2021 10 07 Current Developments Greek NT BMA Seminary Jacksonville TX

Why Current Developments in Greek New Testament Textual Criticism Matter

I am seriously thankful to have the opportunity to talk to you about this subject. You're the first group of students that have had this opportunity to do this with, and so that doesn't make you a guinea pig.

It just means that I think this is really, really important. If you're doing any type of New Testament studies, you need to know what's going on right now. I was sort of blindsided by this stuff myself, to be honest with you.

I don't want you to be blindsided. I also think that pastorally, once the word starts getting out as to what is happening, the media is going to spin it in such a way as to cause great concern on the part of people.

I just think pastors need to be individuals who will be able to give a solid answer and to alleviate some of those fears. That's where you are. That's where you are in your studies. I think this will be helpful to you.

I want to point your attention to a few things down here. What I'm going to do, actually, is I actually Now, I've got somebody in the back who's going to be watching this. If all these volumes aren't back when I leave, there will be dire consequences as a result.

That's all I can say. This is eventually something that you want to have on your wish list for your library. This is currently what is available, what's called the ECM, the Editio Critico Mayor. This is only Mark, Acts, and the small Catholic epistles.

Look how big it is already. Can you imagine what the New Testament's going to look like? It'll probably be, you know, probably about yea long. Mark cost $280, Acts cost $320, and I think the general epistles were like $240, something like that.

This is not the New Testament that you will carry in your car. You will not be bringing it into the pulpit with you. But, what it does represent, and I want to pass around I'll go ahead and pass around Mark and Acts here.

How's that sound? And hope it doesn't fall over. This was supposed to have been completed. I'll start one over here and one over there, and they'll just sort of pass in the middle of the night, and it'll get very confusing and whatever.

But here you go, sir. This series is supposed to be completed in 2030, I'll be honest with you. When I was in Munster, Germany in 2019, asking about when Mark was going to be made available, interviewing the lead on this project, that was before COVID, and so something tells me there's probably going to be somewhat of a delay.

He told me Mark was done at that time, and it took 18 months more before it finally came out. So what you're looking at is the fruit of the largest collation of Greek manuscripts that's ever been done.

So think about it. Only a matter of decades ago, many of the Greek manuscripts that we possess today, we knew where they were. They were in a central catalog. There had been a desire to microfilm them.

Anybody remember microfilm? That was a while back. But they were not generally available for actual analysis, and they had not been collated, which means taking all of their readings, normally against a particular standard, but making all of their specific readings available.

Not just the big readings, because if you're familiar with the process of New Testament textual criticism, you know that what has been going on for about 100 years now is there has been an attempt to organize the manuscripts into families.

So you've heard of the Byzantine manuscript tradition. You've heard of the Alexandrian, Western, sometimes Caesarean. And how were they organized? Well, scholars who would work with the manuscripts and work with their readings would notice similarities in regards to what passages they may or may not contain, how they read in a certain variation, things like that.

And in general, up through about 2010, you would put them in these families based upon about a 70 agreement. So if any of you have, for example, Metzger's New Testament commentary, the textual commentary that comes with, sometimes it comes with the UBS.

Which New Testament do you all, do you use UBS or Nessie Olin? UBS. UBS, okay. So you've got UBS V right now. The textual commentary from Metzger, from the committee that put that together initially, very, very popular.

You can get it in all the Bible programs and stuff like that. You could not read anything that Metzger says about almost any variant without him using Alexandrian, Western, and Byzantine, those phrases.

This is how textual criticism was done up until a German by the name of Gerd Mink started thinking through how can we actually use computer technology to help us to understand the relationship of the manuscripts in a fuller and less subjective way.

Is there an objective way of finding the relationship between these manuscripts? Now that's a tall order because we have about 5 ,800 fragments of the New Testament and they come from all over the place.

We don't know how they are related. There was, as you know, a tremendous amount of persecution of the Christian church up through 313. In fact, between 303 and 313, the Roman Empire tried to wipe the New Testament out and destroyed thousands and thousands of manuscripts.

And so what we have today is just a selection of the survivors. It's amazing we have as much as we have, to be honest with you. And so how to relate them to one another, which one is copied from an ancestor of another, extremely difficult to do.

And to actually get to that point, you need to be able to track thousands of different points of data. In other words, you'd have to have a collation of all of those manuscripts and be able to ask the computer, put it into a massive database and go, all right, now that you've got all these points of data, where are they connected?

