Abstract
F or decades now, textual scholars have been using computer software developed for the biological sciences to study the transmission of texts. Although part of a much larger renaissance in stemmatic methods among text critics, such computer-aided methods (known as cladistics) have, until now, been used on the New Testament only in a few small studies. The publication of Stephen Carlson’s Duke University dissertation thus marks a significant milestone as the first full-scale application of any cladistic method to the Greek New Testament. A principle common to all cladistic methods is that of ‘maximum parsimony’. The computer searches among all possible stemmatic relationships until it finds the one that requires the smallest number of changes between witnesses. That is the principle at least. In practice, users must settle, not for the best stemma, but rather the best found stemma. (Even computers have their limits.) Still, the results have frequently proven themselves to be valuable tools for further investigation.
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