The Text and Margin of Gregory-Aland 274

Abstract Bibliothèque nationale de France Suppl. Gr. 79, also known as Gregory-Aland (GA) 274, is a tenth-century minuscule manuscript of the gospels. Perhaps due to the common character of its main text, its only feature that has received any detailed discussion in scholarly literature is the inclusion of the rare intermediate ending of Mark in its margin. What other scholars have missed is that many of the nearly one hundred other notes that also appear in the margin preserve uncommon and early variations on the text. In this study, I attempt to close the information gap by providing the first comprehensive survey of the marginal readings of this manuscript. I first identify readings in the main text of GA 274 that may have been derived from sources other than its presumed Byzantine exemplar. I then examine all of the marginal readings of GA 274, distinguishing between those that represent corrections to common errors, those that are related to lectionary usage, and those that indicate knowledge of textual variants. On the basis of an extensive collation of 140 Greek manuscript witnesses, I evaluate the textual affinity of the readings in the last category and find that these readings agree frequently with the decidedly non-Byzantine manuscripts GA 33 and 1342. A commentary offering details of the collation and justifications for my classifications of the marginal notes is included as an appendix. Questions about the hands responsible for the marginal notes, the critical sigla used in the margin and their functions, and the role of block mixture in the production of the manuscript all receive attention. The results of this examination show that despite this manuscript’s ordinary text, the extraordinary content preserved in its margin commends it for consideration in future text-critical work on the New Testament.