130 Jacyntho Lins Brandão an undue division of the name Aminadam, as observes Westcott-Hort: “ ᾿Αδάμ (...) may however be only the latter half of ᾿Αμιναδάμ (...). Ami- nadab and Admin, Aram and Arni, are evidently duplicate forms of the same pair of names, preserved in different family records”12. In the same way, Hearter concludes: a) Aminadam would have originated from Ami- nadab through a “confusion of the labials b/m”; b) Adam “comes from the last four letters of Aminadam”; c) Admin is “a variant of Adam”13. The first of Heater’s explanations causes a problem, for it is not a matter of phonetics, but of writing. Nevertheless, in light of the form of the cursives β and μ in the second and third centuries14, the two variant readings could possibly be confused as long as it is recognized that the latter originated in a cursive and not an uncial environement (for the same reason, that is, the similarity of the two letters’ forms, the alterna- tion is perfectly explainable in the minuscule manuscripts from the ninth century on). It is also paleographically improbable, if not impossible, for Admin to have originated from Adam, being more reasonable to sup- pose that it may have originated from Amin (that is, the beginning of Aminadab), since the copyist may have repeated one triangular uncial letter twice (ΑΜΙΝ > Α∆ΜΙΝ), although there remains no satisfactory explanation for why the rest of the name was abandoned. Finally, deriving Adam from the last part of Aminadam is quite reasonable but with the inconvenience of the fact that the reading should then be Admin-Adam, and not Adam-Admin. The possibility that we may have the correction of a more ancient read- ing in p4 points to a much earlier date for the production of the variant Adam-Admin-Arni. Therefore, I believe that, in this case, dealing only with the testimony of the manuscripts available is insufficient, and that it is necessary to move backward to pretextual stages in the composition of Luke. In fact, ever since studies were conducted regarding the Philodemus Library, preserved at Herculaneum under the ashes of Vesuvius, much has been learned of the manner in which ancient authors worked: be- fore an original was given over for publication, it would undergo several stages including research done by the writer, whose steps were described by Pliny the Younger regarding his uncle, Pliny the Elder: first, legere, 12 B. F. Westcott & F. J. A Hort, Introduction to the New Testament in the original Greek (repr. Peabody 1882 [not correct date—this is the original date]), Appendix, 57. 13 Heater, “A textual note”, 27. 14 Cf. E. M. Thompson, A Handbook of Greek and Latin Palaeography (Chicago 1966), table ‘Greek cursive alphabets’.