The human mind can't do that. We just can't put 70, 80, 100 ,000 different readings in our mind and remember, oh, that manuscript said that there and that manuscript said that there. So they go together.

We can't do that. But we now have the computing capacity to be able to see those types of relationships. And that's what CBGM is all about. Coherence-based genealogical methodology, CBGM, is the brainchild of Geerd Mink.

It is being utilized in Munster. Your UBS 5th edition and the upcoming 6th edition, your Nessie Oland 28th edition and upcoming 29th edition are all based now on this. They will now reflect the text readings of the ECM.

And the ECM is being created along with the application of CBGM technology to each of the readings. And so, for example, when the General Epistles came out, there were 30-some-odd differences between the ECM and the Nessie Oland 27th edition.

So the 28th edition incorporated those 30-some-odd changes. Now, to be honest with you, they were relatively very small changes. And in fact, for most people who are not actually translating the Greek text, you wouldn't even notice that they were there.

There was one really significant one. I'd be really interested in how many of you are aware of this particular change that took place and how it's impacted the New Testament. But one change that did take place is in the little book of Jude.

In the 5th verse of Jude, the phraseology normally has been, in most translations, the LORD delivered a people out of Egypt. Now, that's standard phraseology, kurios, LORD, that's, you know. But we've known for a long time.

I still have my dad's old Nessie Oland that he had when he studied Greek under Kenneth Wiest at Moody Bible Institute back in the 50s of the last century. And I can dig that out and I can look down in the footnotes and we've known for a long, long time that there are a number of manuscripts that at Jude 5 do not say kurios, they do not say LORD, they say Jesus.

Jesus delivered a people out of Egypt. Now think about that. If that's the reading, what are the Christological ramifications of a text saying Jesus delivered the people of Israel out of Egypt? Okay, that's a fairly important text.

If you look at the Nessie Oland 27th edition, then you will see the text reading is kurios and down the note you'll see all the manuscripts that say LORD and then Jesus and so on and so forth. Well, actually you won't see all the manuscripts.

The Nessie Oland doesn't list a whole lot of manuscripts, the UBS has more, cites more in those. The Nessie Oland 28th edition, the text reading is now Jesus and kurios is in the notes. And the ESV has adopted that reading.

And so since there is still an active translation committee for the ESV, it's gone from LORD to Jesus. And in fact they did it before the 28th edition came out because they knew that was what was going to be in the 28th edition.

So the question is, why does the Nessie Oland 28th edition have that particular reading? And the answer is CBGM. It is one of the 30 some odd places in the general epistles where there has been a change between the Nessie Oland 27th and the 28th and it's reflected in the ECM.

And so I'm not sure how many more books are going to have to come out before they're going to do a 29th edition of the Nessie Oland. My gut feeling, I haven't asked any of my sources on this yet, but my gut feeling is probably when John comes out.

John's actually being done outside of Munster. It's being done in Birmingham, England. And I think when John comes out, that will probably trigger the mechanism of doing a 29th edition of the Nessie Oland, probably 6th edition of UBS.

And I have a feeling that's when this is finally going to enter into the consciousness of Christian media and you're going to start hearing the discussion of computers determining the text of the New Testament.

It's not, that's not what it is. It's a tool. It's a tool that sheds a tremendous amount of light based upon more collation evidence than we've ever had before. That's a hugely positive thing. Especially as an apologist, I can tell you that my Muslim friends don't have anything even close to the Nessie Oland text.

There is no critical edition of the Quran. And so we are light years ahead of them in the study of our text. So to go from this to this, and now no longer do we have to, you know it used to be you'd ask some big major scholar, well how much, what percentage of difference do you think exists in the manuscripts?

And he'd give you some sort of super educated guess, but he didn't have access to the actual numbers to give you an exact number. We now have exact numbers. We can go to a computer readout that will tell you these two manuscripts agree in 97 .77 of their readings.

And so, and it's all available to you right now online if you know how to use it. One of the things I'm going to do when I wrap up, the only reason we've got the projector up is so that I can show you online what this looks like.

So what is, I do want to send these around too, if you're, if in any way shape or form I get you interested and you are, you're as much into textual criticism as I am and always have been since I was a student in Bible college.

My Greek professor told me years later, once we were colleagues, he said, oh man, by second year you were beyond me in text criticism, I just didn't want to tell you that. I've just always, as soon as I opened up the UBS text, it was a third edition corrected, as soon as I opened that up and asked, what are these notes down at the bottom?

