Scribal Habits in Greek New Testament Manuscripts 105 may also now add transcriptional probability), our current critical text tends to follow the readings of small related groups of documents whose common fault is large numbers of such omissions. This has resulted in the critical text suffering the matador’s “death by a thousand cuts”. Nor, thirty years after Royse’s dissertation and despite subsequent studies corroborating his findings, does there appear to be any movement towards rectifying this problem. Indeed, the 2010 SBL Greek NT is an even shorter text than NA2740. Barbara Aland argues that not even the canons of criticism should be altered: “in the previous comments I did not go into the criteria that lead in each particular case to a decision about the original reading, since they of course have not changed and will not change”41. Strangely, despite the criticism of Royse for allegedly failing to take account of Griesbach’s exception clauses, there has been no corresponding call for NA27 (or NA28) to reinstate short omissions into the text (ironically, the only text to retain short omissions on the basis of the “exception clauses” is Griesbach’s). Without such balance, the calls emphasising “nuance” sound largely hortatory: they merely give comfort (and cover) to those wishing to contentedly persist with an outdated and discredited canon. Prefer the Harder Reading For the investigation of the Harder Reading canon, 11 chapters of the NT (out of the 33 chapters earlier studied) were examined and all of the singular readings (not just additions and omissions, but also substitutions and transpositions) were catalogued. From these chapters 2279 singular readings were analysed for their effects upon the text. The results were categorized in six ways: as nonsense, harder sense, harder style, neutral, easier style or easier sense. The categorization process involves asking a series of questions: 1. Is a singular reading nonsensical, being impossible either lexically, gram- matically or in context? If yes, it is nonsense. 2. Does a reading change the sense or meaning of the text, either making the text more difficult or easier? If yes, it is either a harder or easier reading. 40 The Bibleworks computer program counts 138020 words in NA27 and 137647 words in SBL. Even with the addition of the Pericope Adulterae (John 7,52 – 8,11) which SBL en- tirely omits but NA27 retains in double brackets, SBL would still have only 137834 words. 41 B. Aland, “Neutestamentliche Textforschung und Textgeschichte: Erwägungen zu einem notwendigen Thema”, NTS 36 (1990) 339 (Royse’s translation).