Daily Gleanings: Textual Criticism (18 October 2019)

Peter Gurry discusses “a shorter Byzantine reading in the parable of the Prodigal Son”—particularly Luke 15:21. Along the way, he makes some insightful methodological comments along the way.

In particular,

In addition to its good external evidence, the shorter reading has a very obvious transcriptional explanation in parablepsis.

…

I imagine many will reject parablepsis as less likely than harmonization (so Metzger’s Commentary). But why should such an intentional change be more likely than the equally obvious but unintentional one? Certainly, scribes harmonize to the context. But, from my experience, they accidentally omit by parablepsis even more. Any look at a large apparatus bears this out on page after page. (italics original)

For the balance of Gurry’s discussion and a substantial thread of comments to go along with and provide differing evaluations of it, see the original post.