Another Oddity in P115 at Rev 13:18
Another strange thing about papyrus manuscript P115 at Rev 13:18 (other than 616 for the number of the beast) is that it appears to have an eta (Η η) before the number. However, the word before the number in the critical text is ΑΥΤΟΥ (αὐτοῦ "its") which looks nothing like an eta. What's going on?
Part of the answer is that the text of Revelation is divided into two very old families, one with P47 and א, and the other with A C and P. (The division of the text in the rest of the New Testament into Alexandrian and Byzantine does not hold for Revelation.) P115 belongs to the latter family, and that family has the word ECTI (ἐστι "is") before the number. But isn't there still a problem with ΤΙ not looking like an Η?
Wieland Willker does not think so based on how the scribe of P115 writes ΤΙ and he has put up a page to show why.
What happened to the book in which the Secret Gospel of Mark was found?
In the summer of 1958, Morton Smith photographed the back pages of a book on which was written two quotations from a hitherto-unknown secret gospel of Mark. What happened to the book and the back pages?
In the spring of 1976, David Flusser, Shlomo Pines, Archimandrate Meliton, and Guy Stroumsa visited Mar Saba to see the book. A monk found it there and the back pages were indeed written with the letter that Smith photographed. They advised Meliton to take it to the Patriarchal library for safekeeping due to too many thefts at Mar Saba, which he did. Flusser, Pines, and Stroumsa wanted to do an ink analysis of the MS; however, the only place capable of doing that was at an Israeli police headquarters but that was unacceptable to Meliton. (Stroumsa, "Comments," JECS 11 (2003): 147-148).
The rest of story is in Hedrick's 2000 FOURTH R article. Hedrick, working in conjuction with Nikolaos Olympiou, was able to learn that shortly after the book was deposited into the Patriarchal library, then-librarian Kallistos Dourvas (Olympiou's student) removed the pages from the book and photographed them, both in black and white and in color. (Hedrick was eventually able to get some of the photographs via Olympiou, which were published in the FOURTH R article.) Accordingly to Kallistos, who remained the librarian until 1999, the pages of the Clement letter were supposed to have been kept along with the book, but when Olympiou visited the library in 2000, the Clement pages were missing. The last report in the Hedrick article is that Kallistos was to go to the Patriarchal library in Sept. 2000, yet Hedrick's 2003 JECS article did not say whether this had actually happened or what was the result.
616: The Other Number of the Beast
Most people are familiar with 666 as being the number of the beast according to Rev 13:18. However, some manuscripts such as P115 have 616 instead. Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 5.30 has an obscure explanation for this:
1. Such, then, being the state of the case, and this number being found in all the most approved and ancient copies [of the Apocalypse], and those men who saw John face to face bearing their testimony [to it]; while reason also leads us to conclude that the number of the name of the beast, [if reckoned] according to the Greek mode of calculation by the [value of] the letters contained in it, will amount to six hundred and sixty and six; that is, the number of tens shall be equal to that of the hundreds, and the number of hundreds equal to that of the units (for that number which [expresses] the digit six being adhered to throughout, indicates the recapitulations of that apostasy, taken in its full extent, which occurred at the beginning, during the intermediate periods, and which shall take place at the end), — I do not know how it is that some have erred following the ordinary mode of speech, and have vitiated the middle number in the name, deducting the amount of fifty from it, so that instead of six decads they will have it that there is but one. [I am inclined to think that this occurred through the fault of the copyists, as is wont to happen, since numbers also are expressed by letters; so that the Greek letter which expresses the number sixty was easily expanded into the letter Iota of the Greeks.]
Intentional Fallacy
Ehrman's point of departure in the SBL paper about scribal intent was Wimsatt and Beardsley's intentional fallacy. The intentional fallacy is usually explained that the meaning of a literary work is not to be judged from the author's intentions, which is external and private, but from the text itself, which is internal and public. Also a vital part of "New Criticism" or "Formalism" is the affective fallacy which criticizes the other extreme that places the meaning in the reader's reaction to the text.
The New Criticism's formulation of the intentional and affective fallacies are helpful correctives to the excesses of probing the author's biography on one hand or the relativism of readership on the other, but it's possible to go too far here too. For one, when talking about the cognitive aspect of a text instead its aesthetic aspect, isn't authorial intent the purpose of communication? Also, what about the role of context? Consider an author's whose text has been encrypted. What's the meaning of the cyphertext and can we learn it without the password? To be fair, the objective inquiry into the meaning of a text as Wimsatt and Beardsley propose does look at the context and at some quasi-private/quasi-public information about the author, so even Formalism does not have a pure theory of the meaning inhering in a text.
This is not too far removed from the legal-inspired approach to finding intent I mentioned, in which the author's stated intentions are part of the evidence for what the text means, but it is less privileged than what a reasonable reader of the text would understand it to be. This avoids the intentional fallacy because the meaning is presumed from a reasonable reader's response to the text, but it also avoids the affective fallacy, because the "reasonable reader" does not support any idiosyncratic reading any old person might come up with but what most people would understand. Meanwhile, it allows for strong and credible evidence of the author's actual intent to play a role.
