The CBGM Applied to Variants from Acts

Hüffmeier Annette

Abstract

This contribution illustrates use of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) to develop and weigh external evidence in a new way. The CBGM tries to control the subjective element of applying external criteria (e.g. “best quality witnesses”) by taking into account how all included witnesses relate to one another in terms of coherence. Each variant is assessed impartially regardless of its appearance in a certain group of manuscripts or its apparent importance. As a rule, this approach assumes a scribe did his best to produce a fair copy of an exemplar. He did not distinguish between more or less interesting variants, and often we can only speculate about the reason why a variant arose. Illustrative examples from editorial work with Acts reveal important insights that are generated when the results of coherence analyses are balanced with everything else known about the textual transmission of the New Testament, especially on the basis of the internal criteria of Transcriptional Probability.