Thoughts on Antiquity

Blog Move

2006-03-02T16:46:00.000-06:00

This blog is now transferred to here.

New Blog: pro lingua Latinae magistris

2006-02-21T06:54:00.000-06:00

I want to welcome Mark Keith to the classical blogdom with his new blog pro linguae Latinae magistris. In case you couldn't figure it out from the name, the blog is about teaching Latin, in particular high school Latin. Here is the blurb:

This weblog is dedicated to the musings of a high school Latin teacher. It is my hope that these comments, thoughts, and ideas will be of benefit to all teachers of Latin: experienced, inexperienced, and brand new. I will strive to remain positive, productive, and professional.

Welcome Mark!

The Magna Carta: Sigla, Ligatures, and Diacritics

2006-02-19T16:26:00.000-06:00

I have a couple of questions for any reader who may be knowledgeable about Medieval Latin manuscripts. I have a copy of the Magna Carta reprinted from Lincoln from which I began to make a transcription. I also was using the one hosted at the British Library.

My first question is the TC question - why version is superior? I'm inclined to go with the one at the BL, but before I do I'd like to get some information first.

My second question goes to those knowledgeable with medieval manuscripts. I'm interested in the sigla, ligatures, diacritics, etc... I've compiled a short list at my forum where I'll be keeping it up-to-date as I go through the document. You can join the conversation here.

The elongated "a" in gra[cia] and the little & above it (the familiar ampersand - doesn't look like the Latin ligature for "et" nor does "et" fit in anywhere)

The 7 between Norm[anniae] and Aquit[anniae] - well, some may not draw their sevens like that, but I do [edited - yeah, this has to be a ligature for "et"]

I'm supposing the "3" at the end Abb[a]tib3 is a ligature for "us" (abbatibus). Actually, it looks more like the IPA symbol ʒ)

The -e in Hib[er]nie is, I suppose the shortened form of -ae; Hiberniae. Odd that the online transcription should give us thus Anglie, Hibernie, Normannie etc...

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Archaeologiests Unveil Staircase in Tivoli

2006-02-16T00:31:00.000-06:00

From here:

Archaeologists who have been digging for more than a year at the villa of Roman Emperor Hadrian in Tivoli have unearthed a monumental staircase, a statue of an athlete and what appears to be a headless sphinx.

...The staircase is believed to be the original entrance to the villa, which was built for Hadrian in the 2nd century A.D.

That Phoenix - the ANE List

2006-02-15T22:15:00.000-06:00

From here:

All ANE subscribers,

The voting members of the Oriental Institute have decided to withdraw
their support for the OI's continued hosting and management of the
ANE list. Therefore, all list activities will end at noon (CST)
February 16, 2006.

The on-line archive with old ANE posts will remain available for the
time being. A date for the removal of the archive will be announced
in advance on the ANE home page:

http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ANE/OI_ANE.html

We hope that the ANE community will be able to move their discourse
from the ANE to one or several alternative list(s). Please note that
for the privacy of the subscribed members to the ANE list, we will
not distribute to any individual or organization our current email
directory.

John Sanders
Magnus Widell

Thus falls the mighty ANE list, one that I had been ignoring for quite some time due to the bickering. Jeffrey Gibson has already opened up the ANE-2 list as a moderated list here on Yahoo. What's this? Another Gibson list? No way!

Nah, just kidding. Hopefully, this one will be better fared than the last.

The Quest for the Historical Jesus, pt. 3

2006-02-13T14:20:00.000-06:00

There are three early historians who are thought to mention Jesus Christ. The first is Josephus. Flavius Josephus was a Jewish historian writing once captured in Judaeo who then wrote for the emporers of Rome. He wrote in Aramaic and translated it himself into Greek, but all we have surviving is the Greek copy. He published his Antiquitates Iudaeorum (Antiquities of the Jews) in the early 90's CE. In it, he refers twice to Jesus Christ. However, the passages are very dubious and show clear signs of tampering. In fact, the first reference is so Christian, that it is often labelled the "Testimonium Flavianum" for its gospel-like message.

Perhaps the best survey of the passages is done by Peter Kirby at EarlyChristianWritings.com. In it he examines the both passages and evidence for and against their authenticity. His conclusion is typical - the first reference is spurious and the second contains an interpolation. I would have to agree with him on this.

More recently, some have challenged this. Notably, Stephen Carlson at Hypotyposeis suggests that some form of the TF must have been original since Tacitus uses it. Also, G. J. Goldberg makes a case that Josephus and Luke both used a proto-source for their information.

Well, concerning Josephus and Luke, it has been shown elsewhere that there Luke most likely had used Josephus independent of this examination. I currently have no doubt that Luke uses Josephus. However, I do not think the situation is so simple as it may seem. As Goldberg's theory may afford some evidence to an original TF, I still have my doubts.

Ken Olsen has been doing some research on this, and you can find our conversation on Xtalk about it. Ben C. Smith has also dared to rebut some of Olsen's claims as well.

That the passage is entirely spurious, I find on Peter's site that arguments 5-11 are the most convincing. It was, in fact, those arguments that led me from thinking that it was merely corrupted to entirely spurious, especially 5 and 8. That the passages sticks out like a whale in the jungle (pardon my metaphor) is always the first sign of an interpolation. (Well, second sign - the first is absence in some manuscripts).

So what of Luke and Tacitus then? This is difficult. To be certain, there are no certainties here. It's merely guesswork, hypothesizing, and scratching of head and chin. Actually, I am still undecided entirely. I like what Ben has done, but find that Ken Olsen's dismissal makes more plausible sense. What if the parallels are merely imagined? Odd coincidence for those that seem like real parallels? Especially noted is that Tacitus seems to not know Antiquitates at all, instead relying on Bellum Iudaeorum (War of the Jews).

Also, there is something odd about passage in Tacitus. When first reading it, it did not seem right to me - call it gut instinct. It was then I realized that others also have doubted it's authenticity. Having checked into it, there are only two qualities which seem unTacitean. There's the odd cut-off in Tacitus, which makes a short sentence (Tacitus is usually rather profuse with his words). The other being the alliteration which is rather unknown in Tacitus - "Tibero imPeritante Per Procuratorem Pontium Pilatum suPPlicio Adfectus Erat". A user on IIDB made a rather impressive post in favor of forgery, and this is where I got it from. And of course, the Procurator/Prefect and Christ/Chrestian mismatches seem to nudge me as something wrong. What? I'm not sure. But something... Hopefully I'll have more on this sooner or later.

The last author is Suetonius, who in the Life of Claudius 25.4 we see, "As the Jews were making constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome." This is, however, a rather dubious connection to Jesus. When did Jesus instigate the Jews in Rome? However, we see later on, "Punishment by Nero was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition."

At this time, I have no conclusion, not even a working hypothesis on how to solve this jungle of a puzzle. I am working on the possibilities, though, and will keep everyone updated on how that turns out.

Updated: I realized that I was missing a couple of links. All should be fixed now.

New Blog: Gospel of Matthew

2006-02-13T01:01:00.000-06:00

Just found this blog scrolling through Dr. Goodacre's blogroll, not sure how I missed it earlier. It is a blog by Jason Hood about the Gospel of Matthew, a favorite subject of mine. He, like me, also lives in Memphis, TN. He has plenty of information for me to look over, take what I need, and criticize with what I disagree with, though I must say, Jason, it looks good so far.

Is Matthew Jewish?

2006-02-02T23:20:00.000-06:00

Phil Harland's recent blogpost A Very Jewish Jesus: The Gospel of Matthew's portrait (NT4) raises a very relevant concern for me. He writes:

Something I often stress to students of early Christianity is that this Jesus movement was very much a form of Judaism in its origins. The peasant Jesus was a Jew, and all the earliest followers of Jesus were Jews, Jews who continued to feel that following the law (the Torah) was humanity’s response to God’s covenant with his people (Paul, the Jewish Pharisee, was a bit of an exception in not requiring that gentiles follow the Jewish law in order to join, but in other ways was also very much a Jew and did not object to Jewish followers of Jesus following the law).

This as it stands I do not have a problem with at all. The original Jesus, if he existed, was definitely Jewish, and most likely so were the earliest Christians. My post here is a strong piece of evidence I found for it, and that there's an issue with Paul and James at all suggests that early Christianity was wholly Jewish.

I also do not have a problem with Phil relating Jesus to Moses:

Furthermore, Jesus is often presented as the new Moses, as in the birth narrative. This continuing theme of Jesus as the expected prophet like Moses continues in what Matthew has as the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5-7).

This idea, actually, plays a central part in my theory on Matthew that I introduced here back in July last year. Since then, I've even gotten a good portion of my paper written and reviewed by various people. So far, the reviews have been very positive, which gladdens me. (Although, Loren Rossen, if you're reading this, what did you think of it? I've got some more revisions to do, but your input is always helpful, although to be honest I know you must disagree with it.)

However, I do think that his view of Matthew is not accurate. To be sure, his view is the common one circulating now - the status quo of Matthean studies is his fidelity to the Law. In my paper, I argue that Matthew is not a Jewish gospel. Au contraire, Matthew is a Christian gospel which denies the Torah.

Phil quotes Matthew 5.17-20 in favor of Matthew's Judaism. However, in context with larger Matthew, the verse takes upon a different meaning altogether. For Matthew, Jesus was Jewish, and he accepted that, but he had to explain why they weren't Jewish anymore. "If Jesus was Jewish, why shouldn't we be Jewish also?" he may have asked himself. The gospel fully explores this question and answering it is fundamental to understanding Matthew's ecclesiology.

I regret to not release my paper yet, as it is not anywhere near finished, but I can bring up some key points.

Matthew does affirm the entire Law, but only until everything is fulfilled. We can't say certainly when fulfillment occurs, but it definitely is prior to Matthew's writing. The top candidates are either the death and resurrection of Jesus or the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.
Matthew clearly in several places nullifies the Law and sums the entire Law up in one or two phrases. (Mt. 5.11, 7.12, 23.23).
Matthew foreshadows the stripping of Israel from the Jews and the giving of it to the faithful (Mt. 8.7-8.12).

In the paper, I make much more explicit, and hopefully I can finish that soon enough so everyone can read it.

Boys find Second Temple burial cave near Beit Shemesh

2006-02-01T05:33:00.000-06:00

In a scene out of the Hollywood Indiana Jones, three Israeli children stumbled upon an ancient Second Temple cave in the Beit Shemesh area filled with skeletons and ossuaries, Israel's Antiquities Authority announced Monday.

This should prove useful. I wonder how far back we're going here? Hopefully we'll get something from at least 500 auc or earler. Now that would be cool.

Early papyrus ‘rewrites history’

2006-02-01T05:30:00.000-06:00

ROME - It served first as a notebook for ancient painters and then as part of a mummy’s wrapping. Now, a first-century-BC parchment believed to contain the earliest cartography of the Greco-Roman era will be on display next month in the northern Italian city of Turin.

The Papyrus of Artemidorus tells a tale of more than 2,000 years of art and culture.

Egyptologist Alessandro Roccati, of the University of Turin, said the parchment was “extraordinary” in that it “conserves direct and ancient testimony that helps reconstruct history.” Roccati was not involved in the project.

The parchment’s story begins around the mid-first century BC, when a copyist in Alexandria, Egypt, began working on a blank parchment to copy the second of 11 books by Greek geographer Artemidorus of Ephesus.

I absolutely love maps, the older the better. Fascinating news.

Archaeologiests Find Tomb Under Roman Forum

2006-01-20T20:45:00.000-06:00

ROME - Archaeologists digging beneath the Roman Forum have discovered a 3,000-year-old tomb that pre-dates the birth of ancient Rome by several hundred years.

...
State TV quoted experts as saying the tomb appeared to date to about 1,000 B.C., meaning the people who constructed the necropolis pre-dated the ancient Romans by hundreds of years.

Legend has it that Rome was founded in 753 B.C. by Romulus and Remus, the twin sons of the god of war, Mars.

Maybe we ought to switch from Varro's dating of Rome to Ennius' implicated date of Rome instead. Very interesting nonetheless! Rome keeps on getting older and older with every new find.

Lost Works You'd Like to See Recovered

2006-01-13T16:16:00.000-06:00

What works no longer extant would you like to see recovered? Here is my top 10 list.

The entire Commentary on Matthew by Origen
The Egerton Gospel
Matthew's Logia of Jesus mentioned by Papias
The complete works of Tacitus
The Yue Jing (樂經)
Any of the original works of either Zeno, Cleanthes, or Chrysippus
The very first letter to the Corinthians by Paul (I Cor. 5.9)
Q, if it existed
The Book of Remedies (thanks Jim)
Another form of the Homeric epics

Update: Thanks to Jim Davila for the title of #9.

Wieland Willker's Textual Commentary 2006

2006-01-11T03:57:00.000-06:00

Wieland Willker has his new commentary on the gospels updated. Here's what he has to say (via textualcriticism):

Changes to the 3rd edition:

- Added a short 4 pages general discussion of the so called Western non-interpolations as an extra file.

- Added a short file discussing some smaller important papyri, comparable to the file about the fragmentary uncials. This is a work in progress.

- Added P. Williams' comments on certain Syriac attestations in NA from his book: "Early Syriac Translation Technique and the textual criticism of the Greek Gospels", Gorgias Press, 2004

- Added the attestation of the Palestinian Syriac lectionaries from A. Smith-Lewis collation.

- The deviations of Tregelles' text (Greek NT, 1857 ff.) from NA have been incorporated. [Very interesting, it appears that WH probably used Tregelles' GNT as their base text. Tregelles' text (and apparatus) deserves more attention.]

- The readings of J.M.S. Baljon's text from 1898 have also been added. Baljon follows more often 01 (or Tischendorf?) against 03.

- Added the quotations of Basil of Caesarea from the Gospel of Mt (J.F. Racine "The text of Mt in the writings of Basil of Caesarea", Brill, Leiden 2004)

- I have checked and at certain positions expanded the discussion of the papyri in Mt from the new book: Kyoung Shik Min "Die früheste Überlieferung des Matthäusevangeliums (bis zum 3./4. Jh.): Edition und Untersuchung", ANTF 34, Münster 2004, ISBN: 3-11-018281-5).

