AN ANALYSIS OF THE COHERENCE-BASED GENEALOGICAL METHOD USING PHYLOGENETICS by ANDREW CHARLES EDMONDSON A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Theology and Religion School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham September 2018 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract The Novum Testamentum Graecum: Editio Critica Maior is the first major critical edition of the New Testament for a century, aiming to document the New Testament’s textual history through its first millennium. To date, two of the six volumes have been published. As part of this project the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster has developed the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM), a computer-aided method designed to handle complete sets of textual evidence and to identify their initial text and textual history. The CBGM is widely held to be difficult to understand and its results are treated with scepticism. Phylogenetics is the study of relationships between groups of organisms and their evolutionary history. Phylogenetics and the CBGM (and wider textual criticism) have many commonalities. This thesis provides a thorough examination of the CBGM using phylogenetics. Part One documents the literature surrounding the CBGM and includes a worked example of the process. Part Two explores the ECM data for John’s Gospel and identifies appropriate methods for applying phylogenetics to it. Part Three compares the results of phylogenetics and the CBGM. It concludes that the CBGM is producing valid results from the data, but could be improved in a number of ways. iii Acknowledgements I am indebted to many people for helping and supporting me during my studies. I have had the privilege of being supervised by two directors of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE). First I would like to thank my main supervisor Professor David Parker for his immeasurable help and guidance during the last six years, even into his stepped retirement. He has found a perfect balance of giving me autonomy yet not letting me go off track during my research. My thesis is built on David’s work editing John’s Gospel for the Novum Testamentum Graecum: Editio Critica Maior, and could not exist without it. Following David’s partial retirement Professor Hugh Houghton took over as director of ITSEE and has also been my co-supervisor for the second half of my research. I am very grateful to Hugh for his many insightful comments on my thesis, and for all the help he has offered me in my time at Birmingham. I would also like to thank Dr Catherine Smith for her help in ITSEE, and for introducing me to BlueBEAR (the University of Birmingham’s supercomputer) which radically reduced the time required for my experiments. I have received expert help from many places during my research. I would particularly like to mention Dr Klaus Wachtel from the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster. Klaus has discussed the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) many times with me, and has read drafts of my work and provided many valuable comments and corrections. This thesis explores the CBGM partially by making use of phylogenetics, and I am very grateful to Professor Jean-Baptiste Cazier (director of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Computational Biology) and Dr Albert Nobre de Menezes for validating the method, interpreting the results and making many valuable suggestions. Albert introduced me to Fluxus Engineering’s Network program, which has proved itself to be excellent for analysing my data. v Many thanks go to Rev Dr Lee Rayner, then leader of Malvern Evangelical Church, for introducing me to New Testament Greek and encouraging me to go to Bible College to study Theology where I was taught Greek by Dan Yarnell. Dan’s enthusiasm for the Bible, and its Greek text in particular, continues to inspire me. His comment, following a lesson on textual criticism, to the effect that he could see me spending the rest of my career on that topic may well be the reason that I am where I am today. There are many other people I should thank, but space will not permit. I will nevertheless mention Dr John Owen and Carol Sandys for supporting my research during my time in the Advanced Research Computing team. Thanks also to Jonathan Bell, leader of Churchcentral in Birmingham, for providing opportunities for me to teach people in our church network about the things I have learned during my research. I could not have completed this research without the support of the scholarship awarded to me by the College of Arts and Law for the second half of my studies. I’m very grateful to my parents and parents-in-law, who have helped and supported me many, many times during this journey. Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank my wife Karen, who has sacrificed a lot over the last six years. We started this task as a couple, and end it as a family of four. vi Table of Contents Introduction............................................................................................................................1 PART ONE THE COHERENCE-BASED GENEALOGICAL METHOD Chapter 1: The CBGM...........................................................................................................7 Introduction.......................................................................................................................7 History of the CBGM and the ECM..................................................................................7 The Method......................................................................................................................10 Texts not Manuscripts.................................................................................................11 Assumptions................................................................................................................12 Terminology................................................................................................................13 Local Stemmata..........................................................................................................15 Overview of the Method.............................................................................................15 A Controversial Example: 1 Peter 4:16/24-28............................................................18 Primary Literature............................................................................................................27 Introduction and Genre...............................................................................................27 INTF Publications.......................................................................................................28 Chapter 2 – The CBGM in Wider Scholarship....................................................................45 Introduction.....................................................................................................................45 David Parker, the IGNTP and ITSEE..............................................................................45 Other Authors..................................................................................................................51 Chapter 3: CBGM Example.................................................................................................79 vii Introduction.....................................................................................................................79 Witnesses.........................................................................................................................79 Collation..........................................................................................................................80 Pre-genealogical coherence.............................................................................................92 Local stemmata................................................................................................................93 Genealogical Coherence and Textual Flow...................................................................102 Consistency of Results...................................................................................................116 The Final Apparatus......................................................................................................121 Optimal Substemmata....................................................................................................126 Global Stemma..............................................................................................................131 The Effects of Collation Decisions................................................................................131 Correctors......................................................................................................................148 Phylogenetic Comparison..............................................................................................154