GA2965 and the Nicetas Manuscript Cluster: Guest Post by Post II

Sometimes things hide in plain sight. Such was the situation with the manuscript cluster of Nicetas’ catena on John’s gospel. These individual manuscripts, 249, 317, 333, 423, 430, 743, and 869 have been known to exist for years, but this group was largely ignored until Brill published an article in 2016 by Michael A. Clark, Nicetas of Heraclea’s Catena on John’s Gospel: How Many Manuscripts are There? (https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004334960/B9789004334960_016.xml) This helpful article established with certainty which mss should truly be cataloged as a catenae of Nicetas.  Clark later completed his dissertation, The Catena of Nicetas of Heraclea and its Johannine Text (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/33528801.pdf), which included a reconstructed text of John’s gospel as penned by Nicetas, complete with an apparatus showing variations between the Nicetas text, the Byzantine text, and the NA text. 

A contributing factor to the historical ignorance of this cluster involves the damaged and tattered nature of each of the manuscripts (see table below). Furthermore, none of them include the synoptic gospels, meaning these were avoided during the profile studies that identified other minuscule clusters.

Bruce Morrill’s dissertation (https://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3733/1/Morrill12PhD.pdf) on John 18 found 317, 333, and 423 as closely related, but 249, 430, and 869 lacked chapter 18. 743 changed dramatically somewhere between chapter 11 and chapter 18, where Morrill found it to have different relatives.

Recently, the INTF assigned a new GA number, 2965, to a previously unknown copy of Nicetas’ catena on John. This find is significant for two reasons. First, the text of 2965 seems complete and undamaged, and second, the Greek text strongly matches the cluster. The readings from this cluster’s text are mixed, retaining many of the readings found primarily in the Alexandrian mss—more so than Family 1 or Family 13. 

The table below shows the contents and location of each member of this cluster:

*397 is included here because in portions of John’s gospel, chapter 11 for instance, it presents the same Greek text as found in the Nicetas cluster.

In John 11 there are 50 instances where the NA text varies from the 2005 R-P MT. 249, 317, 333, 423, 430, 869 and 2965 include 40% of these readings, while 397 includes 42% of them and 743 just 22%. By comparison, Family 1 has as many as 33% of these readings and Family 13 just 20% of them. Other frequently cited minuscules rank as follows: 33 – 58%, 579 – 52%, 213 – 50%, 1241 – 45%

Notable variations in John 11 supported by this Nicetas catena cluster include ηδη ημερασ rather than ημερασ ηδη in 11:17; την instead of τασ περι in 11:19; inclusion of δε, ηγερθη instead of εγειρεται and ηρχετο for ερχεται in 11:29; the inclusion of ετι in 11:30; προσ instead of εισ in 11:32; τετελευτηκοτοσ rather than τεθνηκοτοσ in 11:39; the omission of ο τεθνηκωσ κειμενοσ in 11:41, and εμεινεν for διετριβεν in 11:54. This last one is particularly rare, given the only other witnesses found to support this reading include P66, P75, 01, 03, 019, 032, 579, 597, 1241 and 1654.

The first table below shows the percentage of agreement in John 11 each member of the Nicetas cluster has with the MT. The second table shows the agreement between the mss, again from John 11.