Loading...
Likelihood calculations for reconstructed lacunae and Papyrus 46’s text of Ephesians 6:19
McCollum, James
McCollum, James
Author
Abstract
This article presents an approach to quantify the likelihood of a given reconstruction of lacunose text in a manuscript using statistics on line lengths (in letters), information about the line-breaking conventions and scribal habits of the scribe who copied the manuscript, and the well-known computational technique of dynamic programming. The approach and its value are illustrated with an application to a textual contest between the readings τὸ μυστήριον τοῦ εὐαγγελίου and τὸ μυστήριον in Ephesians 6:19, where the early papyrus witness P. Chester Beatty II/P. Mich. Inv. 6238 (Gregory–Aland 46) is lacunose. The study shows that under reasonable assumptions, 46 is over fifty times more likely to have read τὸ μυστήριον.
Keywords
manuscript, lacunose text, scribal habits, dynamic programming, Ephesians 6:19, papyrus
Date
2023
Type
Journal article
Journal
Book
Volume
38
Issue
2
Page Range
647-657
Article Number
ACU Department
Collections
Relation URI
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
CC BY 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.