"a very important discovery, equal to the Naga Hammadi scrolls"

This find went public in February.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/730/he1.htm

I have seen two sets of dates for these new documents ... the 3rd/4th and 6th centuries. These dates stem from the presumption that they were hidden during persecutions which would have happened at those times.

I think the picture on this page is from Nag Hammadi.

Itacism again

Following on from my last note: the Greek accentual system distinguishes final αι as long from final αι as short. Is there a greater frequency of ε for αι when the latter is short?

Vowels in Voelz

Peter mentioned the following article on another thread: James W. Voelz, 'The Greek of Codex Vaticanus in the Second Gospel and Marcan Greek', Novum Testamentum 47 (2005) 209-249. What caught my attention about this article was nothing to do with its main point, but rather its list of itacisms within Vaticanus for Mark on p. 211. What do Γαλειλαιας (1:16), θλειψεως (4:17), ατειμος (6:4), μεικρων (9:42) and all the other examples he gives have in common? They have in common the fact that the ει is used where etymologically there is a long i. He gives twelve examples of this, though he does not mention vowel quantity. Is it the case generally that this type of itacism in manuscripts correlates with the presence of etymologically long vowels? If so, this could tell us interesting information. One thing that fascinates me is the high incidence of the ει spelling for Semitic names (David, Pharisees, Galilee, etc.). Either the scribes were familiar with the vowel quantity of Semitic names (through knowing Hebrew/Aramaic or through hearing the names clearly enunciated in public Scripture reading) or the presence of ει comes from the authors themselves. Possible counter examples could be λειαν (6:51), which could apparently have short or long quantity, ανακλειθηναι (6:39), for a verb whose vowel quantity changes between various tenses, and εξεισταντο (6:51), whose vowel quantity I would have to do more work to discover. Does anyone out there know its quantity?

Every frame, every sound, every word ...

There is an interesting post on http://filmchatblog.blogspot.com/ about cartoons and music which has special resonance for textual criticism and exegesis.

"I think you must learn -- If you're in any filmmaking, you must respect the single frame, and there are 24 of those per second. And in my opinion, if you don't respect that single frame, you're in the same boat with a musician who does not respect an eighth note or a sixteenth. . . . You have to find the smallest unit and you have to love it and believe that that one will make a difference. One frame, to me, will make the difference whether anything's funny or not."

Loving the smallest unit is something that characterises evangelical textual criticism!

Pete

The dog that didn’t bark

In some contemporary discussion of textual criticism of the NT one could easily get the impression that the text was in a state of considerable fluidity. One possible counter to this is the existence of locations in the text where there are fewer variants than we might expect (Conan Doyle’s ‘dog that did not bark’). I raised the example of Matthew 27:9 in http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/vol08/Luz2003rev.html. If Luz is right that early scribes corrected Matthew 13:35 to preserve the truth of the text, why did so few do this in Matthew 27:9? Similarly, no scribes seem to have found the negative added in Matthew 2:6 problematic. Is there a case for studying non-assimilation and non-harmonization as phenomena? Can we establish that it is in fact a tiny minority of texts that may have been found difficult by early scribes that any of them ever deliberately altered? Can we find evidence against the assertion that scribes changed the text to try to maintain the appearance of its factual correctness?

Strengths and weaknesses of evangelical textual criticism

Perhaps we should reapproach the question of what tasks need to be performed by an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of evangelicalism within textual criticism. It seems to me that it is useful to mention weaknesses, since these are the areas that will require research and some problem solving. I'll start with one strength and one weakness. The weakness is variants that are hard to resolve. These present evangelicals with the problem that they claim authority for a text, but they're not sure which text they're claiming authority for. The strength is the converse: the great amount of text for which a massive array of witnesses show no variation. This means that very many copying events have gone on without corruption of the text. This suggests the basic reliability of those transmitting the text. These assertions are a bit short on detail, I admit. But let's leave that to the discussion.