Scribal Habits in Greek New Testament Manuscripts 111 Jesus before things that he said, making the fact that Jesus is speaking explicit. Conjunctions are often added, removing asyndeton. Because some verbs (notably the verb “to be”) may be implicit, scribes sometimes supply them. Pronouns are similarly added to make explicit the object of a verb or used as possessives to make clear to whom something or someone belongs. For example, when we read οι μαθηται in Matthew’s Gospel, we do not usually need the possessive pronoun αυτου to tell us that the disciples belong to Jesus, but scribes sometimes add this word to the text. The corollary of this, again, is that the omission of such words makes the text more abrupt, austere, harsh and jagged, thus less polished and more difficult stylistically. Thus, the shorter reading usually ends up being the stylistically harsher reading. Lectio durior potior is thus related to lectio brevior po- tior because a large majority of additions and omissions are one-word and have no effect upon the text other than in stylistic terms. Here are some examples of Harsher Readings from Matthew 20: 20,5: K* omits δε1 (producing asyndeton) 20,7: A(01)* omits ημας (omission of object of verb) 20,13: 348(vSod) omits ενι (omission of adjective makes style more stark) 20,13: 1346 omits ειπεν (verb now implied) 20,23: 69 omits μου (possessive pronoun omitted) 20,30: 565 omits Ιησους (omission of subject) Articles are a slightly more complicated category. In the majority of cases, articles fulfilled a stylistic and/or syntactic purpose in the text. Most articles obeyed the rule that inclusion had the effect of distinguis- hing, specifying, emphasising, identifying or particularising the noun in some way; however there were exceptions. Similarly, omission of articles usually had the effect of removing the specificity that the originally pre- sent article preserved, resulting in a less polished expression. Some use of articles may relate to particular writers’ stylistic preferences, but these are usually considerations for intrinsic, not transcriptional, probability. Of course, sometimes the addition of extra words like conjunctions and articles resulted in a clumsy construction because the sentence was perfectly sensible before their addition. Some additions, particularly the 98 cases of dittography, also often produced nonsense. These variants, where the sense was affected rather than the style, belong under the hea- ding of the harder reading canon. Additions and omissions were not the only types of variant readings that had stylistic effects; some substitutions (and even transpositions) had