I'm sure that enticing title should get the clicks coming! Anyway, I'm enjoying teaching a class this term on the Greek text of Galatians (this includes syntax, exegesis, translation, and text). So I was excited to see in the apparatus at Gal 1.8 the following notation: D(*.c).2
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At this point I wasn't actually that interested in solving the textual question, more to point out that there are occasions when the NA28 text is based on only a couple of manuscripts. (Incidentally THEGNT prints a different text reading, but as I said, I'm not trying to solve the overall problem here). And secondly to point out that the main early witness in support of the NA28 reading is presented in a complicated way:
D(*.c).2![]()
So I tried to explain as best as I could, using the appendix at the back of NA28, what may have happened here in this manuscript (also that D is potentially confusing to those new to textual criticism!). I thought that this notation suggested that the text of D was corrected twice; that the original text must have a spelling variant that broadly supported the text reading more than any other reading and that it was corrected to another reading that was also not the text reading exactly, but must have been quite like it - hence the parentheses. And then that a second corrector had corrected the already corrected text another time to make it correspond to the text reading.
It was a helpful exercise in demonstrating how much information is preserved in the NA28 apparatus (and appendices); but I also argued that in these situations it is always necessary to check a photo so that you really can see what was happening. So I did:
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