Fri Jan 17 11:19:53 1997

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Date: Fri, 17 Jan 1997 10:24:20 -0600
From: Jack Kilmon 
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Subject: Re: Original Text
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Jim West wrote:
> 
> Jim,
> At 02:48 PM 1/16/97 -0500, you wrote:
> > To use a modern analogy, let's say that someone
> >writing a book writes a first draft, then substantially modifies his own
> >work in subsequent drafts, until he finally has a version that he wants to
> >send to a publisher.  Which is the "original text," the first draft or the
> >final, publishable version?
> 
> This is a useful analogy where pen, paper, and word processors make it quite
> inexpensive to toy with a manuscript.  But where papyrus could cost an arm
> and a leg it is not likely that an author would write two or three versions
> and then decide which one to send in.  He would most likely have well in
> mind exactly what he (or she) wished to say and then it would be written down.

	I think the GJohn is a good example for this issue.  It is
one of the most glossed, edited, interpolated and restructured books
of the NT and had at least 4, and probably more, redactional strata
between it's "autograph" and the form now extant.  Speculating the
probability of an original "proto-John" narrative by Johnny Zebedee
and subsequent embellishments over the course of the 1st and early 2nd
century by Greek Christians in Ephesus, which "stratum" would be the
goal for recovery by textual criticism?

Jack Kilmon
jpman@accesscomm.net

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