Thu Oct 31 14:04:35 1996

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From: Vincent Broman 
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	(dwashbur@wave.park.wy.us)
Subject: Re: More on 2427, family resemblances
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Bob Waltz wrote:
> This brings up a serious question: How much change can a manuscript
> tradition undergo and still be considered direct descent?

Dave Washburn wrote:
> It seems to me that what we need most in order to answer this 
> question are some clear examples of direct descent....

There are precious few known examples of extant MSS being directly
descended from each other, even after searches of monastic libraries
where family relations of MSS ought to be close, even inbred.
Bezae and D-Abschrift are one pair, with a few (couple of?) other pairs known.
In the Ferrar family, the general topology of the family tree is known,
but a substantial number of hypothetical intermediaries are hypothesized
to make the connections work.  I'm not sure about the smaller Lake family (f1)
but the same might be true there.

In Silva Lake's reconstruction of the stemma of Family Pi in Mark, all of
the extant MSS, excepting possibly Pi, were leaves of the tree, and all of
the ancestors of MSS were hypotheticals.  She didn't even commit to the
idea that Pi itself was the granddaddy of the family, because the reconstructed
text of the archetype, obtained from the oldest miniscules by voting,
differed from Pi in 14 (+-?) places in Mark.  She did allow that if the
archetype was not Pi, it was quite a good copy of Pi.  By taking advantage
of the uncertainty of late medieval paleographical dates, she was able to
argue that the nominally 9th century MS K (Cyprius) was a grandson of Pi,
but Geerlings thought K was just a sibling or cousin of Pi.
Geerling's and Champlin's not-quite-as-thorough analysis of family Pi
in the other three Gospels was much less certain about the exact family
relations of the MSS, basically saying that the later MSS in the family
probably descended from the earlier ones, with progressive degrees of
Kx mixture as the generations pass.  One of the two, G. or C., I forget which,
used a rule of thumb that agreement in 93% of the variants from the TR
would indicate a one-generation-of-copying distance between father and son.
Similarly, 86% for two-generations, 79% for three generations.  Really.

Wisse found a bunch of close pairs among the Kx and Kmix heaps, but
I suspect that inside such a homogeneous tribe, random coincidental
resemblances are no big surprise.  More detailed study than a simple
profile comparison would be needed to be confident that a closely related
pair had been found among the Kx and Kmix MSS.


Vincent Broman,  code D783 Bayside                       Email: broman@nosc.mil
Naval Command Control and Ocean Surveillance Center, RDT&E Div.
San Diego, CA  92152-6222,  USA                          Phone: +1 619 553 1641
=== PGP protected mail preferred.  For public key finger broman@np.nosc.mil ===

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