Subject: Re: A text-critical question

From: "Perry L. Stepp" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 22:16:22 -0600

(with apologies to Bart Ehrman)  NOTE: what follows is a joke, and bears no
resemblance to any opinions held by the author.

> From: Vinton A. Dearing <[email-masked]>
 
> According to Leigh Rubin, as the animals were leaving the ark, one 
> elephant said to the other, "That was a terrible trip. It rained 
> every day." Question: did the ur-text read "almost every day" and 
> does the answer depend on whether it was the momma elephant or the 
> poppa elephant who was speaking?

Yes.  Bauer's reconstruction of early elephant history shows that mother
elephants were oppressed.  Oppressed mother elephants would never speak in
absolutes ("every day") (unlike white male members of the privileged class
like myself).  Poppa elephants would never shy away from absolute terms, so
it's impossible that he would have said "almost every day."  And all white
male members of the privileged class know that momma elephants never quit
talking long enough for poppa elephants to get a word in edgewise, so . . .
. 

Therefore, the ur-text must have read "almost every day."  It was changed
by misogynistic scribes.  They recognized the clear tones of a female voice
in the text and removed them, and thus introduced this orthodox corruption
of scripture.

(I don't think I'll sign this.)

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From: ANDREW SMITH <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 16:11:46 -0500 (EST)

> > poppa elephant who was speaking?

It needs to be noted that, in early literature refering to this text, the
poppa elephants were sometimes refered to as papa elephants. This
indicates a continued fluidity of orthography and of the language itself.
Therefore, the ur-text may well have read either "every day" or "almost
every day", but given the fluidity of the morphological development, it
could also have read "most every day" (a colloquial construction, not
technically grammatically correct, but frequently attested in early MSS) 
or "most days". But the real problem is this: whichever phrase may have
been used in the autograph, that phrase has probably undergone some
semantic shift in the time between the autograph and the fixing of a
standard text.

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From: "Lewis Reich" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 18:08:19 -500

> semantic shift in the time between the autograph and the fixing of a

It should not be forgotten that the Samaritan rescension attributes 
the remark to the rhinoceros rather than the elephant.
Lewis Reich
[email-masked]

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From: Bart Ehrman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 21:54:14 -0500 (EST)

Ha!   You laugh, but *I* for one am convinced!

:-) Bart Ehrman