Subject: Re: tc-list new book review on TC

From: [email-masked] (U. Schmid)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 22:14:45 +0100

On Mon, 8 Dec 1997, Jimmy Adair wrote:

>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.
>

Under point 4. of your review, Jimmy, I read: "...Landon offers a set of
distinctive characteristics of Jude's style: the frequent use of
[italics]hapax legomena[/italics]...".

Do you (or Landon) really consider the "_use_ of hapax legomena" (Of what?
The NT? The Biblical Greek? The Koine Greek? The...???) to be
characteristic of someone's "_style_"? If so, this amazing phenomenon
should be treated under the heading "providential anticipation of a NT
author's vocabulary choices when compared to the rest of his fellow
collegues" (filling in just the first reference at hand for "hapax
legomena").
Or is there a different way to understand your text, overlooked by the
non-native speaker?

Ulrich Schmid,
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies

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From: "Robert B. Waltz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 15:44:28 -0600

>Or is there a different way to understand your text, overlooked by the

I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on what is said, but
I think this is a meaningful statement.

A quick glance at my specially-marked-up Bible shows 14 unique words
in Jude -- a very high rate. (Though it's not as high as the 51 in
2 Peter.) To me, this means that the author of Jude liked to use
unusual and hard-to-understand words. He is, in other words,
pretentious.

This may not be the point of the original observation -- but it
is how I think that data can be used. (Of course, the large number
of _hapax_ also implies an author who doesn't have many other
writings in the NT -- as, e.g., the large number of unique words
in Ephesians implies that it is not by Paul. But the number in
2 Peter and Jude is too high for that.)

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-

                        Robert B. Waltz
                     [email-masked]

Want more loudmouthed opinions about textual criticism?
Try my web page: http://www.skypoint.com/~waltzmn
(A site inspired by the Encyclopedia of NT Textual Criticism)

---

From: "James R. Adair" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 21:05:30 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 8 Dec 1997, U. Schmid wrote:

> characteristic of someone's "_style_"?

Landon's point is that Jude has 14 hapax legomena with relation to the NT
(22 if Jude and 2 Peter are considered together).  (Although not
explicitly stated, the term "hapax legomena" is commonly used in both OT
and NT discussions to refer to words unique _to the corpus under
discussion_, and I think most people seeing the phrase without further
qualification would interpret it that way.)  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).

Jimmy Adair
Manager of Information Technology Services, Scholars Press
    and
Managing Editor of TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web Site
-------------> http://shemesh.scholar.emory.edu <--------------