Subject: Re:

From: Jim West <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 11:14:49 -0400 (EDT)

At 04:15 PM 8/25/97 +0000, you wrote:
>Bonjour.
>Could anyone on this list give me a/some site/s where to find:
>
>-the LXX text
>-the VULGATE text
>-translations of the same
>
>En vous remerciant.
>

Check the Scholars Press web site (TELA) and go to the Electronic Canon link.
Also the U Penn has these also.

Jim

+++++++++++++++++++++++
Jim West, ThD
Adjunct Professor of Bible, Quartz Hill School of Theology

[email-masked]

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From: Jim Deardorff <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 10:36:53 -0700 (PDT)

May I get some opinions from this list about this phenomenon of
duplication of identical, consecutive words in parallel Gospel passages,
up to about 30 words long in some instances?  

I have noticed that the frequency of replication does not fall off
smoothly (or exponentially) with increased length of the string of words,
as would be expected for independently edited works, but the distribution
instead exhibits an anomalous number of longer strings.  For this reason I
doubt that scribal assimilation can be responsible. 

The other possibility is purposeful replication by the Gospel writers
and/or a translator, as proposed in theories of Theodor Zahn and J. M
Voste, the latter being discussed by B. C. Butler in his book, _The
Originality of St. Matthew: A Critique of the Two-Document Hypothesis_.

Jim Deardorff
Corvallis, Oregon

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From: Vincent Broman <[email-masked]>
Date: 26 Aug 1997 17:34:35 -0000

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[email-masked] wrote:
> as would be expected for independently edited works,

>                                                    ... the odds are
> less than one (e.g., 0.7) that the next word (4th) they used would be the
> same word; then the odds would be 0.7 x 0.7 that the 5th word would be the
> same, and so on ...

The assumption that the conditional probabilities at each step
would be the same I find highly dubitable.  The remarks about articles
and prepositional phrases affecting the probabilities should be taken
as cautionary -- that all the probabilities will depend on the idiosyncrasies
of Greek syntax and prose usage.  The remark about the law of large numbers
taking over is confusing, because that law predicts convergence to a normal
distribution, not the geometric distribution you derive.  The fact that by
eliminating a few points a geometric sequence can be fit (how well?) to
the data is not much evidence that that is the proper kind of curve one
*should* attempt to fit.  Without more convincing a priori reasoning to support
the idea of a geometric distribution, some substantial observational data
would be needed to validate this approach.

Vincent Broman         Email: [email-masked],[email-masked]     =   o     
2224 33d St.             Phone: +1 619 284 3775                    =  _ /- _   
San Diego, CA  92104-5605  Starship: 32d42m22s N 117d14m13s W     =  (_)> (_)  
___ PGP protected mail preferred.  For public key finger [email-masked] ___

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From: Jim Deardorff <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 1997 16:26:57 -0700 (PDT)

> would be needed to validate this approach.

Vincent,

Like you say, the conditional probabilities are all somewhat different
from one choice of word the editor makes to the next, but each lies
between 0 and 1.  Only on the average does one particular value emerge,
like 0.7, which one can derive after determining the coefficient within
the observed exponential fall-off rate.  I overly simplified the reasoning
behind it so that it would be more understandable first time through.

The law of averages you refer to -- the bell-shaped curve -- doesn't apply
to the distribution of the number of times in a row that you will flip a
coin and get heads, for example, since that distribution is one sided with
a maximum at 1 or 2 flips of the coin.  The word-string duplication
problem is more like that, except the average odds on each successive word
choice by the editor, or "flip of the coin" is not 0.5 but somewhat
higher on the average.

The ideosyncracies of the language do average out, with a large sample
size, for word-string length "I" larger than about 3, because sometimes
the next word, say the 4th word under consideration, is a verb, sometimes
an adjective, sometimes a noun, etc.  But even the I=3 results don't lie
excessively far from the exponential curve derived from 3<I<10.  And the
longer strings can obviously involve more than one duplicate prepositional
phrase and occasionally more than one duplicate sentence.

Your objection made me think that in the related problem of drawing balls
out of a mixed bag of black and red balls, I should alter the probability
randomly on each draw and repeat the calculations.  Instead of having the
probability be 0.577 on each draw, e.g., I could have it merely average
about 0.577 but vary randomly between 0.25 and 0.9, say, on each draw. 
Then, would the resulting frequency distribution of the number of
successive drawings of black balls again turn out exponential?  I suspect
that it would, though I should think that the sampling error, or scatter,
would increase somewhat. 

You're free to repeat a similar analysis of the Gospel parallels, or other
parallel text, and see if you can find a better 2-parameter fit than the
exponential for 3 < I < 10.  In fact, my analyses could stand repeating,
if only because of the difficulty in carrying it out without making
occasional errors -- omitting an occasional 2 or 3-word string, or even
longer, miscounting a longer string by one, or losing your place and
counting a string twice, etc., in deriving the data.  And even in making
the final tally of how many 3's you got, how many 4's, how many 5's, etc.,
it's easy to miscount.

For the analogy of drawing balls out of a bag of black and red balls,
however, with a fixed probability on each draw of getting a black or red
ball, there is no doubt that the distribution of successive black-ball
draws is exponential -- exp(-b*I), and not, e.g., exp(-b*I*I)  (Gaussian)
or any other exponent than unity.  So that's the natural starting point in
explaining the Gospel-parallel results.

I did do one analysis of two different English translations of the
parallels between the Septuagint's Ezra... versus 1 Esdras.  Its
distribution also turned out nicely exponential out to I = 17, with only
one longer string past that point that might cause one to wonder if there
was an editorial dependency involved. 

Jim Deardorff