’s performance?

This leads to a provocative — and admittedly playful — question: Was Romans simply written by Paul, or was it, in some sense, also performed by Phoebe?

GA 2685 in Romans: A Close Relative of the 6-424KC/1739/1881/1908K Cluster of Witnesses

GA 2685 is a 14th century manuscript housed in the Varlaam Monastery in Metora, containing the Gospels, Romans and Hebrews. Although the folio numbers themselves are not clear, the images in the NTVMR seem to show that Hebrews begins on 291v, while Romans ends on 291r which would make this one of the few Greek manuscripts that (as with P46) has Hebrews immediately after Romans. This witness was transcribed by the IGNTP for the ECM of Romans and is included in the collation published here.

In my recently published book, Chrysostom’s Homilies on Romans and the Textual History of the New Testament (Brill, 2025), I included a phylogenetic reconstruction of the textual history of Romans (also freely available in the online supplement), based on an apparatus of high-entropy variation units derived from the IGNTP transcriptions. In this stemma, GA 2685 was placed as a sister manuscript to GA 6, closely related to GA 424KC, and in turn to GA 1739, 1881, and 1908K. Since this section of the tradition was not especially relevant to my focus in that book, I did not think much about this at the time or discuss it further.

However, I’m currently working on a paper with Joey McCollum that will introduce a set of tools for identifying manuscript groupings within a large collation, and GA 2685 came up again. This time I paid attention. Based on a quick preliminary search, this witness doesn’t seem to have been discussed in any detail in connection with the cluster of witnesses related to GA 1739 (while included in a table in a recent article by Gäbel on Hebrews in GA 1739, it isn’t discussed; it isn’t mentioned in Birdsall’s or Peterson’s dissertations), though please let me know in the comments if this connection has already been pointed out. However, it shares a large number of distinctive readings with this cluster, far too many to be a coincidence. 

In the table below (based on one of Joey’s extremely helpful tools, that will be properly introduced in the paper we are working on), I’ve ordered the readings that connect GA 2685 and one or more members of the GA 1739-related cluster based on how distinctive they are, with the list limited to readings shared by ten or fewer witnesses including GA 2685 (there are many more agreements that involve a larger number of witnesses). 

The first column has the reference to the ECM collation, the second has the distinctive reading found in GA 2685, the third has the witnesses that share this reading, and the fourth has the other readings found in this location. I’ve highlighted in blue the readings that seem to me the most significant agreements. While the connections to GA 6 are the most striking (not only does it have two unique agreements, but it agrees with GA6 in 98.99% of readings in the full collation), GA 2685 also agrees with other witnesses in this cluster in places where it disagrees with GA 6, meaning that it is unlikely to descend from it directly. In any case, GA 2685 should be included in subsequent investigations of this fascinating cluster of witnesses.