Subject: Readings, Profiles, Samples

From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 May 1997 12:28:27 -0700

Since Jimmy Adair has politely asked us to cool it, I though I would
try throwing out a new topic to get people thinking.

One thing that seems to be pretty widely agreed upon is that any
general-purpose sampling method should focus only on readings
found in two or more manuscripts. In practice, this becomes
"two or more *known* manuscripts," and often "two or more
of the manuscripts I'm studying."

Just to play Devil's Advocate, I'm going to ask the question,
"Why?"

Let me explain my reasoning. It starts with one of my favorite
oddball manuscripts, 1506.

This manuscript (1320 C.E., on Mount Athos) contains the gospels
(in a very defective, strongly Byzantine text) plus Romans and
the first few chapters of 1 Corinthians.

1506 has one extremely fascinating reading. It *omits* chapter
16 of Romans. Other than that, based on the studies I've done
(based here on every reading noted in NA26) it looks like a fairly
typical Alexandrian manuscript, though I know of at least one
other apparently unsupported reading (1 Cor. 2:14 omit TOU QEOU).

Unfortunately, as noted, 1506 is very fragmentary. And I, for
one, would very much like to see other texts of this type. Given
the small amount of text remaining to us, it may be hard to
identify a "1506-text" based solely on widely attested variants.
Searching using its singulars might help. I concede that this
is sort of like turning profiling on its side -- but so what?

Now I know that including such seemingly-singular readings will
cause the overall rates of agreements between manuscripts to
rise. But this does not matter as long as we compare rates of
agreements based on the same sample. So why not do this?

Thoughts, anyone?

Bob Waltz
[email-masked]