Alan Taylor Farnes on Scribal Habits in Copies with Extant Exemplars

We are delighted to feature the newly baked Dr. Alan Taylor Farnes in this guest blogpost where he summarizes his work on scribal habits in copies where the exemplar is preserved. Well done Dr. Farnes!

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Scribal Habits in New Testament Copies with Extant Exemplars

As many of you may know, I have recently completed my dissertation at the University of Birmingham. The following is a summary with some conclusions, ramifications, and next steps to take.

In 2007, James R. Royse published his exceptional study on the scribal habits of six early New Testament papyri. In his work, Royse revolutionized text critics’ understanding of the text critical canon lectio brevior potior or, “the shorter reading is preferred”^[1] by demonstrating that the scribes he studied tended to omit more than they added. In its place he coined a new canon which he called lectio longior potior or, “the longer reading is preferred.”

One disadvantage of Royse’s method is, because the papyri he studies had no known exemplar. he was forced to reconstrcut what the hypothetical exemplar probably said and then determine how the scribe copied the hypothetical exemplar. This is obviously a completely normal procedure in textual criticism. Royse admitted that his method had flaws and called for an examination of another set of manuscripts—those with surviving exemplars. Royse wrote: “there has been (it seems) a failure to explore the problem of scribal habits for the text of the New Testament in the best possible case, namely where the Vorlage of an extant manuscript is also known to be extant. In such a situation we can virtually look over the scribe’s shoulder and compare the text he is copying with his result.”^[2]

My research has attempted to support or disprove Royse’s new text critical canon that, in fact, the longer reading is preferred. Rather than analyzing early papyri for which no exemplar remains, I chose to identify and analyze manuscripts which have a known exemplar.

I have therefore identified twenty-two New Testament manuscripts which have known extant exemplars (see Table here). Of these twenty-two I chose four manuscripts, which are italicized in the Table, and their copies to transcribe, collate, and analyze to determine how well the scribes copied the text of their exemplar.

3 postdocs and a funded doctoral position at ITSEE

I received this notice, which should be of wide interest.

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Dear colleagues,

We are delighted to announce the advertisement of three postdoctoral fellowships at ITSEE (the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham).

All involve work on Greek New Testament commentary manuscripts, to start this autumn. One is on the AHRC-funded Codex Zacynthius project, using multispectral imaging to recover the text of the earliest catena on Luke. Two are on the ERC-funded CATENA project, producing a catalogue of commentary manuscripts, identifying different stages in their history and development and making electronic transcriptions and editions of their text.

The posts would be suitable for Classicists or scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity with experience of working with Greek manuscripts.

Further details and links to the application portal may be found at:

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BIK263/
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BIK261/

Candidates may apply for one or more of these positions. The deadline is 11th April 2018.

In addition, the CATENA project is advertising a funded doctoral studentship on the Pseudo-Oecumenian Catena on Romans, suitable for candidates with expertise in Greek and an interest in manuscripts. Further information and application link at:

https://www.findaphd.com/search/ProjectDetails.aspx?PJID=95826
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BIB891/

Closing date 9th April 2018.

Informal queries may be addressed to me by email (links on the webpages above)

Please forward this message to anyone who might be interested in applying.

With many thanks,
Hugh Houghton

How long will it take to completely revise the Nestle edition?

We all know that the revisions to the Catholic Epistles were printed in the NA28 and that the revisions for Acts, John, and Revelation are underway as I write. But how long will it take to have a completely revised edition of Nestle? Writing in 2000, here is what Klaus Wachtel said:

A simple calculation shows how important this aspect [of collaboration] is. The first instalment of the Editio Critica Maior comprising the Letter of James was published in 1997. We sent the second instalment (the Letters of Peter, sixteen of 670 pages in the Nestle-Aland pocket edition, without the ten pages of James) to the publisher in 1999. This means that 654 Nestle-Aland pages remain to be edited and that would take another 82 years for the edition to be completed, if we keep working on our own, provided that funding will be available to about the same extent overt whole time. One does not have to be a prophet to see that it is unlikely that we will reach our goal under these condition. This means that it is an urgent task to establish an effective infrastructure for cooperation with editors and other collaborators from outside the Münster institute.*

So we need more places like Münster, Birmingham (UK), and Wuppertal. Perhaps it’s time that a US institute joined the labor force.

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*From Klaus Wachtel, “Editing the Greek New Testament on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 15, no. 1 (2000): 43–50 (48 n. 2).

ETC Interview with Hugh Houghton: Part 2

Congratulations to Drew Longacre for winning our book giveaway! Thanks to all who participated. I have taken note of your many suggestions for future interviewees. Now here is part 2 of our interview with Hugh Houghton in which we learn of his secret life as a Disney star! Part 1 is here.

You work at the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) where “computer methods are now fundamental to every stage of the editorial process.” The emergence of digital texts has been hailed as “revolutionary,” something that frees “writing from the frozen structure of the page” (source). From your vantage, how important are electronic texts to how we conceive of texts, how we use them, and how we edit them?

It has become something of a truism, but I do agree with those who say that the advent of digital media is likely to have an even greater impact on our approach to texts than the invention of printing. Of course, in textual criticism, one of the principal benefits of digitisation has been the imaging of primary sources, meaning that we can read the pages of manuscripts from across the world without even travelling to the nearest library.

