{"id":9416,"date":"2023-09-15T06:16:32","date_gmt":"2023-09-15T11:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abudinen.com\/blog\/?p=9416"},"modified":"2023-09-15T06:21:01","modified_gmt":"2023-09-15T11:21:01","slug":"correctors-and-corrections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abudinen.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/15\/correctors-and-corrections\/","title":{"rendered":"Correctors and Corrections"},"content":{"rendered":"\n Introduction\n\n\n\nAncient scribes were at least as aware of scribal errors as moderns. Since all manuscripts were copied individually, each needed to be individually checked for errors. This process eventually came to be standardized.\n\n\n\nWe don’t know how or whether early manuscripts were corrected. In a scriptorium, however, it was the practice that a manuscript be checked as soon as it was finished. This was the task of the diorqwths, literally “one who straightens,” which we might loosely render as “guy supposed to make this thing right.” The diorthotes was often a scribe specially trained to find and rectify mistakes, though we often find a scribe acting as his own diorthotes.\n\n\n\nThe\u00a0diorthotes\u00a0was often the last scribe to work on a manuscript. (This is particularly true of Byzantine manuscripts.) But manuscripts represented a lot of expense and work; an owner might be reluctant to discard a manuscript simply because its text did not meet the tastes of the times. So we see many manuscripts, including Sinaiticus and Bezae, repeatedly corrected to bring them more in line with the Byzantine text.\n\n\n\n–\n\n\n\nIn the past, correctors were often referred to by a superscript letter. So a referred to a reading from the first corrector of Sinaiticus, while b would refer to the second. It is now more normal to refer to correctors by number, making 1 the first corrector, 2 the second, etc. If a manuscript had only a sing[...x]<\/span>
le corrector, of course, the simple c<\/sup> notation is retained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A distinction is sometimes made between “amateur” and “professional” correctors. This is an unfortunate notation; in the period after the split of the Roman Empire, professional scribes were very nearly the only people who could read and write, and therefore all<\/em> correctors were professional. If we change the designations to something like “systematic” and “casual,” however, the distinction is accurate. A systematic corrector is one who goes over a section of text in detail, comparing it to some sort of exemplar. A casual corrector is one who notices a variant or two, probably in the course of reading, and makes some sort of correction. A casual corrector will make only a few corrections in a manuscript, and may not be dignified with a separate superscript number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The list below describes some of the more noteworthy corrected manuscripts and the scribes who corrected them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Noteworthy Corrected Manuscripts<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following list describes most of the manuscripts which have experienced noteworthy corrections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  • P<\/strong>66<\/sup>. P66<\/sup> is, in terms of scribal accuracy, one of the most poorly-written manuscripts known to us. Although it contains only the gospel of John (and portions even of that have been lost), it contains roughly 450 corrections! As Colwell comments [“Method in Evaluating Scribal Habits.” now published in E. C. Colwell, Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament;<\/em> p. 121], “Wildness in copying is the outstanding characteristic of P66<\/sup>.” This means that many of the corrections in the manuscript were early alterations made to correct the scribe’s own errors; Colwell [p. 118] reports “P66<\/sup> seems to reflect a scribe working with the intention of making a good copy, falling into careless errors, particularly the dropping of a letter, a syllable, a word, or even a phrase where it is doubled, but also under the control of some other person, or second standard, so that the corrections which are made are usually corrections to a reading read by a number of other witnesses. Nine out of ten of the nonsense readings are corrected, and two out of three of all his singular readings.” (It should be noted that Colwell, p. 109, finds no fewer than 482 singular readings in P66<\/sup>; this would imply that two-thirds of the corrections in P66<\/sup> correct singular readings — an astonishing proportion. Colwell also reports, p. 111, that “two out of five [of P66<\/sup>‘s singular readings] are nonsense readings,” leaving 289 “Sensible Singular Readings”.)
