Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 76:1 (NA 2025)
Article: Dissertation Summary Revision And Reference: The Transformations Of The Biblical Text Of Chrysostom’s "Homilies On Romans" And Their Significance For The Transmission Of The New Testament
Author: Peter J. Montoro IV

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Dissertation Summary
Revision And Reference: The Transformations Of The Biblical Text Of Chrysostom’s Homilies On Romans And Their Significance For The Transmission Of The New Testament¹

Peter J. Montoro IV

Research Associate in New Testament
Tyndale House, Cambridge
[email protected]

The significance of Chrysostom’s Homilies on Romans (RHom) for our understanding of the transmission of the biblical text has long been recognised, but thus far an appropriate methodology for dealing with such a massive and complex manuscript tradition has been lacking. This dissertation intends to meet this need by providing a new paradigm for the use of Chrysostom’s exegetical homilies in New Testament textual criticism. It is composed of seven chapters.1

Chapter 1 begins with an introduction to the RHom, which originated as a series of exegetical homilies preached to a late fourth-century congregation in the city of Antioch. It continues with a survey of the use of Chrysostom in the textual criticism of the New Testament. Unfortunately, while the majority of Chrysostom’s biblical citations are found in his major exegetical series (such as the RHom), no adequate critical editions of any of these series have yet

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been published, necessitating the approach provided in this dissertation. This approach is organised around four fundamental research questions.

• First, what is the Romans text of the Homilies on Romans (chapters 2–4)?
• Second, how has this text been made the object of textual revision (chapter 5)?
• Third, how has this text been used as a source of textual reference (chapter 6)?
• Fourth, how should New Testament text critics use the Homilies on Romans and similar works (chapter 7)?

In the absence of an adequate critical edition, methodologically sound analysis of the biblical text of the RHom must begin with a consideration of the manuscript tradition of the work as a whole. After obtaining full images for each of the 39 primary witnesses to the direct tradition (involving more than 20,000 manuscript pages), each witness was fully indexed, using a new approach developed for this dissertation. This indexing served as the basis for the systematic survey of the contents and paratextual features of each of the witnesses found in chapter 2.

Chapter 3 focuses on determining the stemmatic relationship between these witnesses. An initial phylogenetic analysis based on extensive test passages revealed the presence of eight distinct textual clusters within the thirty-nine primary witnesses. After sel...