Simon Gathercole has a new open access article out in JSNT that questions the dominant view that 1 Cor 15.51–52 shows that Paul expected to survive until the Parousia. It’s worth your time to read for the main point it’s addressing, but being a blog about textual criticism not Pauline theology, I wanted to highlight one outcome of his against-the-grain reading of these verses. There are a number of variants in v. 51 (at least thirteen per TuT). Gathercole gives the main ones as follows:
These are sometimes expained by later readers/scribes wanting to fix Paul’s theology. Here is Metzger:
Because Paul and his correspondents had died, the statement πάντες οὐ κοιμηθησόμεθα seemed to call for correction. The simplest alteration was to transfer the negative to the following clause (א (A*) C 33 1739 itg arm eth al). That this was an early modification is shown by the artifical conflation of both readings in 𝔓46 Ac Origen...
From his own argument, especially regarding the syntax of v. 51, Gathercole says of this suggestion:
This is of course possible, but there is an alternative explanation, namely that ancient scribes were as perplexed as modern scholars by the wording of 1 Cor. 15.51: as [A.T.] Robertson comments, ‘the variations in 1 Cor. xv: 51 may be also due to … failure to understand Paul’s language’. As we have seen, Paul’s language in 1 Cor. 15.51 is far from straightforward.
I should add that Gathercole sides with the current concensus about the original text of v. 51 and so follows B Maj. I will say I had never noticed the seemingly odd placement of the negative particle in v. 51 before.
As a side note, there are some interesting things happening in 02. You can see a small ου added before κοιμηθησόμεθα and you can see where an original οι before παντες has been slightly adjusted to turn the iota into an upsilon to make ου. (Unfortunately, the BL still doesn’t have 02 back online after the hack so these images are from a monochrome facsimile courtsey of CSNTM.)
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| A/02 (CSNTM) |
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