Darrell Post on a New Lectionary Group

The following is a guest post by Darrell Post who has been researching John 11 for many years (see here and here and here). In this connection I also want to mention that Post has done a great job with entries on Greek New Testament manuscripts on Wikipedia.

  

A Newly Found Lectionary Group?
by Darrell Post

New Testament textual critics have lamented the status of lectionary studies for generations. Despite the large quantity of these liturgical works, there are more continuous-text manuscripts and many of these remain to be fully studied. Lectionaries have been perceived as secondary, not existing in the early centuries of the church, and therefore further removed from the initial text. Most lectionaries are presumed to align closely with the Byzantine text and would therefore add very little to what is already known.

 

Happily, research into lectionaries has been increasing in recent decades, so when I embarked on a project five years ago to collate manuscripts that include John 11, I wanted to involve lectionaries in my work.  Compared to continuous-text manuscripts, fewer lectionaries have been digitized and made available on the internet. Far fewer have had their images indexed with the Scripture references. Locating a specific New Testament portion can be a challenge given the varying lectionary formats. I was fortunate with John 11 as the lesson that includes verses 47-54 appears early in most lectionaries and follows the lengthy lesson about the man born blind in John 9. The other lesson, John 11:1-45 is normally found just a few lessons past the artwork signaling the start of the Gospel of Mark lessons. But the easy way to find it was by scrolling through the images looking for the rare use of the decorative pi that stands out for starting the lesson of John 12, as this lesson is separated from John 11 by only one lesson from Matthew.

 

A year ago, my work was finished with continuous-text manuscripts, having collated 1,726 of them against John 11. One of them, GA-345, caught my attention in June 2021. Upon examination, the text presented a strong resemblance to the pattern of variations found in the papyri and early majuscules. Wisse had found the text of Luke in GA-345 to be within the Byzantine tradition[1], and checking the Manuscript Clusters tool on the INTF’s website[2], little returned in the search of GA-345 against the samples taken from John. I presumed the text of John 11 within GA-345 to be an anomaly. 

 

As my work turned to the Lectionaries, my initial survey found a possible 881 that might include John 11 and have images available to study. I have now completed the work on 382 of the 881. Lectionary manuscripts might naturally be presumed to have been always created from other lectionaries, meaning they would have developed their own patterns of variation, distinct from continuous-text manuscripts. However, Burns found in 1982 that L574 belonged to Family 13.[3] 

 

I have found comparable results so far in John 11. Several lectionaries include readings distinct to the Π family, including L2023, a match to the text of Π members GA-268 and GA-787. After the launch of the Kr group among continuous-text manuscripts, at least a dozen lectionary texts were copied in conformity to Kr readings.
 

Just recently I have collated John 11 in four lectionaries that surprisingly were found to share the variation pattern of continuous-text GA-345. These five manuscripts present an early form of the text of John 11:

345, 11th, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, F. 17 sup.
L466, 12th, Grottaferrata, Biblioteca Statale del Monumento Nazionale, A. α. 11.
L518, 13th, Messina, Biblioteca Regionale Universitaria, S. Salv. 95.
L534, 12th, Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. gr. 448.
L546, 10th, Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 781.

I have not found anything written about these lectionaries and the readings they share in John 11, although I am still looking and invite anyone to point out something I have missed. Jordan did not select any of these manuscripts for analysis in his dissertation on the lectionary text of the Gospel of John.[4] 

 

Each of these manuscripts needs to be fully collated to see the extent of these distinctive readings. L466 has lost the opening pages including the lesson covering 11:47-54. L518 and L534 follow the Majority Text in 11:47-54, but match GA-345 in 11:1-45. L546 follows GA-345 in both lessons, indicating the potential for more parallels.  

 

Morrill found that GA-345 has 96.1% agreement with the Majority Text with no close relatives in John 18, so this manuscript was not selected in his list of recommended manuscripts to include in the ECM edition of the Gospel of John.[5]

 

Given the text presented by GA-345 and these four lectionaries, at least in John 11, future critical editions should consider including the testimony of these witnesses. Most importantly, this find demonstrates that lectionaries are worthy of study with the potential for more surprises to be found that are right now hiding in plain sight. 

 

The chart below shows a comparison from John 11 of 345, L466, L518, L534, and L546 against well-known manuscripts:

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[1] Frederik Wisse, The Profile Method for Classifying and Evaluating Manuscript Evidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 110.

[2] http://intf.uni-muenster.de/TT_PP/Cluster4.php

[3] Yvonne Burns, “A Newly Discovered Family 13 Manuscript and the Ferrar Lection System.”

In Studia Patristica, vol. XVII, part 1, edited by Elizabeth A. Livingstone, 278– 289.

Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982.

[4] C.R.D. Jordan, ‘The  Textual Tradition of the Gospel of John in Greek Gospel Lectionaries from the Middle Byzantine Period (8th-11th Century)’ (PhD; Birmingham, 2009), 48-49.

[5] Michael Bruce Morrill, ‘A Complete Collation and Analysis of all Greek Manuscripts of John 18’ (PhD; Birmingham, 2012), 169, 386.