    It does appear that P66<\/sup> was eventually corrected from a different exemplar. The nature of this exemplar is difficult to determine due simply to the mass of nonsense and singular readings requiring correction. Nonetheless, the original text of P66<\/sup> seems to have been Alexandrian, and the corrections do not seem to have changed this much. (Various scholars have mentioned what they regard as “Western” readings, but most are “Western” only in the false sense “Non-Alexandrian;” many of these readings appear to be simply scribal slips.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • . Sinaiticus is one of the most-corrected of all Biblical manuscripts; Tischendorf lists nearly 15,000 alterations (some of them involving multiple changes in the same place), and this is based only on the London portion of the text. At this rate there would have been in excess of 25,000 corrections in the entire manuscript (Old and New Testaments). It is believed that nine correctors (perhaps more) have worked on the manuscript (though not all engaged in the New Testament), dating from the time it was written to perhaps the twelfth century. For reasons of simplicity, however, a rather more limited set of sigla has been used for these correctors:
    • a<\/sup> is contemporary with the scribe, or nearly (i.e. fourth century). This corrector made a relatively slight number of changes, not all of them in the direction of the Byzantine text (e.g. this corrector apparently marked Luke 22:43-44 for deletion). Hort, e.g., thought the readings of this scribe to be of value nearly equal to the original readings of the text. Tischendorf believed this copyist was one of the original copyists of the manuscript, specifically, the scribe D who wrote a few random leaves of the New Testament (probably to correct pages he felt incurably flawed).<\/li>
    • b<\/sup> dates probably from the fifth\/sixth century. This corrector made many changes in the first few chapters of Matthew (generally bringing it closer to the Byzantine text), but did very little other work.<\/li>
    • c<\/sup> actually refers to a large group of scribes (perhaps five) who worked in the seventh century and made the large majority of the corrections in the manuscript. Often they cannot be reliably distinguished. The most important (and probably the first) of these is known as c.a<\/sup>, who did a great deal to conform the manuscript to the Byzantine text (and not infrequently undid the work of a<\/sup>). The next phase of corrections, labelled c.b<\/sup>, may perhaps have been the work of three scribes, who added a few more Byzantine readings. In addition, the symbols c.Pamph<\/sup> is sometimes used to refer to a scribe who worked primarily if not exclusively on the Old Testament (his corrections, in fact, seem to be confined to 1 Kingdoms-Esther), commenting that he was working from a Pamphilian manuscript, while c.c<\/sup> and c.c*<\/sup> refer to two minor correctors from late in the seventh century; many of their changes are in the Apocalypse. We may ignore d<\/sup>; this symbol is not generally used.<\/li>
    • e<\/sup> refers to the last known corrector, who made a few alterations (Tischendorf reportedly lists only three) in the twelfth century.<\/li><\/ul>The current Nestle-Aland edition has simplified this notation; a<\/sup> and b<\/sup> are now subsumed under the symbol 1<\/sup>; all the c<\/sup> correctors now appear in the guise of 2<\/sup>; the handful of corrections of e<\/sup> are placed under the symbol c<\/sup><\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • B.<\/strong> The corrections in B are, in a sense, far less significant than those in the preceding manuscripts. There are corrections, but they do not fundamentally change the manuscript’s text-type. But in another sense, they affect the entire text of the manuscript.
      Traditionally B has been regarded as having three correctors: B1<\/sup>, contemporary with the original writing; B2<\/sup>, of about the sixth century, and B3<\/sup>, probably of the ninth or tenth century. (A few later corrections are also found.)
      B3<\/sup> is the most important of these correctors, as this scribe retraced the entire manuscript (except for a handful of words and phrases he regarded as spurious). This scribe added accents, breathings, and punctuation at the same time. Presumably he made some reference to another manuscript during the process (since he did make some few textual changes), but the changes are slight. The primary effect of the retracing was to ruin the beauty of the ancient lettering.
      In the Nestle-Aland text, the readings of the correctors B1<\/sup> are labelled B1<\/sup>, while those of B3<\/sup> are labelled B2<\/sup>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • C.<\/strong> Codex C is, of course, a palimpsest, which makes it even harder than usual to assess its correctors. The fullest study of the correctors of C was made by Tischendorf, but of course this was done before ultraviolet photography and other modern techniques were available. Robert W. Lyon offered corrections to Tischendorf, but even these are regarded as inadequate. Thus the only fully current information is that offered by the apparatus to the current Nestle-Aland edition — which is accurate but of course not complete. So all the information here must be considered tentative.
      Traditionally, C is listed as having had three correctors: C1<\/sup> (Ca<\/sup>), C2<\/sup> (Cb<\/sup>), and C3<\/sup> (Cc<\/sup>). C1<\/sup> is the symbol used for the diorthotes.<\/em> However, there are no readings which can be attributed with certainty to this corrector, and many scholars omit this hypothetical scribe from the list.
      The existence of C2<\/sup> and C3<\/sup> can hardly be denied, however, as each made some hundreds of corrections to the text. (The Nestle-Aland text shows about 251 corrections by C2<\/sup> and about 272 by C3<\/sup>). C2<\/sup> is believed to have worked in the sixth century, possibly in Palestine; C3<\/sup> worked in the ninth century, perhaps at Constantinople.
      Neither corrector was really thorough. Both seem to have alternated between moderate attention and extreme inattention. This is particularly true of C3<\/sup>, who all but ignored large fractions of the text. For example, C3<\/sup> offered only three corrections in the Catholic Epistles and only 20 corrections in Mark. The table below summarizes the extent to which the two correctors worked on various parts of the New Testament (the Apocalypse is omitted because NA27<\/sup> shows only 3 corrections of C in that entire book! All numbers are approximate).