Now, although I think the legal-inspired approach is helpful in putting some of the issues in a more rigorous analytical framework, it is important to remember that criticism is different from adjudication. The crucial difference is that the critic can say "I don't have enough information to made a decision now" and refuse to decide, but the court is forced to decide in favor of one side or the other, with preclusive effect. That's why there are reams of legal rules for shifting the burden of proof from one side to the other. They are the mechanisms for allocating the responsibility for producing evidence and argumentation for one's position or risk being ruled against. The legal system has a built-in bias for the status quo, and the burden of proof is the main way of rationing the state's resources: it sets a standard for what is needed to convince the machinery of justice to act in such a way to change the status quo (transferring wealth, imprisonment, etc.).
Another place where authorial intention and textual criticism intersect is editing. Gabriel Egan, a Shakespearean scholar, has some interesting teaching material. Here is a teaser:
Oh dear. Let me restate the problem clearly: without the author's intention as a guiding principle, how can we hope to make editions of literary works which remove the errors which necessarily creep in during transmission? There is a short and simple answer to it and it is an answer that I most urgently wish to persuade you to avoid. That answer is "we can't!" We cannot distinguish authorial intentions so we cannot tell whether something has been corrupted by, for example, printer's error; all we can do is rely on the text we have which we must simply reproduce as it stands without interfering with it. This is a simple answer, and currently a fashionable one in some circles, but I hope to show you that it is wrong.One image I like his geometrical explanation of a text as "the intersection of the two axes: it is where the author and reader meet and it is where the abstract meaning and the physical object meet."
Ehrman on Scribal Intent
An interesting discussion came up in response to Bart Ehrman's paper at SBL in the New Testament Textual Criticism Section about the issue of scribal intent in studying the changes that occur when manuscripts are copied. Ehrman argued that we should be talking about function rather than intention and expressed some disappointment that his treatment of the issue in his Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) was not followed up more. One place his point is found is on p. 28 (footnotes omitted):
This is not to say that scholars can speak glibly of scribal "intentions," if we mean by that an assessment of the scribe's personal motivations: we do not have access to the scribes' intentions, only to their transcriptions. For this reason, it is easier--and theoretically less problematic--to speak metaphorically of the intentions of scribal changes rather than the intentions of scribes, conceiving of the category in strictly functional terms. Some changes of the text function to harmonize it with parallel passages. Others function to eliminate possible grammatical inconcinnities or exegetical ambiguities or embarassments. Still others function to heighten clarity or rhetorical force. And a significant number of others, I will argue, function to establish the orthodox character of the text, either by promoting more fully an orthodox understanding of Christ or by circumventing the heretical use of a text in support of an aberrant teaching.During the question period, Larry Hurtado wondered whether it is such a good idea to move completely away from trying to determine intent, since determining intent is very important in our society, especially in our legal system. I stood up and tried to explain that, as far as the law is concerned, Ehrman and Hurtado were not that far apart. Of course, in U.S. law, the element of intent is very important, especially in criminal trials. However, defendants accused of a crime are not likely to be candid about their intent, so the jury may presume that people intend the reasonably foreseeable effects of their actions. In the scribal context, reasonably foreseeable effects include the functions of scribal changes, as championed by Ehrman, and are therefore precisely right kind of the evidence that the law uses to infer a person's intent.
There are a few subtleties here. First, the reasonably foreseeable effects of one's actions are not the only evidence of intent; there is also direct evidence by the person, i.e., what the person claims to have been the intention. This testimony is subject, of course, to credibility determinations. Few scribes tell us why they made the changes they did (but Rufinus in translating Origen did explain why he made Origen more orthodox).
Second, the effects must be reasonably foreseeable, which invokes the infamous reasonable person standard, i.e, what a reasonable person would have understood the effect to be. Applied in the text critical context, the critic must have an understanding the relevant times, places, and controversies surrounding the scribal change. For example, some changes may have different effect two centuries later than at the time they were made, but the way that the scribal change might happen to function 200 years later is not reasonably foreseeable and therefore irrelevant.
Third, the inference is only a presumption, which means that it can be rebutted by evidence showing some other reason behind the scribal change. For example, the scribe may be a poor speller as shown through the MS, so changes for this scribe that could be a typical misspelling may not ultimately support the conclusion of the scribe's intention behind the change. (In law, a presumption shifts the burden of proof such that the presumption will be accepted unless rebutted.)
Hypotyposis in the N.T.
The Greek term hypotyposis (ὑποτύπωσις), which is the singular form of this blog's title, occurs twice in the New Testament with the meaning of example, pattern, standard, or outline:
- 1 Tim 1:16 "But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life." (NIV)
- 2 Tim 1:13 "What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching, with faith and love in Christ Jesus." (NIV)
John 20:31
John 20:31 reads: ταῦτα δὲ γέγραπται ἵνα πιστεύ[σ]ητε ὅτι ἰησοῦς ἐστιν ὁ χριστὸς ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ. This is usually translated as "But these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God" (NIV). However, H. M. Jackson, "Ancient self-referential conventions and their implications for the authorship and integrity of the gospel of John," Journal of Theological Studies, new series, 50 (1999): 1-34, points out since ὁ χριστὸς has the article while ἰησοῦς does not (both are definite), ὁ χριστὸς should be the subject. Thus, a better way to understand it as "... believe that the Christ, the Son of God, is Jesus" or even "... believe that it is Jesus who the Christ, the Son of God, is." The difference is not one of meaning or semantics, but emphasis. Jackson argues that this is a clue to the origin of the Fourth Gospel.
