Thu Oct 31 15:20:00 1996

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From: Jack Kilmon 
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Subject: Re: More on 2427, family resemblances
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Vincent Broman wrote:
> 

> 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.

	There seems to be a great parallel between textual criticism
and palaeoanthropology.  We are examining small fossil fragments and
speculating on a common ancestor...looking for the "Lucy" of
manuscripts.  Everytime a new fossil is discovered, we re-examine
the family (hominidae/Byzantine/Alexandrian) and it's genera, species
and sub-species as well as "tribes and clans."  Textual variants are
like genetic codes.

	I, for one, am not convinced that the common ancestor of the
Gospels lie strictly in oral tradition.  This seems to infer the
redaction layer propaganda that the disciples and immediate post-passion
Yeshuine Movement Jews were either illiterate, or wrote
nothing.  In this respect, Aramaisms are much like mitochondrial
DNA with direct lineage to "Lucy" documents.  The Antiochene and
Ephesian "genetic engineers" in Hellenic Christianity seem to have
performed some extensive gene-splicing.

	I wonder if the 11Q New Jerusalem fragments just might
represent a holotype for Revelation.

	Just a thought in passing on these interesting discussions
that arouse the biologist in me.

Jack Kilmon
jpman@accesscomm.net

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