Revision and reference: the transformations of the biblical text of Chrysostom’s Homilies on Romans and their significance for the transmission of the New Testament

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Montoro, Peter (2024). Revision and reference: the transformations of the biblical text of Chrysostom’s Homilies on Romans and their significance for the transmission of the New Testament. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

The significance of Chrysostom’s Homilies on Romans (RHom) for the history of exegesis and the transmission of the biblical text has long been recognized, but thus far an appropriate methodology for dealing with such a massive and complex manuscript tradition has been lacking. This thesis uses new digital tools and introduces multiple methodological innovations to provide a new paradigm. Based on a full set of manuscript images, indexed by content, it provides a detailed overview of the thirty-nine primary witnesses of the direct tradition of the RHom, locating the lacunae and textual dislocations in each, and surveying key paratextual information. The phylogenetic analysis of extensive test passages is used to group the manuscript tradition into textual clusters, and sixteen representative witnesses are selected. Further test passages and additional analysis (using both phylogenetic and common-error approaches) demonstrate several forms of textual mixture and establish an initial stemma of the direct tradition. Two annotated apparatuses, the first dealing with citations from Romans, the second with citations from other biblical books, offer a full collation of each of the 1962 sentences in the RHom that contain biblical citations. The first apparatus also includes a critical reconstruction of the Romans text of the RHom and of each of the sixteen selected witnesses, as well as a thorough correlation with 164 transcriptions of Romans at all points of textual interest. The creation of a dataset of “high entropy” variations in the transmission of Romans allows for direct stemmatic comparisons between the biblical texts of RHom witnesses and New Testament manuscripts, enabling the evidence of the RHom to be located in the broader transmission of Romans. Building on these datasets, the many layers of textual revision in manuscripts of the RHom are investigated. A recension is identified that clearly revises the Romans text of the RHom towards a text of Romans that is earlier than Chrysostom’s own. Examples of textual influence from manuscripts of the RHom are also analyzed. Theophylact’s commentary on Romans is shown to differ from the Majority Text because of influence from a specific recension of the RHom. This demonstration that the biblical text of the RHom is inextricably intertwined with the broader transmission of Romans leads to the suggestion of an improved methodology for the use of commentary witnesses in New Testament textual studies.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):