[B-Greek] KAQWS (Travis Jackson)

George F Somsel gfsomsel at juno.com
Wed Jun 15 10:43:01 EDT 2005


On Wed, 15 Jun 2005 07:11:04 -0700 trepp at telus.net writes:

> > 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.
____________

Do you have a reference for that statement by Tertullian?  I would be
interested to check it out, but I don't feel like looking it up since I'm
not certain whether he even uses the words you used (silly me, of course
he didn't since he wrote in Latin).

george
gfsomsel
___________



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