Hypotyposeis

New Home for Hypotyposeis

Hypotyposeis now has a new home. Please visit:

http://www.hypotyposeis.org/weblog/

Clownish Greek on Super Millionaire

The prime-time game show Super Millionaire featured a question that asked what coulrophobia meant. The correct answer was "fear of clowns." After being disappointed with not finding the Greek etymon in my Great Scott Greek Lexicon (LSJM), I heard from Regis the claim that the term came from Greek coulron meaning "stilts."

Other sites give more, though not necessarily more accurate, information. For example, The Mavens' Word of the Day has:

Coulrophbia [sic] is the name for 'an unnaturally strong fear of clowns'. You may also hear it called clownophobia informally. The word comes from the Greek words kolobatheron [sic] (stilt) and phobia (fear) and was coined fairly recently, in the 1980s.

The Macmillan Essential Dictionary Resource Site explains it a little differently:

Coined during the 1990s, the word coulrophobia is based on the Greek word koulon [sic] ("limb") and related derivatives suggestive of stilts and stilt-walking, i.e. the Greek kolobathristes means "one who goes on stilts".

According to LSJM, κωλοβαθριστής means "one that goes on stilts", though it is only attested (according to TLG) in Hesychius in order to define καδαλίων. The related noun κωλόβαθρα "stilts" is found twice in Artemidorus, Onirocriticon 3.15 and once more in Hesychius as a definition for κάνδαλοι. The word κωλόβαθρα is evidently a combination of κῶλον "limb, leg" and βάθρον "base, pedestal, scaffold, step, rung, etc."

I'm really wondering about the correctness of the derivation of coulrophobia. The form of the word is very strange. Why is the omega rendered as -ou-? As far as I can glean from LSJM and TLG, κοῦλον is not the standard Greek form, nor even an attested alternate, for "limb"; that should be κῶλον colon.

Also, what's with the intrusion of the -r-? If from κωλόβαθρα, why isn't the term more properly colobathrophobia but that would mean "fear of stilts" or better yet colobathristophobia?

Furthermore, there are other Greek words meaning "clown" that might be better candidates for the phobia, resulting in such possible coinages as scleropaectophobia, phluacophobia, scoptolophobia, gelotopoeophobia, and geloeastophobia. To bring this back to Biblical studies, the last term is actually found in the LXX translation of Job 31:5 (Εἰ δὲ ἤμην πεπορευομένος μετὰ γελοιαστῶν, ...) but the meaning of the word here in context seems to be more like "tricksters" instead of "jesters" or "buffoons" as the LSJM suggests.

Sant'Agostino

I've been noticing quite a few good websites on patristics based in Italy. Here is one devoted to Augustine of Hippo with Migne's Latin text plus an Italian translation:

Sant'Agostino - Vita, Scritti, Pensiero, Santità, Attualità.

The site includes a couple of English language pages, but the bulk of the site is in Italian and Latin. Enjoy!

"The Origin(s) of the 'Caesarean' Text"

I have been rather busy working on various off-line things. One of them is a paper of mine whose proposal has been accepted for the upcoming 2004 SBL Annual Meeting in San Antonio. Here is the abstract:

Eldon J. Epp's famous essay on the twentieth-century interlude in text criticism has decried the lack of progress in understanding the theory and history of the text, and the rise and fall of the so-called Caesarean text-type is a case in point. The twentieth century began confidently with the work of Lake and Streeter first in identifying a family of related MSS comprising Theta, fam. 1, fam. 13, 28, 565, and 700 and then in connecting this family to Codex W. As the century wore on, however, the Caesarean text-type disintegrated in the light of additional scrutiny, particularly in the work by Hurtado.

Stemmatics is a method used in classical text criticism that produces an explicit history of the textual witnesses for a manuscript tradition in the form of a family tree. While the volume of manuscripts and the occurrence of mixture have confounded attempts to apply stemmatics broadly to the text of the New Testament, new possibilities have been opened up for stemmatics by developments in computational biology. For example, the Canterbury Tales were recently edited using cladistics to generate a preliminary stemma of over 40 witnesses. This paper proposes to investigate two chapters of Mark using a form of cladistics designed for handling mixture and propose an origin or origins for the "Caesarean" text.

