Table 2

Comparisons of all manuscripts (identified by manuscript numbers in the 'Manuscript' column) included in the ECM apparatus with a reconstruction of the text of the seven nearly pure Byzantine manuscripts as determined in Aland et al. (1997, B8-B9). These manuscripts are 1, 18, 35, 424, 607, 617, and 2423. At 748 of the 761 variant passages, at least five of them witness to the same reading, which is very likely to be the reading of the majority of all manuscripts containing the Letter of James. At the remaining 13 passages, the Byzantine witness is divided and the majority reading cannot be distinguished with sufficient probability. The second column ('Total') shows the number of variant passages at which the compared manuscript and the reconstructed majority text are both extant; this number cannot exceed 748. The total is only 736 for A, the edited approximation to the original, because at 12 passages there is considerable doubt about the reconstruction of the original reading. The 'Byz' column gives the number (and the '%' column gives the percentage) of variant passages out of this total that are Byzantine in the focal manuscript. The terms 'majority text' and 'Byzantine text' have to be distinguished carefully. The majority text consists of the passages without variants and the variants that are attested by the majority of witnesses, while the Byzantine text is that form of text that is distinguished from older forms by majority readings. In the ECM of the Letter of James, there are 69 variant passages at which the edited text differs from the text of the majority of witnesses. At these passages, the majority readings are regarded as 'Byzantine' in the historical and text-critical senses of the word.