[B-Greek] Capital theta in John 1:18?

George F Somsel gfsomsel at yahoo.com
Wed Dec 16 11:39:15 EST 2009


Unless we can manage to get into the mind of the final editors who decided in one instance to use lower case and in the other to use upper case, whatever we say will necessarily be guesswork.  My personal judgement is that there were two separate editors, and that one editor thought QEOS was a name while the other did not. 
 george
gfsomsel 


… search for truth, hear truth, 
learn truth, love truth, speak the truth, hold the truth, 
defend the truth till death.


- Jan Hus
_________ 




________________________________
From: Daniel Buck <bucksburg at yahoo.com>
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Wed, December 16, 2009 10:16:27 AM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Capital theta in John 1:18?

John Owlett wrote:
>>In NA27, the first letter of John 1:18 is a capital theta.

IN UBS4, it is a lower case theta.

Why the difference?<<

Barry replied:

>A matter of editorial choice.  No such distinction would have been employed in the earliest manuscripts.<


I think John wanted to know *why* the editors made that choice. Since Barry has speculated on the format of the archetype, I guess I'm free to speculate on the editor's motives. I think they were trying to make a distinction between 'the' God of the first QEON in the verse, and 'a' god of the second QEOS.

But I jest. Nestle capitalized it, and he probably got it that way from Tischendorf. The distinction may be traceable all the way back to 2e for all I know. This is just one example of how a reading can be carried over from an exemplar without a further thought.

As far as the anarthrous structure is concerned, might it be due to a reluctance to begin a Gk sentence with TON?

Daniel Buck


      
---
B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
B-Greek mailing list
B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek



      


More information about the B-Greek mailing list