Collation 1 of the Great Stemma

Notes

[This version, last edited 2012.04.05, was online mid-April 2012 and is referred to in a forthcoming publication by Jose Carlos Mart�n. It has been replaced by an updated version.]

The Paris scholar Yolanta Zaluska collated the texts of a majority of the Great Stemma manuscripts in the mid-1980s into a single comparative document, but to the best of my knowledge this has never been published. Bonifatius Fischer's Vetus Latina Genesis appeared in 1954 and contains a critical text of the first half of the stemma. This is based on four witnesses only and suppresses most of the uncanonical material.

Piggin.Net presents here a collation from five of the most intact examples of the Great Stemma— those in the Plutei Codex, the San Millán de la Cogolla Bible, the Urgell Beatus, the Roda Codex and the Facundus Beatus.

Each cell here generally represents a single roundel in its manuscript, although there are many singular cases where a manuscript has failed to properly enclose a section of of text. In some instances I have divided a longer text from a single roundel into multiple cells.

Cells in the transcription which represent gaps in a single manuscript as compared to its counterparts are marked [omitted]. Where medieval and latter-day biblical scholars expected to find a name, but it is not found in any of the five manuscripts, the row is marked: [lacuna]. Where a roundel was left unfilled though its intended occupant is easily guessed, it is marked here [empty]. But this has not generally been done with the Urgell Beatus, where the scribe carelessly drew himself far more roundels than he really needed.

The transcription has been divided into four parts to make it less unwieldy. The page below contains only the genealogy of Christ and the royal history of Judah. A second page contains other genealogies including those of the Horrites, Moses and King Saul. A third page assembles the timeline data. Although the chronographic material is clearly also the work of the Great Stemma's author, it accompanies the stemmatic structure but is not a logical part of it.

Finally there is a separate page of the confirmed interpolations: doubtless some of the unique entries in the Alpha and Beta columns below are interpolations too, but the item-by-item proof of this has not yet been found. It is to be assumed that the leftmost columns below represent the most primitive text and the rightmost ones the corrupted texts.

A transcription is an arduous, dull and error-prone task that never seems to be complete. This one is certainly not complete. If any reader feels inclined to pinpoint errors, detect mismatches or suggest better translations, the author will be grateful. You can read four of these manuscripts in the original thanks to high-resolution images on the internet (list).

Especial thanks are due to Seumas Macdonald, who undertook the more difficult translations. Any errors are entirely my own. Latin words on this page can be instantly looked up by using the Alpheios.org Latin translation add-in for the Mozilla Firefox browser.

The columns at right represent Piggin.Net index numbers, type codes (A=persons, E=glosses, B/C=external persons, D=heading), English translations, notes, scriptural and other references for the material, and paragraph numbers of similar material in Mommsen's edition of the Liber Genealogus. Since the Urgell Beatus is incomplete, the Delta column has been supplemented in the first 130 or so lines from Fischer's collation of the San Juan bible: the San Juan items are asterisked.

[to be revised]

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