At the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego (November 2024), CSNTM Executive Director, Daniel B. Wallace, and former CSNTM Intern, Sean McGuire, presented their paper, “Disturbing Dittographies: A Second Take on Scribal Corrections.”
Dittographies in manuscripts are ubiquitous. Their frequency is inversely proportional to detailed discussion of them in works on scribal habits. Many of these dittographies may offer hints about a scribe’s accuracy in general. But accuracy is not the only issue. When a given dittography does not duplicate exactly the initial wording, the reason for the change needs to be explored.
Larger dittographies especially are susceptible to inexact copying. This paper’s primary focus is on these larger dittographies in Codex Sinaiticus. Every dittography involving at least six words or parts of three lines (twenty-seven instances) is examined and analyzed (select smaller dittographies are also discussed). Remarkably, the majority of these longer dittographies involve differences from the initial wording, often significantly so.
The reason for the differences in the dittographies varies. This paper will address the following questions:
1. Does the dittography involve a more exact copying of the exemplar’s wording?
2. Of the meaningful variants in the dittographies, are any attested by other witnesses?
3. Can the differences in dittographies indicate anything about scribal habits beyond what is already known of a given manuscript’s tendencies?
4. Is it possible, even likely, that in rare instances the dittography reflects a different exemplar from what was used in the first writing?
To be sure, dittographies are only one piece of the puzzle, but they make a small contribution in response to Hort’s dictum that “knowledge of documents should precede final judgement upon readings.” Since they have hardly been explored, dittographies are an open field for further research.