Thu Feb 1 01:28:29 1996

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Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 01:28:16 -0500 (EST)
From: "James R. Adair" 
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Subject: Re: Synoptic Harmonization
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On Wed, 31 Jan 1996, Maurice Robinson wrote:

> > There is no conscious effort to harmonize; rather, it seems that 
> > isolated words (AGAQH in Mt 19:16, SOU in Lk 18:20, MOU in Lk 18:21) are 
> > supplied from one or another gospel (cf. also the addition of ARAS TON 
> > STAURON from another context in Mk 10:21 Byz; also TI ME LEGEIS AGAQON; 
> > OUDEIS AGAQOS EI MH O QEOS from Mk and Lk in Mt 19:17 Byz).  
> 
> I would agree with the primary claim that there is no conscious effort to 
> harmonize, either among the Byzantine MSS or the Alexandrian MSS as a whole.
> I would not accept the texttype-specific examples given above, however, 
> since I also fully agree that it is only "isolated words" which tend to 
> become harmonized, and that basically occurring in "isolated MSS" and not 
> texttypes as a whole.  I see a key methodological error (which began with 
> Westcott and Hort) in attributing to entire texttypes elements which 
> properly concern only individual elements of that texttype, and then only 
> in "isolated case" examples.

Certainly attributing elements to an entire text-type that are 
characteristic of only a minority of its members is unjustified.  
However, all of the examples I listed above from the pericope of the Rich 
Young Ruler occur in the majority of the mss, not isolated Byzantine 
witnesses.
 
> > Without any indicator of parablepsis, 
> > accidental omission of 16 letters seems unlikely.  
> 
> But which MSS are we talking about?  Not a large number, but also not all
> genetically (texttype) connected; this is of some significance. 
> 
> Aleph*, however, is corrected by a near-contemporary scribe in this place,
> which could maximize the possibility of accidental line-omission in the
> case of that MS (line-omission is known frequently to occur in Aleph). 

How many letters per line are there in a typical line-omission in Aleph. 
I don't count more than 14 letters in any line of Aleph itself, and many
have fewer letters.  Of course, I realize that the exemplar might have had
16 characters per line.  Line omission was a central theme in A. C. 
Clark's (not the sci-fi writer!) _The Descent of Manuscripts_, in which he
argued that the longer (Western) recension of Acts was closer to the
original, since the shorter version was characterized by omissions whose
lengths corresponded to a line or multiple lines (I can't recall the line
length he used--was it perhaps 17 or 18 characters?). 

Jimmy Adair
Manager of Information Technology Services, Scholars Press
    and
Managing Editor of TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web Site
---------------> http://scholar.cc.emory.edu <-----------------

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