Publisher: Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht
Author: Hermann Freiherr von Soden
Von Soden’s work has been called a ‘glorious failure.’ It was industrious on a scope never before attempted, or probably imagined. He wanted to catalog all the readings of the extant NT MSS. Funded privately, von Soden did not need to be accountable to peers; consequently, when his work was finally published, much of it (especially his text-critical theory) came as a surprise to scholars. His apparatus is not particularly reliable when it comes to individual MSS. Where his work is most helpful is in its layout of the Byzantine subgroups. Difficult to use because of his ingenious MS identification system and abbreviations, von Soden is nevertheless valuable for his listing of variants and MS groups in support. One copy owned by CSNTM was from Dr. Bruce Metzger’s personal library.
