Editing and genealogical studies: the New Testament

The same data as used for creating the new printed Editio Critica Maior of the New Testament, commencing with the Catholic Letters, allows a genealogical analysis of the witness. The objective is to establish a comprehensive theory of the structure of the tradition. Because the tradition of the New Testament is highly contaminated this theory has to handle the problem of contamination, and also the problem of accidental rise of variants, and must be able to be verified at any passage of text. Where there are variants, the witnesses have a relation that can be described by a local stemma of the different readings. These local stemmata allow or restrict relations among witnesses in a global stemma, which must be in harmony with the total of the local stemmata. In the first phase, local stemmata were established only at places where the development of the variants is very clear. The coherencies within each attestation were analysed. This analysis rested upon the agreements of witnesses, for their genealogical relations were unknown. Nevertheless, readings could be excluded from being primary by checking the coherencies of the witnesses. Then the local stemmata must be revised in the light of the total of the genealogical data included in them. Now an analysis of genealogical coherence is possible and may help to find local stemmata for passages unsolved so far. Finally, the global stemma (or stemmata) mirroring all the relations of the local stemmata will be established by combining optimal substemmata, each containing a witness and its immediate ancestors, to produce the simplest possible tree.