New TC List

Wieland Willker has informed me of his creation of a new textualcriticism list:

Since the TC-list is now dead, I have set up a (hopefully only) temporal replacement at Yahoo groups. It can be accessed at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/textualcriticism/messages

Axioms of "Source Hunting"

Michael Gilleland sends in the following about the scholarly enterprise of hunting for sources (Quellenforschung):

Axioms of Quellenforschung, as outlined by A.E. Douglas, Cicero (Oxford, 1968) = Greece and Rome, New Surveys in the Classics 2, on p. 28:
(i) nobody ever said anything for the first time, particularly if he was a Roman and is extant, (ii) nobody had any general knowledge -- he always had a 'source,' (iii) nobody ever compared sources if he could follow a single one, (iv) nobody ever read a single reputable source if he could use a digest or handbook, (v) lost sources never made mistakes, while extant writers make egregious blunders.

Thanks!

Logia

Here is a message I recently sent to B-Greek in response to the following query:

Reviewing several NT versions, I have found that a number of them have translated TA LOGIA TOU QEOU as "the oracles of God" , "the Holy Scriptures", "God's messages" or even "God's revelations". I am wondering if there might be a more appropriate historically informed translation of the phrase especially in light of early papyri and LXX usage.

A decent, recent treatment of the term λόγια can be found in Dieter Lührmann, "Q: Sayings or Jesus or Logia?" in Ronald A. Piper, ed., The Gospel Behind the Gospels: Current Studies on Q (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 97-116. Lührmann endorses the definition given in LSJM "oracle, esp. one preserved from antiquity" (in which an "oracle" is to be understood as a "divine utterance") as appropriate in all the contexts in which the term is found in early Christian literature.

The divine utterances of God preserved from old that are in view at Rom 3:2 would seem to be those given by God to Moses on Sinai, i.e. the Torah (cf. νόμος in 2:23, 3:19, etc.).

Can the Word of God be Copyrighted?

There recently was a big discussion going on B-Greek about a new publication by Zondervan called A Reader's Greek New Testament , which presents a Greek text to the New Testament with footnotes for each uncommon word giving an English gloss. Now, I said "a Greek text" because for some reason according to the discussion, Zondervan couldn't get the appropriate releases from the current owner of the copyright in the critical Greek text either in time, at the right price, or under the right conditions. As a result, Zondervan decided to print the Greek text implied in the choices and translations by the translators of the NIV (not unlike in spirit Scrivener's reconstructed Greek text behind the KJV). This text is very close to, but differs in some respects from, the critical Greek text.

Now, the issue of whether it is good to purchase, use, or even learn Greek from any text of the New Testament that differs from the current scholarly standard has been thoroughly discussed on B-Greek, and I don't want to add to that. However, I would like to point that obtaining the appropriate copyright clearances, even when the copyright owner is willing to license at a reasonable and non-discriminatory royalty, is still a cost of the copyright system, and this cost has apparently affected Zondervan to produce a book that some may question.

(Obviously, the social benefits of the copyright system as a whole are widely believed to outweigh its costs, or otherwise we'd see a lot more effort to abolish the copyright system than we see today. The effect of the administrative costs of copyright should never be ignored, though, and ever so occasionally at the margin they will prevent the dissemination of works to the public, which is the main goal of copyright law. One of my first posts to Hypotyposeis was lamenting a situation in which some (and increasing numbers due to term extension) copyright holders are squatting on--or, in the case of heirs, totally unaware of--their rights on out-of-print works to the detriment of the public.)

One issue this brings up is whether one can copyright the Word of God. Isn't the Greek text what the authors of the New Testament (or--depending on one's theory of inspiration--what God) actually composed? If so, why should any living human claim a copyright in the Greek text? There is not a lot of case law that I'm aware directly on point concerning the question of the copyrightability of the critical text in a scholarly edition (I'm not talking about the apparatus, etc., just the text itself), though one could argue that a critical text is not really what an ancient author indeed wrote but a modern person's creative attempt to reconstruct it and the critical text would therefore be copyrightable as to that modern person. (Whether or not the law accepts that argument, it is always good to keep in mind the conceptual difference between a critical text and what the ancient author actually wrote.) But what if there is the claim that the true author is not a human but God?

While this question has not been litigated as to the Greek New Testament, a similar question came up in the case of Urantia v. Maaherra, 114 F.3d 955 (9th Cir., 1997), in which both the plaintiff and the defendant apparently and sincerely believe the Urantia Papers to be authored by a space alien. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that such a work could nonetheless be copyrighted by a human:

Maaherra claims that there can be no valid copyright in the Book because it lacks the requisite ingredient of human creativity, and that therefore the Book is not a "work of authorship" within the meaning of the Copyright Act. . . . The copyrightability issue is not a metaphysical one requiring the courts to determine whether or not the Book had celestial origins. In this case, the belief both parties may have regarding those origins, and their claim that the Book is a product of divine revelation, is a matter of faith, and obviously a crucial element in the promotion and dissemination of the Book. For copyright purposes, however, a work is copyrightable if copyrightability is claimed by the first human beings who compiled, selected, coordinated, and arranged the Urantia teachings, "in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship. " . . . Those who were responsible for the creation of the tangible literary form that could be read by others, could have claimed copyright for themselves as "authors," because they were responsible for the revelations appearing " 'in such a way' as to render the work as a whole original." . . .

