Daily Gleanings: Manuscript Matters (15 August 2019)

Reading time: < 1 minutes

Leigh Ann Thompson and Andrew Patton discuss four types of ektheses, or visual markers of textual divisions, in New Testament manuscripts and provide a helpful example illustration of each.


Peter Montoro discusses textual stability in Patristic literature and this literature’s function in textual criticism of the Greek New Testament. Montoro particularly focuses on Chrysostom’s homilies on Rom 8 as a helpful illustration. A repeated refrain is that

it seems sometimes to be forgotten that the task of “proper evaluation” [of the witness that Patristic citations give to the text of the Greek New Testament] is incomplete without a careful investigation of the manuscript transmission of the work in which a given patristic citation is located.

It needs to be more clearly recognized, in practice as well as in theory, that the usability of patristic citations is directly dependent upon their stability within the manuscript tradition of the work from which they derive. (italics original)

Yes, and yes. For the balance of Montoro’s discussion, see his original guest post.

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