6 J.K. Elliott, Christian Amphoux and Jean-Claude Haelewyck introductory matter (pp. 45*f.) as merely a working text, capable of being changed, the reader being invited to make use of its apparatus so to do. The recent fascicules of the Editio Critica Maior (= ECM) on James and the Petrine epistles5 give us a newly edited text of these three epistles. The text differs somewhat from the Nestle text, edited under the auspices of the same institution (the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster, Germany). The editors of ECM anticipate future changes as they work through the New Testament. And even for the books already published they are aware that further changes may occur, as their under- standing of the manuscripts and the interrelationships of certain witnesses are better plotted and analyzed. We may already see such a development in an addendum to the fascicule on the Petrine epistles which draws our attention (ECM IV,2 part 1 p. 24*) to one further change to the text of the earlier published fascicule at James 2:4. In a normal pocket edition of a critical text one encounters the variants deemed important by its editors together with a selection of ‘important’ manuscript evidence in support. What one cannot do, because the manu- script evidence is presented piecemeal and inconsistently, is to re-establish from such apparatus the running text of any one manuscript, even if it is a consistently cited witness. Such an enterprise should however be possible, at least in part, for the manuscripts selected for display in the relatively exhaustive apparatus in ECM, although not all variations are given even there, and purely orthographical variants are avoided. It should be even easier to do this in Swanson’s display of variants in extenso6. He enables us to see in his horizontal lines of variants the actual running text of the thirty or so manuscripts for Mark which he prints, and for the other New Testament books published to date. Electronically stored collations, such as those currently being under- taken by the International Greek New Testament Project in its on-going work assembling a full apparatus to the Fourth Gospel, will eventually enable the user to recall the actual text of each manuscript collated, re- gardless of the collating base originally used by the collator when entering the evidence for each manuscript. But what one cannot do, even with the clearly displayed (and highly accurate) material in Swanson, is to observe in any meaningful way the principal divergences between the texts. 5 Novum Testamentum Graece: Editio Critica Maior IV Catholic Epistles 1 James (Stuttgart, 1997); 2 The Letters of Peter (Stuttgart, 2000). 6 R. Swanson, New Testament Greek Manuscripts: Variant Readings arranged in Horizontal Lines against Codex Vaticanus. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John (Pasadena and Sheffield, 1995); Acts (Pasadena and Sheffield, 1998); Galatians (Pasadena, 2000).