- Inspired from Jan Krans' work, I have added 6 interesting conjectural emendations.

- I have read the very inspiring work of Alexander Pallis (Notes on St. Mark and St. Matthew 1932, Notes on St. Luke and the Acts 1928, Notes on St. John and the Apocalypse 1926) and added his more important comments into the commentary.

- A major new TC work appeared in 2005, the textcritical commentary on the Gospel of Mark by H. Greeven and E. Güting (768 pages, ISBN 3825868788). I have worked through it and have incorporated all noteworthy things into the commentary. All quotations are my translations.

- The Byzantine text "BYZ" has been corrected at a few points to bring it in line with Maurice Robinson's new 2005 edition.

- A short Principal Component Analysis of the variants in the Longer Ending of Mark (image). It reveals 2427 to be basically Byzantine against C, L.

- A lot of additions, expansions here and there, about 100 new pages, the Luke volume crossed the 500 pages barrier.

Sad News

2006-01-09T20:29:00.000-06:00

Just heard the sad news from Jim Davila... J. T. Milik is no more.

J. T. MILIK, 1922-2006. I regret to inform you that J. T. Milik, one of the original members of the Dead Sea Scrolls editorial team, passed away in Paris yesterday. Eileen Schuller and Eibert Tigchelaar have e-mailed with the information and to say that the funeral is on Wednesday.

Milik published a great deal, including some of the Bar Kokhba era material in DJD 2, the Copper Scroll in DJD 3, and the Qumran fragments of 1 Enoch and some of the Book of the Giants material in The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4.

Another giant in the field has passed on. Requiescat in pace.

Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World

2006-01-09T20:17:00.000-06:00

I received this in the email:

Please join us Jan. 22-24, 2006 at Princeton University for the three-day colloquium:

Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World.

The colloquium will explore the themes of tradition construction and collective memory amongst Jews, Christians and Pagans from the third century BCE to the seventh century CE. Nineteen papers will be presented by faculty from around the world and Princeton University graduate students.

It looks interesting. Anyone planning on going? I wish I could afford to go, but alas, I think I'll have to miss out on this also. Such a shame.

New Mailing List

2005-12-24T18:53:00.000-06:00

In case you haven't noticed, along the side of this blog, underneath the blogroll, there's a roll of academic mailing lists which I subscribe to (and very good ones at that!). I just added another one today, Kevin Edgecomb's bibicalia, a companion list to his website and blog.

SBL Calls for Papers

2005-12-22T01:10:00.000-06:00

The Society of Biblical Literature is calling for papers for their 2006 Annual meeting in Washington D.C.

Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics

2005-12-22T00:43:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Stephen Carlson for the link:

The Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics is a collaborative project of the Classics Department of Princeton University and the Classics Department of Stanford University. Its purpose is to make the results of current research undertaken by members of Princeton and Stanford Universities in the field of classics available in advance of final publication.

There's a lot of interesting papers there - should be worth checking out.

New Blog: biblicalia

2005-12-18T20:39:00.000-06:00

I went to mention Kevin P. Edgecomb and his new blog biblicalia! So far the posts are most informative. Welcome, Kevin!

Earliest Christian Traditions pt. 2

2005-12-14T16:13:00.000-06:00

This is a sub-series of the Quest for the Historical Jesus series that I introduced earlier.

As Loren Rossen pointed out earlier, as did Ben Smith and others, there is a fair amount of evidence that the earliest Christians were apocalyptic - expecting the end to be near. This may derive from the Messianic expectation of the restoration of the Israel, but regardless, there's evidence for its existance.

I Thessalonians 4.13-18, which was recently the subject of debate at SBL, looks to be the earliest witness to apocalypticism. In it, Paul addresses the concerns that those who have died will not get the chance to be saved. Obviously, that view would presuppose a hasty return by Jesus.

Mark also contains apocalyptic references, especially at chapter 13, the "Apocalyptic Chapter". Here Mark gives an account of the end of days, citing the usual apocalyptic wars, plagues, etc... Verse 26-27 specifically mentions Jesus' return to gather up the "elect". Verse 30-37 explicitly state that the return is imminent ("this generation shall not pass until all things are done"), even though no one knows exactly when.

The Gospel of Thomas also contains cryptic quotes that appear to be apocalyptic, such as saying 11 (also 111). It parallels Mark 13 about heaven passing away, which naturally leads to the end-of-the-world scenario.

The Second Epistle of Peter also, as Paul does earlier, address the concerns of the apocalyptic beliefs. In particular, he reassures that the end is still near, although that it is delayed. He confirms that "the Day of the Lord" will surprise them, then follows it up with an end-times scenario about the world passing away. Finally, he reaffirms the belief that the end will be soon.

Finally, Jude 18 seems to imply that the end-times are near.

Sacred-Texts' New Writings

2005-12-13T18:04:00.000-06:00

There are several noteworthy books uploaded at Sacred-Texts: Tacitus in Latin, Herodotus in Greek, and the Argonautica in Greek. Sacred-Texts is a great site full of interesting resources. Go check it out if you haven't already.

A New Symbol for the IPA

2005-12-13T05:17:00.000-06:00

Apparently, the IPA has a new symbol - the labiodental flap - the newest letter in twelve years. The New York Times has the story:

The sound, a buzz sometimes capped by a faint pop, is present in more than 70 African languages. It is produced by the lower lip moving back and forward, flappimg on the inside of the upper teeth.

Neat to see yet another addition to the alphabet.

Earliest Christian Traditions pt. 1

2005-12-12T20:08:00.000-06:00

This is a sub-series of the Quest for the Historical Jesus series that I introduced earlier.

Mentioned on my forum a while back, I noted that there are only two names in the genealogies of Matthew and Luke that are the same (none are expected, of course, as they go through different lines, one Solomon and the other Nathan). They are Schealtiel (Σαλαθιηλ) and Zerubbabel (Ζοροβαβελ).

Zerubbabel was the son of Schealtiel according to Ezra, Nehemiah, and Haggai, but uncle according to Chronicles. However, both Luke and Matthew list them in their genealogies (well, Luke was the surprising one since his does not follow the Chronicles line).

According to the story, Zerubbabel and Jeshua (aka Jesus) son of Jozadak came back from Babylon, they were commissioned to rebuild the temple. Foreigners had asked them if they could help, but the two refused, for the Temple is for Jews only.

The implication here is that Jesus, like his possible namesake, is supposed to come to restore the Temple and Israel per the Messianic prophecies and return the land to the Jews. So one could assume that the earliest tradition was in line with Judaism of the day. Perhaps the historical Jesus was also?

Some may argue that Paul and the Four Gospels unanimously agree that Jesus is for Gentiles also. Since this would directly contradict the first tradition, I'm fairly certain we're dealing with either two different traditions that merged or later reforms nullified the original claim. In fact, Paul and Acts regularly deal with this problem - Jews or Gentiles? This would point to the latter solution over the prior in my opinion.

The Quest for the Historical Jesus pt. 1

2005-12-11T20:36:00.000-06:00

It's futile. As all historical reconstructionists must needs know, there is never such a thing as absolute certainty. We work with proximity and probability, and what becomes "fact" is merely what has the highest probable chance of having occurred, not necessarily what did. We like to hope that our conclusions are correct, but putting any faith in them would be quite ludicrous.

Dealing with the Historical Jesus is even trickier. When dealing with historical facts, scholars ultimately aim for the earliest source about that person and how it dealt with the history. Since dependency usually rules out examination, this leaves out only a handful of sources which we can derive our foundation upon which the historical Jesus can be built.

These few sources I've indentified:

Earliest Christian Traditions - the earliest christian traditions are probably the oldest source to the claim on Jesus, yet they are the most scattered, most diverse, and are still being argued about today. If we can be fairly certain concerning these traditions, then we arrive to the clearest picture of Jesus.

Earliest Gnostic Traditions - the earliest Gnostic traditions, at least superficially, appear to be generally distinct from Orthodox Christian traditions. Unfortunately, most of the Gnostic traditions are too late to be recognized as independent, and several show dependency on Orthodox ones.

Talmud - The Talmud relates the stories of two men both named Jesus, both of which bare resemblance to Christian tradition. Whether or not they refer to the same people will be examined.

Josephus - Josephus, as we have him, contains two quotes which are remarkably similar to Christian tradition, but assuredly one is at least tampered with if not fabricated entirely and the other is suspect as well. The conclusions drawn from him are crucial to the historical Jesus.

Tacitus - Tacitus briefly mentions Jesus' crucifiction in the Annals. He may have merely gotten the information from Christians themselves, which would nullify his claim to being an original source. There's also some speculation that the passage might be tampered with, but the evidence thus far is inconclusive. Note that Tacitus uses the name "Chrestiani" instead of "Christiani" for the Christians.

Suetonius - Suetonius briefly mentions that an agitator named Chrestus caused the Jews to be expelled from Rome. The identity between Chrestus and Christus being either the same or distinct is still debated.

I am hoping to start arriving at conclusions soon. There's still so much to be discussed, so much to be unraveled. We must realize, though, that if this house is to be built, it cannot be built on so many presumptions as others have done. I've seen Jesus be it all - cynic, stoic, rabbi, zealot, mythical godman, itinerant ascetic, Wicked Priest, Teacher of Righteousness. Each of these rest upon suppositions and selectively choose evidence based on a seemingly arbitrary method of determination.

The real Jesus will probably never be known. There's too little information out there for anything to have real probabilities. However, with an examination of the sources, a firm, however incomplete, conclusion will hopefully be drawn.

My Clarification and Moving On

2005-12-06T00:13:00.000-06:00

In Mark Goodacre response he said he felt chastened by my words, and I think Jim Davila also thought I was attacking him. Sincerely sorry to anyone who thought I was being offensive - this was not my intent. It was merely a much-needed (again, in my very humble opinion) closure to the oddly ended debate. Personally, I'm not obsessed with it (heck, I had been ignoring the debate until my first post on it yesterday) and after today it'll probably fade away again.

Also, his comment on the effects of the "problem" of female bloggers:

My concern (e.g. mentioned here) is that our inevitable concern about the issue has the wrong result -- it unduly problematizes something that we are unlikely to be able to do anything about, and which we may make worse by the way we potentially isolate.

I'm in entire agreement with this. Female bloggers is not something we should address nor is it a problem we can do anything about. There is no solution to the problem besides merely keeping on with what we do. He reiterates this during his Blog of the Month interview:

Of course we are right to be concerned about the lack of women bloggers in our area, but I am not sure that the issue is fruitfully dealt with by our obsessing about it. To problematize the phenomenon actually runs the risk of making it more difficult for changes to happen because we draw too much attention to the current situation, unduly isolating current and potential women bloggers. In other words, I am becoming increasingly convinced that the current lack of women bloggers is a situation not well served by a bunch of men sitting around frowning about it.

Congratulations to Mark Goodacre on being the Blog of the Month for December.

On a related note to blogging, I have updated my blogroll, included some new ones (some old ones that I've recently found!) and got rid of a couple of dead blogs. Enjoy.

"Biblioblogging" "Femiblogging" and Blogdom

2005-12-04T22:17:00.000-06:00

For the couple of weeks, there has been a debate on certain blogs about biblical bloggers and then female biblical bloggers. Personally I find the whole debate quite ludicrous, but apparently spurred on by the SBL session and most likely addressed again tomorrow at Sheffield, I thought I might as well give my two-cents on this "highly important" matter. (rolling-eyes here)

This whole travesty started, from what I gather, about a year ago when Jim Davila questioned the term "biblioblogger" which was originally coined by Dave Meadows. From there sparked a huge debate over what name bloggers who study the Bible ought to be called. His initial rejection, which is in my opinion still valid, is that it the proper etymology would belong to bloggers who blog about bibliographies or perhaps books in general. Several responses were thrown out there, the best of which, again in my opinion, was "bibliablogger" by Ed Cook. An other valid suggestion was Joshua Tallent's at The Four Questions "antiquiblogger", which is probably more akin to what most of us do anyway. In fact, very few on my blogroll actually deal only with the Bible. For this reason alone, I wouldn't label myself a biblioblogger, even if a good portion of my posts deal with the Bible and my current fascination is with Matthew's gospel.

That should have been the end of it. Alas, it was not. A whole year later, biblioblogging returns, this time not as a question of name (biblioblogging won out, as you can tell), but of qualifying characteristics and identifications. Questions such as why female bloggers are underrepresented in biblioblogging and would blogs that are primarily personal theology in their nature be considered biblioblogs or perhaps God-blog is a better term arose informally by Mark Goodacre and was responded to by Tim Bulkeley and Phil Harland, although Phil must have deleted his posts since there's no trace of them left, but otherwise no serious discussion arose from the matter. However, at the SBL conference, for some reason I'm not exactly sure of, there was a biblioblogging session, still using the etymologically-incorrect name, they touched upon these very questions.

Since I was unfortunate to miss SBL this year (how I would have loved to go!), I can't with any certainty claim I know what happened there, but I have a very good idea. If I understand correctly, Paul Nikkel mentioned these questions and the ideas exploded. Furthered by some of Jim Davila's remarks (again, I'm getting this information second-hand, so correct me if I'm wrong) about who are bibliobloggers (professors and graduate students only?), the next thing you know people are angry over who is a biblioblogger and who isn't and why women are being excluded from this white-middle-age-male association and whathaveyou nonsense and then...Tim B. leaves.

At this point, I'm confused. What exactly was Tim leaving? What is all this nonsense of being a club/association/whatever? What some people are forgetting is that names serve as a descriptive category for things, and by no means is biblioblog that descriptive, thus it must be fairly general. But, like being a scholar or a nihilist, it's not something that you can leave. Biblioblogging isn't a choice-club - you don't choose to be in it. It's a descriptive category, one that labels certain blogs as having certain characteristics, such as discussing the Bible. The only way you can "leave" Biblioblogdom is to merely stop posting about the Bible altogether - but why would anyone want to do that for the sake of the quibbles of others? If some label my blog a biblioblog, and some have, would I stop posting about the Bible because I don't like biblioblogging demographics or because I prefer the term "antiquiblogger" because that more accurately describes my blog? Of course not! If you ignore the problem, it will go away, because this problem is wholly superficial.

