Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Ba(si)leia as nomen sacrum?

4
Perhaps lots of other people have, but I haven't seen basileia written as a nomen sacrum. (I mentioned this to Larry Hurtado and he hadn't either.) I think there is one in POxy 5072. Richard Goode has discussed the Egerton Papyrus's use of basileus as a nomen sacrum (in the 2007 Birmingham conference volume), and I looked at the nice photo in Bell and Skeat, and interestingly the supralinear stroke starts in almost exactly the same place there as it does in POxy 5072 - at the very end of the beta, almost at the beginning of the alpha. The abbreviation is - mutatis mutandis - in the same form as well (BALEUSI in P.Eg. and BALEIA in the text below).
Check out line 9 of POxy 5072:
(It's one of the images posted by oxy.ac when they publicised the open access of the papyri images. It'll be the first in the next POxy vol.)
Simon

4 comments

  1. Thanks for posting this Simon. Are you saying that basileus is a rare nomen sacrum? I don't believe I have ever seen basileia, but in the collation I just finished (GA2907), I found basileus to be abbreviated to bleus.

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  2. My post was really just a comment on basileia. Re basileus, it is found as BC in P.Oxy. 2068 according to Bell and Skeat (Frs. of an Unknown Gospel, 4), who have a list of various nomina sacra I haven't seen, e.g. XRANOUC for Christianous and ECTPW for estaurothe.

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  3. Look at Mk. 1:15 in MS 1241.

    Yours in Christ,

    James Snapp, Jr.

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  4. I'm pretty sure I came across it in a lectionary at some point too.

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