Article on early Latin manuscripts of Mark published by Dr Hugh Houghton

The current issue of the Revue Bénédictine, the specialist journal for work on the Latin Bible and early Christian texts, includes an article by Dr Hugh Houghton. Entitled "The Gospel according to Mark in Two Latin Mixed-Text Manuscripts", this lengthy article analyses the text of two witnesses to the text of the Latin Gospels.

In two articles published in the Journal of Theological Studies in 2009 and 2010, Dr Houghton had identified these gospel books as witnesses to the Old Latin text of the Gospels which preceded the revision by Jerome at the end of the fourth century later adopted as the Vulgate.

The present article demonstrate that, in certain sections, these manuscripts also preserve Old Latin material in the Gospel according to Mark. In fact, the St Petersburg Insular Gospels (VL 9A) appear to be the only surviving Latin manuscript which agrees with the editorial reconstruction of the earliest Greek text of the gospel in the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament.

The work behind this paper was supported by the ERC-funded COMPAUL project, and the full text is freely available in Open Access at http://dx.doi.org/10.1484/J.RB.5.110621