However, the tone that some have taken towards this has raised even more debate. Paul Nikkel goes into more depth about this so-called "problem" of exclusivity and biblioblogging. This has even prompted Tyler Williams to parody this already with his "Seal of Approval" graphic.

Honestly, folks, I don't see all the huff about this? But anyway, here's my opinion on what ought to be done.

Blogspot is one of those great websites that offer you free webspace. One of the benefits of free blogs is that you can have more than one, like Jim did with both PaleoJudaica and Qumranica. My suggestion would be that if a substantial part of your blog revolves around something other than your "theme", or if it could easily be broken up into two blogs or more, then by all means let's separate. It's more than perfectly acceptable to post every so-often about your children, or politics, or, heaven forbid sports, but if you have a blog devoted to Israel excavations and Taiwanese politics, perhaps we can do a little splitting there? I've been thinking about starting a blog revolving around my own politico-religious philosophy, but I would never incorporate those into my academic blog, which I try to keep mainly on one page, even if divergent every once-in-a-while. I know I twice now posted on evolution and once on the creation of Palestine, yet that's merely three times in nine months (oh, and that little post about a blogger's worth, so make that four) which I don't think is so bad. Actually, I'd even give others more freedom than I'd give myself.

But you must remember, this is coming from my personal opinion. I personally don't wish to see a blog with little substance and all filler. My blogroll has been paired down a couple of times because certain blogs became uninteresting to me because of constant posts about daily life, church, politics, sports, etc... Heck, no offense to the big man, but I skipped over all of Mark Goodacre's posts about his move to America. (Ok, I skimmed to see if anything was relevant.) If those kind of posts became all that Mark posted about, not only would he lose certain respect, but I certainly wouldn't want to read him no matter how interesting his life may seem. I echo Joe Weaks' concern:

The two main concerns have centered around the amount of personal, non-field related material and the clublike nature of "the group" that excludes others such as women. The first concern does come out of a misguided need to define a group, but it also includes a plea, really. There are some blogs I'd like to read, but it's just too muddled with other topics for me to invest the time to include it on my feed. For instance, I took AKMA off my feed list earlier this year. His children sound really great, but I have two of my own kids and it's hard enough for me to keep up with them.

The other main concern is that white males are dominating the biblioblogdom. I'm appalled actually that we have not yet become so blind to sex and skin color. When I read a scholarly opinion, I think about one thing: does the conclusions fit the evidence. If I may not be so knowledgable in a certain subject, I may also check credentials, but often I find that credentials rarely matter anymore, though this may be a personal bias.

Why are there not more female bibliobloggers? Does it really matter? Are we really going to quibble over whether results come from a male or female? In biblical and general antiquity studies, males dominate the field. Since blogging is merely an extension of a field, perhaps the problem lies deeper. Or perhaps there is no problem at all. If women are drawn towards it, they will come. I don't think they need males hypothesizing about why they aren't coming and preparing differents methods to have them come. Are we fishing for women? Sounds a bit sexist to my ears.

I did notice three women "bibliobloggers" commenting on this (and I put up the irony quotes for irony, thank you very much): locustyears, Yasmin Finch, and Lese Bellevie. The former would be a good read, but I couldn't seem to find very much of anything relating to Biblical studies, so I probably wouldn't read it, and Yasmin's seemed to have much more Biblically related materials, but it's so polluted with personal notes or topics not of my interest. Perhaps someone else who is into that sort of thing will keep up with it and mention any serious Biblical topics she might bring up. It's nothing against them personally that I wouldn't want to read it, but there's so much that disinterests me that I there's no point, really. Sorry if I'm offending, I don't mean to be, and it has absolutely nothing to do with sex. In fact, I can think of several other biblioblogs by males that exhibit the same problem and thus I wouldn't keep up with. On a promising note, locustyears (Pilgrim at First and Lake?) said she will be posting more in line with scholarly topics in the near future as her interests become more narrowed. I will keep my eyes open.

Perhaps one reason it's not so much of a problem with me is because of Lese Bellevie's Magdalene Review blog (link above) and classicist Glaukopides blog which I read with the same regularity as the rest on my blog roll. They're living proof that blogs can be kept consistently academic-related and by females at once.

To finish this (rant?), I quote Dr. Goodacre's finishing touch on his assessment of these problems:

As my closing thought, I would say: Write your blog on what you are interested in, and if people want to read it, they will read it, no matter what categories and sub-categories it may be thought to fall under. Blog on what you want to blog on, read blogs on what you want to read, and let the blogosphere continue to evolve and develop in its own unpredictable and unique way.

More Godless Linguistics

2005-12-03T00:04:00.000-06:00

Back in September, I had noted a parody of "Creationism" hosted by talk.origins by comparing their arguments to those that could be made by "Babelists" or those who think that God created all the languages at the tower of Babel. Via Language Log, I've come across A Roguish Chrestomathy, and in particular this post about "Wrathful Dispersionists" which parodies ID. A must read! If I may quote the opening paragraph:

Linguists here in Canada have been following closely, with a mixture of amusement, bemusement, and, it must be admitted, a little trepidation, the deliberations of our neighbours to the south, who are currently considering, in a courtroom in Pennsylvania, whether "Wrathful Dispersion Theory," as it is called, should be taught in the public schools alongside evolutionary theories of historical linguistics. It is an emotionally charged question, for linguistics is widely and justifiably seen as the centrepiece of the high-school science curriculum—a hard science, but not a difficult one to do in the classroom; an area of study that teaches students the essentials of scientific reasoning, but that at the same time touches on the spiritual essence of what it means to be human, for it is of course language that separates us from our cousins the apes.

New Linear A and Linear B Tablets Found

2005-11-16T23:41:00.000-06:00

Minoan treasures found off the Cretan track
ATHENS (AFP) - Archeologists in Crete have found an important trove of archeological treasures containing some of the earliest known examples of Greek writing.
...
Among the discoveries was an amphora containing an intact text written in linear B, the language of the court at Mycenae where the legendary Agamemnon ruled.

Also found were two terracotta tablets containing texts in Linear A, an even older alphabet -- used around 1,700 years before the common era -- which has not yet been deciphered.

The rest here. Very interesting news! I wonder what the new texts may say, and if the new Linear A may perhaps give us new clues for deciphering.

SBL Forum 2005 - Matthew

2005-11-04T02:58:00.000-06:00

Some of SBL's seminar papers for the gospel of Matthew have been released. They are available for download here. Hopefully, I will be able to release the next in the series in my Commentary on Matthew and a discussion paper addressing some of the points mentioned in the papers.

Another Reason NOT to Bring Back the Medieval Ages

2005-11-01T20:35:00.000-06:00

Student launched from catapult died after missing safety net

A university [sic] student died after being hurled 100ft through the air by a medieval-style "trebuchet" catapult, an inquest heard yesterday.

Kostydin Yankov, 19, an Oxford University student, suffered multiple injuries and serious spinal damage when he fell short of the safety net.

More, unfortunately, here.

Blogger's Worth

2005-10-23T16:16:00.000-05:00

Loren Rosson III over at thebusybody has discovered a website which measures the value of one's blog. I'm quite surprised to see mine worth as much as it is!

My blog is worth $2,258.16.
How much is your blog worth?

Perhaps as this creative genius is recognized little free investment will grow into a fortune. Now I wonder how this websites measures the value?

Baby Got Butt...in Latin?

2005-10-17T21:40:00.000-05:00

Indeed! Some Latinist has decided to "translate" Sir Mix A-Lot's classic ode to the gluteus maximus. Here are some of the lyrics (if a bit verbose, but still surprisingly...well, you decide):

magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.
(Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.)
quis enim, consortes mei, non fateatur,
(For who, colleagues, would not admit,)
cum puella incedit minore medio corpore
(Whenever a girl comes by with a rather small middle part of the body)
sub quo manifestus globus, inflammare animos

The rest can be found here.

Dead Sea Scrolls...again?

2005-10-11T20:11:00.000-05:00

Apparently, some of the Dead Sea Scrolls are unreleased being sold in Israel's antiquity market. What a shame. This will, as this article points out, undoubtedly lead to even more fakes, and even more claims from Hershel Shanks to their authenticity. (Ok, it's a joke people.)

According to Eibert Tigchelaar, a theologian from Groningen, at least thirty fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls are being offered for sale at the moment. He was shown pictures during his last visit to Israel in August.

He says that all items belong to the descendants of antique dealer Kahlil Iskander Shahin Kando who in the past century amassed a fortune from the sales of the Dead Sea Scrolls. His family commissioned renowned scientist Emile Puech from the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Française, an authoritative research institute in Jerusalem, to write a concise description of every fragment. Tigchelaar states that as far as their content is concerned the fragments are hardly revolutionary. "But the idea that there are more items out there is interesting."

I wonder if anything exceedingly significant will turn up, or even if we'll ever get our hands on all the dead sea scrolls.

Hangŭl Day (한글날)

2005-10-09T18:26:00.000-05:00

I wonder why I didn't hear about this earlier. It's not like I don't talk to a certain Korean every day, but oh well. Found this over at Language Log:

Today, October 9th, is Hangul Day (한글날), the celebration of the promulgation of the Korean alphabet Hangul 한글 by King Sejong the Great in 1446.

King Sejong (세종대왕 in Hangul, 世宗大王 in Chinese characters), the fourth king of the Choson dynasty, was born May 6, 1397 and ascended the throne in 1418 at the age of 21. He died May 18, 1450 aged only 53. He is known for his work improving Korea's defenses against Japanese pirates and invaders from Manchuria, for his patronage of scholarship (among other things, he founded the 집현전 集賢殿 (Jiphyeonjeon) or "Hall of Worthies", a kind of royal academy) and for his own scholarly work. He is credited with the invention of a rain gauge, a water clock, and a sundial. His literary works include the highly regarded Yongbi Eocheon Ga "Songs of Flying Dragons", Worin Cheon-gang Jigok "Songs of the Moon Shining on a Thousand Rivers", and Seokbo Sangjeol "Episodes from the Life of the Buddha". He also compiled the Dongguk Jeong-un "Dictionary of Proper Sino-Korean Pronunciation". Most of all, he is known as the creator and promulgator of Hangul.

Prior to 1446, the Korean language was rarely written at all. The written language used in Korea was Classical Chinese. The combination of the use of a foreign language with the large amount of memorization required to learn thousands of Chinese characters meant that only a small elite were literate, overwhelmingly men from aristocratic families. The great majority of people were illiterate. On the relatively rare occasions when Korean was written, it was written using Chinese characters, in part for their sound, in part for their meaning. This too was a complex system poorly suited for mass literacy. Hangul was the first writing system to make it easy for any Korean to read and write his or her native language.

Unilang forums also has a good post on Hangŭl Day.

EDIT: I removed my disagreement with LL. Thinking it over - rules would negate ambiguity, as long as they're consistent, and they are. So happy Hangŭl Day everybody!

BTW - anyone know of any good Korean grammars?

Hoax or Forgery? Secret Mark and Pseudepigraphy

2005-10-03T23:22:00.000-05:00

Recently, there has been some debate over the terms "forgery", "hoax", and "pseudepigrapha". Loren Rosson III at the busybody has raised the question here about Carlson's definition and his disagreement. For the most part, I recognize that pseudepigraphy ought to be considered forgery, since the primary purpose was to decieve. However, after reading Carlson's book, I think scholars should definitely make a distinction between hoax and forgery. Since many of you had not the opportunity to read it yet (and won't for another month :P), I want to caution those who still don't make the distinction to carefully assess the motives before judging. Secret Mark, and I have just been persuaded to the camp which claims it is a fake thus far, would rightfully be considered a hoax after reviewing his evidence.

As for pseudepigrapha, I also think we ought to make a slight distinction between works written for swindling purposes and works written for religious purposes. The sheer number of works purpoted to be written by someone who hadn't should give us an insight into the attitudes at the time concerning these works. Even with an honorable name attached to a letter, this does not always ensure survival, just like we do not have Paul's other letter to the Corinthians. Then again, the Epistle to the Hebrews proves that it could also be anonymous as well. I am not certain, but I would hazard a guess that some were smart enough to tell differences. Perhaps not. So where does that leave us? Somewhere in the gray areas, like it has always been, and I am content to keep it.

EDIT: Another update, this time pointing back to Stephen Carlson at Hypotyposeis for his most recent update on the debate.

The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark

2005-10-02T16:08:00.000-05:00

I just received and finished Stephen Carlson's The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark and I must say, though I was skeptical at first, it has convinced me that Secret Mark was fabricated by Morton Smith. It's an easy-to-read book, finishing it in only a little bit over an hour, but is clear and concise and cuts straight to the chase.

In the book, Carlson uses several arguments including internal clues and paleography to determine indeed that the fragment Smith discovered was actually "forged" by him. The evidence he gives includes an analysis of the handwriting (the first and most convincing of the arguments), a statistical analysis of the vocabulary and hapax legomena in the letter from Clementine, and several hints that place the gospel well into the twentieth century. But even more admirably, Carlson does not, as some may suspect, denounce the work and Smith with it, but shows great appreciation for the great scholar and concludes that it is not a forgery, as we normally come to think of forgery with fraud, but a clever hoax, one only able to be engineered by Smith.

As I was told by Michael Turton, so I tell you now, you just have to read and instantly you'll recognize that it is indeed an ingenious hoax, one that to this day still has scholars debating it.

EDIT: I've edited it a bit and now include a link to Carlson's book due to hit bookstores and Amazon in November.

Extracts from Theodotus

2005-10-02T15:23:00.000-05:00

Andrew Criddle kindly supplied me with extracts from the works of Theodotus for my website as a resource for any curious about Valentinian gnosticism. You can check it out here. It appears that it was scanned from a book and not gone through a good typographical proof first. I ran through it and fixed some of the things I noticed, but if anyone else notices serious or even minor errors, let me know. Thanks Andrew for the work.

Rare Manuscripts from the Vatican Go on Display at Israel Museum

2005-09-30T19:38:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Jim Davila over at Paleojudaica for this bit of news:

The Vatican library has loaned the Israel Museum four illuminated Jewish manuscripts from the 13th and 15th centuries, which will be on exhibit to the public for the next four months.

