Year: 2024
Type: preprint
Abstract: Textual criticism has developed a sophisticated set of practices over centuries to reconstruct the original forms of ancient works, as well as the shift events that gave rise to textual variants over history, utilizing genealogical models like stemmata to understand how scribal copies relate to one another. But despite this long tradition, the discipline lacks a unified mathematical framework, often relying on vague concepts, subjective judgment, or heuristics borrowed from phylogenetics without establishing a consistent formal vocabulary to rigorously test conflicting hypotheses. This paper introduces a new graph-theoretic framework to describe textual transmission as a dynamic network process and applies it through a Monte Carlo simulation of the Pericope Adulterae (John 7:53–8:11); the results suggest that the passage was likely original to the Gospel of John rather than a later insertion, demonstrating how a precise mathematical metalanguage coupled with computational simulation can help drive progress in longstanding debates and validate reconstructive methods.
Source: HAL
Author: Rodriguez, Norman Simon
Institution: Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4403970160