Subject: tc-list new book review on TC

From: "James R. Adair" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 09:34:01 -0500 (EST)

A review of Charles Landon's _A Text-Critical Study of the Epistle of
Jude_ is now available in TC, vol. 2.  To see it, go to the volume 2 Table
of Contents page at http://purl.org/TC/vol02/vol02-toc.html.  Comments on
the book (or the review) are welcome on the list.

Jimmy Adair
General Editor of TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism
-------------------> http://purl.org/TC <--------------------

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From: [email-masked] (U. Schmid)
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 12:14:06 +0100

On Mon, 8 Dec 1997, Jimmy Adair wrote in part:

[quoting Landon]
> He says, "The presence of so
>many hapax legomena in such a short text has implications for my handling
>of transcriptional evidence at some points of variation in Jude:  scribes
>habitually substituted unfamiliar words with familiar words, and the
>possibility of such substitution having been effected must always be
>considered whenever a hapax legomenon is not firm in the text of Jude."
>True, hapax legomena are not independent stylistic criteria like triadic
>illustration or synonymous parallelism, but they do serve as a measure of
>Jude's vocabulary in comparison with the rest of the NT (in a manner
>similar to Jude's use of set expressions found elsewhere in the NT).

That's all I wanted to emphasize. Hapax legomena are NOT stylistic features
of a text as, e.g., some features of word order, parallelisms, position of
the adjective, etc. I do not question the (limited) use of hapax legomena
when considering transcriptional evidence of a larger body of texts as
outlined above.

Ulrich Schmid,
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies

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From: Abigail Ann Young <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 09:21:24 -0500

On the question of hapax legomena in Jude, I would be more impressed
if the words in question were rare in general rather than hapax just
in the very limited NT corpus. After all, the readers/hearers of Jude
were not restricted in their daily conversation or regular reading to
the NT and its vocabulary. Many of them would have spoken Koine
regularly in business or family life. Many of them would have read
Greek texts not in the NT, whether letters, manuals, treatises,
perhaps even works of literature (gasp!). So I am not at all sure it
is fair to make the kind of assumptions that Bob did on the basis of
Jude's fondness for rare words if the words in question are only rare
within the NT and not generally rare in Koine and the work of popular
authors.

What may be more interesting is that Jude and 2Peter seem to share
vocabulary not used in the rest of the NT. Bo Reicke (I believe)
argued for the author of Jude having been the amanuensis of 2Peter on
the basis of shared vocabulary and themes.....

Dr Abigail Ann Young, Records of Early English Drama| young@chass.|
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