The manuscripts include a 15th-century manuscript of Maimonides' Mishne Torah, a 15th-century manuscript of Rabbi Jacob ben Asher's Arba'ah Turim, a 13th-century manuscript of the Bible, and a 13th-century book of Psalms.

Godless Linguistics

2005-09-29T19:23:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned about Palestine, I rarely go into the realms of politics. I also decided to rarely go into the realms of theology as well, however I will make this exception (and who knows, there may be more). Thanks to Languagehat for pointing me to this old article on Talk Origins, something that appears to be once again in the spotlight of the media/church/academic circus.

If I may quote:

Third, there is NO evidence that transitional languages ever existed. What use is half a language? A noun without verbs conveys no meaning! Sure, there is middle and old- English. But these are ENGLISH! A complete nontransitional language. We do not deny that micro-linguistics can happen, but this process can create only DIALECTS. There is NO EVIDENCE that a series of random micro-linguistic events can create a WHOLE NEW LANGUAGE. I'll believe in Macro-linguistics when I see a video tape of a child growing up in an Eskimo village suddenly become fluent in Armenian! It takes A LOT MORE FAITH to believe in atheistic linguisticism than the truth of Babelism.

Miniscule Manuscript Walkthrough

2005-09-12T20:53:00.000-05:00

Bryan Cox has informed me of his "Manuscript Walkthrough" where he has been taking readers of his blog, Biblaridion, line-by-line through ms 1432 to explain some of the intricacies of miniscule manuscripts. A treasure of information stored there. He also gives links to many other good websites online, for anyone seriously looking at the later manuscripts. Good job, Bryan.

Gaza is Israel's No More

2005-09-11T16:32:00.000-05:00

From the BBC:

Israel lowers its flags over Gaza
Israeli troops have begun pulling out of the Gaza Strip 38 years after they captured the narrow coastal area.
The move followed a decision not to demolish more than 20 synagogues, after rabbis argued against it.

Palestinians had urged Israel to raze the synagogues and an official said on Sunday they would do it themselves.

Only structures such as green houses and a former Israeli army headquarters might be retained, Interior ministry spokesman Tawfiq Abu Khoussa said.

I usually do not appreciate mixing scholarship with politics, but this is important. Personally, I have supported allowing Gaza becoming Palestine, but always wondered how would a divided Palestine work if Jerusalem was split. Reminds me too much of a certain situation before in Europe.

Even more, what is to become of archaeological excavations at Gaza? I hope the PLA can enforce regulations and keep the place from becoming too dangerous too quickly.

Best of luck to the Palestinians out there - almost 40 years of battle finally payed off. Now let us move on to peace.

Minor Agreements Against Mark

2005-09-05T14:01:00.000-05:00

This post has been a while in the making and there's still more to do. Following several debates on the synoptic problem earlier this year (found here: Matthew 3:16 , Synoptic Problem split from Matthew 3:16, and Three Arguments for Lukan-Matthean Dependence) I decided to take a more systematic look at the Matthew-Luke minor agreements against Mark. I used Neirynck's, The Minor Agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark as a fairly comprehensive list of the agreements. Neirynck offers a very useful classification of agreements at the end of the book, but I had to go beyond it since my goal was to estimate the significance of the agreements.

This first attempt at this task entailed classifying the agreements in four broad categories. The first category is of the agreements in omission (where Matthew and Luke agree in leaving out some text found in the Mark in the triple tradition). The next three categories are of the positive agreements (where Matthew and Luke agree in a text differing from Mark in the triple tradition). The three agreements are: 1) literal agreements, where the agreement entails the exact same word and spelling, although, not always in the same order, 2) root agreements, where Matthew and Luke agree in using the same word, but have different forms, 3) sense agreements, which includes agreements in any of the following: tense, person, number, meaning, or any other grammatical or syntactic agreement that doesn't fall into the earlier categories. The only agreements I chose not to include are agreements in order, since they are very few and well discussed at the end of Neirynck's book.

Below are my counts of the words in each of my categories. There might be slight adjustments in these in the future since reading through 140 pages of agreements can get rather dull and I may have made errors somewhere. The "instances" counts are according to how Neirynck separates them. These instance counts are, admittedly, somewhat arbitrary.

Omission: 2687 words / 553 instances / against 412 Markan verses (4.86 words per instance, 70.9% of all agreed words)

Literal: 721 words / 347 instances / against 254 Markan verses (2.08 words per instance, 19% of all agreed words)

Root: 208 words / 154 instances / against 127 Markan verses (1.35 words per instance, 5.5% of all agreed words)

Sense: 176 words / 109 instances / against 94 Markan verses ( 1.61 words per instance, 4.6% of all agreed words)

It is important to note that the instances and verses in the above counts are not mutually exclusive. Often, there would be a combination of agreements in omission, literal, root and sense against a particular Markan verse, although, in most cases where there were multiple agreements against a Markan verse, they'd consist of a couple literal agreements and a few negative ones.

For reasons already cited in earlier debates, I do not take the agreements in omission very seriously. Instead, in this post, I will focus on the positive agreements, and specifically the literal agreements, since they are the most numerous positive agreements and comprise the most significant hurdle for the 2-Source Hypothesis.

At first glance, the agreements seem quite numerous and, at least in number, not very "minor." It should be noted that the minor agreements are similarly problematic for competing documentary hypotheses that posit a Mark redacted from Matthew and Luke since one would have to account for why the Markan redactor would so often depart from his sources when they both agree. When, however, examining the literal agreements more closely, the brute force of the numbers begins to lose its mystique. The first observation is that each instance of an agreement on average involves only 2 words. Indeed, the majority of the literal agreements is only in one word per instance (198/347 of the instances), and when we examine later what these agreements are, it'll become clear why many of them are irrelevant. 280/347 of the instances of literal agreements are only in 1 or 2 words per instance. 35 instances involve 3 words. 16 instances involve 4 words. There are only 16 instances of literal agreements that involve 5 or more words.

Why so many instances of literal agreements involving only one word? When examining what the literal agreements are, we find that the largest class involves conjunctions and particles. There are 93 instances where: 1) Matthew and Luke use DE for Mark's KAI (4 cases of the reverse), 2) Mark and Luke use the same conjunction or particle where Mark has asyndeton (1 reverse), 3) Matthew and Luke agree in using a participle where Mark uses KAI + finite verb, 4) a number of other cases of agreements concerning 'INA, 'OTI, ALLA, GAR, etc.

The next largest group is that of avoiding the historic present or other tense agreements (which result in a literal agreement) with 53 such cases. Next we have 30 cases of Matthew and Luke agreeing in making explicit a subject which Mark leaves implicit. This may not seem like an obvious correction for independent redactors to make, but when one looks at the actual agreements, one finds that almost all of these agreements are simply in adding an article, 'O or 'OI where Mark avoids it, and the next largest number of these agreements consisting of making IHSOUS explicit. There are 8 cases of agreement in using the participle of LEGW instead of a finite form or another speaking verb, and 5 cases where Matt and Luke avoid the awkward HRXATO + infinitive. Thus, this next group of agreements involving slight adjustments to grammar adds up to 96 instances.

Thus, we can easily see why insignificant literal agreements in Matt and Luke involving 1 word comprise 57% of the instances of literal agreements.

Now, agreeing that such changes ought to be obvious and occur both to Matt and Luke regularly in the same place is convincing on its own to an extent, but it helps to look at some specific probabilities. For my example I have chosen the DE/KAI interchanges since the potential variations from which to choose by any redactor are fairly low: in most cases where Mark uses KAI in the triple tradition, Matthew and Luke choose between KAI and DE. Out of the 209 instances in the triple tradition where Mark uses KAI (if my count based on Neirynck's tables is correct), Matthew changed 111 to DE and Luke changed 128 to DE. In other words, Matthew chose DE over KAI, 53% of the time and Luke 61% of the time. Thus, by random chance, Matthew and Luke ought to coincide in changing KAI to DE 32% of the time. In fact, there are 48/209 times where they both agree in using DE against Mark's KAI, or 23%, which is well within probability. If anything, there should be more agreements in DE against KAI.

Welcome Walter Shandruk

2005-09-03T00:16:00.000-05:00

I'd like to welcome a new team member to this blog - Walter M. Shandruk. Walt is my co-admin at the forum where he has led the debate against the Farrer's Hypothesis with Stephen Carlson, also a member of the forum. Let us all welcome him warmly. ~ :)

The Genealogy of Matthew

2005-09-02T21:13:00.000-05:00

Here is my first draft of my analyzation of the genealogy of the Gospel of Matthew. Critical comments are very welcome. - Chris

Edited - I realized that Blogger doesn't play well with Microsoft's Word's footnotes, so I fixed the little buggers myself. If you click on them now, it should work properly. - Chris

The Gospel of Matthew is the first book of the Christian Testament and one of the most intriguing of the entire corpus. Its composition truly reflects its dynamic beginning as Christian separatists defining themselves against both their Jewish origin and fellow Christians.

The Gospel of Matthew begins with an extensive genealogy of Jesus from Abraham onwards. In the introductory passages, Jesus is called both Χριστος and υιου Δαυιδ υιου Αβρααμ. This is to establish the legitimacy of Jesus as the Messiah, the son of God, and a descendent of the “father of all nations”[1].

The genealogy was taken mostly from the first four chapters of 1^st Chronicles, although not entirely – some of it taken from other books. There are several discrepancies with the genealogy, agreeing both with the Greek Septuagint against the Hebrew and also against the Greek and Hebrew. Moreover, there are peculiar similarities between the Syriac as well.

Comparing his genealogy in both Greek and Syriac, there is not a simple answer which would solve all questions. Instead, each name must be taken individually and analyzed in turn.

The first occurrence of something odd is Matthew using the name Ιακωβ instead of Ισραηλ in verse 2. The official genealogy at Chronicles uses the name ישראל at both occurrences in the Hebrew and Syriac at verses 1.34 and 2.1. The Septuagint, however, uses the name Ιακωβ at 1.34 and Ισραηλ at 2.1. This either signifies that the author used the Greek text or he felt the need to minimize the name Israel for theological and political purposes, or perhaps both, but that will be discussed later.

The next discrepancy is at the verses 3 and 4, in particular the name Ram. This is somewhat of a puzzle, and nothing here is for certain. The Greek Chronicles 2.9 has both Αραμ and Ραμ, but in two different situations. The first, which is most common, is “και ο Ραμ, και ο Χαλεβ, και Αραμ.” However, the other version is “και ο Αραμ και ο Χαλεβ.” The oldest manuscripts of Matthew have the name as Αραμ while the Byzantine correction is Ραμ, which correlates better with the Hebrew. The Hebrew Chronicles has the name spelt רם, and the Syriac here agrees. But the Peshitta has Matthew’s spelling as ארם.

What probably happened is very complex, but perhaps goes along the line of thus: the original Greek had Αραμ, who was probably confused with the other people by that name (indeed, Αραμ is quite common in the LXX). Matthew, using this version of the Greek, copied it likewise, but a later revisionist of the Septuagint changed the minor spelling mistake. Then afterwards, Christian scribes noticed the discrepancy and decided to “correct” the LXX, leading to the common reading “και ο Ραμ, και ο Χαλεβ, και Αραμ.” This is evidenced by the lack of a definite article in this sequence though it is included with the other two. The scribes who copied the Byzantine text changed Matthew instead to go along with the Hebrew. The Syriac, when translated from the Greek, kept Matthew’s error, which explains the discrepancy between Chronicles and Matthew in Syriac but not Greek.

After that, Matthew is pretty quiet except for two small errors. He spells the name, Ωβηδ as Ιωβηδ, Σαλωμων as Σολομων, and Ασα as Ασαφ, the latter which is accounted for by the Asaph mentioned in Ezra. The next problem arises in verses 8 and 9. First of all, he leaves out three generations from Ιωραμ to Οζιας – Οχοζια, Ιωας, and Αμασιας. Secondly, there is no attested Οζιας in the LXX. Through the Syriac, it is identified with Αζαρια, but it could possibly be Οχοζια and then Αζαρια would be the third generation left out of the genealogy. But the Syriac has Αζαρια’s name spelt עוזיא in both Chronicles and Matthew, thus it was probably here that the name was taken.

This is the almost exactly the same as the Αραμ-Ραμ problem above, except backwards. This time, the Greek has an unattested form and the Syriac agrees in both places. If indeed Matthew was written in Greek, he likely received the name from a pre-revised version of the LXX, or even more plausible is that he received it from the Aramaic influence that surrounded him. Perhaps Matthew took the genealogy from an already circulating genealogy tradition lost to us all. It is noted, though, that this is one of the few places that lends evidence to Aramaic priority.

Matthew again is quiet except for missing one generation, a Ιωακιμ, but soon after he brings up another even more intriguing textual problem. In verse 12, Matthew lists the son of Σαλαθιηλ as Ζοροβαβελ. This would be expected if he were reading the LXX, but not if he knew the Masoretic Text or the Syriac, both which say in Chronicles that the זרבבל was the son of פדיה. However, the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Haggai all agree that זרבבל was the son of שאלתיאל. Luke also has the son of Σαλαθιηλ as Ζοροβαβελ. Since this passage of Chronicles was not found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is impossible to say with certainty if it reflects a different tradition or if it was changed by later Hebrew scribes. Another possibility is that the passages of Ezra and Haggai were aware that Zerubabel was the nephew of Scheatiel, but their use of בן implies not a literal son but a relative, in this case nephew, a position which is speculative at best.

Concerning theological purposes, they are strewn throughout genealogy. Of course, there is the obvious one, which is that the Messiah has to be from a “branch” of David[2] and from the tribe of Judah[3]. Another one aforementioned is the impact of changing the name Israel to Jacob, or rather keeping the name Jacob instead of using Israel. This probably is more evidence of Greek primacy countering Aramaic primacy instead of any intended theology, but it could have possibly been used as an anti-Jewish sentiment steeped in Matthew’s gospel, but it is not likely.