Thus, under the Ninth Circuit's logic, if the Greek New Testament were written today in the U.S., it may well be possible to copyright the Word of the God, and that conclusion does not depend on which theory of inspiration is correct.

Danker Festschrift

Rodney J. Decker has posted his thoughts on the recently issued Festschrift honoring Fred Danker, the lexicographer behind the latest revision of the popular Greek-English lexicon. Here is a teaser of his comments on the Danker Festschrift:

Biblical Greek Language and Lexicography: Essays in Honor of Frederick W. Danker, ed. B. Taylor, J. Lee, R. Burton, and R. Whitaker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).

This should not be considered a formal review of the new Danker Festschrift, just a few notes now that I've finished reading it. Overall this is a very substantive volume that is well worth its price. The individual chapters are diverse; some are broader in scope, others are very narrowly focused and quite technical. ...

Read the rest for more.

Boismard, RIP

Mark Goodacre at the NT Gateway Weblog mentioned the passing of Marie-Emile Boismard. This giant of synoptic source criticism will be sorely missed.

Boismard is a provocative critic who has delved into the synoptic problem and the question of Acts, with an intense text-critical interest that is often lacking in many 20th century source critics. For some reason, textual critics are more willing to postulate a lost ancestor than source critics (I have my ideas why), and Boismard is no exception. His text-critical approach has led him to postulate a whole series of hypothetical ancestral documents, variously identified as pre-Luke and proto-Luke, pre-Mark, etc., for explaining the richness of the synoptic data. Needless to say, with the exception of some of his immediate colleagues, his specific ideas have not been generally adopted. Although I too cannot accept everything he has postulated, I do feel that there may indeed lie a few unnoticed pearls of wisdom in his scholarship, particularly regarding the relationship between Matthew and Mark (which I fear might not be so straightforward as to be one of direct dependence), and for that reason it would be beneficial to continue studying what Boismard has published.

Although Boismard wrote mainly in French (the one saving grace of my high school age decision to study French instead of German!), some of his work has been translated into English. The most notable of these includes: "The Two-Source Theory as an Impasse," NTS 26 (1979): 1-17. The basic statement of his position can be found in his statement of the case at the 1984 Jerusalem Symposium: "Théorie des niveaux multiples" [Multiple-Stage Theory] in Dungan, ed., The Interrelations of the Gospels (BETL 90; Leuven, 1990), 231-243

Unfortunately, due to the complexity of his theories, German and English-language scholarship never really knew quite what to make of Boismard's ideas or how to respond to them, and he has been too commonly dismissed for being "too complicated" than truly engaged. A notable exception to this is John S. Kloppenborg-Verbin, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 43-50, which contains one of the most extensive and perceptive engagements with Boismard in English-language scholarship. (It is precisely because Kloppenborg had devoted so much space to Boismard instead of to Goulder that I feel that Christopher Tuckett's defence of Q remains the strongest to date, but perhaps Kloppenborg and Tuckett should be viewed as complementary, not as substitutes, since Tuckett defends Q against simpler solutions and Kloppenborg against more complicated ones.)

I'm sure that Boismard has touched more people lives than those of source critics, but I do know that his contributions to synoptic source criticism have left it for the better. Who will carry Boismard's torch will remain to be seen, but I hope that the long line of French Roman Catholic source critics of unquestionable intelligence and brilliance (Vaganay, Benoit, etc.) will not come to an end with the passing of Boismard.

Νεφελοκοκκυγία feed

I've been informed that Νεφελοκοκκυγία has an RSS feed:

http://komputilo.org/~crculver/nephelokokkygia/index.rdf

Cerrato, Hippolytus Between East and West

I've just started reading J. A. Cerrato, Hippolytus Between East and West: The Commentaries and the Provenance of the Corpus (Oxford Theological Monographs; Oxford: 2002). A review of this work by Eugene V. Afonasin for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review concludes as follows:

Generally speaking the monograph is very well written and produced and will certainly be of great interest to everyone involved in the studies of Early Christian literature and the Gnostic tradition.

