The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Part 13

ten nymphen the bride in l. 1 and the omission of ek from in l. 3 and epi ten gen upon the earth in l. 9 are no improvements; hagion holy ones without BA's angelon angels in l. 3 and prosanapherousi they offer up without BA's tas proseuchas ton hagion the prayers of the holy ones are hardly open to the inferences which Simpson (op. cit. 521) draws from a comparison of the 'angelology' of BA and א concerning the later character of BA. The use of theou tou megalou the great God in l. 6 in place of א's kyriou Lord perhaps illustrates the 'tendency to emphasize the transcendental character of the Godhead' which according to Simpson (loc. cit.) serves to distinguish BA from א, and optanesthai to appear (l. 19), as he pointed out, came to have a definite Christian connotation, being found in Acts i. 3 with reference to the appearances of Christ after the Resurrection. But the word occurs in the LXX and Ptolemaic papyri, and curious linguistic affinities between Tobit xii. 16–22 and the Gospels (cf. Simpson's n. ad loc.) are traceable in the text of א as well as BA, so that the mere occurrence of optanesthai to appear does not prove much. The reading of 1594 in v. 18 ego meth’ hymon ouch hoti te emautou chariti emen I was with you, not that by my own grace is defensible against א's ego hote emen meth' hymon ouchi te eme chariti emen meth' hymon I, when I was with you, not by my grace was I with you: but the arrangement of vv. 18–19 as a whole is more satisfactory in א; for pasas tas hemeras all the days is more appropriate in conjunction with eulogeite bless than with optanomen I appeared, and the repetition eulogeite . . . hymneite bless . . . sing praise in א is probably better than the repetition optanomen . . . etheoreite I appeared . . . you beheld in 1594, which here combines the two verbs found singly in א and BA, though whether א's theoreite you behold is superior to etheoreite you were beholding in 1594, here supported by the Old Latin, is very doubtful. In l. 3 angelon angels (א) is perhaps preferable to hagion holy ones (1594), the two words being liable to confusion as soon as contractions came into use (cf. p. 3).

Our conclusion therefore is that, while the recension of א is probably older than that of BA, א had before the age of the Antonines, perhaps even from the earliest times when Tobit was read in Greek, a rival in the shape of the text to which 1594 belongs. This was largely superseded after A.D. 200 by the BA recension, which was based on it; but traces of the influence of the 1594 text are discernible in the Old Latin version, which was made probably before 300, and the 1594 text remained sufficiently important by the side of the BA text for it to be used in the compilation of the intermediate text found in the cursives and 1076, which was designed (in the fourth or fifth century?) as a compromise between the various conflicting versions of the story. The result of the discovery of 1594 is, we think, to diminish somewhat the superiority in point of age which can be claimed for the recension of א over others, and to increase the respect due to both BA and the third recension, as being either based upon or, in the case of the third recension, influenced by an older recension which is independent of א and may well contain some original elements.