06_Biblica_1_D_Callan_Layout 1 05/11/12 12:20 Pagina 427 Reading the Earliest Copies of 2 Peter The three earliest extant copies of the Second Letter of Peter are found in the following manuscripts: Papyrus 72 ― third century; Codex Sinaiticus ― fourth century; and Codex Vaticanus ― fourth century 1. These and other early copies of 2 Peter have been studied inten- sively in the effort to determine the earliest recoverable text of 2 Peter, and many of the differences among them have been identified in critical texts of the New Testament. The results of such text crit- icism are now taken as the beginning point for the interpretation of 2 Peter. Text criticism, however, divides manuscripts into variation units and to a great extent considers them piecemeal, not as a whole. Thus much less attention has been given to reading these manu- scripts in their entirety and to the meaning of a particular manu- script’s various readings taken together. There have been efforts to see how the perspective of their scribes is reflected in manuscripts. Such efforts might be expected to yield interpretation of the manuscripts as a whole, but generally this has not been the result. Attempting to identify the outlook of the scribes has required distinguishing any changes introduced by the scribes from what they found in the texts they copied. This is the procedure followed by Bart Ehrman in The Orthodox Corrup- tion of Scripture 2. This procedure yields an interpretation of certain features of the manuscripts, but not the manuscripts as a whole. 1 A facsimile of the P72 text of 1 and 2 Peter accompanies C. M. MARTINI ed., Beati Petri Apostoli Epistulae. Ex Papyro Bodmeriana VIII Transcriptae (Milan 1968); a facsimile of Codex Sinaiticus has been published as Codex Sinaiticus. A Facsimile (Peabody, MA 2011) and is available on line at http://www.codex-sinaiticus.net/en/; a facsimile of the Codex Vaticanus New Testament has been published as Ē Kainē Diathēkē. phototypice expressus iussu Pauli PP. VI. (Civitate Vaticana 1965); a facsimile of the complete Codex Vaticanus has been published as Bibliorum Sacrorum Graecorum Codex Vaticanus B (Rome 1999). 2 B. EHRMAN, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York, NY – Oxford 1993) 31. This is also the approach taken by J. R. ROYSE in Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri (New Testament Tools, BIBLICA 93.3 (2012) 427-450