Ignatius, To the Magnesians, 11

Ταῦτα δέ, ἀγαπητοί μου, οὐκ ἐπεὶ ἔγνων τινὰς ἐξ ὑμῶν οὕτως ἔχοντας, ἀλλʼ ὡς μικρότερος ὑμῶν θέλω προφυλάσσεσθαι ὑμᾶς μὴ ἐμπεσεῖν εἰς τὰ ἄγκιστρα τῆς κενοδοξίας, ἀλλὰ πεπληροφορῆσθαι ἐν τῇ γεννήσει καὶ τῷ πάθει καὶ τῇ ἀναστάσει τῇ γενομένῃ ἐν καιρῷ τῆς ἡγεμονίας Ποντίου Πιλάτου· πραχθέντα ἀληθῶς καὶ βεβαίως ὑπὸ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, τῆς ἐλπίδος ἡμῶν, ἧς ἐκτραπῆναι μηδενὶ ὑμῶν γένοιτο.
Holmes, M. W. (1999). The Apostolic Fathers : Greek texts and English translations (Updated ed.) (Ign. Magn. 11). Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books.

I am not writing these things, my beloved, because I have learned that some of you are behaving like this. But as one who is less important than you I want to protect you from being snagged by the fish hooks of worthless ideas. You should be fully convinced of the birth and suffering and resurrection that occurred in the time of the governor Pontius Pilate. These things were truly and certainly done by Jesus Christ, our hope. From this hope may none of you turn away.
Erhman, B. (2002) The Apostolic Fathers (Ign. Magn. 11). Series: Loeb Classical Library, vol. 23. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

If the sitemeter reports are to be believed, sometime in the next 24 hours ricoblog will top 100,000 visitors.

And that doesn't include folks who actually subscribe to and read from RSS feeds. Yikes.

Thanks to all who read or stumble here. I'm continually amazed that folks actually would sign up to read my meanderings. Thanks for your support and encouragement.

Update (2007-04-27): Visitor 100,000 was just here, arriving at 5:35 AM (my time, UTC-7 w/Daylight Savings), visiting from Ankara, Turkey (UTC+2, so 14:35 or 2:35 PM). The visitor arrived from a Google search via Google.com.tr for "participle clauses in context". The lucky post was "Ephesians 5 and Clauses". Hopefully you found what you were looking for!

If you went "huh?" when you read that title then you haven't thought about how "Oxyrhynchus" would translate into English.

The "What's New in Papyrology" blog pointed to mention of a book by this title awhile back. Today they pointed to a review of City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt (amazon.com) in the New Statesman.

Do check out the review. The book sounds fantastic.

Are you familiar with the "Best Blogs about Biblical Studies" community ranking/list thing going on at Amazon's UnSpun?

Somehow, ricoblog is placed barely in the top 10 at #9 (and that has been fairly steady since late last week). There are, at present, over 100 blogs listed. I am amazed, humbled and flattered all at the same time.

I'm unsure how to receive this. Part of me thinks "what are people thinking?!"; the other part thinks "my, there are a bunch of smart, well-informed and intellectually curious folks ranking those blogs".

I think I'll choose the second part.

Side note, though. Have you checked the individual rankings of folks in the "Most recently ranked by" list on the right margin of the page? Many folks have only voted for one or two blogs, and most of those seem to be associated with the voter. (Hey, I'm guilty of this too, see?) So it looks like the people who take the time to rank are more interested in making sure their own stuff is near the top; they're not necessarily interested in ranking blogs. That said, however, the ones rising to the top seem to be those that are ranked well by non-blog-authors.

In the "Why aren't they ranked higher?" department, here are the blogs that have low rankings that I just don't get. You should read these (at least have 'em on your feed) if you don't already:

• Biblicalia
• Thoughts on Antiquity

Here's the list at present:

Update (2007-04-24): Link changed from "Top 50 ... " to "Best Blogs about Biblical Studies". Apologies to Airton for getting it wrong the first time.

Check out these reviews out from RBL:

Charles E. Hill
From the Lost Teaching of Polycarp: Identifying Irenaeus' Apostolic Presbyter and the Author of Ad Diognetum
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5512
Reviewed by Mark Weedman

Matthew Brook O'Donnell
Corpus Linguistics and the Greek of the New Testament
http://www.bookreviews.org/bookdetail.asp?TitleId=5362
Reviewed by Paul Elbert

I own and have read both books. The review of Hill's is spot on from my perspective; more folks need to read and interact with the material Hill presents. I'd say the review of O'Donnell's book is overly pedantic but worth reading.

Roger Pearse (who is always dabbling in very interesting things) reported on Thoughts on Antiquity his inability to find a reasonably priced general introduction to Armenian in English, and the inability to find an Armenian-English dictionary. I responded in the comments with a lead on a dictionary (Bedrossian's, which is mentioned in Thomson's intro as the Armenian-English dictionary to start with). I haven't looked for it in awhile, but I had never been able to find a decently-priced edition of Bedrossian's dictionary (maybe Wipf & Stock will do it someday?)

