La question de l’apparat critique du Nestle-Aland dans le témoignage des manuscrits de la Vieille Latine : l’exemple des Pèlerins d’Emmaüs

Abstract

Old Latin manuscripts are among the most noteworthy early witnesses of the New Testament because of their age, predating the Vulgate, while being contemporary with the first translations into other languages such as Syriac and Coptic. However, they are often classified “en bloc” in the critical apparatus, thus preventing them from seeing the contribution of each manuscript from being seen, and thereby their role as “tracer” in the transmission of the New
Testament text is overlooked. This article intends seeks to study the pericope of the Pilgrims on the Emmaus Road (Lk 24.,13-35) in various manuscripts of the Old Latin. While the Greek text of this pericope attests to two distinct textual states, that of the “Western” text and that of the Alexandrian text, the testimony of the Old Latin manuscripts seems, after a careful study of their variants, to trace have left traces of this the evolution from one state to the other. Far from using applying the classical, and general, criteria of a “Western” or “mixed vulgate”
character, such as is generally attributed to Old Latin manuscripts, this article suggests that the variants of these manuscripts occur at the very places of the tensions between the “Western” and Alexandrian texts, and offer suggest a paved evolutionary pathway for of the text of this pericope, comforting a probably primitive “Western” form of text as suggested by earlier studies.