[B-Greek] Mark 7:18-19

Iver Larsen iver_larsen at sil.org
Tue Nov 3 02:03:10 EST 2009


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tony Pope" <borikayaama_tekiri at sil.org>
To: "B-Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: 2. november 2009 22:46
Subject: [B-Greek] Mark 7:18-19


> To comment first on a couple of Iver's points, I don't think it is correct to
> say that KAQARIZON is
> a "fairly late reading" and pass it off as a copyists' lapse due to
> inattention. The earliest Greek
> MSS that read it are in fact Sigma/042 and Phi/043, from the 6th century.
> Neither the NA apparatus
> nor Wieland in his Textual Commentary are aware of these (nor incidentally is
> Caragounis in his
> book).

Thanks for the updated textual history. However, I just want to mention that the
attested age of a reading and the reason for the differences are two independent
issues. There are many accidental mistakes in the mss, even early ones including 
the papyri. It seems to me that we are spending too much time and effort trying 
to make sense of a faulty reading which cannot make sense. I know that you have 
often said that a reading can be TOO difficult to claim the right to be 
original, and that is IMO the case with KAQARIZON.

> More to the point, it should be borne in mind that the Sinaitic Syriac version
> (4th - 5th c.)
> presupposes a clause that is integral with the preceding speech. Mrs Lewis
> (who discovered the MS)
> translated it as "that not everything which entereth into a man defileth him,
> because it entereth
> not into his heart, but into the belly, and is cast out, and all meat [= food]
> is purged." Matthew
> Black (Aramaic Approach) translates it as "... for it enters not his heart but
> his belly, all the
> food being cast out and purged away." So that version, as well as the Greek
> Codex Bezae (5th c.) and
> several other early versions, do not presuppose the interpretation of Origen.

I cannot comment on these translations from Syriac or assumed underlying 
Aramaic, apart from saying that they are not translations of the Greek text we 
are studying, and therefore carries very little weight. I suppose the mistaken 
translation "purge" in the KJV was caused by them trying to make sense of the 
faulty reading in the mss available to them. "Purge" is not within the semantic 
range of KAQARIZW and does not occur in either BAGD or L&N.

>
> Regarding the question mark after BRWMATA in the Nestle editions, whether you
> call this "recent"
> depends on what you mean by recent. I see from archive.org that Nestle's 5th
> edition (1906) has the
> question mark after BRWMATA, but his 2nd edition (1899) has it after
> EKPOREUETAI. Nestle originally
> constructed his text by majority agreement of the editions of Westcott & Hort,
> Tischendorf's 8th and
> Weymouth. Then in 1901 he substituted Weiss for Weymouth. Both Tischendorf's
> 8th and Weiss have the
> question mark after BRWMATA and so they overruled Westcott & Hort. (The first
> UBS edition of 1966
> follows W-H but the third follows Nestle.)

Is the punctuation decision not derived from whether they read KAQARIZWN or 
KAQARIZON?

>
> Personally, in the past I always accepted the position of the modern English
> versions, but reading
> more widely of late makes me more doubtful. Evidently it's reasonable enough
> to suppose that
> KAQARIZWN could refer back to KAI LEGEI. Field cites a similar example from
> Xenophon (Anabasis
> 7.1.22), though the intervening passage there is only about half as long. But
> I tend to sympathize
> with John Sanders' concern that there is nothing else in the text that
> suggests that this is what
> Mark is getting at. It wouldn't surprise me if Origen and other expositors had
> taken this clause out
> of context because it expressed such a good truth when read as Mark's comment.
>
> I don't quite see why people label the clause as nonsense if it is taken as
> part of Jesus' words.
> KAQARIZW can be taken in a literal sense just as much as in a ritual sense,
> and presumably as with
> KAQAIRW its object can just as well be the undesirable item that gets cleared
> away as the thing that
> is cleared of something undesirable.

I don't think so. KAQARIZW and KAQAIRW are two different words with different 
meanings. The first is common in the NT for cleanse or purify, the second is 
only found in John 15:2 and has the sense of "clean out" or "prune" in the 
context of a vine. There are examples outside the NT of "cleaning out the soul." 
But you cannot "clean out the food" or even "clean out the filth". It is the 
person or soul that is object for the cleansing, not the undesirable item.
It is true that in Mark 7:19 the word is used in an extended sense of "declaring 
to be clean/pure/acceptable for eating." But even this extended meaning cannot 
have the undesirable item as its object.

> Also, there seems to be a question mark
> over the sense of the
> word BRWMATA. Alexander Pallis (A Few Notes on the Gospels According to St
> Matthew and St Mark,
> 1903, also online at archive.org) argues from modern Greek that it means
> "filth" in this context
> rather than food, i.e. referring to excreted material; see also the entry in
> LSJ, sense III. And
> Black in his Aramaic Approach makes a similar remark about Aramaic 'ukhla.
> Thus taken, IMO it fits
> the context well enough.

Again I disagree. BRWMA is common enough in the NT with a clear meaning: food. 
If a similar word in Aramaic or Modern Greek includes a different sense, that is 
not an argument to add that sense to the word as used in the NT.
In any case, if it meant "filth" it could not be used as an object for KAQARIZW.

Iver Larsen 




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