On the other hand, having Jesus as a descendent of Zerubabel is most likely theologically motivated. Zerubabel was a governor of

Judah

after the return from the exile and one of the two prominent figures associated with the rebuilding of the temple, along with Jeshua (Jesus) son of Josedech.[4] It may not be by coincidence then that he was an ancestor of Jesus son of Joseph. This allusion probably stems from Jewish messianic expectations that the Messiah would “rebuild” the temple and thus restore Israel. Some may construe this allusion also as a statement against the Gentiles, since Zerubabel refused to let the “enemies of Judah and Benjamin” to help rebuild the temple, but it is doubtful whether or not Matthew was aware of this interpretation that came along with this tradition.

There is one descendent who is often marked for criticism in Matthew’s gospel. In verses 11 and 12, Matthew lists Ιεχονιας as an ancestor of Jesus, but oddly leaves out his father Jehoiaqim. This may be due to Jekoniah (or Jehoiakin) being cursed by the Lord in Jeremiah[5], but then it is strange that Matthew would list him but not his father who, even though still did evil in the Lord’s eyes, did not have the curse. It is significant that Matthew used Ιεχονιας and not Ιωακιμ, which according to the Septuagint is the name for both father and son. But in Jeremiah, the name is slightly different than that in Kings. Thus, Matthew picked the wrong name of the wrong person – wrong on both accounts.

Matthew also tries to make the genealogy theologically significant by numerology. He claims that from Abraham to Jesus are three sets of fourteen or six sets of seven. However, with the text that we have currently, there are only five sets of seven and one set of six, one ancestor shy the intended result. This has been attributed to several factors, most popular ones being Matthew’s error, deliberate editing for theological purposes, or just merely lost in the gospel’s infancy[6].

Out of those three, the only one really requiring positive evidence is the deliberate theological editing. The main theory coming from that is that in the original gospel story, Joseph was twofold. There was a Joseph who was the father of Mary, thus making the entire line through Mary[7] and not Joseph, and the other Joseph was the husband of Mary. I would not be surprised if there were some who claim that Joseph was both the father and the husband of Mary, though I have not actually seen someone propose such an indication. As for the Joseph confusion, this argument primarily lies around the use of ανηρ.

Although Greek use of ανηρ is fairly well defined, meaning either man, husband or something very similar, it can be argued that it possibly meant “father”. However, the reading would be peculiar and lies with no solid evidence. The other related argument is that the first ανηρ once read πατηρ, and copiers later changed it either deliberately or merely thinking the author was confused. There is some evidence for the latter. Many manuscripts have edited verse 16, but this usually is for theological purposes to make it more apparent that Joseph is not the biological father of Jesus. This perhaps is an indication that something else may have been there originally that is now lost in all manuscripts. There are other signs of tampering with the birth narrative, but that will also be discussed later.

Found among the names of 41 men are five women: Θαμαρ, Ραχαβ, Ρουθ, η του Ουριου, and Μαριας. Proponents of the theory that the genealogy is of Mary often use the women mentioned as evidence that Matthew was feminine-friendly.

The first woman, Thamar, is the daughter-in-law of Judah. As the story goes, Judah sees her and mistakes her to be a harlot. He then “knows” her, to use the Biblical euphemism, and when she is found pregnant, Judah realizes that he was the father, having given her his bracelets, staff, and signet beforehand. He then proclaims her to be righteous.[8] The key here seems to be redemption and righteousness out of sin.

Rachab, the second on the list, was a harlot of Jericho who helped Joshua overcome the city by hiding his spies. For that act, her life was spared.[9] Matthew may have known the Epistle to the Hebrews, since its author also commends her. Again, we see righteousness and redemption out of a sinful lifestyle.[10]

Ruth was the third woman listed. Instead of prostitution, her “crime” was that she was from Moab and not from one of the tribes of

Israel

.[11] Her inclusion may be a sign that Matthew wanted to extend the ministry of Jesus to Gentiles, since without this Gentile there would be no David, hence no Jesus.

The phrase “η του Ουριου” refers to Bathsheba, the woman married to Uriah whom David committed adultery with.[12] There is nothing exceptionally forgiving about her, but this may be why her name is not said directly.

The final woman was by necessity Mary, the mother of Jesus. Her importance is actually understated in Matthew’s gospel, but being the mother of Jesus, even to the point of being called “η αλλη Μαρια”[13] later in the gospel, she could not have been left out.

[1] Genesis 22.18

[2] Isaiah 11.1-2, 10

[3] Genesis 49.10

[4] Ezra 3.2; Haggai 1.1

[5] Jeremiah 22.24-30

[6] I’m not sure if I intended that pun or not…

[7] This theory is often dwarfed by the theory that Luke’s genealogy is Mary’s and not Matthew

[8] Genesis 38.6-26

[9] Joshua 21.1-24

[10] Hebrews 11.30-31

[11] Ruth 1.1-4.22

[12] 2 Samuel 11.1-27

[13] Matthew 28.1

Looking for Sources on Juvenal

2005-08-22T22:06:00.000-05:00

I've decided to turn my attention towards a text-critical edition and translation of Juvenal to keep my Latin occupied while my other projects are currently simmering. So far this is what I have:

A copy of Bücheler's text via The Latin Library
Michael Hendry's critical text via Curculio, the site he maintains
J. D. Huff's edition
E.G. Hardy's Edition

I am looking for information on Parisinus 8072, Vindobonensis 107, and the Scholia from Pithoeanus. I am also seeking excerpts from classical authors on the text regardless if they offer unique insight or not. And finally, I am wondering if there are other critical editions of Juvenal that I did not list above that may offer a unique text. I am in the process of getting Housman's edition, but how are the editions of Knoche, Courtney, Martyn, Clausen, etc...? Particularly, I would like an edition with a strong criticus apparatus, and for this reason I would recommend anyone venturing down this path to stay away from Hardy's edition. I'll probably end up not using him anyway. Also, any studies or journal articles that may shed light would also be appreciated.

Steven Carlson has some good things to say at the forum:

L. D. Reynolds, ed., Texts and Transmissions: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1983), is a great place to get started.

The entry on Juvenal was by R. J. Tarrant. Juvenal's work survived in more than 500 copies, an impressive number, but most of which were heavily interpolated. Tarrant states that the best edition is by W. V. Clausen (Oxford Classical Texts, 1959) and that U. Knoche (Munich, 1950) has "the most elaborate critical apparatus," who also had made "the most detailed study of the transmission" of Juvenal in his Handscriftliche Grundlagen des Juvenaltextes (Leipzig, 1940). An English language account of its transmission, called "admirably lucid" by Tarrant, is E. Courtney, "The Transmission of Juvenal's Text," BICS 14 (1967): 38-50.

The library/shelfmark for manuscript P is Montepellier 125, which was written in the early 9th cen. in Lorsch. If Tarrant's cite is correct, more information about P can be found in B. Bischoff, Lorsch im Spiegel seiner Handschriften (Munich, 1974), pp. 38 and 98-99. P's text is closely related to the surviving five leaves of the Fragmenta Arouiensia (10th cen., Germany) and to an anthology written in the late 9th cen (St. Gall 870).

Stephen

I'll probably be getting Texts and Transmissions, but what about Clausen's and Knoche's edition. Anyone else with some input?

Genealogy Comparison

2005-08-10T00:04:00.000-05:00

I created and uploaded the genealogies from Matthew (both Peshitta and UBS) and from Chronicles (MT, LXX, and Peshitta) for viewing. There are some notes you must be aware of first, though.

First of all, I stuck with 1st Chronicles 1-3 with few exceptions. Those are in the Hebrew where Haggai and Ezra-Nehemiah list Salathiel as the father of Zorobabel, but Chronicles lists Padaiah. The second is the Peshitta's listing of Obed, which in Chronicles 2.12 has `wbr which is probably a mistake made here where I got my information from. However, elsewhere in the Peshitta (Ruth in this case) you can get the correct reading. Also note that there is a discrepancy between Septuagintal versions as to whether the name is Iouda or Ioudas and Ram or Aram.

Finally, here's the chart.

10th Century BCE Palace Found - David's?

2005-08-05T18:00:00.000-05:00

From here:

JERUSALEM, Aug. 4 - An Israeli archaeologist says she has uncovered in East Jerusalem what may be the fabled palace of the biblical King David. Her work has been sponsored by a conservative Israeli research institute and financed by an American Jewish investment banker who would like to prove that Jerusalem was indeed the capital of the Jewish kingdom described in the Bible.

Other scholars are skeptical that the foundation walls discovered by the archaeologist, Eilat Mazar, are David's palace. But they acknowledge that what she has uncovered is rare and important: a major public building from around the 10th century B.C., with pottery shards that date to the time of David and Solomon and a government seal of an official mentioned in the book of Jeremiah.

Even Israeli archaeologists are not so sure that Ms. Mazar has found the palace - the house that Hiram, king of Tyre, built for the victorious king, at least as Samuel 2:5 describes it. It may also be the Fortress of Zion that David conquered from the Jebusites, who ruled Jerusalem before him, or some other structure about which the Bible is silent.

Very interesting... I have no comment yet, but Dr. Jim Davila has some interesting things to say about it.

Sinaiticus to Go Online

2005-08-05T17:44:00.000-05:00

Although you can find a PDF transcription of the Codex, it appears that it will finally appear online in digital form. From the link above:

A team of experts from the UK, Europe, Egypt and Russia is currently digitising the parchment known as the Codex Sinaiticus, believed originally to have been one of 50 copies of the scriptures commissioned by Roman Emperor Constantine after he converted to Christianity.

I knew this was said about Vaticanus, but I didn't realize proponents said this about Sinaiticus also. I highly doubt this on probability alone, especially since there's no real evidence for it.

All four institutions are co-operating to digitise the entire text, as well as using hyperspectral imaging to photograph it, in order to find any hidden or erased text.
"To do it also in infra-red or ultra-violet photography, as in forensics, you'll find out any hidden aspects of it as well," explained the British Library's digitisation expert Lawrence Pordez.

This will be great to see the different layers of Sinaiticus, which went through several different revisions, some saying up to ten or more different editors.

For his part, Dr McKendrick said he estimated it would be about four years before the codex is fully available online.

The British Library will also develop a free website to present the manuscript.

I can hardly wait, so I'll keep you updated.

A New Dead Sea Scroll!

2005-07-15T15:09:00.000-05:00

A new Dead Sea scroll was found, apparently containing extracts of Leviticus dating to the Bar Kochba revolt. Thanks to Dr. Davila at PaleoJudaica for finding this.

Bedouin wanders across Biblical manuscript
Fragments of a Biblical manuscript dating back to the last Jewish revolt against Roman rule in 135 AD Judaea, have been uncovered near the Dead Sea.

After four decades with a dearth of new finds, archaeologists had resigned themselves to believing the desert caves in the modern-day West Bank had already yielded all their secrets from the Roman era.

"It's simply sensational, a dream come true," archaeology professor Hanan Eshel, a Biblical specialist at Israel's Bar Ilan University, said.

For the past 20 years, he has scoured the Judaean desert around the Dead Sea, overturning stone after stone in search of Biblical parchments.

He has been trumped by Bedouin, who stumbled across the miniature fragments last August.

Only a few centimetres long, the pieces contain extracts in Hebrew from the Biblical Book of Leviticus.

Damaged by bat droppings and lying under a film of dirt in a cave near the Ein Gedi oasis, the Bedouin pocketed the manuscripts and began an arduous bidding process with Professor Eshel.

"Thanks to this find, we now know a little more about the troubled period that gave rise to the Jewish revolt against the Romans," the Professor said.

I wonder if there's anything else written on it, since it isn't the actual text of Leviticus...?

A New Look on Matthew

2005-07-12T15:09:00.000-05:00

The current consensus on the raison d'être for the Gospel of Matthew is that it was written to reconcile Jewish-Christian relations. Having read Matthew a little closer, though, I've come to an entirely different conclusion on its formation and why it was written. Matthew is instead writing a (knowingly fictional) novella on Jesus Christ establishing him the new Moses for Christians. He also briefly dismisses the idea that Matthew is anti-Gentile, instead making it wholly Christian.

Matthew first introduces the idea of a Mosaic savior in 2.15 "και ην εκει εως της τελευτης Ηρωιδου ινα πληρωθηι το ρηθεν υπο κυριου δια τοθ προφητου λεγοντος 'Εξ Αιγυπτου εκαλεσα τον υιον μου.'"

"and was there until the death of Herod that it should be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet saying, 'Out of Egypt I have called my son.'"

The quote is used by Matthew as an allusion to Moses directly, since Israel, which was led by Moses, was the one called from Egypt. This in effect makes the followers of Jesus the Israelites, led by Moses, but together constitute the Israel. The significance of this shifts the function of Jesus from being the savior of mankind through the Law or Faith, as were the common Jewish and Christian thinkers of the time commenting on, but instead a later understanding of the freedom of Christians from slavery of Judaea, which Matthew paralled Egypt as.

Matthew also parallels the Egyptians in his "gospel" with the Scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees. They become the slave-holders who are keeping the "true" people from reaching the Promised Land, which becomes the Kingdom of Heaven, a uniquely Matthaean construction opposed to the construction mostly found elsewhere as Kingdom of God. This charge is found explicitly in Matthew 23.13.

Even the Ten Commandments are paralleled in Matthew, as Jesus' teachings are broken into five large blocks of sayings, which Dr. Tabor summarises here:

Chapters 5-7 (7:28)

Chapter 10 (11:1)

Chapter 13 (13:53)

Chapter 18 (19:1)

Chapters 24b-25 (26:1)

There are two more obvious parallels to the story. The first is the massacre of the innocents. For the Exodus story, all the Hebrew children are killed so the Hebrews would not be able to overthrow the Egyptians one day. The same with Jesus, as all the little children in Jerusalem are killed to prevent the "King" from overthrowing the Herodian line. This passage is so uniquely Matthew that it's existence alone provides the hypothesis with the most evidence for it.

The second parallel is the signs of Moses to the Pharaoh and the signs of Jesus to the Pharisees. Jesus several times performs miracles to the doubters to show that he is coming from the true God, such as 9.6 and 12.22 (with a specific mentioning for whom Jesus works in 22.24-22.29), and he even went so far as to include the "hardening of his heart" parallel in 12.39, as even though the Pharisees and scribes just saw Jesus perform signs, they still ask for another one, yet he denies them that. If Matthew borrowed from Q, we can assign this passage to Q, since it is in Luke but not in Mark (at least the extensive wording on it), but if Luke borrowed from Matthew and there were no Q, then this is Matthew's extension, and should be viewed as even more evidence for Matthew's intent.

