Early Variants in the Byzantine Text of the Gospels

Taking Inventory on the ‘Age of the Minuscules’: Later Manuscripts and the Byzantine Tradition within the Field of Textual Criticism

“…The Byzantine tradition is the distinctive pattern of readings attested in the vast majority of post-ninth-century minuscules (e.g., 18, 35, 319, 330, 617, 2423, as some of the best representatives) and a handful of late majuscules (e.g., 09/F, 011/G, 013/H, 045/Ω). While ‘Byzantine’ is the most common label at present, it has also been known as Majority, K/ Koine , Antiochian, Lucianic, Oriental, Asiatic, Constantinopolitan, Syrian, Traditional, Alpha, and Ecclesiastical (Sturz 1984: 13; on the difference between ‘Byzantine’ as a text-critical label and ‘Majority’ as a quantitative label, see Boogert 2015: 6-7; Wachtel 2006: 29; 1995: 7-8; Parker 2003: 137). Long ago it was relegated to the rubbish bin and is still often regarded as a ‘secondary kind of text inferior in its value’ (Hurtado 1981: 62) and a ‘corrupt medieval text’ (Zuntz 1946: 1), being awarded a fifth-tier status (Aland and Aland 1995: 106) due to its lack of Textwert in restoring the initial/original text (K.…”

“…Work on the ECM and TuT has consistently demonstrated that even the two most opposed texts (Byzantine and the eclectic text of NA/UBS) feature far more agreement than typically acknowledged. For instance, in the TuT collations and the Parallelperikopen volume for the Gospels (Strutwolf and Wachtel 2011)—which by definition focus on the most highly-variable passages—there is a level of agreement of over 85 percent between the Byzantine tradition and NA/UBS (Wachtel 2009: 11; 2006).…”

“…For Revelation the Byzantine tradition is split almost evenly between A v and Q groups, forcing even Robinson and Pierpont to fall back on internal evidence (1991: xv-xvi). In the TuT Teststellen for the Gospels, the Byzantine text is split in 9 percent of cases (Wachtel 2006: 29-30), and in the Catholic epistles there are considerable disagreements among even late Byzantine witnesses (Amphoux 1982: 97). We can quantify the internal diversity of some of the most ‘pure’ (according to the ECM) Byzantine minuscules (18, 35, 319, 617) even more precisely using the ECM–Acts/Catholics data (see Table 2).…”