Great Expectations: Teststellen Efficacy for Byzantine Manuscripts of 1 Timothy

ECM projects use the data from Text und Textwert to determine which Greek manuscripts should be selected for transcription, collation, and use in the edition. The Teststellen that rate these manuscripts provide an efficient and helpful way to manage a massive amount of textual data, though there is the possibility of missing interesting readings or relationships between manuscripts that remain untranscribed. The abundant collection of transcription data for the Pastoral Epistles ECM project has provided a unique opportunity to use full collations of a larger sample of Byzantine manuscripts to evaluate how well Text und Textwert determines Byzantine agreement, especially for New Testament books with very few test passages. This paper provides that evaluation based on newly transcribed data for 1 Timothy, which has nine test passages in Text und Textwert.