Subject: Re: tc-list Question from Amateur - Polycarp NT Citations?

From: Michael Holmes <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 13:45:40 -0500 (CDT)

At 09:33 AM 9/23/98 -0400, D. Edwards wrote:
>Has the textual family of Polycarp's NT citations been established? Thanks
>in advance.

No, for two reasons.  First, while Polycarp in his letter to the Philippians
has numerous allusions to what we now refer to as the NT, his actual
"citations" (instances where his reference is precise enough to permit his
text to be reconstructed with some certainty) are extremely sparse.  Second,
even where a citation contains what appears to be a textual variant, it is
not clear whether he is citing a variant *text* or a pre-textual tradition
that later led to the rise of a variant text.  E.g., in PolPhil 1.2,
Polycarp's reference to Acts 2:24 contains a "Western" variant.  But is
Polycarp here a witness to the "Western" text, or a witness to an
interpretive tradition that influenced the "Western" text? We do not know.
In short, there is very little evidence with which to work, and what
evidence there is is often ambiguous.

Mike Holmes
Bethel College