From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Family 13 is a group of New Testament Greek Gospel manuscripts which all share common deviations from the typical Textus Receptus (the Greek text closest to the KJV).

Although the so-called family started as a group of four witnesses, some lists today number 13 family members.

The first published account of Family 13 appeared in the year 1877, in a book published by T. K. Abbott on behalf of his deceased friend (and discoverer of Family 13), William Ferrar. Before his untimely death, Ferrar collated four minuscules (Greek handwritten cursive texts) to definitively demonstrate that they all shared a common provenance. His work, A Collation of Four Important Manuscripts, would be the first scientific attempt to discover the lost archetype of these four minuscules.

The four minuscules Ferrar collated are: manuscript 13 (in the French National Library at Paris, France), ms. 69 (in the Leicester Public Records Office, Leicester, UK), ms. 124 (in Vienna, Austria), and ms. 346 (in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, Italy).

Ferrar transcribed three of these minuscules himself, accepting a previous transcription of 69 done by another person as trustworthy and adequate. The result of his work demonstrates that the members of Family 13 do indeed seem to share a common deviation from the accepted Greek texts of antiquity.

In 1913, Hermann von Soden’s work on the Greek New Testament seemed to confirm the assertion that this family descended from a late and erroneous archetype.

By 1941, Kirsopp and Silva Lake briefly turned their attention to this important family of manuscripts. In their work on the Gospel of Mark entitled Family 13 (The Ferrar Group): The Text According to Mark, the family is characterized as consisting of 10 manuscripts (13, 69, 124, 346, 543, 788, 826, 828, 983, and 1689).

In this rather short essay, the Lakes thoroughly cover all that was then known about the provenance of each of these manuscripts.

In 1961, Jacob Geerlings published three monographs (Matthew, Luke, and John) on the family, although it is impossible to fully evaluate his actual work because of what appears to be serious methodological problems.

Today, the family supposedly consists of thirteen members (13, 69, 124, 174, 230, 346, 543, 788, 826, 828, 983, 1689, and 1709), although the most recent fine work of Drs. Barbara Aland, Klaus Wachtel, and others at the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster, Germany, imply that some of these family members are more similar to the traditional Textus Receptus, and therefore should not be included in this family at all.

To date, the present author has transcribed the Gospel of John in all but three of the Family 13 members for future computer analysis under the guidance of Drs. David Parker and Ulrich Schmid (University of Birmingham, UK: Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing), as part of a PhD thesis to be completed by 2009.

As part of this process, a digital edition consisting of all transcriptions (sans ms. 1689 which was lost during World War I) will be made available to scholars who wish to research further the various members of this family.

New collations resulting from the use of Dr. Peter Robinson’s computer program, Collate, will also provide a more accurate appraisal of variant relationships that may yield new hypotheses about the genealogy of these minuscules.

A fresh assessment of the work of the many scholars of the past will also be proffered, and a complete history of the scholarship will be offered in one place.

• Ferrar, W.H. and T.K. Abbott A Collation of Four Important Manuscripts, Dublin:Macmillan, 1877.
• Soden, Hermann. Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments in ihrer ältesten erreichbaren Textgestalt hergestellt auf Grund ihrer Textgeschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913.
• Lake, Kirsopp & Silva. Family 13 (The Ferrar Group) The Text According to Mark, Studies and Documents 11, 1941.
• Geerlings, Jacob. Family 13 – The Ferrar Group: The Text According to Matthew, Studies and Documents 19, 1961.
• Ibid for Luke, Studies and Documents 20, 1961.
• Ibid for John, Studies and Documents 21, 1962.
• Barbara Aland and Klaus Wachtel. Text und Textwert der Griechischen Handschriften des Neuen Testaments, Volume V., Das Johannesevangelium, Testellenkollation der Kapital 1-10 Band 1.1, and 1.2. New York: De Gruyter, 2005.