The Earliest Systematic Use of GA 03 in the Modern Period

A few years ago, Dirk Jongkind posted a brief article on this blog about GA 372, a minuscule manuscript of the synoptic Gospels and the first few chapters of John. As he noted then, this manuscript certainly gives the appearance of being a copy of a printed edition. While it seems to have been copied by hand, it includes faux wood cuts capitals, and does not include nomina sacra or ekthesis. As Teunis Van Lopik helpfully pointed out in the comments to that article, the scribe of this manuscript is  Johannes Honorius, whose “script formed the basis for the font of  the pontifical press.” 

However, the text does not match any printed edition. In preparing the forthcoming Tyndale House Textual Commentary, Dirk and I noticed a few places where the text overlapped with that of GA 03. In his comment, Teunis had suggested that this manuscript might have been intended as the printers copy for a canceled Greek New Testament project, noting that “in 1560-1561 a congregation of four cardinals, assisted by Guglielmo Sirleto worked on the text of the Vulgate and the Greek New Testament. Some documents, produced during the existence of this congregation, are still available. To this small collection I will add GA 372.” 

Since this project was based in the Vatican, it raises the possibility that the edited text of which GA 372 was intended as the printer’s copy had made use of GA 03. Consulting the TUT results for GA 372 in Matthew, I discovered that it has 16 “2” readings, 16 “1/2” readings, 26 “1” readings, and 6 Sonderlesarten.

The high number of “1” readings in GA 372 rules out the possibility that it is simply a copy of GA 03, which only has one such reading in Matthew. However, a consideration of the non-majority readings in GA 372 make it almost certain that the text of which it is a copy was corrected against GA 03 at some stage in the process. 

The Sonderlesarten are especially telling. There are six of these in GA 372. In three of these (6:4, 23:3, 37:4), it agrees straightforwardly with GA 03. In fact, in 37:4, GA 372 agrees with GA 03 in a reading found in only two other witnesses (01 and 873). In two others (15:3 and 58:3C), the distinctive reading of GA 372 can be simply explained as either a conflation or a partial correction of a standard TR edition against the reading of GA 03. In only one case (59:3), is there no obvious relation between a Sonderlesarten of GA 372 and the text of GA 03 and this particular reading is much less distinctive than the others, being found in a large number of minuscules.

The “2” readings continue the same pattern. Out of the 64 Teststellen in Matthew, GA 03 has the “2” reading in 42 locations, or about 66% of the time. According to TuT, GA 372 has only 16 such “2” readings. In 14 of these locations, GA 372 has the same reading as GA 03, including a number of places where the “2” reading is found in a tiny handful of other witnesses (e.g. 35:2, a reading otherwise found only in five other known witnesses—GA 05 032 163 2680 2737). One additional location (32), while being classed as a “2” reading, is found in no fewer than 590 manuscripts in the TuT collation, so it is hardly distinctive. In the final location (20), a consultation of the images reveals an error in TuT—GA 372 does not have the “2” reading here, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that this is the one location where GA 03 does have a “1” reading. It is quite striking that GA 03, while having “2” readings only 66% of the time, can explain *all* of the distinctive “2” readings in GA 372. 

To sum up, of the 16 “1” readings and 6 Sonderlesarten in GA 372, all but 2 of them can be explained by the comparison of a standard Byzantine text (or printed TR edition) with the text of GA 03. Given Teunis’s previous identification of GA 372 as a remnant of an edition of the Greek New Testament prepared in Rome, it seems clear that those who were preparing this edition made use of GA 03, which would make this the earliest known systematic text-critical use of this manuscript in the modern period. It is perhaps worth noting that GA 372 is not discussed in Yi’s history of the early text-critical use of GA 03, From Erasmus to Maius.

As a useful follow up to this study, if anyone had a list of distinctive readings of various early TR editions in the Synoptic Gospels, it might be possible to determine if GA 03 was compared to a Byzantine manuscript or, as I suspect is more likely, to a printed edition. If the latter, it is entirely possible that this edition is still in the Vatican library, waiting to be discovered.