[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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