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Abstract
The opportunities for research in field of New Testament textual criticism are seemingly never ending. Scholars have spent countless hours examining textual variants, seeking to determine the original text of the New Testament. They have also studied individual manuscripts to evaluate their contents, quality, possible genetic history, and importance in making text-critical decisions. Familiarity with NT manuscripts is essential for the field of textual criticism, but of the thousands of extant NT manuscripts, only a small fraction (primarily the papyri and major majuscules) have received much attention. Codex Regius (L or 019) is an eighth-century majuscule manuscript in the Alexandrian or Egyptian text-type (Aland category II) that has been largely neglected. The purpose of this thesis is to transcribe and analyze the text of Matthew in Codex Regius to provide insight into the quality and character of the manuscript and shed light on scribal habits in the text, which are vital for evaluating the weight that should be given to Codex Regius in text-critical studies.
Chapter 1 introduces the manuscript and conveys the importance, contribution, and originality of this thesis to the field of NT textual criticism. It provides a brief overview of other manuscript studies and the dearth of research on Codex Regius. The methodology is also presented in this chapter.
Chapter 2 delineates the contents of the text of Matthew in the manuscript, noting any lacunae and unique issues with the Gospel in the text. It also describes corrections, titloi, kephalaia, marginalia, itacisms, accents and breathing marks, ligatures, and ornamentation. Finally, chapter 2 compares the researcher’s transcription of Matthew in Regius to the transcription published by Constantin von Tischendorf in 1846 and notes discrepancies between the two.
Chapter 3 is an assessment of the variants in the text of Matthew in Codex Regius. A full comparison against the NA28 eclectic text and Codex Vaticanus yields the frequency and type of variant units, harmonizations to other texts, and calculated proportional relationships between the three texts.
Singular readings in Matthew in Codex Regius are discussed in chapter 4. The chapter notes the challenges of determining singular readings, chronicles the methodology for determining singular readings, and discusses the frequency and types of singular readings found in the text.
Finally, chapter 5 provides a final synthesis and assessment of Matthew in Codex Regius. It also includes an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the thesis and suggestions for future research. The transcription of Matthew in Codex Regius is in Appendix A, and a full list of corrections to Tischendorf’s transcription of Matthew in Codex Regius is in Appendix B.
