So I was minding my own business and reading an article about Mark 10.45 (M. Thiessen, 'The Many for One or One for the Many? Reading Mark 10:45 in the Roman Empire'HTR 109 (2016), 447-466) when I stumbled on a footnote about the text of Mark 10.45 in Codex W (032):
Although ms W reads λούτρον (ablution) instead of λύτρον (ransom), it is likely that this reading arose due to an unintentional scribal modification. (note 11)
That sounded interesting, but when I checked NA28 it wasn't mentioned, so I checked the facsimile (as one does) and it was obviously correct:
Then I checked the ECM appartus on Mark and I came across this:
OK. So 032r means that the editors have regularised an incorrect reading to an orthographically and grammatically correct form (p. 19*). But λούτρον is a perfectly good word, as the Cambridge Greek Lexicon tells us (and indeed it is a NT word, cf. Tit 3.5):
Now, it doesn’t seem like there is anywhere within the three ECM volumes where a reader can figure out what the actual reading of W032 actually is. You can go to the NTVMR and then you get the information you need:
Obviously I accept that even the most objective kind of resource is impacted by a multitude of editorial decisions, but I was a bit disappointed that for such an important manuscript of Mark ECM didn’t tell me about such an interesting reading. I wonder how many other interesting spellings have been “regularized” in potentially overly zealous ways.