Textual Variation of Peshitta and Peshittovs. Greek texts?

[gbausc]

Hello Richard,

I have some stats on Greek editions. Generally, letter # differences are 10 times greater between Elzevir's 1633 TR edition and Stephens 1550 TR edition.
The Greek NT Textus Receptus exists in various editions, whose mss. are the most consistent and carefully copied of all Greek mss. Elzevir's 1633 edition differs from Robert Stephens 1550 edition by about 87 letters in 1 Corinthians !
That , while only 2 thousandths of the book's 33,260 letters, (0.2%) is still ten times the variation found in the Western Peshitta editions. (compare 2 ten thousandths for Peshitta-Peshitto)-Lukes highest variation of 0.09%)

The Byzantine NT (1991 edition -Pierpoint) has 691,023 letters. Stephens 1550 has 693,395 letters. This is pretty good for Greek texts overall- 99.66 % agreement.This is 0.33 % variation ; Peshitta-Peshitto Lukes vary by 0.09%, 56 letters (the highest variation of Peshitta books) , just 1/3rd of Greek variation.
Overall Peshitta-Peshitto variation, comparing only 22 common books and disregarding John 7:53-8:11 which is found only in Western Peshitto, is 0.023%.
That is an overall variation in The Greek 10 to 14 times as great as The Peshitta-o versions. (1 Cor. is 10 times as great.)
The modern Critical Editions of The Greek NT have much wider divergences.
Westcott & Hort's Greek NT has 679,885 letters. That differs from Byzantine by 11,038 letters, or 1.60%. 98.40% agreement is still not bad at all, but relative to the Byzantine-Textus Receptus comparison, about five times as great.
This is 70 times the Peshitta variation.

1 Cor - W&H 32717; Byzantine 33182; 1550 TR 33256.
WH 98.60% of Byz. ; TR 100.22% of Byz.

WH varies 1.40% from Byzantine - Majority text in 1 Cor.
TR varies 0.22% from Byzantine - Majority text in 1 Cor.

WH variation is 6.36 times as great as TR from Majority text.
I don't have USB NT or Nestles' 26th Edition stats yet. They will be better than W&H comparison numbers, however.
I am sure that The Eastern text mss. have even less variation among some mss. than some of the variation we see in Western editions.Consider 8 variants in one ms. in all of Paul's epistles- (one for every ten pages), in an 8th century manuscript from a 2000 year old version.

Grace & Peace,


Dave