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John 8:12 (א-01) ἔζει "he was boiling" the light of life

Posted: January 10th, 2016, 8:51 pm
by Stephen Hughes
Alan,
This is a "chain of evidence" question about the CNTR.

I remember that there was a spelling mistake in the the photo of the manuscript when Peter Mänder was planning his tattoo. In John 8:12, Codex Sinaiticus has a mis-spelling of ἔξει τὸ φῶς τῆς ζωῆς "he will have the light of life" as ἔζει τὸ φῶς τῆς ζωῆς "he was boiling the light of life".

Personally, I feel that small (human) errors in the text are a reminder to us to worship the person whom the book is about, rather than the book itself as faultless. I would rather see them presented openly so we can see our common human frailty.

In your Center for New Testament Restoration (CNTR) project, you have generally recorded / presented a "corrected" transcription of the manuscript, rather than the actual manuscript including minor orthographic errors like this. What is your general editorial policy, or what was the policy of the sites / sources, from which you have taken the data presented on your site?

Re: John 8:12 (א-01) ἔζει "he was boiling" the light of life

Posted: January 11th, 2016, 7:59 pm
by Jonathan Robie
Alan is generally pretty painstaking, down to recording whether each individual character is legible, and using the original spellings. I'm not sure your generalization is true, and I'm not sure you are right about this particular example.

Here is the relevant text from http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/:
εξει.png
εξει.png (103.99 KiB) Viewed 1613 times
I'm not good at reading papyrii, but it looks like this character was illegible and corrected on the original manuscript. When I look at the ζ in the last word, ζωηϲ, it doesn't look like the character you are talking about could have originally been a ζ in that scribe's handwriting, it's missing at least the bottom line. Perhaps the scribe started to write ζ, recognized the mistake half-way through, corrected it ti χ, thought again, and wrote ξ above the line as the correct letter?

Alan doesn't seem to have a category that precisely captures all that. What do other people do for such transcriptions? Personally, I'd rather see his data released before adding to the kinds of things he might choose to record to cover this case, especially if it is not common practice to record that level of detail.

Re: John 8:12 (א-01) ἔζει "he was boiling" the light of life

Posted: January 11th, 2016, 8:23 pm
by Jonathan Robie
Another note: the Codex Sinaiticus project provides two transcriptions for this word, εχει and εξει, based on the two scribal corrections I highlighted above.

Code: Select all

<app>
<rdg type="main-corr"><w n="29">εχει</w></rdg>
<rdg type="corr" n="ca"><w n="29">εξει</w></rdg>
</app> 

Re: John 8:12 (א-01) ἔζει "he was boiling" the light of life

Posted: January 11th, 2016, 8:29 pm
by Alan Bunning
Yes, I am not sure what Stephen is talking about. I do show damages states of letters as well as edits made. In this case, the correction presumably occurs after 400 AD, and I only retain edits that occur before 400 AD. I am not interested in changes scribes made after that.

Re: John 8:12 (א-01) ἔζει "he was boiling" the light of life

Posted: January 11th, 2016, 8:40 pm
by Stephen Hughes
Jonathan Robie wrote:I'm not good at reading papyrii, but it looks like this character was illegible and corrected on the original manuscript. When I look at the ζ in the last word, ζωηϲ, it doesn't look like the character you are talking about could have originally been a ζ in that scribe's handwriting, it's missing at least the bottom line. Perhaps the scribe started to write ζ, recognized the mistake half-way through, corrected it ti χ, thought again, and wrote ξ above the line as the correct letter?

Alan doesn't seem to have a category that precisely captures all that. What do other people do for such transcriptions? Personally, I'd rather see his data released before adding to the kinds of things he might choose to record to cover this case, especially if it is not common practice to record that level of detail.
Yes. You are completely right. :oops: I had assumed that spelling mistake in the photo was from the scribe and not from Peter.
Alan Bunning wrote:Yes, I am not sure what Stephen is talking about. I do show damages states of letters as well as edits made. In this case, the correction presumably occurs after 400 AD, and I only retain edits that occur before 400 AD. I am not interested in changes scribes made after that.
Thank you for that. I'm sorry for my earlier misinterpretation.

Re: John 8:12 (א-01) ἔζει "he was boiling" the light of life

Posted: January 11th, 2016, 10:16 pm
by Jonathan Robie
Stephen Hughes wrote:Yes. You are completely right. :oops: I had assumed that spelling mistake in the photo was from the scribe and not from Peter.
So ... does this mean that one of us needs to break the news to Peter?

Re: John 8:12 (א-01) ἔζει "he was boiling" the light of life

Posted: January 11th, 2016, 10:43 pm
by Stephen Hughes
Jonathan Robie wrote:
Stephen Hughes wrote:Yes. You are completely right. :oops: I had assumed that spelling mistake in the photo was from the scribe and not from Peter.
So ... does this mean that one of us needs to break the news to Peter?
Thank goodness, no. It seems that that it was corrected by during the discussion of here. The mosttthird last line in the first column has the Xi. Phew.

Re: John 8:12 (א-01) ἔζει "he was boiling" the light of life

Posted: January 12th, 2016, 10:18 am
by Jonathan Robie
Stephen Hughes wrote:
Jonathan Robie wrote:So ... does this mean that one of us needs to break the news to Peter?
Thank goodness, no. It seems that that it was corrected by during the discussion of here. The mosttthird last line in the first column has the Xi. Phew.
Here's what I see.
εζει.png
εζει.png (25.41 KiB) Viewed 1534 times
To me, that's "none of the above", it looks like a capital sigma, a form not used in Sinaiticus. It's not a ζ, see the last word in this image for ζωης. It's not a lunar sigma or χ or ξ. I do think I should mention this to Peter. I have no idea if tattoos can be repaired, or if he would want to do so.

Re: John 8:12 (א-01) ἔζει "he was boiling" the light of life

Posted: January 12th, 2016, 10:30 am
by Stephen Hughes
Look at νυξ in the first line if the third column.The top of a capital sigma woukd reach forward, not back. His back reads έξει which is an attested reading - the one most attested.