ITSEE doctoral researcher Peter Montoro IV has qualified for the award of his PhD.
Peter Montoro IV presenting his research at the Birmingham Colloquium in 2023.
Congratulations to Peter Montoro IV on the successful examination of his doctoral thesis on the text of Romans in the writings of John Chrysostom. Entitled "Revision and Reference: The Transformations of the Biblical Text of Chrysostom’s Homilies on Romans and their Significance for the Transmission of the New Testament", the thesis is a detailed examination of the ways in which Chrysostom's biblical text has been transmitted in the manuscript tradition.
Peter followed the distance learning part-time PhD pathway in ITSEE, supervised by Professor Hugh Houghton and Dr Catherine Smith. Over the course of his studies, he has co-edited a volume of papers from a conference in Birmingham, and published the findings of his work in French and in English in a variety of respected journals. Several of these were co-published with Dr Rob Turnbull, a Senior Research Fellow at Melbourne University, Australia, who developed tools to enable Peter to collect and analyse vast quantities of data.
This week, Peter is presenting his research at the International Patristics Conference in Oxford, for which he was awarded a scholarship by the Association Internationale des Études Patristiques (AIEP).
Peter and his supervisor Hugh Houghton in Oxford this week.
The abstract of Peter's thesis is as follows:
The significance of Chrysostom’s Homilies on Romans (RHom) for the history of exegesis and the transmission of the biblical text has long been recognized, but thus far an appropriate methodology for dealing with such a massive and complex manuscript tradition has been lacking. This thesis uses new digital tools and introduces multiple methodological innovations to provide a new paradigm. Based on a full set of manuscript images, indexed by content, it provides a detailed overview of the thirty-nine primary witnesses of the direct tradition of the RHom, locating the lacunae and textual dislocations in each, and surveying key paratextual information. The phylogenetic analysis of extensive test passages is used to group the manuscript tradition into textual clusters, and sixteen representative witnesses are selected. Further test passages and additional analysis (using both phylogenetic and common-error approaches) demonstrate several forms of textual mixture and establish an initial stemma of the direct tradition. Two annotated apparatuses, the first dealing with citations from Romans, the second with citations from other biblical books, offer a full collation of each of the 1962 sentences in the RHom that contain biblical citations. The first apparatus also includes a critical reconstruction of the Romans text of the RHom and of each of the sixteen selected witnesses, as well as a thorough correlation with 164 transcriptions of Romans at all points of textual interest. The creation of a dataset of “high entropy” variations in the transmission of Romans allows for direct stemmatic comparisons between the biblical texts of RHom witnesses and New Testament manuscripts, enabling the evidence of the RHom to be located in the broader transmission of Romans. Building on these datasets, the many layers of textual revision in manuscripts of the RHom are investigated. A recension is identified that clearly revises the Romans text of the RHom towards a text of Romans that is earlier than Chrysostom’s own. Examples of textual influence from manuscripts of the RHom are also analyzed. Theophylact’s commentary on Romans is shown to differ from the Majority Text because of influence from a specific recension of the RHom. This demonstration that the biblical text of the RHom is inextricably intertwined with the broader transmission of Romans leads to the suggestion of an improved methodology for the use of commentary witnesses in New Testament textual studies.
The full thesis will in due course be available on the University of Birmingham eTheses portal.
Peter has since taken up a postdoctoral position as an associate research fellow with Tyndale House in Cambridge, contributing to the next edition of the Tyndale House Greek New Testament and helping to develop a large-scale research project on the textual history of the New Testament.
Professor of New Testament Textual Scholarship
School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion
Biographical and contact details for Professor Hugh Houghton, Professor of New Testament Textual Scholarship at the University of Birmingham.
Research Fellow and Technical Officer
Biographical and contact information for Dr Catherine Smith, Research Fellow and Technical Officer, Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, University of Birmingham.
