Bibliothek Goussen

Heinrich Goussen (1863–1927) collected an extensive library centered around Oriental Christianity. The monographs in this collection publish until the year 1900 are now available online (English/Deutsch/Français). Thanks to the University of Bonn and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia for making these texts available. The digital collection offers most of the important Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, and Syriac editions from the 16th–19th centuries.

Marginal Comments Included in the Main Text

I found the following information in a rather old book and have not been able to verify this, but it looks interesting. According to Tregelles' intro to his text of Revelation (1844), the Codex Corsendoncensis (I believe this is Gregory-Aland minuscule 3, right?) reads as follows in 2 Cor 8:4-5 δέξασθαι ἡμᾶς ἐν πολλοῖς τῶν ἀντιγράφων οὕτως εὕρηται καὶ οὐ καθὼς ἠλπίσαμεν. The first two words δέξασθαι ἡμᾶς are an addition found in some mss, while everything from καὶ οὐ ... onwards is part of the regular text of 8:5. That leaves the words 'ἐν πολλοῖς τῶν ἀντιγράφων οὕτως εὕρηται' ('such it is found in many copies'), referring apparently to the addition of δέξασθαι ἡμᾶς. A good example of a marginal comment in the exemplar that was included in the main text. This phenomenon must have happened more often.

King James Only?

Here is a new blog devoted to the KJV-only debate

From the description:

Hysteria, misinformation, rancor and hype fill the King James Version (KJV) only debate. Cynicism sometimes colors the view of those on both sides of the debate. This blog aims to confront the King James craze head on, and evaluate the claims of KJV-onlyism from a Biblical perspective.

The authors are all former proponents of KJV-onlyism. Each has made his own journey out of that movement. We shall do our best to fairly represent the opposite view here, yet we acknowledge that there are multiple varieties of the KJV-only position.

We welcome honest debate in the comments. But we reserve the right to moderate discussions in an effort to keep this a charitable, Christ-honoring blog.

Hebrews 2.8 in NA27 and P46

Hebrews 2.8 contains the first bracketed text in Hebrews in NA27 - an indication that although the committee decided on AUTW as the text to print, they were sufficiently doubtful as to signal their doubts with single square brackets. This isn't the same as split decisions where the committee was not unanimous (these are not routinely marked and can only be discovered by reading Metzger's commentary carefully). This is a committee decision to codify their own doubts within the printed text (this is defcon 4 on the the scale of committee uncertainty [defcon 3 is to signal that NA25 had a different reading; defcon 2 is to provide evidence for and against the text reading; defcon 1 is to note that a variant exists - these are NA27's subtle indications of degree of doubt and well worth being familiar with]).

The text and apparatus presents this as a choice between the presence and absence of AUTW. The apparatus puts the witness of P46 in brackets. This means that the editors regard P46 as a "kind-of" witness to the absence of AUTW, but the brackets signal that things are not as simple as that. The editors of NA27, being careful about such matters, knew that readers would be interested in what P46 actually does read here, so they have a cool appendix where (all?) all the bracketed witnesses are explained. It is the place to go when you wonder what the complication is with P46 here. It is appendix II (pp. 721-749) and is a very valuable collection and on p. 745 re Heb 2.8 we discover that P46 lacks not only AUTW but the whole phrase AUTW TA PANTA.

Armed with this extra information we might notice that NA27 here over-simplifies the textual situation as a simple choice whether to read AUTW or not. In fact P46 offers a third reading altogether. Occasionally when you notice this in NA27 (it is a characteristic of NA27 which is the negative side of the editorial decision to include as much information as they possibly could in a compact and abbreviated manner - it is not something to complain about, but to be aware of) it is worth checking what else may be happening in the passage. A quick look at Tischendorf reveals the interesting information that D E syr and cop have TA PANTA before UPOTAXAI. This gives a fourth variant:

1. UPOTAXAI (P46)
2. UPOTAXAI TA PANTA (B etc.)
3. TA PANTA UPOTAXAI AUTW (D E etc.)
4. UPOTAXAI AUTW TA PANTA (01 A etc.)

Once you write them down like this you can see that there are more issues here than the presence and absence of AUTW, but also about the presence and placement of the (arguably redundant) anaphoric TA PANTA. Incidentally in some cases like this it can be helpful to check the apparatus of the UBS 4 edition (although not on this occasion, since here it is worse that NA27).

I'm not going to attempt to solve the general textual problem here, more illustrate how to get the most out of the NA27 edition while being aware of its limitations, but it is worth noting that even with the extra bracketed information about P46 we haven't yet got all the relevant information about how this verse reads in P46. Along with the shorter reading here, there is a different placement for the second AUTW and the lack of the article before PANTA (when it does occur later on). P46 has its own, rather elegant, way to present the thought of this passage. Interesting.

Bibliography of Greek New Testament MSS

Prof. Keith Elliott is assembling the third Supplement to his Bibliography of Greek NT mss. The last supplement was in Novum Testamentum 49 (2007): 370-401. He would be grateful to be sent the bibliographical details of any recent relevant material - editions, articles, plates etc. to add to his files. Better he told the same information more than once than he miss out a useful item. Contact him at j.k.elliott@leeds.ac.uk.

Reading Marks in P46 (Heb 2.5-8)

Secondary reading marks occur in various places throughout the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri. There are a couple previously in Hebrews, but they kick in quite consistently at 2.5 (see the picture below). In general they serve to mark the thought units within the OT citation (Ps 8.5-7) - it is less clear to me what is going on in v5 (as if it were me I would place a mark after MELLOUSAN to separate the prepositional clause).


One interesting feature of P46 here is the reading TIS in v6 (it is masc. suggesting a personal question: 'who?', as opposed to TI which is neut., 'what?') [which, of course could be original to Hebrews since it is not assimilated to the LXX, which in most witnesses has TI]
Anyway Zuntz had an ingenious theory that v6 in P46 (reading TIS) consisted of a question and an answer: 'Who is the man whom Thou mindest?' 'Truly the Son of Man, for him Thou visitest.' Among the various objections to this (from style, theology, syntax), perhaps we could make two objections from P46 itself: firstly, whoever put in the reading marks surely did not recognise the two clauses as question and answer since then we would expect an extra reading mark (as it is the marks seem to treat the double clause as a unit, suggesting parallelism as normally taken); and secondly, that if P46 had wanted to indicate that 'Man' and 'Son of Man' were christological titles it could have used nomina sacra for ANQRWPOS.