Saturday, February 11, 2023

Draft Apparatus Part 5

The editing of the Letter to the Romans is now complete and the PDF is located with the other draft documents so far completed.

While there are many significant variants in Romans, there's an interesting but very minor variant in the Beza GNT at the end of the book. Here Beza adds a 28th verse to chapter 16. There's nothing particularly important about the text, as it is one of the 20 versions of the subscript, in this case the wording is identical to that of Stephanus' 1550 subscript and is found in Codex 1244 an 11th century Byzantine manuscript (St Catherine's Monastery, Egypt) and included in some other Textus Receptus editions.

Screenshot of Beza's 1598 GNT at Rom 16 verses 27 & 28

Πρὸς 'Ρωμαίους ἐγραφη ἀπὸ Κορίνθου, διὰ Φοίβης τῆς διακόνου τῆς ἐν Κεγχρεαῖς ἐκκλησίας

Where other Greek New Testaments might add this subscript as a separate text at the end of the book, Beza chose to add it as a new verse. He also added it to his new Latin translation in the middle column and to the Vulgate text in column 3. I'm not sure if any other Vulgate edition had this subscript, I've checked a few, including Codex Amiatinus, the oldest complete Latin Vulgate (c.7th century AD), and they do not.

This text is in small print (see screenshot above) so it seems that it's not intended to be read as a new verse of Scripture but rather a stylistic choice for the layout of his edition. This variant does not change the text of Scripture and is therefore of little importance, but I thought it interesting to see that the versification still appeared to be fluid half a century after Stephanus added it to his 1551 edition and that Beza saw it as a way to mark the subscript.

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