Thomas Kraus on Luke 14.5 and What We Need in Our Critical Editions

The March issue of Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses has an article from Thomas Kraus exploring what text critics need in their critical editions with an interesting example from Luke 14.5. The article is “Kritische Ausgaben des Neuen Testaments und Textkritik: Anmerkungen anhand von Lk 14,5 als Testfall?” ETL 91.1 (2015): 111-130.

In the first part of the article, Kraus raises the following four questions which are then explored by way of Luke 14.5.

1. What kind of data and how much do we need in our critical editions? Here he mentions the Internet Greek NT Project which “intends to collate and transcribe all extant manuscripts of the New Testament”—an ambitious goal to be sure!
2. Must someone working on the text have all available variant readings? What about nonsense readings and how should such be determined?
3. What role does the plausibility of the origin and development of a reading play in relation to the quantity and quality of witnesses that attest it? 
4. Will the many possibilities of the internet make these first three questions obsolete? (I’m not sure I grasped how this relates to #3.)

Luke 14.5 is a good choice because Kraus discusses the possibility, suggested by Martin and Kasser in the editio princeps of P75, that the majority reading υἱὸς ἢ βοῦς (“a son or an ox”) was originally ὗς ἢ βοῦς (“a pig or an ox”). Martin and Kasser suggested that the original reading could have been corrupted by way of the supralinear line such that υϲ became the nomen sacrum υ̅ϲ̅. The problem with the reading, as Kraus acknowledges, is that none of our witnesses attest υϲ without the supralinear line.

Luke 14.5 in P75

Early Christian Manuscripts (Brill)

This book from Brill is just out:

Early Christian Manuscripts - Examples of Applied Method and Research (ed. by Thomas J. Kraus and Tobias Nicklas; Texts and Editions for New Testament Study 5; Leiden: Brill, 2010):
Series: Texts and Editions for New Testament Study, 5
ISBN-13: 978 90 04 18265 3
ISBN-10: 90 04 18265 9
Cover: Hardback
Number of pages: xx, 243 pp.
List price: € 99.00 / US$ 141.00

Abstract
For the reconstruction of early Christianity, the lives of early Christians, their world of ideas, their ways of living, and their literature. Early Christian manuscripts - documents and literary texts - are pivotal archaeological artefacts. However, the manuscripts often came to us in fragmentary conditions, incomplete or with gaps and missing lines. Others appear to form a corpus, belong to an archive, or are connected with each other as far as theme or purpose are concerned. The present collection comprises of nine essays about individual or a set of certain manuscripts. With their essays the authors aim to present special approaches to early Christian manuscripts and, consequently, demonstrate methodically how to deal with them. The scope of topics ranges from the reconstruction of fragmentary manuscripts to the significance of amulets and from the discussion of individual fragments to the handling of the known manuscripts of a specific Christian text or a whole archive of papyri.

Contents
Editors’ Preface
Introduction
List of Contributors
Preface
Abstracts

1. "Reconstructing Fragmentary Manuscripts—Chances and Limitations" (Thomas J. Kraus)

2. "Hunting for Origen in Unidentified Papyri: The Case of P.Egerton 2 (= inv. 3)" (Rachel Yuen-Collingridge)

3. "Papyrus Oxyrhynchus X 1224" (Paul Foster)

4. "Is P.Oxy. XLII 3057 the Earliest Christian Letter?" (Lincoln H. Blumell)

5. "P50 (P.Yale I 3) and the Question of its Function" (John Granger Cook)

6. "The Reuse of Christian Texts: P.Macquarie inv. 360 + P.Mil.Vogl.inv. 1224 (P91) and P.Oxy. X 1229 (P23)" (Don Barker)

7. "Papyri, Parchments, Ostraca, and Tablets Written with Biblical Texts in Greek and Used as Amulets: A Preliminary List" (Theodore de Bruyn)

8. "The Egyptian Hermas: The Shepherd in Egypt before Constantine" (Malcolm Choat and Rachel Yuen-Collingridge)

9. "The Babatha Archive, the Egyptian Papyri and their Implications for Study of the Greek New Testament" (Stanley E. Porter)

Index