      Book\/SectionC2<\/sup>C3<\/sup>Matthew3342Mark4820Luke3142John4989Acts2124Catholics Epistles263Pauline Epistles4151
      The text of C3<\/sup> is almost purely Byzantine. That of C2<\/sup> is more complex. The Byzantine element is still dominant, but there are occasional readings which go against the Majority Text. Few of these agree with the earliest Alexandrian witnesses, but they are often shared with late Alexandrian manuscripts.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • D<\/strong>ea<\/sup>\/05. Codex Bezae is unique. (Oh, you knew that?) No other manuscript departs so far from the New Testament norm. It is a testimony to the value of manuscripts, and the effort required to make them, that it was preserved and repeatedly corrected, rather than thrown away.
      Scrivener counts a total of fifteen correctors who worked on the manuscript; nine worked on the Greek side (the others confined their attention to the Latin or the margins). The earliest of these is contemporary with the writing (the original scribe occasionally sponged and\/or scraped away errors); the last dates from the eleventh or twelfth century. Gregory summarizes the earliest of these as follows: “The first one made about 181 changes in a careful beautiful hand in the sixth century. The second was probably of the seventh century, and made about 327 changes, besides adding some spiritus and accents and other signs. The third, it may be towards the end of the seventh century, made 130 changes, and the fourth, of the same age, 160 changes, mostly in Acts” (The Canon and Text of the New Testament,<\/em> p. 352).
      Scrivener, naturally enough, designated the various correctors by the letters A through M (the use of twelve letters — I\/J are treated as one — is explained by the fact that correctors E and G worked only on the Latin side). In Tischendorf’s edition this was simplified; DA<\/sup> becomes D1<\/sup>, DB<\/sup> and DC<\/sup> retain their symbols; the rest are subsumed as D2<\/sup>. In the Nestle text this is further simplified; the early correctors DA<\/sup>, DB<\/sup>, DC<\/sup>, and DD<\/sup> are summarized as D1<\/sup>; the middle correctors (DF<\/sup>, DH<\/sup>, DJ<\/sup>, DK<\/sup>, and DL<\/sup>, all of around the ninth century) are given the symbol D2<\/sup>, and the eleventh\/twelfth century corrector DM<\/sup> becomes Dc<\/sup>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • D<\/strong>p<\/sup>\/06. Codex Claromontanus resembles Codex Bezae in many ways. It is a diglot, it dates from about the sixth century — and it has been heavily corrected. Tischendorf distinguished nine correctors, though only four were really significant. These four he assigned the symbols Db<\/sup> (D**, seventh century?), Dc<\/sup> (D***, ninth century; whom Tischendorf regards as actually the fourth corrector. It should be noted that Tischendorf often marked corrections Db et c<\/sup>, indicating that this corrector agreed with Db<\/sup>), plus the nearly-contemporary correctors Dd<\/sup> (D****) and Dnov<\/sup>, which must be after the ninth century. (In the Nestle-Aland text, Db<\/sup> becomes D1<\/sup>, Dc<\/sup> becomes D2<\/sup>, and Dd<\/sup> and Dnov<\/sup> together constitute Dc<\/sup>.)
      Of these, the most significant was the ninth century corrector (Nestle-Aland’s D2<\/sup>), who, according to Scrivener, made “more than two thousand critical changes in the text, and added stops and all the breathings and accents.” The text used by this corrector, as might be expected, was almost entirely Byzantine.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • H<\/strong>p<\/sup> (015). H is not as noteworthy for its corrections as for their claimed source. Originally written in the sixth century, some centuries later a second hand went over the manuscript adding accents and breathings as well as badly retracing letters. Of greater interest is a note affixed to the end of Titus. This claims that the manuscript was corrected from a manuscript written by Pamphilius and kept at C\u00e6sarea. (The wording of the note is\u00a0egraya kai exeqemhn kata dunamin steichron.<\/sup>\u00a0tode to teucos paulou tou apostolou pros eggrammon kai eukatalhmpton anagnwsin. twn kaq hmas adelfwn.<\/sup>\u00a0parwn apantwn tolmhs suggnwmhn aitw. euch th uper emwn.<\/sup>\u00a0thn sunperiforan komizomenos.<\/sup>\u00a0anablhqh de h biblos.<\/sup>\u00a0pros to en kaisaria antigrafon ths biblioqhkhs tou agiou pamfilou ceiri gegrammenon autou). This note is dated by Tischendorf to the seventh century — i.e. to a date\u00a0after<\/em>\u00a0the manuscript was written. However, it seems almost certain that the note is either wrong or misunderstood. It is highly unlikely that a Pamphilian manuscript would have a purely Byzantine text — but the handful of surviving corrections in H that involve a change of text (as opposed to spelling, accents, etc.) — will be seen to be almost invariably Byzantine, with the others being perhaps from the Lectionary (1799 also has lectionary readings). Readings marked * are not in the Nestle apparatus, and so have been given in full; for the other variants listed here, the reader is referred to NA27<\/sup>:\n