And Dr. Baird said, well those are where the manuscripts differ. I knew I needed to know everything I could know about that, because I was already witnessing Mormons and they were already saying things like, you know, the Bible's been changed, stuff like that.

So I needed to have that information. There aren't many books on this subject out. It's that new. And there aren't that many people who know much about it. This is Peter Gurry's doctoral dissertation on a critical examination of the coherence-based genealogical method in New Testament textual criticism.

And this is a much easier to read, A New Approach to Textual Criticism, An Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, Tommy Wasserman and Peter Gurry. It makes me sad to realize that Peter Gurry is younger than my son, which makes me very old.

But these are some of the resources that would be available to you to do follow-up. I'm just giving you some basic stuff that maybe will make those books a little bit easier for you to jump into if you want to do further studies.

Coherence-Based Genealogical Method and the Text of Jude 5

So what is this all about and why? Let's use Jude 5. Let's use Jude 5 and then I'll show you one of the variants that I was really interested in, I've been saying since I started studying CBGM, that I was going to be very interested in seeing what they did with Mark 1 .1.

I have a clip of a debate that I did, my first Muslim debate in 2006 at Biola with Shabir Ali. It's now Dr. Shabir Ali. I have a clip where he presents to everybody the textual variant at Mark 1 .1. Because it says, the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

The Son of God is a textual variant. And there's a real clear reason why it is. It is a long string of genitives. And if you're familiar with the text of the New Testament and how it was written for the first 8 -900 years of its history, it was written in what's called maguscule or unseal text, which is all capitals, no spaces between words, and almost no punctuation.

Can you imagine if your Greek New Testament looked like that? Most people who graduate who even do well in Greek look at an ancient manuscript in unseal text and go, what on earth is that? It's very difficult to read.

And so you put a series of genitives in a row, and it's easy to see how someone in copying could skip over one, and then that's a series of genitives using what's called the Nomina Sacra. Let me just ask real quickly, how many would feel confident giving a definition right now of the Nomina Sacra?

1, 2, 3, was there, did you have your hand up? That's a 4. Okay. The Nomina Sacra, we do not know why this happened, but in the ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, Christians adopted the practice of abbreviating the Nomina Sacra, the sacred names, God, Jesus, Lord, Spirit.

They didn't always use the exact same form, sometimes it was three letters, most of the time it was two letters. So, for example, God, the genitive of God would be a theta and an upsilon in capitals with a line over the top.

So instead of theta, epsilon, omicron, upsilon, which is what you would see in your Greek New Testament, it would just be two letters. And so it makes it easy to identify Christian manuscripts in the ancient world, because as soon as you see a Nomina Sacra, you go, okay, there you go, a Christian copied this.

We don't know why, again. There are lots of theories, but they are just that, they are theories. And so, at Mark 1 -1, the question was, I was thinking, I wonder what CBGM is going to say about Mark 1 -1.

Well, if you've got the Mark volume back there somewhere, you can look at Mark 1, and you'll be able to see what the conclusion was, and they have included it as the text reading. And so, why is that?

Well, let's use the Jude 5, Jesus Lord one as our primary example here, and let me lay out just a few basics. What CBGM is looking at is coherence. Now what is coherence? Well, generally, the term would be used in reference to how things, how consistent things are with another standard, how well they cohere with one another.

And so, there are different kinds of coherence. One of the problems with this methodology is it was invented by Germans, and therefore they are terrible at titling anything. If you know anything about German, any German speakers in here?

Keine? Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch, und Sie? Jawohl! Es ist ein schönes Sprache, ja. It's a wonderful language, but if you know anything about German, when they want to come up with a new way of describing something, all they do is take a bunch of old words and cram them into one really big long word that may take like two lines for a single word.

And it's just true. So, the name CBGM is not, they weren't trying to sell this to anybody, you know. It's just meant to be accurate. It's hard to follow. But what they're doing is they're looking at different kinds of coherence, and they're using the computer databases to measure these kinds of coherence.

So, you would have, and I'm just running up here just to grab my cold bottles of water if that's okay. So what you would have, first of all, is what's called pre-genealogical coherence. Pre-genealogical coherence.

What is that? That is, you simply take, let's say we take two really well-known manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. And you can do this online right now. And you can break this down into chapters, you can break this down into books, you can do it for everything in the ECM that's been done.

But you can simply say, what is the pre-genealogical coherence? So when, so for all the places where Codex Sinaiticus has a text and Vaticanus has a text. For example, Vaticanus stops at Hebrews 9 .14.

