Draft Apparatus Part 6

It has been a rather productive week, though checking is faster than finding the variants and adding them since most of the work is already done and only corrections and a few additions need to be made.

So now 1 Corinthians is complete and added to the list. I did find a somewhat quirky variant in this book, once again in the Beza edition. Beza has the same subscript as Stephanus but here it wasn't added as an extra verse as in Romans, it stands by itself as is usual with these.

Probably one of the more baffling yet minor variants in this book is found in chapter 15 verse 55 where the Alexandrian texts read:

Ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ νῖκος; ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ κέντρον;

 Most of the TR and Byzantine texts read:

Ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ κέντρον; ποῦ σου, ᾅδη, τὸ νῖκος;

The text is essentially the same, but with κέντρον and νῖκος swapped and ᾅδη (Ἅιδη in the Byzantine) for θάνατε.

Here Beza reads:

Ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ νῖκος; ποῦ σου, ᾅδη, τὸ κέντρον;

Why this is so, I cannot say, but for whatever reason Beza went with that reading. The word order is the same as the Alexandrian texts, but he chose ᾅδη instead of θάνατε. I do not know which manuscripts he relied on for his choices apart from the 6 used by Erasmus in addition to the 18 or so used by Stephanus for his 1550 Editio Regia. He did have access to Codex Bezae Cantabrigensis and Codex Claromontanus. The latter contains the letters of Paul, but the text at this point is:

Ποῦ σου θάνατε το κέντρον, ποῦ σου θάνατε το νεικος

Apart from the spelling of νεικος and θάνατε, it has the same word order as the TR and Byzantine texts, so that's not it. Whatever the origin, it's a relatively minor change - death versus Hades (the place of the dead) and the word order doesn't alter the meaning. But, even so, it is interesting to find Beza standing apart from the other three families here with one foot in the TR/Byzantine camp and one in the Alexandrian.

Put together you can see the variants a little more clearly:

Alex	Ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ νῖκος; ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ κέντρον;
Beza	Ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ νῖκος; ποῦ σου, ᾅδη, τὸ κέντρον;
TR/Byz	Ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ κέντρον; ποῦ σου, ᾅδη, τὸ νῖκος;
Claromontanus	Ποῦ σου θάνατε το κέντρον, ποῦ σου θάνατε το νεικος

It's an interesting, but minor change.