GA 048 and the Text of Ephesians 5:22

Some years ago, I wrote a blog post on the text of Ephesians 5:22. There I suggested that the neglected longer reading (ὑποτασσέσθωσαν) seemed to me to be the more difficult reading while noting a simple transcriptional explanation for the shorter reading.

Since then, I have fleshed out my argument in much more detail and the result is a new article in NTS. (For those without access, here’s the pre-pub version.) If my textual argument is sound, the upshot is a resolution to the longstanding debate about where Paul starts his instructions to the household. Beginning with the RSV, English translations started to reflect the uncertainty by putting paragraph breaks before 5.21 or before both 5.21 and 5.22 (NEB, NIV1984, NRSV, NCV, etc.) while some still put one only before 5.22 (NKJV, NASB, ESV, NET). Commentators, of course, also disagree and the issue has become a lighting rod for debates about Paul and gender.

As part of my work on this variant, I revisited the text of 048 (Vat. Gr. 2061). 048 is a palimpsest with a fifth-century undertext from Acts and Paul. Given its early date, it’s quite important and is consistently cited in NA28. However, it is not cited at Eph 5.22. My guess is that this is because the last major collation of 048, done by Dale Heath in 1965 from photographic plates, says the text is illegible at this point. Well, I gave it a crack using the images at the VMR and some Photoshop adjustments and I’m pretty sure that this fifth-century witness has ὑποτασσέσθωσαν. Not surprisingly, it also has a new paragraph at 5.22 too. 

You can see my attempt to reconstruct the text and judge how I did. Red letters are ones I’m pretty confident about and blue are ones where I really can’t be sure about.

Because I didn’t have color images or MSI, I included 048 with “vid” in my article. So, here is my formal appeal for the Vatican to digitize this early manuscript using MSI and for someone to write a fresh dissertation on it. Even without new photos, I think there’s quite a bit more text to be deciphered than what Heath was able to if someone is willing to work at it.

Update

Christian spotted that the Vatican now has color photos that weren’t there when I worked on this last. They seem to use UV light. Posted below is a close shot of the color image with some heightened contrast. I only had a little time to spare today. Anon also alerted me to the IGNTP transcriptions that I didn’t know about. They disagree with my reconstruction so be sure to check that out too.

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Free Edition of 048

I recently found out that Dale Heath’s 1965 Michigan State University Ph.D. dissertation (“A transcription and description of Manuscript Vatican Greek 2061 [Gregory 048].”) is free online, here.

048 is a 5th-century palimpsest that contains text from Acts and the Epistles. When I’ve needed to work with 048, I’ve found Heath’s dissertation helpful. There is a physical copy at Tyndale House, which I used a good bit. That copy says “Taylor University” on it though. It turns out that Heath was a professor at Taylor, but his Ph.D. was from Michigan State. I guess Tyndale House simply had a copy made by (or for?) Taylor.

The signature is too faded for me to make out Heath’s supervisor (UPDATE: supervised by Richard E. Sullivan; thanks Hugh Houghton!), but in the preface, he wrote that it was “gratefully undertaken at the suggestion and under the guidance of Dr. J. Harold Greenlee of Asbury Theological Seminary.”

Enjoy!