For some reason I'm fascinated by things Armenian though I have yet to do any serious reading or study on the language (outside of sections in Metzger's Early Versions and Vööbus' Early Versions). It's one of those things on my mental "stuff to study someday" list.

So imagine my surprise when Roger posted a follow-up to his original post pointing us all to the Leiden Armenian Lexical Database. This site has dictionaries (including Bedrossian) and, more importantly, some lexically analyzed texts, including Jonah and the Gospels of Luke and John (from Zohrab's edition) along with Cox's edition of Deuteronomy! Zounds! With a lemmatized John and a dictionary, and Thomson in print at my side, it makes working through the text to familiarize myself with the language that much more approachable!

Now, I just need about four more hours in each day ...

I'll discuss Atticism in more detail later (likely in part 4 of my Thorough-going Eclecticism series) but I wanted to mention this now.

Just last night I was reviewing some areas that J.K. Elliott chalks up to atticism and was thinking, "so how do we know what an atticism is?" I mean, my one year of Greek at a formal learning institution was Attic (my autodidact efforts have focused largely on Koine/Hellenistic). I remember the biggies (e.g. Attic ττ shifts to Koine σσ, πραττω to πρασσω) but not much more.

Later in the evening I was reading Caragounis' The Development of Greek and the New Testament (amazon.com). Imagine my surprise when I ran across his section on Atticism, pp. 120-140 where he reproduces lists from Phrynichos (424 words!) and Moiris (less than 50 words) that could be helpful when reviewing variants for possible atticism.

[This is part of a series of posts looking at "thorough-going eclecticism" as practiced by J.K. Elliott in his book The Greek Text of the Epistles to Timothy and Titus. See the introductory post for more information. --RWB]

As a part of Elliott's first principle, line omission is pretty much the same as homoiteleuton (though not necessarily with the same start/same end type thing) only on a grander scale. Instead of skipping letters or words of an exemplar, one or more lines are skipped. Elliott writes:

Another cause of omission is line-omission. Clark in his Acts of the Apostles (38) shows how the shorter text of Acts was frequently the result of line omission. ... This cause of omission is less demonstrable in the Pastoral epistles, (Elliott 6-7).

There are not many examples; I will list two here.

• 1Ti 1.14. Elliott uses line omission to explain what happened in MS 1518 (a XIV/XV cent. MS in Jerusalem) at this verse. The NA27 has the following:

14 ὑπερεπλεόνασεν δὲ ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν μετὰ πίστεως καὶ ἀγάπης τῆς ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ. (1Ti 1.14, NA27)

MS 1518, according to Elliott, has this:

14 ὑπερεπλεόνασεν δὲ ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστῷ. (1Ti 1.14, MS 1518)

The difference is obvious; instead of being about "the over-abundant grace of our Lord with faith and love in Christ Jesus" it is now about "the over-abundant grace of our Lord Jesus Christ". Elliott posits the following:

The omission may represent one or two lines of an exemplar. The scribe's eye passed from του κυ ημων to the divine names, which he inverts and alters to ιυ χω to follow του κυ ημων.

That's one way to explain 1518's variant. I'm skeptical, though. If it is simple line omission, why would the further change in word order be made except to make sense of the verse with the omission? And wouldn't that imply knowledge of the omission by the scribe?

• 1Ti 6.5. In this case Elliott accepts a longer text that has some decent testimony against the shorter text of Siniaticus and Alexandrinus. NA27 has the following:

5 διαπαρατριβαὶ διεφθαρμένων ἀνθρώπων τὸν νοῦν καὶ ἀπεστερημένων τῆς ἀληθείας, νομιζόντων πορισμὸν εἶναι τὴν εὐσέβειαν. (NA27)

5 διαπαρατριβαὶ διεφθαρμένων ἀνθρώπων τὸν νοῦν καὶ ἀπεστερημένων τῆς ἀληθείας, νομιζόντων πορισμὸν εἶναι τὴν εὐσέβειαν [αφιστασο απο των τοιουτων]. (Elliott's reading)

Elliott's longer text is the Byzantine reading (translated by the NKJV as "from such withdraw yourself"). He notes the following support: D^c K L Ψ P 061. T.R. and most minuscules. Lect. Byz. L (vg DLT). Arm. Goth. EthPP. L (vt mon. m.) and a host of Fathers to boot. He appeals to the validity of the omitted text on the basis of style and further posits its omission due to line omission.

If original, the omission could be accounted for, by the careless omission of one line of the exemplar. If secondary, the longer reading would be a gloss introduced to the text. In view of the above comments on the language [the previous paragraph discussed style] the former is more likely. Accept the longer reading. (Elliott 94)

So in this case Elliott uses line omission to explain the omission. He does this only after he has justified that the text is worthy of including on the basis of style.

So, line omission can be a way to argue for the inclusion of the longer text (yes, the rule of brevior lectio potior isn't always right; it is a guideline and not a rule) when the longer text makes sense based on author style or when the vast majority of quality witnesses include the text. At least, that's the way I'd apply it; I'd guess Elliott would not necessarily qualify the statement as I do.

Next up: Author's Style and Usage