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Bayesian phylogenetics and its application to the text of Ephesians

McCollum, James Joseph
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Author
McCollum, James Joseph
Abstract
In this dissertation, I describe how textual criticism can be practiced in the framework of Bayesian phylogenetics, and I demonstrate this approach on the tradition of the New Testament Epistle to the Ephesians. Bayesian phylogenetics, originally developed in the context of evolutionary biology, makes rigorous use of mathematical laws of probability to infer transmission history in the presence of uncertainty about observed data and unknown parameters in the transmission process. The model of a phylogenetic tree or stemma offers a clean separation of concerns for traditional text-critical criteria. Intrinsic probability (concerning which readings the author was likely to write) acts at the stemma’s root, transcriptional probability (concerning how later emendators were likely to alter the text) acts along its branches, and genealogical evidence about the relationships of witnesses is encoded in the arrangement of its branches. Bayesian phylogenetics can incorporate, assess, and refine these judgments and quantify how well-supported its results are. Throughout this study, I emphasize the relevance and importance of traditional philological judgments and considerations of paratextual and historical evidence to the computer-assisted analysis. In a new textual commentary on twenty points of textual variation in Ephesians, I show how intrinsic and transcriptional judgments inform my analysis. I then present the results of a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of 189 textual witnesses, including ten patristic sources and witnesses to seven ancient translations. By refining these results through a comparison with historical evidence and results from an approach more resilient to textual mixture, I produce a provisional reconstruction of the transmissional history of Ephesians—the first of its kind for this work. My analysis suggests changes to the Nestle-Aland critical text (NA28) in ten places, and it resolves split decisions in fourteen others. I conclude with insights from the study and suggestions for further improvements to the dataset and methodology.
Keywords
New Testament, Ephesians, textual criticism, phylogenetics, Bayesian inference
Date
2025-09-06
Type
Thesis
Journal
Book
Volume
Issue
Page Range
1-414
Article Number
ACU Department
Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry
Collections
HDR Theses
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URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14802/38213
 https://doi.org/10.26199/acu/1180
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DOI
Source URL
https://github.com/jjmccollum/ephesians-thesis-supplement
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Open Access Status
Open access
License
CC BY 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International)
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Notes
This work © 2026 by James Joseph McCollum is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This research was supported by the Commonwealth through an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship [DOI: https://doi.org/10.82133/C42F-K220].