So it doesn't, you couldn't do it for Revelation because it doesn't contain Revelation. But for everything where they both have all the same text, where there are variants, how often do they have the same reading in the variant?

Now one of the things that's fascinating about all this is, what we've discovered, is when you take all manuscripts of whatever, wherever they came from, no matter how different they might be, on the underlying text, well let's put it this way, when there are differences, the average agreement amongst all manuscripts is over 85%.

That means where there isn't variation, they're almost identical all the way across. The quality of the New Testament textual tradition, it's no longer a scholar going, well I'd estimate this. The computer can tell you how absolutely spot on all these manuscripts are because all the readings have now been read in.

That was a lot of work. I don't know who they were paying to do that, but that was a lot of work to put that stuff in. So pre-genealogical coherence is where you're not asking a question about how these two manuscripts are related to one another, it's just simply the bulk numbers, how often do they agree with one another in the places where there are textual variants.

It's just a number, and it's a pretty simple number to derive. Once you have all their readings available on a computer, you can just simply compare the two databases, where there's differences, how often they agree.

That's pretty simple computer stuff to be done there. That's not AI level stuff. That's pre-genealogical. Then you have what's called genealogical coherence. Genealogical coherence. What is genealogical coherence?

This is one place where there is a subjective element to the CBGM. Now textual criticism has always, it's been an art form, it has involved critics making decisions based upon how much weight they put on this witness, and how much weight they put on that witness, and whether they put weight on internal testimony or external testimony.

There's always been a great deal of subjectivism in textual critical studies. There has to be. And so there is a subjective element to CBGM. And it's primarily in the editors when they look at where Sinaiticus and Vaticanus have different readings.

They look at those and they determine, and this is the subjective part, which reading gave rise to the other. So they make that decision. Now it's getting to the point where, I think eventually, you're going to be able to download a program onto your computer that will get hold of these databases, and you can change the parameters yourself.

You can disagree with the editors and say, no, I think the reading went the other direction, and then put that in and then run the program and see what comes out the other end. We're pretty much at that point right now, if you really want to go to that level.

There aren't too many of us doing that, but if you want to go to that level, then you could. But the point is, I've looked at a lot of these. And yeah, they're subjective, but most of the time it's pretty obvious, yeah, obviously this reading gave rise to that reading, not the other way around.

And so while it may be somewhat subjective, most people would agree, yeah, okay, that obviously is the easier reading, or things like that. And so you can go into the databases and it will tell you how many times for Sinaiticus that it has the earlier reading, the Vaticanus.

Now, earlier doesn't necessarily mean earlier as in time. This is one of the real tough things. Okay, if you want to bend your minds, if the food is, you know, I had a cinnamon bun, right, before I came over here, so my insulin has kicked in.

I'm ready to take a nap right now. So if you're in the, but I'm standing up, so I'm okay. If you're about to take a nap, this is where you need to poke the guy next to you, do whatever you need to do to stay awake at this particular point in time, because this is where everything sort of comes together and you start understanding what they're doing here.

When they did Jude 5, what they did is they looked at all the manuscripts that say Lord, and they looked at their pre-genealogical coherence. And then they looked at all the manuscripts that say Jesus, and they looked at their pre-genealogical coherence.

So in other words, just all the manuscripts say Jesus, how closely related are they to one another? And then over here, all the manuscripts say Lord, how closely related are they? Now, how do you determine close relationship?

Well, that eventually is where you have to do what's called the text flow material and what's coming from what. And here's the hard part, and I still struggle with this because I learned textual criticism late 1970s, early into the 1980s, and this is not how we were taught to think.

The only way CBGM works is that you treat the text of a manuscript separately from the manuscript itself. So in other words, if you're talking to CBGM, you don't talk manuscripts, you talk a witness. And that's just the text, it's not the manuscript.

Why is that? Well, you can't put manuscripts in a computer in the first place, but the text itself might be much older than the material upon which it's written. So we've always known, for example, that manuscripts 1739 and 1881, those are 10th century manuscripts, but we know they were copying from 2nd century exemplars.

And so the text in that situation is much, much earlier than the manuscript itself is. And so CBGM disconnects that, and that's where I've always had a concern about CBGM, and that's one of the things that's going to have to be fleshed out more in the future, is there is a sense in which CBGM disconnects the manuscripts and the text from history.

And so when you compare Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, the databases will tell you that 25 of the time Sinaiticus has the earlier reading and Vaticanus the later, and 75 of the time it goes the other way.

