I’ve uploaded the paper, “The Origin(s) of the ‘Caesarean’ Text“, I’ll be giving at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the SBL in San Antonio this Saturday. The paper is presently in MS Word format.
In the paper, I explore using cladistics, after modifying it to handle reticulation (mixture), to identify genealogical groups of manuscripts in Mark 6:45-8:26. A brief summary of my conclusions based on this investigation is:
To cut to the chase, the results of my investigation suggest that many of the so-called Caesarean texts do constitute a genetic group, more closely related to a branch of the Western text-type containing Codex Bezae and the Itala-type Old Latin texts than to the Alexandrian text-type. Its best representatives are family 1 and codex 28, and this group also includes k, an Old Latin Afra text, plus one of the ancestors for the Byzantine text-type. Origen’s text in this section of Mark also belongs to this group, and, given family 1’s connection to the library in Caesarea, this group can plausibly be called “Caesarean.” Contrary to Streeter, Θ and W are not this group’s leading members, but poor, rather impure representatives. The text of W is very divergent, showing more scribal changes than any other witness in this study except for the Old Latin Codex Colbertinus c. Codex Θ, along with 565 and 700, is a member of a small sub-family that has been considerably assimilated to a Bezan-type text. Even in this sub-family, 565-–not Θ–-is the leading member.