* (asterisk) in the body Text of NA27
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Sep 18 15:46:18 EDT 2002
At 10:39 AM -0700 9/18/02, c stirling bartholomew wrote:
>In the first chapter of Mark there are several asterisks in the body text of
>NA27.
>
>Consulting the key at the end of NA27 I translate the Latin (dynamic
>equivalence) "the beginning of a new section where it does not make sense."
I don't know whether that was meant ironically or not, but I make out the
Latin (INITIUM NOVAE SECTIONIS, UBI ID PER SE NON INTELLEGITUR as
"beginningof a new section where that is not self-evident" and its German
version in the inset manual of signs ("Anfang eines Abschnittes in alten
Einteilungen {wenn nötig}") to mean: "Beginning of a section in old/ancient
text-divisions--if called for."
>This leaves one question unanswered. The beginning of a new section in WHAT?
>Some ms. ? Some critical edition? The TR?
>
>Could someone clear this up?
Look at the Introduction (the ENGLISH introduction), p. 79 for an
explanation of how the numbers in the INNER margins of NA27 are used with
and without the asterisk as references to the Eusebian canon. My sense of
what is being indicated is that where the numbers referring to the Eusebian
canon coincide with new sections of text as printed in NA27 (and in terms
of later chapter-and-verse-divisions), there's no need to indicate where
that new text section begins; but where the beginning of the Eusebian
text-division falls WITHIN a verse at a point that is not self-evident, the
asterisk is used to indicate that point. Thus on p. 88 of NA27 there's an
asterisk before ERCETAI hO ISCUROTEROS in Mk 1:7; the inner margine refers
to the Eusebian table and section beginning there; similarly on p. 89
there's an asterisk before KAI hOI AGGELOI DIHKONOUN AUTWi and the inner
margin indicates section 7 of Eusebian canon VI.
All pretty arcane, I guess, but part of the very elaborate mechanism
whereby NA27 means to make it possible for the reader to know all that is
significant about the way the text was read in the ancient church,
sometimes far more than most students of the Greek NT really want to know!
--
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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