CSNTM Finds More Manuscripts in Athens

Manuscripts: great places
to look for new manuscripts.

Dan Wallace teases us on his blog with a note that he has recently found more uncatalogued NT manuscripts in Athens.

I recently returned from two weeks in Athens, working at the National Library of Greece. My student and former intern, Max Berti, joined me. We discovered a surprising number of New Testament manuscripts. But I’ll have to tell you all about that later. Follow the link to the CSNTM website below, where you’ll see info on several discoveries from 2015.

There’s more detail at the CSNTM blog. Rob Marcello tells me that 10 of the new manuscripts have already been published at csntm.org and that more will be coming next month.

Before my first trip with CSNTM I remember thinking it was crazy that there could be NT manuscripts just sitting on library shelves that are virtually unknown to NT scholars. Having now seen the size of some of these library collections and understanding that NT scholars are generally busy folks, I now understand better how this can happen.

So good for Dan and his team for continuing to visit libraries and work through their catalogs. Any students out there reading should take note: if you want to find little-known manuscripts, start poking around in big libraries. (It’s best to get permission first, though.)

A Contract to copy Scripture from AD 1021

Without doubt, one of the most important manuscripts for our modern editions of the Hebrew Scriptures is the Leningrad Codex B19a, and many institutions own the facsimile edition. [Interesting that people stick with the name ‘Leningrad Codex’ and that the name has not gone the way of the Rhodes statues.] This manuscripts is dated, and to my surprise I learned that from some years later we have a contract with the scribe of the Leningrad Codex, Samuel ben Jacob, to copy ‘Eight Prophets and the Writings’ for the respectable sum of 25 dinars.

Read the full story here in the fragment of the month of the Taylor-Schechter Research Unit of the Cambridge University Library.

Look twice, Read, and look again

I came across the textual variant at the end of Lk 12:38, 'Blessed are these'. The issue here is the presence / absence of οι δουλοι in μακαριοι εισιν οι δουλοι εκεινοι (I think οι δουλοι shouldn't be there, yet modern translations, ESV and NIV, put it in anyway). Sinaiticus has its own version and leaves out εκεινοι too, which was later added, as we can see on the second and third line:

The ink and lettering of the correction stands out as that of one of the later correctors, attractively named Cb2. Colour and style matches the interlinear addition αν a few lines further down (on top of an interlinear correction by an early corrector).
But there is something slightly off here, there seems some noise underneath. And indeed, NA27 has this down as Alef¹, and so does NA28, which is more reliable when it comes to the corrections of Sinaiticus and, according to Tischendorf himself, "εκεινοι addidit A, item C". Suspicion was justified, εκεινοι of an earlier corrector was overwritten by a later corrector.

Look twice, read what others say about it, and look again.

What Are Text-Types For?

In his book Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique (1973), Martin West raises an important issue for the use of text-types in NT textual criticism. 

Here is West:

When the critic has established that no stemma can be constructed, how is he to proceed? He must, of course, see what groupings are apparent among the manuscripts, and whether the individual groups can be analysed stemmatically… (p. 42).

Here we should pause and note that, as Colwell noted in his essay on the genealogical method, this is exactly what Westcott and Hort did in rejecting the “Syrian” text. They applied stemmatic principles, not to individual manuscripts, but to groups. Having done this, they were able to exclude the Syrian text from consideration on the principle that it was purely derivative. We might call this principle eliminatio textuum descriptorum.

Westcott and Hort’s stemma has since been modified and the results have not usually been treated with such stemmatic rigor. But West goes on to explain how such groupings can still be useful to the critic:

…even if they [groups] cannot [be analysed stemmatically], he can treat them as units in his further cogitations, provided that they have a sharply defined identity. Thus he reduces his problem to its basic terms.

This reduction of the problem is a major reason why text-types have been so valuable in NT textual studies. Where you have four manuscripts in a tradition, you don’t need to reduce the material. But for the NT such reduction is a huge benefit, even a necessity. No one can keep dozens let alone hundreds of manuscript relations in their head and then apply them to specific variations. But three or four relationships is no trouble at all. Hence the value and appeal of text-types. They “reduce” the problem.

