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.)
 |
| A/02 (CSNTM) |
Interesting thoughts.
ReplyDeleteBut in the first line of the table, doesn't the Byzantine/Majority reading (first line) include μέν, unlike B(03)?
And in the third line, doesn't the corrected version of A(02) still include μέν? The CNTTS NT apparatus shows it that way, making A.c a little different from P46.
After those corrections, it still appears as if P46 has a conflation between the Alexandrian reading of the first phrase that is also found in B, and the Alexandrian reading of the second part that is also found in א and C. This conflation happened in the second century already if it appeared in P46 and Origen.
Unless... Another possibility is that P46 preserves the reading of the Alexandrian archetype (having had the second οὐ added some time after the autograph, and possibly a μέν dropped from the first part), and later Alexandrian manuscripts corrected the double οὐ in two ways: the scribe of B (or a predecessor) corrected it by removing the second οὐ, and a predecessor of א and C also tried to correct it by removing the first οὐ (and replacing it with μέν, which was in other MSS). However, this possibility might not be as likely due to the number of changes that would have had to occur. More likely, P46 is evidence of a conflation between two texts that were extant in Egypt in the second century.
Matthew Brubacher