Minns—The Parable of the Two Sons in Irenaeus and Codex Bezae 63
was not found before μεταμελήθητε. If form II of the parable of the Two Sons is a later
corruption of form I or form III, that corruption must have taken place between the
redaction of the Gospel and not much later than the middle of the second century,
when Irenaeus encountered the corrupted text.
When the oddity of Irenaeus’s exegesis of this parable first piqued my curiosity,
now nearly thirty years ago, I shared Souter’s supposition, referred to at the beginning
of this paper, that if Irenaeus’s biblical text could be secured it might bring us closer
than later witnesses to the original form of the text. That remains a possibility, but one
of the gains of revisiting this subject has been the discovery that more recent scholar-
ship of the text of Codex Bezae itself has revealed an “attitude of liberty with respect to
the text, displayed by an anonymous second-century διορθώτης who obviously felt free
to revise the text of the gospel.”^22