Question about Metzger Commentary

[jkdoyle]

This is a very simple question. In Metzger's commentary on the text of the NT, what do the "{A}", "{B}", and "{C}" designations mean?

[Rick Bennett]

This is a very simple question. In Metzger's commentary on the text of the NT, what do the "{A}", "{B}", and "{C}" designations mean?

 

It's the rating system for the variants. See the Introduction of the work for a detailed explanation.

[dgzylstra]

In short it basically means that the editors looked over the various manuscripts and, when there was variation between them, they decided on the "best" manuscript choice to use based on a number of criteria. {A} Means that the translators are very sure that they have chosen the right manuscript variant and {C} means that there was debate among the team members and that they're still not 100% sure, but this is the best choice they felt that they could make. {B} is, obviously, in between the two.

 

The criteria that the team used are pretty detailed, but the gist of them is that they have some manuscripts that they consider more reliable than others and so those have a higher weight in determining what to put in the GNT, but a large majority of other manuscripts might outweigh a couple of manuscripts for other reasons. Other things that they look at are possible transposition errors, "glosses" that might happen in a particular "family" of manuscripts, etc.

 

Hope that helps!

[jkdoyle]

Thanks! The information helps. I had skimmed the intro, but missed the last paragraph describing the rating.