Wed Jun 26 20:14:59 1996
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From: dwilkins@ucr.campus.mci.net (Don Wilkins)
Subject: Re: Theories of trans.--continued
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William Petersen wrote:
>To the comments of Rev. Don Wilkins:
>
>1) Wilkins writes:
>>In many "citations" a textual variation seems
>>to be nothing more than a paraphrase of the autograph and hardly worthy of
>>being considered a true variant. The substitution of nous for kardia
>>strikes me as an obvious example of this, so that its occurrence even in
>>early authors can probably be written off as coincidence.
>
>This is precisely the issue which precipitated this thread. The problem is
>that in _some_ cases, the "paraphrase" crops up again and again and again,
>across the centuries, across languages, and in VERBATIM form. Now, when
>does that cease to be a "paraphrase" and become a textual tradition worthy
>of consideration. I suggest looking back at my original example, in my post
>of 6/12/96 "Theories of transmission (#2)" for the example. Are ALL of
>these sources paraphrasing? (That strains even my great credulity...)
I apologize for the delay in responding to your post. Thanks to Jimmy
Adair, I was able to look at your original example (BTW, you flatter me
with the "Rev." title; I am a mere lecturer. Feel free to call me Don if
you wish). I ran TLG searches on hEIS ESTIN hO AGAQOS (with and without the
article). With the article, it occurred only once outside Matthew in
Origen's commentary on Matthew. Without the article, it occurred in Justin
(the passage you cited) and, as Ulrich Schmid has already noted, in
Epiphanius' Panarion, where the phrase hO PATHR EN TOIS OURANOIS follows.
This created a problem for me, in that I ran searches thereafter (to
confirm my initial searches) in Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Clement (using
the TLG) and was unable to find any versions of the statements you cite. It
is the policy of the TLG administrators to use the best sources, but you
obviously have other good sources to which you and U. Schmid were
referring.
>2) Continuing:
>>It appears, first of all, that Justin's "lampsato de
>>humon ta kala erga" (with or without "de") occurs nowhere else. Granted,
>>one can find variations on Matthew's "humon ta kala erga" with lampsato
>>elsewhere, but the more paraphrastic the form in the fathers, the more
>>tenuous the reference.
>
>This is true, except that it ignores the fact that these fathers all are
>very early (if the variant is TRULY a happenstance, TRULY a coincidence, a
>"spontaneous" occurrence in each source, then why doesn't the "happenstance"
>continue throughout the ages? why don't later fathers make the same
>"slip"?), and come from the same age (Justin is the earliest at c. 150;
>Clement, Tertullian, and Origen are all rough contemporaries; Eusebius had
>access to Origen's library in his youth, via Pamphilius. There is, then, a
>chronological as well as, in the one instance (Origen-Eusebius) a LIVING
>link between these witnesses. That I, for one, am reluctant to write off as
>insignificant: a slip of the pen, a foggy memory, etc.
Well, if these are paraphrastic citations, they would not be "slips"; and
why should they be duplicated by others? Would not the same paraphrases and
random errors be less likely to be repeated if one has access to a text of
the scriptures, or is working from memory of the text? I would think
different authors would paraphrase in different ways to suit their
purposes.
>As for my comment that Clement was "consistent," I was not inferring that
>all his citations were identical; rather, since he cites the same passage
>in a deviating form more than once, it is hard to say this was just a "slip."
The key to your argument (as I see it) is the word "deviating". I gather
that you are willing to hypothesize an Ur-text behind deviating forms of a
"citation" given by a single author, and extend the hypothesis to cover
other authors whom you see as providing similar citations. You seem to be
doing the same thing with Justin's Shema. Why couldn't the deviation merely
be an abbreviated rendering of the original? Should we or should we not
apply Ockham's razor?
Having said all that, let me again apologize if I have dug up any dead
horses as a result of coming into the discussion late and ill-prepared. If
that is the case, I will try to either catch up or butt out as gracefully
as possible.
Don Wilkins
UC Riverside
Don Wilkins
UC Riverside
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