The proponents of the Westcott & Hort … NA/UBS, SBLGNT, texts have cast a shadow over the reliability of Von Soden's apparatus.
True indeed, and so has many from the MT side of the debate, in working with the WP text, I happened on the Pericope adulterae in tonights task. Dr. Pickering mentions Von Soden in passing here in a footnote:
Dr. Pickering wrote:For these verses I will cite the groups posited by von Soden as used in the H-F apparatus, rather than give percentages (M7 becomes f35); however, Robinson’s collations have demonstrated that Soden ‘regularized’ the data rather drastically, so the H-F apparatus may in fact be rather misleading. For all that, until Robinson’s collations are fully analyzed, and the result made public, it’s the best we can do...
also consider his opening statement in his introduction to his F35 text:
Once upon a time I was led to believe that Hermann Von Sodens's work was basically reliable... However, the Text und Textwert (tut) collations demonstrate objectively that not infrequently Soden is seriously off the mark
I think its generally accepted that Von Soden's Work is lacking in accuracy. We also see the Claremont Profile Method which often shows the groupings are not completely accurate using test chapters in Luke.
With that being said, the tut is not entirely useless. We do get a good general sense of a family type, and to date, there is nothing even remotely close to what he has in his volumes. As far as manuscripts are concerned, INTF is continually adding the minuscules to its databases, and other institutions such as CSPMT (who I've been working with
) and CNTTS have access to a number of minuscules and lectionaries as well. Not all, of course, there's always politics involved when it comes to manuscript access, but the numbers are definitely increasing. Dan Wallace has a number of MSS available but you have to go to his office to see most of them
Now, concerning the indicative and the Subjunctive, Here is how I view the difference after reading all these posts:
Subjunctive: If we say "we have fellowship with him" and
[if] we are walking in darkness....
Indicative: If we say "we have fellowship with him"
[even though] we are walking in darkness....
the other consideration is that the indicative with εαν was phasing in at the time of writing the manuscript which means we would 'pretend' its a subjunctive anyway. Did I get that right?