98 Timo Flink he is not going to the feast in Jerusalem when in fact he does so31. None of these changes, doctrinal or apologetic, mean that John 1,34 has to suffer from corruption but they render the reading υ ς το θεο suspect as an anti-Adoptionistic change. Such an alteration would be in harmony with scribal habits in P66. P75 as a Textual Witness Traditionally P75 has been listed as supporting υ ς το θεο . This is now known to be its corrected reading. The original scribe of P75 wrote κλεκτος with nomen sacrum, a singular reading, not υ ς υς το θεο , as the critical editions and Text und Textwert claim. The scribe then erased κλεκτ ς and wrote το θεο with nomen sacrum instead. Letters tos are still visible before the initial letters of the next words, τ πα ριον, and there are traces of the two epsilons32. The corrected reading is shorter (toyUY instead of eklektos). This has produced a gap with tos visible. Thus, originally the text had a significant singular reading υ ς κλεκτ ς. The reading υ ς το θεο should now be marked as P75c. What follows are my arguments why υ ς κλεκτ ς is not a scribal blunder. Is it possible that the scribe of P75 attempted to write υ ς κλεκτ ς το θεο , whose equivalent is found in some early Latin, Syriac and im- portant Coptic (Sahidic) witnesses, and accidentally omitted το θεο ?33. Scribes, who copied the early papyri, were generally more prone to omit than to add, so υ ς κλεκτος could be a shortened version of υ ς κλεκτ ς το θεο . It is a possibility, because there are several singular readings, some significant, based on omissions in the early papyri contain- ing portions of the Fourth Gospel34. The papyrus P75 has twice as many 31 Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse and the Scribal Tradition, 91, 186-87. The first διορθωτ ς made the change in John 4,25. I have based this identification on Comfort’s work on the scribes, who worked with P66. See Comfort and Barrett, The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts, 381-91. See also P.W. Comfort, The Scribe as Interpreter. A New Look at New Testament Textual Criticism according to Reader-Response Theory (Pretoria 1996). 32 A private communication with Dr Marie-Luise Lakmann of Münster regarding the reading and the corrector activity found in P75 in John 1,34 (January 2005). 33 It should be noted that the word order is not really an issue since it is probably a technical detail due to a translation process. Latin witnesses read electus filius dei (a), filius electus dei (ff2c), dei filius electus (bc). 34 E.C. Colwell, “Method in Evaluating Scribal Habits. A Study of P45, P66, P75”, in idem, Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament (NTTS 9; Leiden 1969) 106-24; Royse, “Scribal Tendencies in the Transmission of the Text of the New Testament”, 239-52; P.M. Head, “Observations on Early Papyri of the Synoptic Gospels, especially on the ‘Scribal Habits’”, Bib 71 (1990) 240-47; idem, “The Habits of New Testament Copyists. Singular Readings in the Early Fragmentary Papyri of John”, Bib 85 (2004) 399-408.