[B-Greek] INA GINWSKOMEN - 1Jn 5:20

Carlton Winbery winberycl at earthlink.net
Fri Jul 11 19:58:31 EDT 2008


Randall egrapse:

>Carlton egrapse:
>
>>  This does involve a textual problem, however which way is the
>problem. Just because Metzger and the committee chose not to consider
>it in the Textual Commentary or in the UBS texts does not mean that
>the indicative could not be original. The Nestle-Aland 27th gives the
>data and the claim of the indicative to originality is strong. In
>fact in the face of the Alexandrian heavy weights, Aleph, A, B, & 33,
>UBS chose to ignore the fact that -KOMEN must be the original which
>gave rise to -KWMEN as a correction. I would consider that the
>indicative is most likely original and would be an instance of the
>use of the indicative with hINA. N.-A. 27 does print the subjunctive
>but the 25th edition gives the sign in the aparatus that the editors
>think that the indicative has a strong case to be original.
>Tischendorf, Westcott/Hort, Merk and Souter list the indicative as
>original.
>
>>I do not want to start a discussion of TC over this, just to say that
>the scribes who passed on the indicative must be considered, and the
>use of the indicative dealt with.
>
>>Carlton Winbery
>
>I appreciate Carlton's conclusion that the "indicative" must be dealt
>with.
>
>There is one more dimension to consider.
>GINWSKOMEN  is pronounced the same as GINWSKWMEN in the
>first century. The YPOTAKTIKH 'subjunctive'  was functional
>and part of the language even when it was not always marked
>unambiguously. I am certain that anyone who heard INA GINWSKOMEN
>being read out loud would have 'heard' a subjunctive, no matter how it
>was spelled. I also have no doubt that a writer could 'think'
>YPOTAKTIKH and write GINWSKOMEN. I do similar things every day.
>What is amazing to me is that the 'indicative spelling' is preserved in a
>significant group of manuscripts. In antiquity people would have received
>letters all the time with cross-spellings of such homonyms.
>
>So I would call 1Jo 5:20 GINWSKOMEN a subjunctive, though as a
>probable/possible misspelling or sub-standard spelling.
>
>
>--
>Randall Buth, PhD

Randall is certainly right about the hearing of the omega and 
omicron. Also the ear was much more involved in the textual process 
than we have imagined. Most who copied from an exemplar read the text 
aloud as they made their copies. This does open the possibility of a 
mistake of hearing. However, I still think that the change from a 
correct statement (hINA -WMEN) to an incorrect statement probably 
would not have happened over such a wide area.
So the use of the indicative hear is a possible eg. of hINA with an indicative.

Carlton Winbery
-- 
Carlton L. Winbery
Retired Professor of Religion
Louisiana College
318-448-6103
winberycl at earthlink.net



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