And so the conclusion of that is that as far as relationships between these texts go, not manuscripts but the texts they contain, Sinaiticus comes after Vaticanus, not before it. And so in the genealogy, in the text flow, and hence in the genealogical coherence, Sinaiticus is before or above, Vaticanus is before or above Sinaiticus.

And so as you would see it, and as I'll show you later on, when you put these diagrams together of how these are all related, you'll see Vaticanus above Sinaiticus, Sinaiticus being below. And what the computer will do is it will start relating all the manuscripts to each other in that way.

And these diagrams end up being huge, very, very large, as I'll show you when I fire up the computer, and hopefully it'll work and you can see it. So there is a third type of coherence, it's called stematic coherence, and that's once you get enough of these done, you can start relating these manuscripts across entire books and eventually across the entire New Testament and see how they relate to one another.

But you need to get all the rest of CBGM done before you get what's called a global stamata, which is not just a, these are how all the, this is the family tree. It's not that. It's the text, how did the text get transmitted through time, as best as we can see it in light of the fact it's extremely fragmentary.

It's extremely fragmentary. We don't have but a few examples where we have one manuscript that was copied from another manuscript, and we know which two manuscripts were. That's very, very rare, given, well, the ravages of time and everything else that takes place in textual criticism.

So back to Jude 5. What they discovered was that when you look at the witnesses that say Jesus, their closest relatives that are related to them on the basis of the analysis of the readings say Jesus.

You might go, wow. The point is there's high coherence. There is consistency between these related manuscripts of saying Jesus. But when you go over the manuscripts that say Lord, very often their closest relative will say Jesus.

So there is low coherence. Now why would that be especially relevant? Well think about it. Which is the easier reading in your mind, to say the Lord delivered a people out of Egypt or Jesus delivered a people out of Egypt?

The Lord. I mean, that just sort of flows. That's what you'd expect. That's what a scribe would be expecting. And so he may have been, what he's copying may have said Jesus, but he's expecting it to say Lord, and that's what he ends up writing down.

And so we hadn't been able to see in the analysis before. And so up until, up through Nesheolam 27, you look at the manuscripts and you go, well yeah, there are some early manuscripts that have Jesus, but there are early manuscripts that have Lord too, and it sort of looks like the preponderance and you're breaking them up into Alexandrian and stuff like that, and you don't have one piece of information.

And that is, the manuscripts that say Jesus are more consistent with themselves than manuscripts that say Lord. That's the new piece of information we've never had before. Never had it before now. And it was so striking and had so much weight to it that the editors changed the text reading.

Now you need to be really careful to explain to people. No one can change the Bible. You're changing which reading you're putting in the main text. They haven't taken Kodios out and thrown it out in the cold someplace.

They haven't erased it so you never know it was there. It's in the footnotes now, just like it always has, just like Jesus was through all the earlier editions of the Nesheolam text. It's just what you're putting up in the text.

And not all translations, if there's, I mean, it's not like we need any new English translations, but if you're doing translation work, you can read the footnotes like anybody else can. And for example, the NASB 2020 that came out, that no one's really noticed, but it's there, they didn't follow the Nesheolam.

They stayed with Lord. And in fact, they sent me about a six or seven page explanation of why they rejected the CBGM reading at Jude 5 and they stayed with Lord. You can do that. You're a Bible translation committee.

You can do what you want. But they were open about it and they said, this is why we don't agree with the editors. But it's still one of the readings that's presented to you. But the point is, pastorally speaking, if you're preaching Jude, you need to know that you're going to have people sitting in your congregation and some of them are going to have Lord and some of them are going to have Jesus.

And they know that that makes a difference. And my concern is very often whoever is standing in the pulpit is just hoping nobody comes up to ask about it. And that makes you uncomfortable. And that's why I want to do this is to at least give you an idea of where this is coming from.

So if you do need to dig into it, you know what some of the resources are, you're familiar with some of the vocabulary and you go, oh, this strange man from Arizona, that's what he was talking about. Oh, yes.

Okay. That's where that's coming from. And like I said, my concern is, and I hope that maybe the world will just be so insane by then. Well, can it get any more insane? I'm not sure, but maybe they'll just skip over it.

But I can just see even Christian media grabbing hold of something like this and running with the computers are now determining the text of the New Testament and stuff like that when it's all it is, is we are just using it as a tool.

And we now have these huge collations of more manuscripts than we've ever had available to us before. And so now we can compare these texts, not just on the few places where one human mind remembers, oh, that text reads this and that text reads that.