The reason I'm interested in Hippolytus is that he has been influenced by and (hopefully) plagiarized Papias. For example, K. Beyschlag, "Herkunft und Eigenart der Papiasfragmente" in Studia Patristica IV (TU 79; Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1961): 268-280 noticed the similarity between Hippolytus, In Dan. 4.60:

1 Τοῦ οὖν κυρίου διηγουμένου τοῖς μαθηταῖς περὶ τῆς μελλούσης τῶν ἁγίων βασιλείας ὡς εἴη ἔνδοξος καὶ θαυμαστή, καταπλαγεὶς ὁ ᾿Ιούδας ἐπὶ τοῖς λεγο¬μένοις ἔφη· "καὶ τίς ἄρα ὄψεται ταῦτα;" ὁ δὲ κύριος ἔφη· "Ταῦτα ὄψονται οἱ ἄξιοι γενόμενοι."

1 Now when the Lord described the future kingdom of the saints to the disciples as being glorious and marvelous, Judas, bewildered by these words, said: "And who will see these things?" But the Lord said, "Those who are worthy will see these things."

and Papias as mediated through Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 5.33.4b:

Et adjecit dicens, "Haec autem credibilia sunt credentibus." Et Juda, inquit, proditore non credente et interrogante: Quomodo ergo tales geniturae a Domino perficientur? dixisse Dominum: "Videbunt qui venient in illa."

And he added, saying "But these things are credible to those who believe." And he said that, when Judas the traitor who did not believe and asked how then will such engenderings be accomplished by the Lord, the Lord said, "Those who come to those times will see."

Back to Cerrato, I've just begun reading the book, but I'd like to pick one nit regarding what he says about Papias:

The chiliam of Papias was expressed in a work on the millenium, known to Jerome as annorum mille iudaicum δευτέρωσιν (vir. ill. 18).

(I have already put on-line a diglot of Jerome's testimonium on Papias, and there appears to be a typographical error, because "iudaicum" should be "iudaicam" in agreement with δευτέρωσιν.) Cerrato seems to indicate that Jerome thought that Papias wrote two works, the second of which is a work on the millenium. This understanding seems to be unique. Rather, Jerome is holding Papias responsible for a "Jewish tradition" (judaicum δευτέρωσιν) of the millennium, not for another writing. Based on my research, I have yet to find a reference to Papias in Jerome that is not derivative of an earlier writer (in this case, Jerome's source is Eusebius), so it is highly doubtful to me that Jerome has any independent information of Papias.

Pseudo-Polycarp 5

I know that readers have been on the edge of their seats waiting for this :-), but here is the fifth and final fragment of Pseudo-Polycarp:

§ 5. Idem in illud: Opus consummavi quod dedisti mihi, ut faciam(John 17:4).	§ 5. The same in this: I have completed the work you have given me to do (John 17:4).
Quomodo opun salutis humanae adimplesse commemorat, cum necdum crucis vexillium conscenderat? Sed definitione voluntati, de qua cuncta venerandae passionis insignia adire decreverat, jure se opus prefecisse significat.	How does he commemorate the fulfillment of the work of human salvation when he had not yet climbed the standard of the cross? But by the determination of his will, by which he decided to undergo all the marks of the venerable passion, he properly means that he completed the work himself.

Another Parody

Roger Pearse writes to inform me of another parody.

I was reading your blog with mention of Ronald Knox poking fun at the subjectivism of source criticism. Related, but much older, is Addison's essay in the (18th century) Spectator on text criticism. I scanned it and shoved it online: there may be complete Spectator volumes online now, tho:

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/spectator/spectator470.htm

Thanks for the link, Roger.

Synoptic Concordance @ Bible Software Review Weblog

Rubén Gómez of the Bible Software Review Weblog discusses the Synoptic Concordance and mentions my name:

Since these volumes are fairly recent, and given the fact that 'the necessary computer programs' were developed ad hoc, I wonder if it's ever going to be available in electronic format. I cannot comment on the quality of the Concordance (I once read that Stephen Carlson had bought a copy of the first volume, and surely most theological libraries must have copies of it), but this is just the kind of work that would lend itself nicely to electronic use... Any takers (at a reasonable price!)?

I do (now) have all four volumes. They're nicely produced and designed well for the paper medium. I'm not sure, however, how well the project would translate to an electronic medium. For example, the electronic equivalent to the paper concordance is not an electronic concordance, but a search engine. I suppose, therefore, any decent Biblie software program that (a) lets you search for words by lemma and (b) gives the synoptic parallel passages can pretty much give you what the Synoptic Concordance does at a more economical price.

For those who enjoy paper resources, as I still do, it is a nice tool, though one which I have used surprisingly little since I've gotten it. Perhaps part of the reason is that I've gotten more interested in the text critical side to the synoptic problem, and the biggest thing missing in the Synoptic Concordance is an apparatus of variant readings, unlike Aland, Huck-Greeven, or even Throckmorton.