I'll have some more parallels coming soon, but before I leave, I want to issue a quick caveat - Matthew is a very complex document, and there is much more to it than merely a first century novella. Indeed, as Moses issued very complex and numerous commandments for the Hebrews, so too does Matthew expand and expound his theology for the new Christians. This is only a fraction of the whole gospel, and hopefully I'll be able to tie up some loose ends soon.

New Sappho Poem Unveiled

2005-06-30T18:20:00.000-05:00

From here, by Martin West:

Since classical times, Sappho has been a source of fascination and romantic construction. The ancients, who had nine books of her poems at their disposal, were unstinting in their admiration. Some called her a tenth Muse. Strabo, writing in the time of Augustus, calls her a wonder, “for in this whole span of recorded time we know of no woman to challenge her as a poet even in the slightest degree”. In modern times, with only fragments of her poetry remaining, she has remained one of the most famous and evocative names from antiquity, a figure viewed by some with narrowed, by others with widened eyes; a socio-historical enigma, a littérateurs’ Lorelei, a feminist icon, a scholars’ maypole.

It is difficult to judge her for ourselves when so little of her work remains. What we have
consists on the one hand of quotations and more general references in ancient authors, and on the other hand of torn scraps from ancient papyrus and parchment copies, mostly from the Roman period and, more often than not, so tattered that they yield only a few words or letters from any given line of verse. In modern editions the fragments are numbered up to 264. But many of these do not contain a single original word. Only sixty-three contain any complete lines; only twenty-one contain any complete stanzas; and only three – till now – gave us poems near enough complete to appreciate as literary structures.

A recent find enables us to raise this number to four. In 2004, Michael Gronewald and
Robert Daniel announced the identification of a papyrus in the University of Cologne as part of a roll containing poems of Sappho. This text, recovered from Egyptian mummy cartonnage, is the earliest manuscript of her work so far known. It was copied early in the third century bc, not much more than 300 years after she wrote.

Parts of three of her poems are represented. As usual, all are in a fragmentary state. But the second one, it turned out, had been partially known since 1922 from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus of the third century ad, and by combining the two texts we now obtain an almost complete poem.

When we had only the Oxyrhynchus portion, we had only line-ends, preceded and followed by line-ends of other poems, and it was not clear where one poem ended and the next began; the left-hand margin, where this would have been signalled, was missing. That question is now settled. We have a poem of twelve lines, made up of six two-line stanzas. The last eight lines are virtually complete. The first four are still lacking two or three words each at their beginnings. But we can make out the sentence structure and restore the sense of what is lost, if not the exact words.

Here is the poem in my own restoration and translation. The words in square brackets are supplied by conjecture.

"[You for] the fragrant-blossomed Muses’ lovely gifts
[be zealous,] girls, [and the] clear melodious lyre:

[but my once tender] body old age now
[has seized;] my hair’s turned [white] instead of dark;

my heart’s grown heavy, my knees will not support me,
that once on a time were fleet for the dance as fawns.

This state I oft bemoan; but what’s to do?
Not to grow old, being human, there’s no way.

Tithonus once, the tale was, rose-armed Dawn,
love-smitten, carried off to the world’s end,

handsome and young then, yet in time grey age
o’ertook him, husband of immortal wife."
We know of several poems in which Sappho spoke of herself as getting on in years. Here
she addresses a group of younger women or girls, whom she calls (to translate literally) “children”, contrasting their blithe singing and dancing with her own heaviness of heart and limb. It is clear from other evidence that she composed her poetry, or most of it, within an intimate circle of women whom she calls her “companions”. Her house is a house of moisopoloi, “servants of the Muses”. Later writers saw her as a chorus-leader or teacher, to whom people of class in several cities sent their daughters for a musical education. We cannot tell how accurate a construction this is, but it must have been based on the impression given by the poems, and it is consistent with what we know.

In the new poem, however, the focus is on Sappho herself. She recites the symptoms of her ageing, as in another famous poem she recites the physical symptoms of jealous love. Then comes philosophical reflection. In the love poem she tells herself that everything is endurable, because fortunes can be transformed at God’s pleasure. In the new poem she tells herself that growing old is part of the human condition and there is nothing to be done about it. This truth is illustrated, as typically in Greek lyric, by a mythical example. It is a tale that was popular at the time, the story of Tithonus, whom the Dawn-goddess took as her husband. At her request, Zeus granted him immortality, but she neglected to ask that he should also have eternal youth, so he just grew ever older and feebler. Finally she shut him up in his room, where he chatters away endlessly but barely has the strength to move.

Sappho is very economical with the myth, giving it just four lines and ending the poem with it. At first sight it might seem a lame ending. But the final phrase gives a poignant edge to the whole. Tithonus lived on, growing ever more grey and frail, while his consort remained young and beautiful – just as Sappho grows old before a cohort of protégées who, like undergraduates, are always young. The poem is a small masterpiece: simple, concise, perfectly formed, an honest, unpretentious expression of human feeling, dignified in its restraint. It moves both by what it says and by what it leaves unspoken. It gives us no ground for thinking that Sappho’s poetic reputation was undeserved.

Here's the Greek text:

Υμμες πεδα Μοισαν ι]οκ[ο]λπων καλα δωρα παιδες
σπουδασδετε και τα]ν φιλαοιδον λιγυραν χελυνναν

εμοι δ' απαλον πριν] ποτ' [ε]οντα χροα γηρας ηδη
επελλαβε λεθκαι δ' εγ]ενοντο τριχες εκ μελαιναν

Βαρυς δε μ' ο [θ]υμος πεποηται γονα δ' [ο]υ φεροισι
τα δη ποτα λαιψηρ' εον ορχησθ' ισα νεβριοισι

τα <μεν> στεναχισδω θαμεως αλλα τι κεν ποειην
αγηραον ανθρωπον εοντ' οθ δυνατον γενεσθαι

και γαρ π[ο]τα Τιθωνον εφαντο βροδοπαχθν Αθων
ερωι φ... αθεισαν βαμεν εις εσκατα γας φεροισα[ν

εοντα [κ]αλον και νεον αλλ' αυτον υμως εμαρψε
χρονωι πολιον γηρας εχ[ο]ντ αθαναταν ακοιτιν

Greek taken from here.

Update on the Conquest of Britain

2005-06-28T09:25:00.000-05:00

Well, from better reporting, it seems that I may have been right afterall. Indeed, the Independent was, as it usually is, merely sensationalist. I turn to the BBC for more accurate reporting:

She added that the site could mean that the Roman conquest could be "a much more complicated story than has hitherto been understood".

"The discovery of this much larger structure really makes us all very excited, and makes us think we have discovered a different chapter, or a different interpretation into the invasion of south west Wales," she said.

Gwilym Hughes of Cambria Archaeology, which is undertaking the archaeological work in partnership with the National Trust, said the excavation was "a unique opportunity".

"Excavation will provide the critical dating evidence from items such as coins and pottery that may confirm when the forts were built and abandoned," he said.

Dave Meadows, at rogueclassicism, goes into a little more depth here. He seems to be in agreement with me about Rome's influence on Britain, mentioning not only the possibility but the probability that there was trade between the areas.

Rome Never "Conquered" Britain?

2005-06-26T09:56:00.001-05:00

Very interesting story that opens a huge can of worms here.

Nota bene - the Independent has been particularly untrustworthy before when it comes to historical articles, but whether it is here or not is to be determined.

The story:

The history of Britain will have to be rewritten. The AD43 Roman invasion never happened - and was simply a piece of sophisticated political spin by a weak Emperor Claudius.

A series of astonishing archaeological findings of Roman military equipment, to be revealed this week, will prove that the Romans had already arrived decades earlier - and that they had been welcomed with open arms by ancient Britons.

The discovery of swords, helmets and armour in Chichester, Sussex, dates back to a period between the late first century BC and the early first century AD- almost 50 years before the supposed invasion. Archaeologists who have studied the finds believe it will turn conventional Roman history taught in schools on its head. "It is like discovering that the Second World War started in 1938," said Dr David Rudkin, a Roman expert leading the work.

Quick thought - World War II started in 1939, a one year difference. We're talking about 50 years. Any parallel to World War II is inappropriate. A better analogy would be that the Civil War started with Jackson and Lincoln took credit for it. :o

The discoveries in Sussex will be revealed on Saturday during a Time Team special on Channel 4 analysing the Roman invasion. Tony Robinson, presenter of Time Team, said: "One of the frustrating things with history is that things become set in stone. We all believe it to be true. It is great to challenge some of the most commonly accepted pieces of our history."

Indeed, history tends to be set in stone, except of course religious history which is always being revised.

Dr Francis Pryor, president of the Council for British Archaeology, said it would prove controversial. "It turns the conventional view taught in all the textbooks on its head," he said. "It is going to cause lively debate among Roman specialists."

Specialist? Nah, he's too kind.

The AD43 Roman invasion is one of the best-known events in British history. More than 40,000 Roman soldiers are believed to have landed in Richborough, Kent, before carving their way through the English countryside.

The evidence unearthed in Sussex overturns this theory. Archaeologists now believe that the Romans arrived up to 50 years earlier in Chichester. They were welcomed as liberators, overthrowing a series of tyrannical tribal kings who had been terrorising clans across southern England.

Sussex and Hampshire became part of the Roman Empire 50 years before the invasion that historians have always believed was the birth of Roman Britain.

The findings and their implications will be published by Dr Rudkin later this year. The discoveries have centred on Fishbourne Roman Palace in Sussex. Artefacts found there in a V-shaped ditch include part of a copper alloy sword scabbard fitting that archaeologists have dated to the period between the late first century BC and early first century AD.

Dr Miles Russell, a senior archaeologist at Bournemouth University who has studied the evidence, said: "All this talk of the Romans arriving in AD43 is just wrong. We get so fixated on the idea of a single invasion. It is far more piecemeal. In Sussex and Hampshire they were in togas and speaking Latin five decades before everyone else."

According to Dr Russell, it was in Emperor Claudius's interest to "spin" the invasion of AD43 as a great triumph against strong opposition. Claudius had become emperor two years earlier but his position following the death of Caligula was tenuous. A bold military adventure to expand the empire would tighten Claudius's grip in Rome and prove his credentials as a strong leader.

"Every period of history has its own spin doctors, and Claudius spun the invasion to look strong," Dr Russell said. "But Britain was Roman before Claudius got here."

Julius Caesar first tried to conquer Britain during the Iron Age in 55BC, but storms on the journey from Boulogne, in France, to Dover caused Caesar's two legions to turn back. A force of five legions tried again in May 54BC and landed in Dover before marching towards London, defeating Cassivellaunus the King of Catuvellauni in Hertfordshire. News of an impending rebellion in Gaul caused Caesar to retreat, but not before he had made his mark.

Britain at this stage in history was not one unified country, rather some 25 tribes often at war with each other. Not all tribes joined the coalition to fight Caesar. For example, the Trinovantes appealed to Caesar to protect them from Cassivellaunus who had run a series of raids into their territory.

Dr Francis Pryor said that the findings in Sussex prove that relationships between tribes in southern England and the Romans continued after Caesar's attempted invasion. "The suggestion that they arrived in Chichester makes plenty of sense. We were a pretty fierce force but the Romans had a relatively easy run. This would have been a liberation of a friendly tribe - not an invasion."

Oxford historian Dr Martin Henig, a Roman art specialist, said that the whole of southern England could have been a Roman protectorate for nearly 50 years prior to the AD43 invasion. "There is a possibility that there were actually Roman soldiers based in Britain during the whole period from the end of the first century BC," he said.

Time Team will unveil their findings in a live two-hour special on Saturday evening on Channel 4. It will form part of the biggest ever archaeological examination of Roman Britain running over eight days and involving hundreds of archaeologists at sites across Britain. The series will investigate every aspect of the Romans' rule of Britain, from the supposed invasion to their departure 400 years later.

Dave Meadows mentions on rogueclassicism:

Preliminary thoughts: if this is the case, why wouldn't Augustus have made a bigger deal of it? Why would we hear of aborted invasions by Gaius? If it were as depicted above, why wouldn't the biographers have mentioned this as just more evidence of how ineffective Claudius was? All arguments from silence, to be sure, but appropriately brought up, no?

If this turns up to be true, it very well may be slightly different than they are portraying it. Instead of 43 CE as the beginning of the Roman influence in Britain, it seems more likely for it to be the beginning of a real military invasion of after decades worth of influence. And where are they getting the idea that they were welcomed as "liberators"? Reminds me of American rhetoric about the lovey-dovey feelings the Iraqis have towards us. But I guess the only thing to do now is to wait and see.

Egyptian King Neferhotep

2005-06-15T22:20:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Sean Holderread for pointing this out to me. From here:

LUXOR, Egypt (AFP) - Buried for nearly 3,600 years, a rare statue of Egypt's King Neferhotep I has been brought to light in the ruins of Thebes by a team of French archaeologists.

Officials said on Saturday that the statue was unusual in that the king is depicted holding hands with a double of himself, although the second part of the carving remains under the sand and its form has been determined by the use of imaging equipment.

Archeologists unearthed the 1.8 metre (six foot) tall statue, as they were carrying out repairs around Karnak Temple in the southern city of Luxor, Egypt's antiquities chief Zahi Hawass told reporters.

Francois Larche, one of the team that found the limestone statue of the king, whose name means "beautiful and good", said it was lying about 1.6 metres below ground near an obelisk of Queen Hatshepsut, the only woman to have reigned as a pharoah in Egypt, ruling from 1504-1484 BC.

Karnak, now in the heart of Luxor, was built on the ruins of Thebes, the capital of ancient Egypt. The huge temple dedicated to the god Amon lies in the heart of a vast complex of religious buildings in the city, 700 kilometres (435 miles) south of Cairo.

The statue shows the king wearing a funeral mask and royal head cloth or nemes, said Larche.

The forehead bears an emblem of a cobra, which ancient Egyptians used as a symbol on the crown of the pharaohs. They believed that the cobra would spit fire at approaching enemies.

Larche said this was only the second time such a statue had been found in Egypt. A similar one was dug up during the excavations of the hidden treasures of Karnak from 1898 to 1904.

