Koine Dialektos

Orthographic variation within the manuscripts of the Greek NT is seldom a cause célèbre beyond the ranks of diehard textual critics. Even among these most will concede that orthographic irregularities amount to little more than evidence of scribal incompetency or inconsistency in their spelling practices. To find the same word both spelled correctly and misspelled with a single manuscript b the same scribe is not uncommon. It approaches the  norm. The critical editions of our Greek NTs have therefore opted, on good grounds, to exclude textual variants displaying non-standardized spelling. To include them would make it impossible for anyone to use the critical apparatuses in a meaningful way. The deluge of senseless errors would drown out variants of demonstrable textual significance.

The publication of Josef Schmid's landmark work on the textual history of the Apocalypse seemingly established the Andreas Text Type as a fourth-century product. The primary evidence for Schmid's claim came from the fourth-century corrections of the Apocalypse in Codex Sinaiticus, corrections which bore a close resemblance to the Andreas text of the Apocalypse. Schmid's reconstruction, however, is flawed. The fourth-century corrections he identified are actually from the seventh-century. The data supporting a fourth-century Andreas text type does not exist. Schmid's widely influential error appears to have been based on a misreading of Milne and Skeat's "Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus."

"The early papyri of Luke are remarkable for their diversity. Six pre-fourth century witnesses are extant. The content, date, provenance, textual relationships, and scribal habits of each vary from fragment to fragment. Their texts range from a few paltry lines to nearly an entire gospel. All were produced in the second, third, or fourth centuries. All are from Egypt--though their precise sites of discovery differ. The nature and frequency of their scribal variations also fluctuate. Nonsense readings, itacisms, and similar orthographic 'deviations' prevail in some; others exhibit little to none of these. The incidence of nomina sacra and numerical abbreviations varies from scribe to scribe, even line to line. Their significance is debated. The amount of surviving text is at once both an accident of history and a byproduct of particular scribal habits. The rates of additions, omissions, transpositions, and the like can be tracked to the individual copyist. Human hands have shaped the bequeathals of history and the absence of 'expected' readings continue to hold the imagination hostage. Questions swirl over textual alignments, while the very nomenclature of 'text types' is decried in some quarters. More than simple artifacts of early Christian piety, these papyri disclose the fault lines of Luke's textual history--well in advance of the great fourth-century codices."