Following up on my follow up on the Byzantine text, it’s instructive to see just how close the text found in the majority of our manuscripts is to the initial text in the Catholic Epistles. From the ECM supplement, here are the number of readings where the “undivided witnesses of the Byzantine text” differ from the ECM/NA28 initial text.*
To put the matter positively, the Byzantine text as defined by the ECM agrees with the editors’ reconstructed text in over 93% of variant passages in the Catholic Epistles.
That’s quite a lot. You could even say that your NA28 is 93% Byzantine in the Catholic Epistles if you were so inclined. In any case, this high level of agreement is what led the editors to conclude that the Byzantine text is “an important witness to the early text.” Hence the re-evaluation for the ECM2 of all places where the Byzantine reading differed from the initial text of ECM1 (see ECM2, p. 34*).
| Book | Differences | Var. Units |
|---|---|---|
| James | 61 | 761 |
| 1 Peter | 46 | 700 |
| 2 Peter | 23 | 417 |
| 1 John | 43 | 765 |
| 2-3 John, Jude | 33 | 403 |
| TOTAL | 206 | 3,046 |
To put the matter positively, the Byzantine text as defined by the ECM agrees with the editors’ reconstructed text in over 93% of variant passages in the Catholic Epistles.
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| GA 35, a key representative of the Byz text in the ECM |
*The stats are from the ECM2 supplement, pp. 10, 13, 15, 17 and Gerd Mink, “Contamination, Coherence, and Coincidence,” p. 147 n. 15.