But it is not clear when or if the statue will be completely unearthed. It is blocked by the remnants of an ancient structure, possibly a gate.

"In order to pull it out, a structure on top of the statue has to be dismantled and then restored," said Larche, adding that permission from the Egyptian antiquities authorities was needed before the team could go ahead with plans to raise the statue.

"It's up to the Higher Council of Egyptian Antiquities to decide on the fate of the statue of Neferhotep I and whether it will be brought to light or left buried where it was found."

Neferhotep was the 22nd king of the 13th Dynasty. The son of a temple priest in Abydos, he ruled Egypt from 1696-1686 BC.

Experts believe his father's position helped him to ascend the throne, as there was no royal blood in his family.

Neferhotep was one of the few pharaohs whose name did not invoke the sun god, Re. It is written on a number of stones, including a document on his reign found in Aswan.

I had asked the question in the forum about his name, in particular the relation of it to his status. He was, as the article quotes, not from royal blood, and wasn't named after a god. I wonder if the two are connected in a way?

Early Christian Inscriptions

2005-05-23T00:33:00.000-05:00

Walter M. Sandruk has released one of his papers dealing with early Christian inscriptions. You can download either the one with pictures or the one without pics. Here's his abstract:

Christian inscriptions of the first three centuries furnish an important source of evidence for early Christian faith. “A Brief Survey of Early Christian Inscriptions as Witnesses to Christian Faith” begins with an overview of early Christian symbols and abbreviations, especially those found in Roman catacombs, and discusses the difficulties of distinguishing inscriptions as Christian as opposed to Jewish or Pagan. The discussion next turns to the controversial “Jesus” inscriptions discovered by E. L. Sukenik in 1945, continues onto Montanist inscriptions and ends with Avercius’ epitaph. The essay is not exhaustive by any means, but offers a beginning point of research for those interested in Christian epigraphy, especially the controversial, and perhaps earliest, Christian inscriptions uncovered by Sukenik.

We went over a couple inscriptions in the forum here and I suggest looking at that as well.

Identifying the Hand of Secret Mark

2005-05-13T06:35:00.000-05:00

Just wanted to post a congratulations to Stephen Carlson for his paper being accepted for the 2005 Annual Meeting SBL's 125th Anniversary program unit Paleographical Studies in the Ancient Near East. His blog has more information. Here is his abstract:

The Secret Gospel of Mark is only known from a single manuscript of a previously unknown letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria that had been copied onto the end papers of a 17th century book. The experts consulted by the original editor of Secret Mark, Morton Smith, initially dated the hand to the 18th century, and this dating has not been seriously disputed since its publication in 1973.

This study revisits the paleography of the manuscript by comparing the hand with MSS written at Mar Saba in the 18th century and concludes that the hand differs in many significant respects, including a "forger's tremor" and other mistakes in execution. This study also uncovers a second, previously unnoticed, MS at Mar Saba from the same hand, which Smith himself identified as belonging to a 20th century individual. Samples of that individual's Greek handwriting have been obtained and are found to account for the observed anomalies in the hand.

The Synoptic Problem pt. 2

2005-04-09T05:49:00.000-05:00

This is the rest of the synoptic debate which primarily is a serious of long and drawn out arguements from Walt Shandruk and Stephen Carlson. It would probably be best to actually read their statements on the forum, but if you can't dedicate that time, here goes a summary.

Responding to Shandruk's Previous Statements
Responding to Shandruk's previous statements, Carlson pointed out that the "bulk" of what is shared between Luke and Matthew are sayings, while what is shared between all three of them is narrative. Thus being so, it is easier to mold sayings to fit narrative action, while vice versa does not hold up as easily, so any case about Luke's fidelity to Mark but not Matthew are explained by that idea. Stephen:

In fact, it is problematic to assume that Luke would be so conservative in his treatment of the speeches as the objection seems to require. Starting from Thucydides, Greek historiographers had no problem composing speeches for their protagonists as a way of conveying what they understood to be their characters' (authentic) voices. Matthew's saying material merely provided the raw material for Luke to do this.

F. Gerald Downing's work on compositional practices in the ancient world indicates that authors tended to work with one source a time and use the other for supplementation.

Given two sources, Mark and Matthew, which contains about 90% of Mark plus much additional material. Luke has two simple options: (a) Go with Matthew and supplement it with Mark, or (b) go with Mark and supplement it with Matthew.

The major defect for option (a) is that Mark has almost nothing to supplement Matthew with. The major upside to option (b) is that a lot of Matthew's additional material is teaching, which Luke can combine with other traditions for his own presentation of Jesus's message, which is what we see in his Central Section.

He later goes on with Farrer's theory that it also assumes Luke recontextualizing Matthew. He points out the possibility of Q merely being the inoffensive hypothesis that would not cause theological problems as Luke rewriting Matthew would have.

Walter counters the idea of Luke recontextualizing Matthew more fluently than Mark. He brings up Mark's speeches as retaining better shape than those shared with Matthew. Walt:

I'd like to now present the order argument from a different perspective, focusing on the retained order as opposed to the lost order. While Luke recontextualizes 2/3 of the "Q" material, 1/3 does retain its order. It seems like a fantastic scenario that 1/3 of the original order of completely recontextualized material should remain. If Matthew is merely raw material for Luke, as you suggest below, the chances seem even slimmer that he should consciously retain so much of the original order. It seems even slimmer that it should be an accident. More on this below.

Walt further rebuts Stephen going into the rarity that Greek authors were so liberal with speeches, not actually placing them into whole different contexts altogether. What Luke would have had to do was take a fully structured document, pick out the large sayings material, fit it into an entirely different context, and assign it a different role, so the Greek authors analogy does not equate. It is easier to understand Luke doing this if the quotes he took was from an entire document full of (mostly) quotations which is what Q is purpoted to be.

Carlson argues that Luke using Matthew's sayings material is just as easy as using Q material:

But the qualification of Markan contexts is crucial if the objection is to have any force. After all, the differences in order of the Double Tradition under the Q hypothesis requires either Matthew or Luke to remove a saying from one context and put it another. When the Farrer Luke copies a saying in Matthew from one of his 5 teaching blocks to one of Luke's 2 teaching block, the Farrer Luke is no more or less difficult than the Q hypothesis in this regard.

Carlson furthers his case by showing that Luke did use liberally Markan teachings:

Mark does not have a lot of speeches, but of the discourse material in Mark 4:1-34, for example, Luke omits or redistributes all of Mark 4:26-34. Hardly an insignificant deviation.

Matthew's sayings material is mostly found in his five famous teaching blocks that are easy to isolate.

In the first example you gave above, the saying is short enough to be remembered and the fact that the portion of the saying best reproduced is a simple parallelism indicates that Luke reproduced this short saying out his memory. No careful comparison or extraction is necessary.

Robert J. Darrenbacker, a student of John Kloppenborg and a supporter of Q, has found evidence that a substantial portion of the Q material was not copied directly but reproduced out of memory. From this, he was able to determine that Q was a notebook and estimate its page sizes. Basically, he found a correlation between the closeness of the verbatim agreements and the closeness of the sayings' contexts in Q.

My understanding of his research indicates that his results are also compatible with the Farrer Theory, i.e, the more pages of Matt that Luke had to flip to reach a particular, the more likely he would give up and rely on his memory instead, which is why Luke sometimes deviates considerably and sometime not much at all from the wording of the Double Tradition found in Matthew.

Carlson also shows Matthean context is seen in Luke, citing the Parable of the Mustard Seed and the Parable of the Yeast:

These sayings are more or less self-contained, almost like stringing beads on a necklace, so the objection as to context has little force for me. However, the Matthean context does shine through every now and then. For example, Luke follows the parable of mustard seed (Matt 13:21-32 = Mark 4:30-32; cf. Luke 13:18-19) with the parable of the yeast (Matt 13:33, no Mark, Luke 13:20-21). Matthew's context for the parable of the yeast is secondary since he added it right after Mark's mustard seed. Matthew's secondary context, however, is evident in Luke.

He then points out the New Testament authors (specifically the one of the Epistle to the Hebrews) replacing Old Testament quotes into entirely different contexts. This was common midrashic effect to take a quote and apply it to a different circumstance. He then finishes up with:

I'm trying to understand the assumption why Luke has to respect someone else's sequencing of Jesus's sayings, particularly when the Q hypothesis requires at least one of either Matthew or Luke to resequence them. It may be said that Q is merely a sayings collection and Matthew is not, but most of the Double Tradition in Matthew is found in one of his five famous sayings collections, so both Q and Farrer are on an equivalent footing in this regard.

In reply to Carlson, Shandruk disagrees that Q and Farrer are on the same level here:

By removing material from one part of the Markan chronological framework in which Matthew inserted it, and placing elsewhere indicates that the redactor would have no regard for the chronology of the sayings material in Matthew. In addition to this, the "Farrer Luke" would ignore the specific Matthean contexts (for the material that Matthew does not conflate with Mark). Unless one conceives of Q as a gospel with its own narrative structure, which most Q scholars today don't hold, rather than merely a sayings source, the Q hypothesis doesn't offer the same complication. There would be no context for the sayings in Q; a redactor would be free to apply the material into any narrative framework he wished. In the Farrer approach, Luke is required to remove sayings material from Matthean and Matthean+Markan contexts, ignoring the original usage and ignoring its place in the text's chronology.

Concerning the Lucan-Matthean agreement against Mark 4:26-34:

The wording here of Luke and Matthew agrees against Mark and suggests that what we're actually looking at is Markan use of Q. Due to the significant differences in wording it's unlikely that Mark was Luke's source here. This is further suggested by the additional saying in Lk 14:20 and Mt 13:33. Both parables of the mustard seed and leaven are closely related in theme and likely to have occurred together in Q. In Mark, the paired saying seems to have been corrupted. This isn't the only example of a pair of closely related sayings attributed to Jesus. Mk 2:21-23 and Lk 14:28-32 are two other such examples. It's possible that we're here dealing with an early Jesus tradition of coupled sayings. As to why Mark may've been corrupted here I'm unsure, but I think Mk 4:33 offers a clue: he had just listed a number of parables and decided he didn't need to reproduce any further, so he summarises with, "and he spoke the word with many such parables..."

Walter further questions the situation of Matthew over Qs:

I've not seen this study, but it seems like many assumptions would have to go into it such as on what page of Q material he was on and the original order Q. Also, considering Kloppenborg favors Lukan order for the double tradition as original for Q instead of Matthean, and so I suppose his student would too, I'm skeptical about how much this study would support Matthew as the source. I'll have to check it out sometime.

How is it that 1/3 of the order is retained? Is it just happenstance that this sequence of Matthean material would happen to be in the order that Luke needs it? The sections whose order is common to Matthew and Luke are not limited to the Central Section. Several are in the Sermon on the Mount and the last one is Lk 19:12-27 (=25:14-30).

But, you're approaching the sayings in Matthew as if they were there artificially in the first place. It is difficult to see why a redactor would consider the context and chronology (when Jesus said it in his ministry) irrelevant. Mark also has memorable one-liners, for instance Mk 10:23,25 (= Lk 18:24-25), yet he does not decontextualize these sayings. One has to presume that Luke weighed his Matthean source very low. This is possible, but it's easier to presume an independent sayings source where we have to asssume nothing about the redactor's preferences and we don't have to explain the heavily incongruous use of sources (why prefer Mark and not Matthew?).

Carlson countered Walt by questioning the understanding of Luke's motives:

This argument assumes that the specific chronology of Jesus's sayings would have been important to Luke. In order words, as I understand the argument, if Matthew put a saying in the Sermon of the Mount, Luke is somehow compelled (out of what?) not to put that saying anywhere else in his gospel. Even if Luke did not perceive the topical collections of Jesus's sayings in Matthew for what they are (topical collections), the mere fact that Jesus is presented as saying one thing on one occasion does not preclude Jesus from saying it on another occasion -- or more to the point -- preclude Luke from presenting that saying in another context.

In fact, while I can see such a concern of the precise chronology when a saying was uttered to be something a modern historian (usually of the inerrantist type) would care about, it is in no way in the least bit self-evident to me that an ancient writer would have such a modern sensibility. I do not accept this as a warranted assumption for Luke's behavior and it also suffers from failing to account for the narrative dislocations we see in the synoptics (e.g. Luke's moving of the anointing of Jeses, etc.).

He further continues with Luke using his memory to copy Matthew explaining the parts that Luke preserves best are those that contain memorable elements. Shandruk objected here:

Although, this is possible and I acknowledge that Lk 10:24 has memorable qualities, I still consider the close wording to speak against this having been taken from memory. Lk 10:24 and Mt 13:17 agree in 20 words. In addition, I don't see why Luke would have replaced DIKAIOI with BASILEIS. Was this a result of failed memory? I don't see why the two should have been confused.

But Carlson continued replying to this:

The saying is short and had parallelism, which fosters memorization. Memory in the ancient world among literates was generally better than it is today. The fact that the portion of the saying is best preserved just where it has the structures that assist memorization supports this.

Replacing DIKAIOI with BASILEIS is more consistent with Luke's remembering Matthew than his reading it. It is also consistent with Luke's redactional agenda, for only Luke presents a trial of Jesus before Herod (23:6-16) in a manner in which Luke's version of the saying is fulfilled in Jesus.

He then goes on to attack the Mark-Q overlapping:

I cited Mark 4:1-34 is to show that Luke drastically edited Mark's collection of sayings material too. The fact that a large portion at its end had been dropped or relocated should be sufficient to dispell ideas of Luke's supposed conservatism with his sources.

As for Luke 13:18-21, it is evidence that points to his knowledge of Matthew's Markan context for a saying. Hypothesizing that Q contained something like Luke 13:18-21 that overlapped Mark 4:30-32 is the standard answer under the Q hypothesis. To that extent you are in good company, but not when it comes to Mark's use of Q (most deny any direct relationship between Mark and Q).

The big problem with supposing a Mark/Q overlap is that we can't check it. Q didn't survive, so we have no way of knowing whether Q really overlapped with Mark. I think we should recognize this Mark/Q overlap for what it is: an ad-hoc hypothesis to explain away an anomaly in the Q hypothesis. I don't have much a problem if this was the only anomaly, but there are other places where Luke apparently betrays knowledge of the Markan context that Matthew added to.

