| Minuscule 13 | Minuscule 69 |
| Minuscule 124 | Minuscule 346 |
| Minuscule 543 | Minuscule 788 |
| Minuscule 826 | Minuscule 828 |
| Minuscule 983 | Minuscule 1689 |
Family 13, also known as the Ferrar Group (ƒ13, von Soden calls the group Ii), is a group of Greek Gospel manuscripts, dating from the 11th to the 15th centuries, which share a distinctive pattern of variant readings. All are thought to derive from a lost majuscule Gospel manuscript, probably from the 7th century. The group takes its name from minuscule 13, now in Paris.
The common characteristics of Family 13 were initially identified in a group of four witnesses (minuscules 13, 69, 124, and 346); but the category has subsequently been extended, and some authorities list thirteen family members. The most obvious characteristic of the group is that these manuscripts place John 7:53-8:11 after Luke 21:38, or elsewhere in Luke's Gospel, with the text of Luke 22:43-44 placed after Matt 26:39, and the text of Matthew 16:2b–3 being absent. Using the study of comparative writing styles (palaeography), most of the manuscripts in the family (with the exception of Minuscule 69) appear to have been written by scribes trained in Southern Italy.
The group also has an affinity with Syriac manuscripts, of which a notable example is Matthew 1:16, where the Ferrar group has the same reading as Curetonian Syriac.[1]
Textual critic Johann Jakob Wettstein observed close affinity between minuscules 13 and 69. The affinity between minuscules 124 and 13 was remarked by Treschow and its resemblance to minuscule 69 by Andreas Birch.[2]
The first published account of Family 13 appeared in the year 1877, in a book published by T. K. Abbott on behalf of his deceased colleague (and discoverer of Family 13), William Hugh Ferrar. Before his death, Ferrar collated four minuscules (Greek handwritten cursive texts) to definitively demonstrate that they all shared a common origin. His work, A Collation of Four Important Manuscripts of the Gospels, would be the first scientific attempt to discover the lost archetype of these four minuscules.
The four minuscules Ferrar collated are:
Ferrar transcribed two of these minuscules himself, accepting a previous transcription of 69 done by another person as trustworthy and adequate. He accepted a handmade copy of 124 from the hand of Dr. Ceriani, the Conservator of the Ambrosian Library at the time. The result of his work demonstrates the members of Family 13 do indeed seem to share a common pattern of distinctive shared readings not seen in other manuscripts.
In 1913, textual critic Hermann von Soden’s work on the Greek New Testament seemed to confirm the assertion this family descended from a common archetype.
By 1941, biblical scholar and textual critic Kirsopp and his wife Silva Lake turned their attention to this important family of manuscripts. In their work on the Gospel of Mark entitled Family 13 (The Ferrar Group): The Text According to Mark, the family is characterized as consisting of 10 manuscripts (13, 69, 124, 346, 543, 788, 826, 828, 983, and 1689).[3]
In this monograph, the Lakes thoroughly cover all that was then known about the origin of each of these manuscripts. Some of the manuscripts proposed as belonging to Family 13 appear to have links to Calabria in Southern Italy (mss 13, 124, 174, 230), and one to Albania (ms. 1689); manuscripts 124 and 174 are recorded as having been written in Calabria, and most of the family members recording menologion (verses from the New Testament arranged by month) readings for Calabrian saints. Some family members have common supplemental geographical material that appears to derive from a 7th-century original.
In 1961, Jacob Geerlings published three monographs (Matthew, Luke, and John) on the family, although some scholars regard this work as flawed by serious methodological problems.
Today, the family supposedly consists of at least fourteen members (13, 69, 124, 174, 230, 346, 543, 788, 826, 828, 983, 1346, 1689, and 1709), although the most recent work of Drs. Barbara Aland, Klaus Wachtel, and others at the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster, Germany, imply that some of these family members are more similar to the majority Byzantine Text, and therefore should not be included in this family at all. Research recently completed using phylogenetic software by Dr. Jac Perrin (through the auspices of ITSEE - Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham, UK) agrees with the conclusions of the Münster team that although the Albanian manuscripts 1141 and 2900 both contain some F13 readings, neither meet the full criteria of F13 membership. In his dissertation on the topic, Perrin lists the current family members as GA 13, 69, 124, 346, 543, 788, 826, 828, 983, and 1689. All of these manuscripts (except 1689) are without the Pericope Adulterae in St. John's Gospel. Most of them relocate the passage after Luke 21:38. This agrees with the historical criteria first established by Ferrar-Abbott in their 1887 publication. Perrin lists 590 distinct and significant non-Majority Text readings in St. John's Gospel which identify F13 and contends in his dissertation, that relocation of the PA from John to Luke is an inadequate criterion for F13 filiality. Prior to the publication of biblical scholar Reuben Swanson's "New Testament Greek Manuscripts" in 1995, Swanson misidentified minuscule 1346 as a member of family 13.
Codex 1709 is held in the national archive at Tirana, Albania; which also holds some 46 other medieval Greek New Testament manuscripts, most of which remained uncollated and unpublished until 2008 - when they were photographed by a team from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (Dallas, Texas). A press release from CSNTM in March 2008 reported that "one or two" of these previously unstudied manuscripts may also belong to family 13; in which case they would be the earliest surviving witnesses to this text.
In 1924 Burnett Hillman Streeter proposed that Family 13 should be classified as one branch of a distinct Caesarean text-type, differing in a number of common respects from the then established Byzantine, Western and Alexandrian text-types. This view is supported by some, but not all, subsequent scholars.
Matthew 27:35
Mark 9:41
Luke 11:4
John 8:7
John 12:5
John 15:16
