109 Reconsidering the Text of Jude 5, 13, 15 and 18 θεὸς χριστός. Thus, we are left with the same three readings as with the external evidence, namely, κύριος, ᾽Ιησοῦς and θεός. But which one is the likeliest “original”? The ὁ θεός could be a harmonisation to 2 Pet. 2,4. The Petrine passage speaks of God, who did not spare angels. This parallels the context of Jude. A scribe harmonising these two parallel passages would have more likely changed κύριος or ᾽Ιησοῦς to θεός than vice versa, irrespective of whether Jude or 2 Peter is an earlier work52. Another possibility is that ὁ θεός is a scribal interpretation of an earlier anarthrous κύριος, which is ambiguous53. It could refer to Jesus or to God. A scribe could have made the statement unambiguous by altering the reading to that of 2 Peter. Yet some scholars are sympathetic for the originality of θεός in Jude 5. The idea is that a scribe read a nomen sacrum ΘC but wrote accidentally either IC or KC because of an indistinctively written theta. This requires the priority of 2 Peter, which the author of Jude used as a source for his own letter. It also requires a transcriptional blunder, which itself is revised either unintentionally or intentionally. The probability for this possibility seems too remote. Current scholarship generally argues for the priority of Jude, though the matter is still open for a debate54. Transcriptionally it is quite unlikely that ᾽Ιησοῦς would be written in place of θεός, but the vice versa makes sense in light of 2 Pet. 2,4. It is thus unlikely that ὁ θεός is the “original” reading. This leaves two textual variant to content for originality: (ὁ) ᾽Ιησοῦς and (ὁ) κύριος55. I find arguments over the priority of 2 Peter vs. Jude non-binding on this issue, 52 because this kind of harmonisation requires that both texts were available to a scribe and it does not matter which one was originally written first. The question is which reading is more likely to be subdued. There is no varia lectio in 2 Pet. 2,4. Black, “Critical and Exegetical Notes on Three New Testament Texts”; Bauckham, 53 Jude, 2 Peter, 49. F. Spitta, Der zweite Brief des Petrus und der Brief des Judas (Halle 1885), 324; W. 54 Grundmann, Der Brief des Judas und der zweite Brief des Petrus (ThHK 15; Berlin 1974), 33 n. 30., See, e.g., Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, 157. F.J.A. Hort, ”Notes on Selected Readings”, in B.F. Westcott with F.J.A Hort, The Text 55 of the New Testament in the Original Greek (2 vols.; Cambridge 1881) II, 106, conjectured that the original reading was simply οτιο, which was then read inadvertently as οτιιφσφ, or perhaps even οτιkφσφ. Metzger (TCGNT2, 657) and Wikgren noted favourably this possibility in a minority vote. The RSV translation adopted this conjectural reading. G. Howard, “The Tetragram and the New Testament”, JBL 96 (1976) 63-83, has conjectured a highly speculative idea that the author of Jude originally wrote hwhy. This gave rise to vari- ous Greek nouns as a scribal attempt to rewrite the text to say what it was taken to mean. I do not consider either conjecture as a real possibility for several reasons. (1) Conjectures are to be dismissed if a variant reading exists that can be given a reasonable meaning in its context. (2) Conjectures may obscure author’s stylistic peculiarities. (3) Conjectures are like scribal emendations i.e. improvements of the text in themselves. See J. Fossum, “Kyrios Jesus as the Angel of the Lord in Jude 5-7”, NTS 33 (1987) 226-43; Landon, A Text-Critical