Carlson then tops off his reply standing firm that the decontextualization of Matthew by Luke is not a problem at all:

The writer of Hebrew (or for that matter almost any other ancient exegete) did not have the same respect for context of his prooftexts that we moderns are so diligent about.

Replying to Carlson's citation of Markan changes by Luke, Shandruk rebuts:

But it is hardly sufficient for your goal since most of this section is retained by Luke in the same place as in the Markan framework, with the same context. The last section is removed since it would be redundant with Q material, which results in some omission of Markan material, but I never claimed that Luke was completely true to his Markan source. Rather, my point is that Luke is largely faithful, while he is virtually never faithful to Matthew.

He also claims that Q was indeed used by Mark, as evidenced by the passages:

Whether it was a direct relationship or Mark employing a tradition closely related to it, Mark here is clearly aware of content that also happens to be present in Q, and for now it seems simpler, along with Streeter, to attribute this to a Markan corruption of Q.

The final post will appear soon as part three.

The Synoptic Problem pt. 1

2005-04-06T16:10:00.000-05:00

Recently on the forum, we've been having various conversations about the synopticity of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and sometimes Thomas.

Background
When we first started arguing, it was only Walter and I. It came about a discussion on Matthew's "poor in spirit" v. Luke's "you poor". At the time I took the position that Matthew was original and Luke used Matthew, which excluded Q altogether. Today I am moreso inclined to take up the Q position, having been convinced of a Q of some sort. I only truly realized thus during the past couple of weeks during an intense argument between Stephen C. Carlson and Walter M. Shandruk. I do not want to give away the ending just yet, so I will give you the argument first.

Initial Argument
During the older dabate, I had made my case on several factors. First, I showed that the Beatitudes style and poor in spirit were used traditionally by quoting the War Scroll. To me, it seemed that if this style and wording were attested in earlier Jewish literature, than source which Matthew used, having always been associated with Judaism proper, would accompany this style. Even though I am not entirely sure that I was wrong, further analyzing Matthew gives me a different perspective every day. But more on that later.

Matthew 3:16
Looking at Matthew's variants, I came across one that was still being debated about. In Matthew 3:16, there are four words missing in א and B - αυτῳ, το, του & και. When Yuri Kuchinsky brought up the Aramaic Sinaiticus, the debate became sidetracked; instead of Matthew 3:16, the focus came to rest on Mark's redactional history and finally on Yuri's view of the gospel origins, which I'll discuss later.

Mark's Redactional History
Concerning Mark, Walter argued Marcan priority with Lucan and Matthaean adoption and correction. Yuri argued for a proto-gospel and Luke best preserving such.
Walt:

The arguments here seem pretty weak. Firstly, the position ignores the major evidence for Markan priority, for instance, that Mark generally represents the tradition "in the middle" between Luke and Matthew, i.e., its readings generally represent the shortest distance between Luke and Matthew. Secondly, arguing that our Mark is a critical reconstruction isn't an argument against 2SH - if anything, a critical reconstruction will hopefully bring us closer to an original text by critically assessing the viability of alternate readings and identifying late elements. Thirdly, Luke indeed seemed to use a lot of other material and it's possible that he was tapping into an independent tradition, but this isn't evidence of his priority. The other material could've been late itself; the triple tradition is much more useful for assessing sequence. Fourthly, the "great omission" is a difficult issue, and I will return to this in a future post, but I don't consider it decisive. Finally, I agree that Luke tends to preserve better both the original order of Q and the wording, but again, this is not evidence for priority. It's merely evidence of how the Lukan redactor felt about treating his source.

None of the reconstructions are without their own difficulties, but the evidence for Markan priority by far outweighs any problems created, and is more significant than any evidence for Lukan priority. "Minor agreements" are about the most difficult element for Markan priority, but I've not yet come by any that have posed any serious difficulties. They generally seem to be easily accounted for by harmonization between Matthew and Luke (Matthew seemed to be an early favorite and against whom the other gospels tended to be corrected) or coincidental correction of Mark based on better Greek usage, or specifically, better LXX usage (Mark no doubt uses the crudest and roughest Greek of the canonicals and is often polished up by Matthew and Luke. Mark also seems to generally have the most theologically problematic readings, too, which get cleared up in the rest of the triple tradition).

To this, Yuri responded with a claim that there are too many minor agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark to have Mark as merely the middle term. Walt pointed out that Yuri's number (actually Neirynck's number) was far too inflated and went with Streeter's far less number. Walt pointed out that many of the agreements were grammatical, cleaning up Mark's Greek, others went to harmonizing Mark with Old Greek, which also came from a small dispute on σχιζω v. ανοιγω in Mark. Yuri's claim was that ανοιγω was original, due to Luke's and Matthew's agreements on it, while Walt went with σχιζω claiming that Luke and Matthew both recognized the verb coming from the Greek Old Testament and changed it accordingly.

Going back to the number of agreements, this is where Stephen Carlson stepped in and showed that there was not much disagreement between Streeter and Neirynck, as Streeter only listed the positive agreements and Neirynck listed both positive agreements and omissions. Positive agreements in Neirynck's work was closer to 300 or so.

Stephen then cited a study done by Vinson:

There has actually been an experimental study (by R. Vinson) to determine just what the percentage of coincidental changes should be expected and he found that the actual level of coincidental agreements in his experiments is much lower than the level of MAs found in the synoptics. More experimental work is probably needed, but Vinson's work is good enough to be cautious in asserting that number of changes should coincidental without empirical support.

Walt replied with a question:

I'll definitely have to look at his work, but the immediate concern that comes to mind is devising a valid control group against which to compare. How did he do it? Did he have two or more groups edit/expand the same text and see how much of it was coincidental?

To which Stephen went further in detail about the study:

The full study is in his Ph.D. dissertation, Richard Bolling Vinson, "The Significance of the Minor Agreements as an Argument Against the Two-Document Hypothesis" (Duke Univ., 1984), but a more accessible summary is found in Richard Vinson, "How Minor? Assessing the Significance of the Minor Agreements as an Argument Against the Two-Document Hypothesis" in Questioning Q: A Multidimensional Critique (eds., Mark Goodacre and Nicholas Perrin; Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP, 2004), 151-164.

Vinson's chapter also includes responses to a critique of his study: Timothy A. Friedrischsen, "The Minor Agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark: Critical Observations on R. B. Vinson's Statistical Analysis," ETL 65 (1989): 395-408.

As far as your questions are concerned, it is yes to both. His control group was four Greek apologists (Justin, Athenagoras, Clement, and Pseudo-Justin) who cited and adapted the same classical texts (Plato, etc.) with the same types of variations that the synoptics made (omission, insertion, replacement, and displacement). He also had ten graduate students independently edit a common English text, and found that his grad students produced about the same level of coincidences as the Greek apologists, but both of them only about one-tenth the rate as that of the synoptics.

Vinson found that the differences in the Minor Agreement rates between the students and the Greek apologists was statistically insignificant (t = 1.13), but statistically significant well within P=0.0005 both between the students and the synoptics (t = 10.63) and between the Greek apologists and the synoptics (t = 8.70).

He also considered many possible sources of error and bias in his experimental set up and adequately addressed them (in my opinion).

Then Walter cautioned about the use of Plato during the study, since Mark had generally bad Greek grammar while Plato was the epitome of Classical Greek excellence. Stephen replied that indeed "rough grammar" was used, compared to normal style. Walt was quick to point out that English grammar has more ways of corrections than Greek did and the appeal to the LXX accounts for many of the factors.

Stephen replied:

In his dissertation (p. 375), Vinson characterized the essay as follows:

"I selected ten paragraphs from three student term papers submitted for undergraduate courses in religion. The criteria for selecting the paragraphs were first, that they dealt with which graduate students in New Testament were acquainted; and second, they contained obvious mistakes in grammar and style."

Then he gave the paragraphs to a group of ten graduate students in the Department of Religion at Duke, a group he tried to make them as theologically and educationally homogeneous as possible, which should make MAs more common. Yet they still couldn't agree in their changes as much as Matthew and Luke did. In fact, the editorial variation in the English-language experiment matched the control group's known independent editing for the Greek apologists instead.

The reason why the rate of MAs should be very low for independent editing goes beyond their common selection of what part of the source to edit, but their agreement in which edit of a range of possible edits that could be made. The minor agreements happen when the editors coincide on both decisions.

It is also easy to overstate how rough the style of Mark is. I wouldn't say that "Mark uses a lot of semiticisms" and not even Streeter went that far: "Mark's native tongue was Aramaic and his Greek is quite the most colloquial in the New Testament" (p.296). Colloquial does not mean semitic. Streeter's big example of the historic present is also popular feature of Latin. Streeter argued that one of the causes typically attributed to the MAs is that both Matt and Luke avoided Mark's historical present, so they changed it to another tense. Neirynck's study documented four different ways had Matt and Luke changed them (aorist, participle, imperfect, and idou "and behold"). It is their agreement in how they changed that creates so many of the MAs, not merely their desire to "improve" Mark. The first option was by far the most popular for Matt and Luke and the last two were fairly rare.

Particularly interesting to me is Luke's choice to go with idou. Of the 170+ historic presents in Mark, Luke changes four of them (against Mark 1:40 2:3 5:22 and 14:43). In all four places, Matt also changed the historic present to idou. Putting this in perspective, Luke has no other instance of using idou to replace a historic present in Mark, and Matt has done in only three other places (against Mark 3:31 4:37 and 5:15). Sure, Matt and Luke could well have happened to be both independently motivated to improve Mark's historic present, but their repeated agreement against Mark in chosing an unusual emendation (idou) hardly builds confidence in their independence.

While Walt said he was unfamiliar with the study and was going to check more into it, Yuri came returned reply by stating that even the omissions were significant since there were so many of them. Walt countered:

Not only are arguments from omission weaker, but there are about as many agreements in omission between Mt and Mk against Lk, and Mk and Lk against Mt, so it's not decisive in any one direction. When we look at the more important positive agreements, the agreements between Mk and Mt against Lk, or between Mk and Lk against Mt are much greater (Burton counts 1,600 agreements against Lk and 860 agreements against Mt, while 275 against Mk). Plus, Mt and Lk never agree against Mk in order of material, but agreements against Mt and Lk do occur. (See Burton, "Principles of Literary Criticism..." from Investigations Representing The Departments: Semitic Languages and Literatures, Biblical and Patristic Greek, pp. 207-210).

The big picture, even if you don't want to explain away any of the positive minor agreements, points to a source for the triple tradition that substantially resembles Mark.

Carlson brought up Farrer as a solution to the triple tradition. He says:

In a nutshell, the Farrer Theory holds that Mark was first, Matthew used Mark, and Luke used both Mark and Matthew. Q is unnecessary because Luke obtained the Double Tradition (both sayings and narrative), the Mark/Q overlaps, and the Minor Agreements from Matthew. Q is insufficient because, even with Q, one must still account for the MAs, the literary relationship between Mark and Q in the overlaps, the Mattheanisms in Q, and, to some extent, the presence of a narrative sequence in Q that resembles Matthew's.

Walt countering again:

But then you have to contend with explaining why Luke would've extracted "Q" material from Matthew and in each case placed it in different contexts in the Markan framework for his own narrative. Also, agreements in order of "Q" between Matthew and Luke are only 35/106 pericopae (by Kloppenborg's count). Why would Luke have also rearranged the order so liberally while he seems to maintain greater fidelity to Markan order than Matthew? Was Luke systematically biased against his Matthean source to such an extent that he recontextualized every Matthean addition and rearranged the order of 2/3 of that material? Q seems like a simpler solution, allowing each redactor to contextualize and order the material according to his own needs. Q seems to be a middle term for the double tradition material like Mark is for triple tradition material. Even if most MAs can't be easily accounted for (I'm confident they can), in light of the undoubted textual complexity of the gospels in the first couple centuries positing an Ur-Mark still seem like a simpler solutions than moving to Farrer.

The rest of the debate is very large so I will put that up later.

Interpolation in Matthew - Mt. 1:22-23

2005-04-05T17:38:00.000-05:00

τουτο δε ολον γεγνομαι ινα πληροω ο λεγω υπο κυριου δια του προφητου λεγοντος ιδου παρθενος εν γαστρι εξει και τεξεται υιον και καλεσουσιν το ονομα αυτους εμμανουηλ ο εστιν μεθερμηνευομενον μεθ ημων ο θεος

"Now all this [was] done that it may be accomplished that [which was] said by lord on account of the prophet saying, Lo, the virgin will have in utero and will bear a son, and they will call the name of him Emmanuel, which is translated with us [is] God."

This is almost a duplicate of verse 21, using the very same terminology. It seems to be a late redaction, not only evidenced by duplication, but also by completing verse 22 which sticks out from the rest of the narrative. There's no other instance of this type of interjection of the narrative in Matthew, but the earliest attestations show no variant here so if it is an interpolation it must be very early indeed.

The LXX version of this quote is δια τουτο δωσει κυριος αυτος υμιν σημειον ιδου η παρθενος εν γαστρι εξει και τεξεται υιον και καλεσεις το ονομα αυτου εμμανουηλ. Here Isaiah was referring to a sign that the Lord promises to Ahaz, and not really a messianic prophecy at all. It show LXX usage by using παρθενος as opposed to אלמה which correlates better with νεανις.

Raising this concern in the forum. At the time it came about correlating with tampering with the introduction of Matthew, specifically the geneology of Jesus in the first chapter, but the case stands by itself. Walter M. Shandruk raised the objection in a private correspondance about stylistic similarities with Matthew. This is easily solved through Matthew 2:15 which could have provided the framework for style on the quote.

Welcome!

2005-04-05T17:27:00.000-05:00

Welcome to my humble weblog! I created this out of a need to start communicating to the world what my forum was revealing. This will basically be the medium which I will summarize the debates of the forum. Also check out the main site, resources about early Christianity, and resources about early Judaism, and early Rome. I'll try to update everything as much as possible, but since I'm currently working on two projects simultaneously - a translation and commentary on The Gospel of Matthew and Juvenal's Satires - I might be delayed in several areas.

Chris Weimer