But note the key qualification in West’s sentence. The critic can treat groups as units in his further cogitations, provided that they have a sharply defined identity.

If this is true, then it would seem that the use of text-types in our text critical “cogitations” is in trouble since no such definition exists. Even Eldon Epp in his excellent essay on “textual clusters” says that “the tricky issue, of course, is determining, in percentage terms [West’s ‘sharply defined identity’], what extent of agreement in readings joins members into a group, and what degree of separation in agreements determines the existence of a separate group” (“Textual Clusters: Their Past and Future,” [2013], p. 571). 

Unfortunately Epp doesn’t have an answer to this “tricky issue” which makes me wonder if our failing effort to define text-types is an indication that we’re trying to solve the wrong problem. Maybe trying to reduce the problem is our problem and we should start looking for ways to use more manuscripts (not less) in studying the history of the text.

Lady Bible Hunters: Kickass Women

Under labels like “female explorers and kickass women,” Ailsa Ross blogs in Atlas Obscura (20 Jan) about the Scottish twins and biblehunters  Agnes and Margaret Smith.

If you want to know more
Agnes Smith Lewis, In the Shadow of Sinai: A Story of Travel and Research from 1895 to 1897 (Cambridge: Macmillan & Bowes, 1898).

Margaret Dunlop Gibson, How the Codex Was Found : A Narrative of Two Visits to Sinai from Mrs Lewis’s Journals, 1892-1893 (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2001).

Modern accounts
Allan Whigham Price, The ladies of Castlebrae (London: Headline, 1987).

Janet Soskice, Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels (London: Vintage, 2009).

Here is a video featuring Soskice who tells the story about the two ladies and her own work on the biography.

For earlier posts relating to the sisters and the MSS they discovered, see here, here and here.

University of Groningen Postdoc and PhD positions

The Hands that Wrote the Bible: Digital Palaeography

The ERC project The Hands that Wrote the Bible: Digital Palaeography and Scribal Culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls invites applications for a 4-year PhD position and a 3-year Postdoc position. This ERC project is hosted by the Qumran Institute at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. For more information on the two positions, the application procedure and deadline, reference the dedicated web advertisements (PhD) and (Postdoc).

The main objective of this interdisciplinary project is to shed new light on ancient Jewish scribal culture and the making of the Bible by investigating two aspects of the scrolls’ palaeography: the typological development of writing styles and writer identification. The combination of new C14 samples and the use of computational intelligence as quantitative methods in order to assess the development of handwriting styles and to identify individual scribes will be used to cluster manuscripts as products of scribal activity in order to profile scribal production and to determine a more precise location in time for their activity, focusing, from literary and cultural-historical perspectives, on the content and genres of the texts that scribes wrote and copied and on the scripts and languages that they used. 

The goal of the Postdoc subproject is to describe the processes of and developments in three to four centuries of copying the biblical manuscripts found in the Judaean Desert in relation to palaeographic dating and writer identification. The major research question is how variant forms and editions of biblical manuscripts can be correlated to palaeographic dates, to identification of writers, as well as other variables such as scribal practices and different find-sites. Previous scholarship has explained textual variety in terms of chronological developments or sociological differences, or both, based on traditional palaeographical dates, or on models of a Qumran scribal practice, and generally on a smaller sample of manuscripts. On the basis of a database of all substantial biblical manuscripts from the Judaean Desert, the Postdoc researcher will select one more confined group of manuscripts (most probably either Deuteronomy or the Psalms), and qualitatively analyse the differences between the manuscripts as well as in relation to the authoritative text forms of the later traditions, in order to plot such variants against the developing time and the different find places and correlating these not only to traditional text-typologies of text, but also to occurrences of rewriting and so-called Fortschreibung, and to the various scribal practices.

[Application deadline is 31 March 2016.  The annual salary appears to be about € 25,000-33,000 for the PhD position and € 30,000-60,000.  This post is adapted from an advertisement on the NTEditions list.]