Lesson 9.4 · Reading
The critical apparatus
Why a few words carry a small mark, and what the note at the foot of the chapter says.
Reading along, you will have met small marks that are not punctuation and not part of Biblang: a raised comma before a word, or a pair of half-brackets round a phrase. They come from the printed Greek edition this text is built from, and every one of them means the same thing — here the editors did not all agree about the wording.
kai ⸀ate tos Iōannos enduorēntos trichain kamēlau
and John was clothed in camel hair (Mark 1:6)
Why there is anything to disagree about
The New Testament was copied by hand for more than a thousand years before printing. No two handwritten copies agree in every detail — a word order swapped, a name spelled differently, a short phrase in one copy and absent from another. So a printed Greek New Testament is not a photograph of an original. It is an edition: a scholar’s judgement about the wording, reached by weighing the surviving copies against each other.
Careful scholars have sometimes reached different judgements. The marks show you where.
The marks
- ⸀ before a word — the note is about that one word.
- ⸂ … ⸃ round several words — the note is about the whole phrase.
- [ ] round a word — the edition itself is not sure the word belongs, and brackets it rather than decide.
- ⟦ ⟧ round a passage — the edition judges a whole passage a later addition. This happens twice in the New Testament, both at the end of Mark.
The note at the foot of the chapter
Every chapter that has any ends with a line reading Textual notes, and a count. Open it and you get one entry per mark, in the order they stand in the text: the mark and the word as it appears here, then what the other editions have instead.
⸀ate Byz ate de. ⸂kai ate⸃ Byz reverses.
Byz = the Byzantine text · other edd. = the
other editions · mod. edd. = the modern ones
A reading is given in Biblang wherever it can be. Sometimes it cannot — a variant word has no grammatical analysis behind it, and Biblang spellings are built from that analysis — and then it is printed in Greek letters instead. Greek letters in a note mean exactly that: this is the word as the edition prints it, not put into Biblang.
How much of the text this touches
Worth being plain about the scale, because a list of disagreements can look alarming out of proportion to what is in it.
- The New Testament runs to about 137,700 words. Roughly 6,900 of them carry a note — about one word in twenty.
- Close to a third of those notes are word order or spelling: the same words in a different sequence, or the same word spelled a slightly different way. Greek word order is free, so a swap usually changes nothing at all.
- A smaller number change the sense of a sentence, and a handful affect whole passages — the ending of Mark being the clearest case.
In the Greek — which editions, and what “Byzantine” means
The Greek here is the SBL Greek New Testament, edited by Michael Holmes, who settled its wording by comparing four printed editions: Westcott and Hort (1881), Tregelles (1857–79), the Nestle–Aland text, and the Byzantine Textform of Robinson and Pierpont. Its apparatus records every place those four part company — 6,928 of them.
One thing to know about what you are reading: these notes cite editions, never manuscripts. No note here will tell you which ancient copy reads what. It tells you which modern editors chose what, which is a narrower thing.
“Byzantine” is the one name worth learning, because it accounts for seven notes in every ten. The Byzantine Textform represents the wording carried by the great majority of surviving Greek manuscripts — numerous, but mostly copied later. The other three editions rest instead on a smaller number of much earlier manuscripts. So when a note says Byz, it usually marks a place where the many later copies and the few early ones go different ways, which is the oldest and most discussed question in the study of the text.