Scribal Habits in Greek New Testament Manuscripts 107 These readings are listed in the Addendum. By contrast, there were 30 times as many readings where the scribe made the text more difficult, yet without producing nonsense (244 cases). Set against the expectation that scribes tended to improve the sense of the text or remove difficulties, a result of less than 1% fails to inspire confidence in the canon43. A figure of less than 1% semantically-improved readings constitutes an extraordinary and surprising result. On its own, such a result is un- likely to convince many to abandon such a venerable canon. However, interestingly, other studies corroborate the findings here. Comparison Studies In Colwell’s study, out of a total of 1014 singular readings (after he had excluded itacisms), only five readings are mentioned that actually remove difficulties or improve the sense of the text, a figure of 0.5%. These readings are listed in the Addendum, as are the readings of Royse and Hernández. However, in the section of his study entitled Editorial Changes, rather than discussing readings that improve the sense, Colwell instead spends most of his time discussing matters of style. He refers to terms like “style”, “clarity”, “conciseness” and “smoothing” 33 times in the five pages devoted to this section of the study44. By spending so much of his time discussing trifling stylistic editorial changes, Colwell appears to unwittingly confirm that scribes rarely ever editorialise in ways which improve the sense or meaning of the text. In Royse’s study, out of 1125 “significant singulars”, Royse only com- ments on nine cases of singular readings which actually remove a dif- ficulty or improve the text semantically (0.8%)45. As an indication of how rare these readings are, the Harder Reading canon is not even referred to in Royse’s index, and it is only mentioned once in the body of Royse’s text, on page 713, note 30. 43 Another anomaly is instructive at this point. The reason Mark 2 contains so many neutral readings is because the “Western” Codices Bezae (D) and Washingtonianus (W) have 58 singular readings in this chapter (representing 27% of the singular readings in the chapter), 26 of which are neutral. Neither D nor W have any easier singular readings in Mark 2 (nor do any other MSS, for that matter). Thus, even the most editorial MSS are just rewording the text in synonymous terms; their efforts do not end up improving the text. 44 Colwell, Scribal Habits, 118-23. 45 In Royse’s study, singulars later corrected by the original scribe were excluded from the list of “significant singulars”. These excluded singulars number between 600 and 700 (depending on disputes over which hand did the correction). “Significant singulars” also exclude other nonsense readings not subsequently corrected.