Abstract
Alan Taylor Farnes’ published version of his University of Birmingham PhD thesis uses an ingenious method to determine how New Testament manuscripts are copied. Farnes’ premise is that when a manuscript and a direct copy of it are both extant, we can determine scribal habits by comparing the texts of Vorlage and Abschrift, noting the differences. James R. Royse had suggested that scribal habits be studied in this way (Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri [Leiden: Brill, 2008], 739), and it is good that Farnes has done so. Farnes includes a helpful table of twenty-three likely Abschriften that will certainly be beneficial to future research (pp. 25–28). After assessing the copyists of P127, 0319 and 0320 (Greek and Latin, but with more than one scribe at work), 205 and 821, Farnes concludes that there were fewer errors in later centuries (p. 200), but that the length of a variant should not be used ‘as a metric for determining transcriptional probability’ (p. 202).
Farnes includes rich bibliographical discussions of some of the later scribes and manuscripts. He also makes a helpful contribution by discussing the copying techniques of scribes who did not know Greek very well (scribes of 0319 and 0320). Such copyists are generally good at refraining from introducing meaningful changes into the text, even if they do make relatively more nonsense errors.
Although the premise of the work is excellent, and Farnes has some valuable findings, the book itself at times suffers from a lack of careful editing. The style can be repetitive, and it seems that in a few places, the monograph was partially but incompletely changed from its unpublished thesis version. Farnes admits (p. 73, n. 53) that the unpublished version often includes images to illustrate his point and directs his readers to see the images there, but references to images remain at times when images themselves do not. For example, on p. 136, the reader is instructed to see the ‘image below from Paris gr. 1732’, but no image follows. Likewise on p. 181, the reader is twice directed to ‘the image below’, but said image must have been removed when the work was revised for publication.
Not all of the manuscripts studied are direct copies of extant exemplars, either. Farnes uses singular readings to study P127, a fifth-century papyrus with a ‘free’ text of Acts, similar to Codex Bezae. One wonders if the abnormally high number of singular readings in P127 can be attributed to its copyist or to the textual tradition of which it is a part. Farnes’ work on 205 ‘operates on the assumption that 205 is a copy of 2886’ (p. 149), but he later settles on the conclusion that their relationship is that of siblings copied from the same parent—neither manuscript an Abschrift of the other.
The more we know about the habits in individual manuscripts, the better understanding we will have about the text of the New Testament. Farnes is to be thanked for extending our knowledge in this area with a useful volume that samples scribal habits across several centuries.