Variant Collation and CBGM

Variant collation and the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM), developed by Gerd Mink at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster, address the central obstacle to editing the Greek New Testament: contamination. Because medieval scribes routinely copied from several exemplars at once, the New Testament tradition is too intermixed for a classical bifurcating stemma. Mink's solution, set out in his 2004 chapter in Studies in Stemmatology II, shifts the unit of analysis from whole manuscripts to individual variation passages. At each passage the editor decides which reading gave rise to which (a local stemma), and the method then aggregates these local decisions, using the coherence of agreement among witnesses, to infer the global flow of text and the relationships among witnesses. CBGM now underlies the Editio Critica Maior and the modern Nestle-Aland and UBS Greek New Testaments.