Lectio difficilior potior

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Lectio difficilior potior (Latin for "the more difficult reading is the stronger") is a principle of textual criticism. Where different manuscripts conflict on a particular word, the more unusual one is more likely the original. The presupposition is that scribes would more often replace odd words and hard sayings with more familiar and less controversial ones, than vice versa (Carson 1991).

This principle has some wider everyday application. If one wants to determine the correct spelling of a name, and finds conflicting versions, it is often the more "difficult" one that is correct, not the one that is most widely used. For example, a British politician was correctly named Peter Alexander Rupert Carington, Baron Carrington - the family name has only one "r", the peerage title two. However, a Google search, which can often be useful to determine such matters, might find:

  • "Peter Alexander Rupert Carington" - 32 hits
  • "Peter Alexander Rupert Carrington" - 79 hits

Choosing the "more common" spelling would thus be wrong in this case. However, even without definite knowledge of what the correct spelling is, Carington is to be preferred because it is clearly the more unusual. If Carrington were correct, there would hardly be such a high incidence of the particular misspelling Carington. But the reverse is not surprising, since people might easily consider the unusual name Carington a mistake and falsely "correct" it.

On the other hand, taken as an axiom, the principle lectio difficilior produces an eclectic text rather than one based on a history of manuscript transmission. "Modern eclectic praxis operates on a variant unit basis without any apparent consideration of the consequences," Maurice Robinson (ref.) has warned, suggesting that to the principle "The reading which would be more difficult as a scribal creation is to be preferred should be added a corollary, difficult readings created by individual scribes do not tend to perpetuate in any significant degree within transmissional history." (Robinson 2001).

Robinson, as a noted proponent of the superiority of the Byzantine text-type, would use this corollary to explain differences from the Majority text as scribal errors that were not perpetuated because they were known to be errant or that existed only in a small number of manuscripts at the time. The majority of textual-critical scholars would explain the corollary by the assumption that scribes tended to "correct" harder readings, and thus cut off the stream of transmission, so that earlier manuscripts would have the harder readings and later ones would not; hence they would not see the corollary principle as being a very important one for bringing us closer to the original form of the text.

However, lectio difficilior is not to be taken as an absolute rule either, but as a general guideline: "In general the more difficult reading is to be preferred." (Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, II.i.1, p. 209). "There is truth in the maxim: lectio difficilior lectio potior ("the more difficult reading is the more probable reading"). But for scholars like Kurt Aland, who follow a path of reasoned eclecticism that is based on evidence both internal and external to the manuscripts, "this principle must not be taken too mechanically, with the most difficult reading (lectio difficilima) adopted as original simply because of its degree of difficulty" (Aland 1995, p. 276).

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