Assistant Professor of New Testament
Villanova University
Dr. Schrader Polczer is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Villanova University. She holds a doctorate in Early Christianity from Duke University, with a focus on textual criticism, Mary Magdalene, and the Gospel of John. Her research has been published in the Harvard Theological Review, the Journal of Biblical Literature, TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, the Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies Bulletin, and the Journal of Early Christian Studies.
Thursday, May 28 | 10:30-11:05 | Breakout Room
“Narrative Variants” in the ECM of Mark
It is often assumed that New Testament copyists were, as a rule, faithful to their exemplars. But with the publication of the ECM, dozens of split guiding lines bring textual critics’ attention to the reality of pluriformity at the origins of the textual transmission. In this paper, the split guiding line examples of Mark 1:2, 1:28, 1:38, 3:20, 6:51, 7:24, 9:29, 10:1, 11:3, 11:19, 13:27, 14:68, 14:72, 15:8, 15:39, and 16:17 will be examined. These verses demonstrate that as far back as the transmission of the gospel can be traced, the actual meaning of some passages were being changed by some copyists. Moreover, my own comprehensive study of “narrative variants” in the gospels has additionally demonstrated that approximately one-third of all gospel verses in Greek manuscripts of the 2nd-5th centuries display alterations in meaning (this statistic sets aside the idiosyncratic Greek text of Codex Bezae). These alterations indicate that substantive changes in the course of copying were commonplace from the very beginning, and consequently, insistence on determining a singular base text is sometimes misguided. These split guiding line examples in Mark (and the hundreds of additional Greek examples throughout the gospels) invite textual critics to let go of the traditional insistence on a singular text, and instead to consider embracing the multiformity that is inherent to the text of the gospels.