But electronic text itself offers an even more powerful research tool in terms of the questions we can ask, from examining a particular copyist’s spelling habits or use of abbreviations to reconstructing phylogenetic relationships for an entire textual tradition. First of all, though, we have to encode texts in such a way that we can use them to answer these questions, and no doubt others which we haven’t yet thought of.

The adoption of editing software such as Peter Robinson’s COLLATE has completely changed the way we approach the task of editing the New Testament: no longer is the focus on the painstaking assembly of a critical apparatus, summarising as much information as economically as possible. Instead, the software allows us to generate a collation automatically from transcription files, and the emphasis is now on preparing an accurate full-text electronic transcription of each witness which can then be explored and re-used in the ways I mentioned.

ETC Interview with Hugh Houghton: Part 1

It is a real pleasure to continue our ETC Blog interview series with someone who is no stranger to our regular readers. Dr. Hugh Houghton is Reader in New Testament Textual Scholarship at the University of Birmingham (UK) and Deputy Director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) there. He is currently working on the volume of John as part of the IGNTP/ECM collaboration as well as the letters of Paul. This month he has a new book out on the Latin NT which we’re giving away thanks to OUP. Without further ado, here’s Hugh.

PG: First things first. Can you tell us how to pronounce your name? Is it HOW-ton or HOE-ton?

HH: Thank you for asking. It’s HOW-ton, although HOR-ton is a very common pronunciation too in the UK, and I sometimes also hear HUFF-ton. As this is a blog on textual criticism, we could explore the relationship of the different pronunciations to textual variation: when my surname is misspelt – which is fairly common – is that because the copyist voiced it in their head and substituted a different spelling for the text of their exemplar? Is it just replacement by a simpler or more common form? Were they copying to dictation? And then what about the visual or orthographic influence of my first name, with the potential for interference, haplography...? You’d better ask the next question or we’ll never finish this interview!

Can you tell us about what led to your current interests in the text of the New Testament and specifically the Latin and Patristic evidence for it?

I’ve always enjoyed languages, particularly the historical relationship between them. I was fortunate to study both Latin and Ancient Greek at school, and then read Classics at university. In my final year, my courses included Medieval Latin, when I first visited the university library to see a manuscript (the Cambridge Songs), and the history of the Greek language up to the fall of Byzantium. I wrote an undergraduate dissertation on the Acts of the Christian Martyrs as linguistic documents.

My Master’s degree, although still in Classical Linguistics, involved studies of Tertullian’s language and the Greek Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. A few years later, I took a second undergraduate degree in Theology as part of my ministerial training, which included a module on the Gospel according to Mark with Keith Elliott. So when Philip Burton (who had taught me as an undergraduate, while he was completing his doctorate) and David Parker contacted me to see if I would be interested in joining them to work on the Vetus Latina Iohannes (an edition of the Old Latin versions of John’s Gospel), I jumped at the opportunity.

Dr. Jac Perrin on Family 13

Jac Perrin has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Family 13 in Saint John’s Gospel,” submitted to the University of Birmingham, and written under the supervision of Prof. D. C. Parker and examined by Profs. Ulrich Schmid and Paul Foster.

Abstract
To date, the single criterion of Family 13 constituency has been the relocation of the Pericope Adulterae from its traditional location in John 7:53. This dissertation demonstrates why this criterion is inadequate and proposes a new criteria.

After an overview of the history of research, potential Family 13 witnesses are classified by means of a methodology originated by Dr. David Parker’s use of Text und Textwert. This process identifies 8 witnesses inappropriately nominated as Family 13 members, thus establishing GA 13, 69, 124, 346, 543, 788, 826, 828, 983, and 1689 as valid members. Each of these 10 witnesses is then described palaeographically as a discrete artefact.

Phylogrammatic software, originally designed for DNA analysis, is then adapted to exhaustively study these Johannine Greek texts. The by-product of this novel process complements and validates the earlier Text und Textwert process. Also available as a result of this study are original witness transcriptions (available at http://www.iohannes.com/family13/), a Critical Apparatus of Family 13 in St. John’s Gospel, an exhaustive description of the contents of 18 potential witnesses, and a description of the computer analysis process used in the study.

As Perrin points out in his thesis, all the 10 valid members of Family 13 are of Calabrian provenance as Abbé Martin has asserted, despite the fact that his specific attempts to localise them are problematic.

Further, Perrin concludes that one of the family members has the Pericope Adulterae in its traditional location in John 7:53 (1689), and not in Luke as other family members, so this cannot be the single criterion for filiality.

Perrin traces three different subgroups of F13 (in concord with Lake’s study of F13 in Mark).  The image below (fig. 63), reproduced with permission, is one way to depict the final stemma (“splits tree cladogram”).

Congratulations to Dr. Jac Perrin!

Update: I have removed reference to a point Perrin makes which seems to be erroneous that “the PA of several other witnesses was in Luke, but their textual content was much closer to the TR than to any F13 member” (p. 277); I cannot find the data to back this up. Perrin’s main point, however, is valid, that the relocation of the PA to Luke (after 21:38) cannot be the single criterion of F13 membership.