Eriugena’s Greek Variant Readings of the Fourth Gospel 75 Of far more consequence for the present analysis is that both are confidently maintaining – on textual grounds – that the manuscript tradition of the homily does not allow us to correct αὐτὸς to οὗτος19 in order to dismiss the variant. Accordingly, even though we can not know for sure what was the nature of the manuscripts Eriugena mentions (graecorum exemplaribus), it is nonetheless safe to say that he explicitly knows this specific variant. As said, the variant does not seem to appear in any other witness, and should probably be considered for inclusion in any apparatus that includes Patristic evidence for the text of John. Jn 1:13 οἳ οὐκ ἐξ αἱμάτων ἀλλ᾽ ἐκ θεοῦ ἐγεννήθησαν Hom. xxi. Qvi non ex sangvnibus neqve ex volvntate carnis neqve ex volvntate viri sed ex deo nati svnt (in antiquis graecorum exempla- ribus solummodo scribitur: Qvi non ex sangvinibus sed ex deo nati svnt.) ‘They who are born not from blood, nor from the will of the flesh, nor from the will of man, but from God’ (in the old Greek manuscripts ‘who are born not from blood, but from God’ only is written).20 This is the first fragment noted by Nestle, the one which made him suggest that, although Eriugena is so late an author, and absent from Tischendorf’s list of authors who are important for the Greek NT, he would still deserve the attention of an editor. In the homily, this is the initial quotation of Jn 1:13, followed by its exegesis. However, since no separate interpretation is offered here for this shorter Greek variant, it has the appearance of a simple note. The first question to address is the following: how reliable is this Johannine quotation as an Eriugenian reading? In other words, is the quotation something Eriugena wrote, or can it be simply explained through alterations in the transmission of the homily? Jeauneau signalled the oddity of the sentence by placing the whole remark in parentheses. The latest edition of the homily rests on 73 manuscripts, and this rather high number is usually regarded to be a direct result of the fact that the homily was long attributed to Origen, due to the allegorical feel to its exegesis. The textual stemma of the homily proposed by Jeauneau comprises two main classes of manuscripts. One of the features differentiating between the two is precisely the presence or absence of the note concerning the shorter variant found in some Greek 19 Cristiani, Il Prologo, 95-96; Jeauneau, SC 151, 231, n. 3: “Il faut lire sans hésiter αὐτὸς, et non οὗτος [...].” 20 O’Meara, Eriugena, 174.