Comparative computational textual criticism of the Gospel of Mark and the paradigm of textual clusters

Abstract In New Testament textual criticism, the paradigm of textual clusters has become a controversial subject. Within this paradigm, the traditional practice of classifying textual witnesses (including manuscripts, translations, and church fathers who quoted the text) into families and larger groups facilitates the task of weighing their support for competing variant readings. But recently, textual critics have raised objections to this paradigm. One point of contention in particular has been how much agreement and disagreement between witnesses is required to define a group and distinguish between groups. To investigate the matter, we apply five digital approaches to a subset of the Editio Critica Maior (ECM) collation of the Gospel according to Mark. Three approaches, classical multidimensional scaling (CMDS), partitioning around medoids (PAM), and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), are explicitly clustering-based approaches. Two others, network analysis and reticulating cladistics, reconstruct models of the textual tradition whose branches correspond to clusters. The responses of these approaches to contamination and coincidental agreement provide another axis of comparison. We find that all five consistently replicate traditional textual clusters, although contamination and coincidental agreement result in misclassifications of individual witnesses to varying degrees. Notably, all five approaches identify the ‘Caesarean’ group, whose existence has long been debated in the literature, as well as the ‘Western’ group, whose existence has more recently been challenged based on its meager evidence among Greek manuscripts. The convergence of the different approaches on similar results speaks to the continuing relevance of the paradigm of textual clusters.