Family 13
Family 13, also known as Ferrar Group (f13, von Soden calls the group Ii), is a group of Greek Gospel manuscripts, dating from the 11th to the 15th centuries, which share a distinctive pattern of variant readings — especially placing the parable of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery in the Gospel of Luke, rather than in John 7:53-8:11. The text of Luke 22:43-44 is placed after Matt 26:39. The text of Matthew 16:2b–3 is absent. All are thought to derive from a lost majuscule Gospel manuscript, probably from the 7th century. The group takes its name from minuscule 13, now in Paris.
The subscription of manuscript 13 states that Matthew was written in Hebrew eight years after our Lord's Ascension, and contained 2522 ρηματα and 2560 στιχοι, Mark was written in Latin ten years after the Ascension with 1675 ρηματα and 1604 στιχοι, Luke in Greek fifteen years after with 3803 ρηματα and 2750 stichoi, and John thirty two years after with 1838 ρηματα.[1]
One of the notable examples of Syriac affinity is Matthew 1:16, where the Ferrar group has the same reading as Curetonian Syriac.[2]
The common characteristics of Family 13 were initially identified in a group of four witnesses (minuscules 13, 69, 124, and 346); but the category has subsequently been extended, and some authorities list thirteen family members. Prior to the publication of Reuben Swanson's "New Testament Greek Manuscripts" in 1995, Swanson misidentified minuscule 1346 as a member of family 13. The most obvious characteristic of the group is that these manuscripts place John 7:53-8:11 after Luke 21:38, or elsewhere in Luke's Gospel. On the basis of palaeographical analysis, most of the manuscripts in the family (with the exception of Minuscule 69) appear to have been written by scribes trained in Southern Italy.
History[]
J. J. Wettstein observed close affinity between 13 and 69. The affinity between 124 and 13 was remarked by Treschow and its resemblance to 69 by Andreas Birch.[3]
The first published account of Family 13 appeared in the year 1877, in a book published by T. K. Abbott on behalf of his deceased colleague (and discoverer of Family 13), William Hugh Ferrar. Before his death, Ferrar collated four minuscules (Greek handwritten cursive texts) to definitively demonstrate that they all shared a common provenance. His work, A Collation of Four Important Manuscripts of the Gospels, would be the first scientific attempt to discover the lost archetype of these four minuscules.
The four minuscules Ferrar collated are:
- ms. 13 (in the Bibliothèque nationale de France at Paris, France),
- ms. 69 (in the , Leicester, UK),
- ms. 124 (in Vienna, Austria), and
- ms. 346 (in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, Italy).
Ferrar transcribed two of these minuscules himself, accepting a previous transcription of 69 done by another person as trustworthy and adequate. He accepted a handmade copy of 124 from the hand of Dr. Ceriani, the Conservator of the Ambrosian Library at the time. The result of his work demonstrates that the members of Family 13 do indeed seem to share a common pattern of deviation from the accepted Greek texts of antiquity.
In 1913, Hermann von Soden’s work on the Greek New Testament seemed to confirm the assertion that this family descended from a common archetype.
By 1941, Kirsopp and Silva Lake turned their attention to this important family of manuscripts. In their work on the Gospel of Mark entitled Family 13 (The Ferrar Group): The Text According to Mark, the family is characterized as consisting of 10 manuscripts (13, 69, 124, 346, 543, 788, 826, 828, 983, and 1689).
In this essay, the Lakes thoroughly cover all that was then known about the provenance of each of these manuscripts. Some of the manuscripts proposed as belonging to Family 13 appear to have links to Calabria (mss 13, 124, 174, 230) and one to Albania (ms. 1689); manuscripts 124 and 174 being recorded as having been written in Calabria, and most of the family members recording menologion readings for Calabrian saints. Some family members have common supplemental geographical material that appears to derive from a 7th-century original.
In 1961, published three monographs (Matthew, Luke, and John) on the family, although some scholars regard this work as flawed by serious methodological problems.
Today, the family supposedly consists of at least fourteen members (13, 69, 124, 174, 230, 346, 543, 788, 826, 828, 983, 1346, 1689, and 1709), although the most recent work of Drs. Barbara Aland, , and others at the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster, Germany, imply that some of these family members are more similar to the majority Byzantine Text, and therefore should not be included in this family at all. Research recently completed using phylogenetic software by Dr. Jac Perrin (through the auspices of ITSEE - Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham, UK) agrees with the conclusions of the Münster team that although the Albanian manuscripts 1141 and 2900 both contain some F13 readings, neither meet the full criteria of F13 membership. In his dissertation on the topic, Perrin lists the current family members as GA 13, 69, 124, 346, 543, 788, 826, 828, 983, and 1689. All of these manuscripts (except 1689) are without the Pericope Adulterae in St. John's Gospel. Most of them relocate the passage after Luke 21:38. This agrees with the historical criteria first established by Ferrar-Abbott in their 1887 publication. Perrin lists 590 distinct and significant non-Majority Text readings in St. John's Gospel which identify F13 and contends in his dissertation, that relocation of the PA from John to Luke is an inadequate criterion for F13 filiality.
Codex 1709 is held in the national archive at Tirana, Albania; which also holds some 46 other medieval Greek New Testament manuscripts, most of which remained uncollated and unpublished until 2008 - when they were photographed by a team from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (Dallas, Texas). A press release from CSNTM in March 2008 reported that "one or two" of these previously unstudied manuscripts may also belong to family 13; in which case they would be the earliest surviving witnesses to this text.
In 1924 Burnett Hillman Streeter proposed that Family 13 should be classified as one branch of a distinct Caesarean text-type, differing in a number of common respects from the then established Byzantine, Western and Alexandrian text-types. This view is supported by some, but not all, subsequent scholars.
Textual features[]
- ω μνηστευθεισα παρθενος Μαριαμ εγεννησεν Ιησουν τον λεγομενον χριστον — Θ ƒ13
Matthew 27:35
Mark 9:41