
In May last year we published
a guest post by Darrell Post on the newly registered minuscule 2957.
Darrell is a graduate of Virginia Beach Theological Seminary, Here below we publish another guest post in which he identifies five new core members of Family 1 in John.
The 2011 dissertation
A Textual Study of Family 1 in the Gospel of John, by Alison Welsby, presented a complete textual analysis of John’s gospel among 17 manuscripts suspected of being related to Kirsopp Lake’s famous Family 1. Welsby included a proposed family stemma and reconstructed text of the Gospel of John according to Family 1. Her completed research placed the 17 manuscripts into the following groups:
Core Group: 1, 565, 884, 1582, and 2193
Venice Group: 118, 205, 209, 2713, and 2886 (formerly 205abs)
Subgroup: 22, 1192, 1210, 1278, and 2372
Miscellaneous: 131
Not a member of Family 1: 872
In her introduction, Welsby explained her selection of the 17 codices to study. 1, 22, 118, 205, 209, 1192, 1210, and 1582 were included based on the confirmation of Amy Anderson's work on Family 1 in Matthew. 131, 872, 1278 and 2193 were also selected because Anderson had found them to be weak Family 1 members in Matthew. Then Welsby added 565, 884, and 2372 as these were not included by Anderson, but were indicated by the Text und Textwert volumes as possible members of Family 1 in John's gospel. Finally, 2886 was also included in its own right, coming out from under the shadow of being formerly known as 205abs.
Having included additions to Family 1 found in Text und Textwert, Welsby’s work gives the impression that all available witnesses to the text of Family 1 in John were included in her dissertation, leaving no others with a GA number as of the year 2011. However, it seems the manuscript clusters tool available on the INTF internet page (http://intf.uni-muenster.de/TT_PP/TT_Clusters.html) was not available to Welsby back in 2011. A quick search using this tool selecting GA-1, John, and Strict Grouping, reveals a much longer list of possible Family 1 members. 138, 357, 994, and 2575 are all indicated as related to Family 1, but none were included in Welsby’s dissertation. These four additional manuscripts also include a commentary in an alternating text format, and they all include the PA in its traditional location, 7:53-8:11 (other core Family 1 members place the PA after the end of the gospel). Further use of the INTF’s Clusters tool also suggest 809 and 2702 as more distant relations to Family 1.
Welsby’s subgroup, 22, 1192, 1210, 1278, and 2372 appears to have several additional members including 19, 149, 660, 697, 791, 924, 1005, and 1365. Most of these additional cluster relationships were also observed by Bruce Morrill in his 2012
dissertation on John 18 (see GA-138 on page 147).
I have also confirmed each of these proposed additions to Family 1 in John’s gospel as part of a project to collate manuscripts of John chapter 11. 138, 357, 994, and 2575 all belong to Welsby’s core group, with these four most closely related to 884 in John 11. I also found Welsby’s subgroup to be two related clusters, both with only a minimal connection to Family 1 itself.
Finally, 2517 was found to preserve only 12 leaves of John’s gospel, and only a small portion of chapter 11. However, this portion was found to strongly match 1, 565, 1582 and 2193. Bruce Morrill found the same results for 2517 in its extant portion of John 18.
The first table below shows the percentage of agreement in John 11 among the core members and the Venice Group, while the second table shows the agreement in John 11 among the subgroup.
There are completed IGNTP transcriptions of 138, 357, and 2575 available on the INTF manuscript workspace page. These three along with 994 and 2517 need to be fully studied and integrated with the work of Welsby toward better understanding the Family 1 text of John’s gospel.