Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan freely available

The full text of the Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan, one of the world’s leading Semitists, is now freely available here. In the opening essay of the volume I write about Semitic long /i/ vowels in Vaticanus NT, making the case that the spellings with epsilon-iota for the long /i/ in Vaticanus are a mixture of early readings and learned innovation.

A New Word from a Non-word in Your NA28?

At 2 Peter 2.14, the majority of Greek witnesses describe a group of people “having eyes full of an adulteress” (ὀφθαλμοὺς ἔχοντες μεστοὺς μοιχαλίδος). Charles Bigg concluded in his ICC commentary that the majority of manuscripts “are certainly wrong” since the sense “absolutely requires μοιχείας [adultery]” (p. 283). I suspect that some scribes agreed with Bigg and that explains why we find μοιχείας in 044 and 2344. “Adulteress” (μοιχαλίδος) is certainly the lectio difficilior and should be preferred as it is in most editions (NA28, SBLGNT, WH, Tischendorf).

This is all straightforward enough. But there is a third reading involved here which is μοιχαλίας, a reading which Metzger’s commentary will tell you is unknown elsewhere. A look at LSJ and a search of TLG basically confirm this. LSJ has nothing and, aside from two quotes of this verse from Ephrem, TLG only turns up a single example of μοιχαλίας which is from a first century copy of an astronomical text. Surprisingly, this unattested word has some hefty manuscript support in 01, 02, 33 and about half a dozen minuscules.

What I can’t figure out is why the NA28/UBS5 have changed the spelling from the NA27/UBS4 so that it now reads μοιχαλείας. We know the ECM doesn’t list spelling differences involving ει-ι interchanges (p. 27*), but this appears to be a case where they have changed the spelling as it is found in our extant witnesses. I checked about half of those cited in the ECM and they all attest μοιχαλίας (see below).

I can’t figure out any rationale for this change. Any ideas?

2 Peter 2.14 in 01, 02, 33, 436, and 621

Consistency is Highly Overrated

Everyone who has worked a lot with the raw data of a manuscript knows that scribes seem to do many things on a whim, without any discernible rule. Editors of our modern text hate scribes for this and expect that the original that lies behind the manuscript tradition shows more consistency. But this is a dangerous attitude, since any imposed consistency may hide something more subtle in the language of the author - a notion of consistency is based on our understanding of the language rather than an attempt to reflect the manuscript tradition.

An example from the Gospel of Mark. Nine times we find the third person plural ‘they said’, ειπον / ειπαν. In NA26/27 it is spelled consistently ειπαν. In each of the nine cases there is manuscript support for ειπαν but in two cases this support is unusually slim, 11:6 and 16:8. In the latter ειπαν is only read by Bezae, all other witnesses read ειπον (nice to talk about Mark 16:8 without mentioning the ...).



What has happened here? Once we accept the external case for ειπον in 11:6 and 16:8 (and you guess correctly that this will be the reading of the Tyndale House edition), we see that of all nine cases of ‘they said’, these are the only two that are not followed by direct speech. It may be coincidence, it may be not. However, simply the possibility that such observations can be made now, is for me sufficient reason not to attempt too much orthographic consistency; there may be more going on than I understand at this moment.

The Irony of Samaria: Σαμαρεια / Σαμαρειτης in the Greek NT

The following is a short note, hopefully fun.
There are several ironies in the spelling of Σαμαρεια/Σαμαρια in our Greek texts.

Readers of United Bible Societies Greek text and the Nestle Aland text will be familiar with the following spellings:

Σαμάρεια (the place), and
Σαμαρίτης (a person of the place, male)
Σαμαρῖτις (a person of the place, female)

The spelling of the two forms is inconsistent, though the root will sound identical when read with a first century pronunciation.
[[ ει is correctly pronounced like the ι [i] vowel sound rather than the [e] sound (close to ey in 'they') that is often heard in academic circles.]]
But this inconsistency is only the first in a series.

The world turns upside down when Westcott and Hort are brought in. Westcott-Hort have:

Σαμάρια (the place) and
Σαμαρείτης (the person, male)
Σαμαρεῖτις (the person, female)

Not only are both WH and UBS/NA internally inconsistent, but they are the opposite of each other. That is a rather unexpected result.

Do the manuscript traditions support either of these inversions or provide a solution? On the surface one would not expect that WH and UBS/NA would come to such doubly inverted results without some good manuscript support. These can be checked rather quickly and fairly comprehensively today because of the books of Swanson, who records manuscript deviances on points like these.

