New Review of ECM Revelation

My review of the ECM Revelation volumes is out today in Religious Studies Review. Per the format, it is short, so don’t expect a deep dive. Instead I tried to hit the high points. You should be able to read it without the paywall using this gift link. Here are the last few lines:

The entire team is to be warmly congratulated. Readers of Revelation will be in their debt for decades to come. It remains now for others to digest the results and use them to better understand the textual history of this remarkable book.

Before on the blog, I mentioned some of the most important changes and alerted readers to the fact that, for the first time ever with an ECM, most of the edition would be put online for free. That has now been done which is really remarkable since the edition costs $800 USD. Here are the links:

1. Text (introduction only, 78 pages). The main apparatus is available in the digital ECM at the VMR (here). For the punctuation, textual structure and paratextual details, I gather you still need the physical copy.
2. Supplementary Material 
3. Studies on the Text 
4. Studies on Punctuation and Textual Structure 

Video Look at the New ECM of Revelation

Greg Paulson has recorded a short video on YouTube giving an overview of the new four-volume (!) Editio Critica Maior edition of Revelation. One whole volume is dedicated to punctuation and “textual structure.”

Some highlights: 

• The textual commentary is the longest yet
• 84 changes to the initial text; 106 split lines; 95 changes in orthography
• The edition gives a list of singular readings
• There is a new punctuation apparatus with paratextual data too
• Nomina sacra are marked in the main text (I wonder how these were decided on)
• This is the first ECM completed outside Münster

Congratulations to the team!

An interesting problem with the Editio Critica Maior (Mark 10.45)

So I was minding my own business and reading an article about Mark 10.45 (M. Thiessen, 'The Many for One or One for the Many? Reading Mark 10:45 in the Roman Empire' HTR 109 (2016), 447-466) when I stumbled on a footnote about the text of Mark 10.45 in Codex W (032):

Although ms W reads λούτρον (ablution) instead of λύτρον (ransom), it is likely that this reading arose due to an unintentional scribal modification. (note 11)

That sounded interesting, but when I checked NA28 it wasn't mentioned, so I checked the facsimile (as one does) and it was obviously correct:

 

Then I checked the ECM apparatus on Mark and I came across this:

OK. So 032r means that the editors have regularised an incorrect reading to an orthographically and grammatically correct form (p. 19*). But λούτρον is a perfectly good word, as the Cambridge Greek Lexicon tells us (and indeed it is a NT word, cf. Tit 3.5):

 

Now, it doesn’t seem like there is anywhere within the three ECM volumes where a reader can figure out what the actual reading of W032 actually is. You can go to the NTVMR and then you get the information you need:

Obviously I accept that even the most objective kind of resource is impacted by a multitude of editorial decisions, but I was a bit disappointed that for such an important manuscript of Mark ECM didn’t tell me about such an interesting reading. I wonder how many other interesting spellings have been “regularized” in potentially overly zealous ways.