Subject: (Fwd) Re: "in ras"

From: "Richard D. Weis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 23:30:03 +0000

Vincent Broman wrote:

> Could anyone tell me what "in ras" means in a MS collation?
> I could not dig anything appropriate out of my latin dictionary,
> but context and etymological atmosphere suggest something about erasures.

"In ras" is an abbreviation for "in rasura".  It indicates that the 
reading was written over an erasure.

Best wishes,
Richard Weis
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Richard D. Weis                                          [email-masked]
New Brunswick Theological Seminary        phone: 1-908-246-5591
17 Seminary Place                                       FAX: 1-908-937-8185
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1196 USA
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From: Maurice Robinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 00:32:03 -0400 (EDT)

> reading was written over an erasure.

Not exactly -- it means the text originally contained a certain reading
which had later been erased, but the original reading is still visible in
the erased portion.  The reading indicated as "in ras" is that original
reading, and not the replacement reading (if any).

Some twenty years ago I collated an interesting MS at Duke in which the
original text of Luke was apparently of the f1 type, but which a later
scribe had systematically erased and replaced with the standard Byzantine
text.  Where words were replaced, he or she simply erased and wrote over
the erased portion; however, where words were omitted with no replacement,
the scribe just left a lengthy blank space, and it was in that portion
where the words "in ras" could most easily be read. 

_________________________________________________________________________
Maurice A. Robinson, Ph.D.           Assoc. Prof./Greek and New Testament
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary     Wake Forest, North Carolina
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