Family 13/Ferrar

I stumbled onto James Stapp's site and found this on William Ferrar's grouping, specifically John 8:44. This is Ferrar's finding that manuscript 13 = BNF 50 gr is also like MS 69 and others. That's the group which sticks Byzantine "John 7:53-8:11" into Luke instead. The group is now subdivided: MS 13 heads up group a, and 69 b.

The earlier survivors of this family (b anyway) cluster around AD 1052, associated with the Greek-speaking church in Calabria and maybe Syracuse. The region was claimed as part of the Rhomania, based in Constantinople, although the Normans were coming to push them out of their last Italian foothold, rather toehold. So what gives with the non-receptus shifting of the pericopa adulterae?

Ferrar thought that this was not a reference text - "The Bible" - so much as a liturgical one. Old lectionaries had circulated, in this case Byzantine ones perhaps from the reign of Constans II. These readings entered this text. After Constans' murder and the Eastern "Roman Empire" retreat to Constantinople, said Empire full of Greeks wasn't much able to dislodge this archetype, and/or didn't care enough. Then when the Normans took Calabria and Sicily, the once-obscure book got loose. High Mediaeval scholars deemed it of interest; Erasmus, for one, knew MS 69. Hence copies all over the Med: from the Escorial to Mount Athos.

Back to Stapp's John 8:44, he finds its omission of "tou patros" be deliberate. It would feed an antiMarcion agenda; the phrase also is absent from Bohairic, a Nile-delta Coptic which became the liturgical language in the High Middle Ages. My thought, however, is that nobody should care to fight Marcion on the ground of John which gospel the Marcionites didn't accept. The same Demiurge/Christ division is found in Gnosticism, and here we do find use of John. Such a battle can be had in Egypt.

BACKDATE 11/23