[B-Greek] KAQWS (Travis Jackson)

trepp at telus.net trepp at telus.net
Wed Jun 15 10:11:04 EDT 2005


> Message: 7
> Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 08:11:00 -0400
> From: "Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad at ioa.com>
> Subject: Re: [B-Greek] KAQWS
> To: B-Greek b-greek <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
> Message-ID: <2EF49E52-7B19-42B3-AC6E-175F20046AFD at ioa.com>
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> The punctuation is, of course, the editors' indication of how they  
> understand the phrasing to be articulated; it isn't in the MSS  
> themselves. And certainly the articulation of these opening verses of  
> Mark presents some difficulties I myself would prefer to insert a  
> raised dot rather than a period at the end of verse 1. The apparatus  
> in UBS4 shows that some editors have placed a colon at this point,  
> others a comma, still others no punctuation at all. As I noted above,  
> I would prefer to understand this segment, "Beginning of the gospel- 
> message of jesus Christ, God's son:" as pointing forward to the  
> entire sequence beginning with verse 2 and extending through verse 4.
As far as punctuation goes, how do certain early statements of Church Fathers 
fit into a nonpunctuated writing system? Since there are early mss without 
punctuation as is said to be later inserted to attempt to enhance clarity, what 
do we make of Tertullian saying he memorized even the punctuation of Holy 
Scripture? I know he read mainly in Latin - but could the punctuated mss he 
dictated to memory have been based on very early punctuated Greek mss? How 
early did Greek writing have punctuation that we know of? 
And in the Shepherd of Hermas, a big deal is made of his copying a Book letter 
for letter in which there was no separation of letter sequence between words - 
but he was noted to have interpretted the mss, so that he could rightly 
separate the words and make sense of what he copied. Would that be an 
indication that in his day many already expected punctuated versions of texts 
for ecclesiastical use?
These questions may seem a silly aside, but they popped up none the less.




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