Codex Bezae (D05) Reading #9

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Aug 23 12:51:43 EDT 2002


At 10:38 AM -0400 8/23/02, Clwinbery at aol.com wrote:
>
>I do not have Metzger, Textual Commentary with me, but I know the committee
>often saw the difficult reading as the cause of the other readings. Is the
>truncated EMNHSTEUMENH (But remember the morphology in which a word whose
>stem begins with a double consonant like MN or ST often simply added E for
>reduplication - EGNWKA) the cause of two corrections?  Caesarean
>MEMNHSTEUMENHN and western - MEMNHSMENHN as Carl has pointed out from BDAG.
>Metzger describes the Western scribes as having a tendency to substitute
>synonyms without much cause. The other instances cited so far are indeed
>mostly synonyms. I think the D reading is both a correction of a perceived
>error and use of a word actually more appropriate to the context.

This does make sense, Carlton--that the scribe meant to correct a perceived
error. But I would repeat the two points I made earlier about this: (1) the
form EMNHSTEUMENH is in fact NOT erroneous but a legitimate perfect passive
participle of an active verb MNHSTEUW; (2) the form MEMNHSMENHN may be
intended as derived from MNAOMAI but as this is a "middle" (so-called
"deponent") verb, the form MEMNHSMENHN ought not to be thought of normally
as a "passive." And there's another point: (3) in Lk 2:5 Codex Bezae (D05)
reads SUN MARIA - TH EMNHSTEUMENH AUTW (w/o subcript iotas, of course,
while NA27/USB4 reads SUN MARIAM THi EMNHSTEUMENHi AUTWi. This suggests to
me that MARIA is given a Hellenized spelling and a true dative as opposed
to the indeclinable MARIAM and that EMNHSTEUMENH actually did stand in the
text copied by the scribe of Codex Bezae. I grant, of course, that this is
speculative.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
Most months:: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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