Thu Oct 31 14:34:29 1996

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Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 14:29:27 -0700
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From: "Robert B. Waltz" 
Subject: Re: More on 2427, family resemblances
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On Thu, 31 Oct 1996, Vincent Broman  wrote:

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
>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.

Just a minor correction: Dabs is a copy of Claromontanus, not Bezae.
And, by strange coincidence, there's a second, fragmentary copy of
Claromontanus.

There is also a copy of 205 known, and Lake thought that 205 itself
might be a copy of 209. (Personally, I doubt it. 205 is very possibly
descended from 209 -- certainly they are very close -- but 205 has
just slightly more Byzantine readings; enough that I have to
suspect that there were a couple of intervening generations.)

>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.

Colwell claims that family 1 is a "true family," with a precisely
reconstructable stemma. I've always doubted that, personally. He
also states that several of the subgroups of the Ferrar group have
reconstructable stemma.

>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.

My inclination -- which I freely admit is based on inadequate research --
is to consider them cousinns.

>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.

Yet another reason why Colwell argued against basing *anything* on
variants from the TR!

>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.

This still, it seems to me, leaves us with the original question.
Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that 2427 had been copied from
a manuscript (call it X) that was copied from B. But suppose that X
had been deliberately but sporadically corrected from another manuscript
along the lines of, say, C (e.g. it's largely Alexandrian, but from a
subtype that differs from B and that has a large Byzantine infusion).
Is 2427 then a copy of B? A descendent of B? A relative of B?

Or suppose the distance were slightly greater. Then what?

Put it this way: 2427 is not an exact copy of B; either there are
intermediate steps, or changes were made as it was copied. A true
copy will differ from the original only in accidental errors. How
far, then, are we justified in extending the term "copy"?

Bob Waltz
waltzmn@skypoint.com

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