The computer knows everything that that text reads. And hence the comparison is objective. It's no, this percentage of time, this is what it reads and this one reads that and you can hook them all together.

And so it's extremely important along those lines, I think, to have that understanding. I think it should be something that we are rejoicing about. I mean, something like this looks intimidating to somebody, but for someone like myself who deals with so many false religions, I love the fact that not only are we wide open, you don't have to present your I'm a Christian card to buy one of these or a vaccine card for that matter.

I think you can get them, though it is Germany, so you never know. That means Muslims can buy these and atheists can buy these and Mormons can buy these. We are open with all this information, which is not the case in many other places.

There are all sorts of things locked up in the archives of the Mormon Church that if they were to be released would have a huge impact on the historical analysis of Joseph Smith and the early Mormon movement.

But probably never see those things unless there's a jailbreak or something at the Salt Lake City headquarters. But we're wide open about these things, and it's exciting to me that we now have so much information where we can give objective data that says, you think our New Testament manuscripts are just wildly all over the place?

Here's the actual data, and you can go online and look at it yourself, and it just simply doesn't say what you say it says. Not that too many people in the media would actually care to report any of that anyways.

But I think it's something to be absolutely... I cannot imagine what Desiderius Erasmus, the compiler of the first printed and published Greek New Testament in 1516, I just can't imagine what he would have thought.

He would have loved to have had one hundred thousandth of the information that we have available to us today in the work that he did. But we've got it, and it's coming out. So let me show you. So you can see that we're up here at Munster.

This is, if you're interested, if you want to find this, write this one down real quick. It's ntg .uni-munster, M-U-N-S-T-E-R dot D-E, and this is slash mark slash ph35 slash. So that's Mark phase 3 .5, you've got Acts phase 4.

They did the pastoral epistles really early. I asked the guy who was in charge, he's since retired, but I asked, sitting in his office there in Munster in 2019, whether they would be updating the epistles software and stuff like that.

And he said, well, we want to, but we've got to get the whole thing done first. So I'm not sure when the epistles will be able to have this same type of... There is an interface online, but it's extremely clunky and very difficult to use.

So Mark and Acts are up to date, and my assumption is that they will eventually put the pastorals out in this format, and as each new book comes out, like John, will be available too. So if you go to coherence and textual flow, now, one of the tricky things here, real quick, and I think I was supposed to be done about now, right, doctor?

So I need to hurry up. Okay. The way you find the variant you're looking for is by counting the space before the first word is one, the first word is two, the next space is three, the next word is four.

That's how they've done this so that you can look up any specific reference in the text. That's not normally how we're thinking. We just go verse numbers. But here is, you'll notice right here, So, the beginning of the gospel of Christ, the son of God.

So this is numbers 12 through 16, all right? So here's the variant. Here's the information available to you for free online. Here are your manuscripts that read each of the variants. So son of God, these are your manuscripts.

Son of God without the article, these manuscripts. Son of the Lord, 1241 went off on its own there. Son of the God, two verses, two manuscripts did that one. Simply of God, there's a few manuscripts there.

It's omitted by these. And then ZZ means these are witnesses in the gospel of Mark, but they don't contain the beginning of Mark. And so they just don't contain the reading at all, so they're not relevant.

Okay, so you got that. That's nice. That's what you're used to having in like UBS or something like that. Then you have what only the computer can do you. And so here is what's called your local stemma.

So this is how the readings relate to one another as far as the editors are concerned. A, son of God gave rise to all these other readings. And you can click on each one of these and it makes differences in what comes below.

Coherence at variant passages, your primary A readings and how they relate to those, each of those. So, in other words, I told you 1241 went off on its own, did something weird. Well, it looks like, given its relationship to other manuscripts, that 1241 was copying from 35.

So, for some reason, he made a change even though 35 reads son of God. So, you can see how they're related. And now, you ready? Here is coherence in attestations. Now, I have to literally scroll across the screen so that you can see how wide and how big the graph is.

Now, you can click on any one of these witnesses, see how they're related to other witnesses. Each one of these, like see these numbers here will change when I run something over it. So, those are all variables that you yourself can change if you want to change what the editors did to see and plug it back into the computer and the computer will spit back out what that does to the relationship of these manuscripts one to another.

But you can see how large a number of manuscripts you're talking about here and how they're related to one another. Notice 35 is a pretty important early manuscript. And you can see how many are related to it in genealogical coherence.

And you go down here and here is general textual flow. And once again, it's humongous. But you can see the relationship between all these manuscripts and how they relate to one other and what the general textual flow is.