New approaches to textual variants in the Virtutes apostolorum

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The lives of the apostles after Pentecost are described in the books of the New Testament only in part. Details of their missionary wanderings to the remote corners of the world are found in writings not included in the biblical canon, known as the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. In the early Middle Ages these originally Greek writings were translated and rewritten in Latin and circulated under the title Virtutes apostolorum. These texts became immensely popular. They were copied in numerous manuscripts, both as a comprehensive collection with a chapter for each apostle and as individual texts, echoing the needs of monastic and other religious communities that used these texts to celebrate the apostles as saints.

The First International Summer School on Christian Apocryphal Literature (Strasbourg, 2012) concentrated on the transmission of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles in the Latin world. This volume also highlights the use of the Bible in the apocryphal Acts, the imagination of the apostles in early Christian art and poetry, and the apocryphal Acts in early medieval print. Other contributions concern the study of Christian apocryphal literature in general and in the context of the Strasbourg Summer School in particular.

When confronted with textual variants in the study of a handwritten textual transmission, each scholar has to face the question how to deal with them. The article presented here challenges scholars to reconsider their own thoughts on textual variants. First, it describes two different perspectives from which philologists usually work. Secondly, two principles are introduced that enable a thorough analysis of textual transmission on the basis of classified kinds of variants. The final part of the article presents the application of this analysis to the Virtutes Bartholomaei as a case study. The results make clear that scribes, when making a new copy of an already existing text, made many interventions both in language and content. The approach to variants as the result of active interventions rather than blind mistakes offers a tool that helps to clarify the enigmatic process of handwritten textual transmission.