(for the complete listing of the data from Swanson, please view my fuller note at
http://alefandomega.blogspot.com/2008/09/irony-of-in-greek-nt.html Only the results and conclusions are presented here.)


The Results for Spelling the Place Name Samaria:

B is consistently -EI-, 10/11, corrected 11/11.
א is consistently -I-, 11/11.
p75 is consistently -EI-, 4/4
p45 is -EI-, 1/1
p66 is consistently -I-, 3/3
A is predominantly -EI-, 9/11 (Lk 17 and Ac 1.8 exceptional)
D is predominantly -I-, 9/10 (Lk 17 EI)
C is mixed, -EI- 4/10, -I- 6/10
E is predominantly -I-, 10/11 (Jn 4.7 -EI?-)
H is predominantly, -EI- 10/11 (A15 -I-)
W is consistently -I- 4/4.
Θ is consistently -I- 4/4.
Miniscules are predominantly -EI-,
though a few show a mixture
like 565 = -EI- 2/4 , -I- 2/4;
614 = -EI- 5/7 , -I- 2/7 ;
1175 = -EI-3/7 , -I- 4/7 .

The place name was spelled -ει- in the old Alexandrian (p75, B, A in Acts)
and in the Byzantine traditions.
Another Alexandrian spelling was -ι-, which is also the Western reading.

It appears that Westcott and Hort abandoned the spelling of B because it lined up with the Byzantine reading and because significant Alexandrian witnesses and the Western witness agreed. However, this looks different today, since p75 and p45 have joined B's spelling. WH should have paid more attention to Σαμαρεια in the six examples where the old Alexandrian manuscripts B and A agree in Acts.

This becomes more telling when the gentilic noun 'Samaritan' is investigated.

(for a complete listing of data from Swanson on Σαμαρειτις and Σαμαρειτης, please see http://alefandomega.blogspot.com/2008/09/irony-of-in-greek-nt.html)

Results and Conclusions

The spelling for the gentilic Σαμαρειτης is a little more inconsistent than for the place name Σαμαρεια, but the same manuscripts are basically lining up with the same relationships.

B is consistently -EI- 9/9.
א is consistently -I- 8/8 (plus one correction of a lacuna with -EI-)
p45 is consistently -EI- 1/1
p75 is consistently -EI- 6/6
D is mixed -EI- 3/8, -I- 5/8. But still in the same direction of its 9/10 preference of Σαμαρια over Σαμαρεια.
W is consistently -I- 8/8.
A is predominantly -EI- 6/7 (Lk 9:52 -I-.) In Acts [Alexandrian] it is -EI- 1/1.
C is mixed -EI- 5/8, -I- 3/8. The three -I- are in Matt and Luke.
The Byzantine manuscripts are predominantly -EI-

How does one distill this?

There is no consistent evidence that would support either UBS/NA or WH ! Differentiating the vowel EI/I in the place name 'Samaria' from the gentilic name 'Samaritan', whichever flip-flop one chooses, appears to be an artificial introduction into the spelling tradition by both published critical texts. UBS/NA may be faulted for following the -I- traditions in the gentilic names Σαμαριτης and Σαμαριτις. The manuscripts that they were following for this tradition would have led them to choose the place name Σαμαρια as well. Likewise, Westcott and Hort should have stuck with their acknowledged preference of B and old Alexandrian witnesses. The papyri p75 and p45 have reinforced the spelling Σαμαρεια. But again, there is no consistent support for maintaining a distinction between Σαμαρια and Σαμαρειτης. The only old witness that moves a bit in that direction is D, Codex Bezae. But Bezae is hardly a reliable tradition, and it only scores 3/8 with Σαμαρειτης. One might also point to the mixed attestation of C, but it, too, is hardly a sterling example of a tight manuscript. It means that there are no manuscripts that consistently support either UBS/NA or Westcott-Hort.

But the manuscripts do support consistency. B, p75, A, and K are on one side (-ει-), and א, p66, and D (-ι-) on the other. Whatever the original authors may have written, the various ancient publishing houses seem to have passed on one tradition or another, though with occasional inconsistencies and some evidence of cross-contamination.

A final irony for this situation is the resulting spelling. The old Alexandrian and the Byzantine manuscripts share a bed here. Together, they both point to Σαμαρεια and Σαμαρειτης as the preferred forms for the Greek NT. The Byzantine text (Robinson-Pierpont) has this spelling right. Fortunately, a person can read both the WH and UBS/NA texts correctly when one is trained to hear the old language.

for an older ETC-blog discussion on 'why spelling matters' see:
http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2006/02/why-spelling-matters.html