Katie Leggett reports on Greek manuscripts of the full New Testament. Far fewer survive than are thought - the old liste claimed sixty. The real number might be twenty.
I personally wonder if the Revelation should count, here, in Greek. I'd say it should count... in Latin, and maybe Sahidic. But out east this book was questionable. And indeed several "complete" MSS have this book penned in a separate hand and later than the rest of the NT.
Leggett further finds that miniscule MS 141, if complete-with-lacuna, becomes less lacunose when 866 is restored to it. Amazing this hasn't been found until now. But then, miniscule MSS tend late and Byzantine, which might interest Byzantinists and Erasmians, but is considerably less sexy to critics.
Least sexy of all - to them - are Handschrifts from ... printed editions. Yeah, some people copied books off the printed page, by hand, and sold that. I dunno. They didn't have xerox in those days. This is like how Slavs went from relating epic tales - to retelling the epic tale, that had got to print as the official version; a famous comparandum with Homer. Or maybe how published Ethiopic literature, ended up translated and handcopied in Amharic, which "MSS" now have to be filtered from authentic mediaeval work.
But now I wonder. May one perhaps hope for handcopies of printed Shakespeare whose volumes we no longer own...?
BACKDATE 4/18
No comments:
Post a Comment