jgibson000

I care about this -- especially as I previously asked him very much the same questions you are asking now.

FWIW, he has already admitted that his claims have no grounding in fact in as much as he used a variety of means to avoid answering them directly, and he never produced any evidence whatsoever or was able to cite any authority to back up his claims.

Jeffrey Gibson

Nazaroo

I have admitted no such thing. But rewrite history any way you wish, since you are living in a fantasy world.



...and you sign your name to this?

As far as anyone with eyes and a brain can see, I'm the ONLY one who has produced any evidence whatsoever, in the form of color photos of rare manuscripts, and quotations and the work of real scholars who personally handled, examined for hours, days, in some cases years, the actual manuscripts, collated them carefully and double- and triple- checked their own work and that of their predecessors, and published the Principal Editions and facsimiles of the books.

Must you dirty up every thread before it even gets off the ground? Remind me never to let you anywhere near the cockpit of an aircraft during takeoff, flight or landing. You'll be handcuffed to the seat or stuffed in the cargo hold, Jack.



Armchair 'critics' such as our friend Mr. Gibson here do not make a wholly negative contribution, and so we can be grateful for one thing. He represents quite blatantly everything that is wrong currently with the world of academia.

Jesus in His day had an appropriate word to say about such people:

"Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
For you don't lift a finger to help men in their work,
and refuse to do any yourselves."

By contrast, Gibson helps us to understand what is the best in science, and what is really essential. Science is the practice of measuring as far as possible what can be tangibly measured, and limiting our conclusions to, but also willingly committing ourselves to the probabilities that the evidence suggests.


To address ALL the other instances of dots in even one manuscript is beyond the scope of this thread. But this is not necessary. In reasonably scaled scientific investigations we make samples of large populations, and make do with projections and probabilities.

And there is the common Law of Diminishing Returns at work here too: Places even in the same manuscript far away from the area of interest will have less connection to, less reliability concerning, and less relevance to the usage of the marks on our page. For instance, often more than one scribe will be responsible for copying a manuscript, and we must note where one leaves off and another begins, as well as consider the work of the 'diotores' (overseer/corrector) of the manuscript.

How a mark or symbol is used in one part of a manuscript versus another can also be influenced by the exemplar or mastercopy. For instance, marks copied from a manuscript of John might differ in their usage from the same marks found in Matthew, even though the same scribe may be responsible for the final surviving manuscript containing both books.

This is actually not all that difficult. There is no need to complicate it needlessly. We shall clarify this when we deal with Codex Sinaiticus in a bit more detail.

It doesn't. In true scientific analysis nothing NECESSARILY means this or that. But a scientist accepts the probabilities. The most plausible explanations become the working explanations until a better one is proposed, tested, and displaces the previous theory or hypothesis.

Again, the usage of 'proof' is foreign to the true scientific method. 'proofs' and 'proving' are for courts of law, which operate on principles far different than science. Scientists aren't concerned to 'prove' this or that, but only to present all the relevant evidence that can be gathered and confirmed independantly if possible, and preferring the most plausible explanation of mechanisms and motivations of processes.

Nothing in science however is "merely speculation". You are setting up a strawman in the form of a needless and exaggerated dichotomy which suggests an 'either/or' scenario in which something is either "proved" or "mere speculation". This also is foreign to science.

Although science often makes use of "disproof", there is never really any such thing as "proof". Scientific philosophical analysis has long recognised that the nature of "proof" in scientific methodology is entirely negative in kind:

One can always "disprove" that all blackbirds are black by finding a grey blackbird, but one can never "prove" that all blackbirds are black. One can only choose it as a working hypothesis, and see if it has any use.

jgibson000

Not directly no. But you certainly did indirectly in as much as you never gave direct answers to my questions, but instead spent all of your -- as you do in the message below -- dodging them.


Unlike you, I take personal responsibility for what I say.

Evidence of what? That there are dots in manuscripts? So what? No one doubts that there are such dots, nor has there been any dispute over this claim.

The question you haven't ever produced any evidence for, or cited any of the text critics you mention as supporting, is your claim about what these dots signify.

Wow. All of those electrons spilled, and still not a single one of the questions put to you answered!

Ben C Smith

To help the casual reader to evaluate this claim, I here post two scans from the same page of Sinaiticus that lacks the pericope de adultera and a third from another page in John. First:



I have circled two suspended dots. The first is the dot after John 7.52 and before John 8.12, where the pericope of the adulteress would be, but is not. The second is after John 8.12 and before John 8.13; it happens to fall at the end of a line.

Second:



This suspended dot falls after John 8.16a (but I am not alone) and before 8.16b (rather [it is] I and the one who sent me).

Third:



These suspended dots are all over Sinaiticus. This one comes after John 9.25.

(BTW, there is no need to rely on the Tischendorf facsimile any longer. The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts has actual scans of Sinaiticus available, and I have its NT portion referenced by folio on my site; the folio that lacks John 7.53-8.11 is 53a.)

Ben.

Riverwind

Excellent, Ben. I can certainly appreciate the work you put into indexing those images!

Well, Nazaroo, I noticed that you responded to my 2 points, but you seem to have missed or avoided the point of both of them. For No. 1, you simply said you can't address "all" the examples. I don't think I asked you to do that. I just want you to show more than the one example of John 8:1-11 as being marked with one of these "text-critical marks" (heck, even one other such example would help your case). Presenting that kind of information is what helps lead others from mere possibility to probability (as you have mentioned).

Unfortunately, you did not discuss No. 2 and only said that you'd address it later. When? If it is as easy as you say to determine whether it is a "dot space", "space dot", "space dot space", or "no space dot no space" and it is easy to determine what each of these indicate, then please explain and help us to understand.

Riverwind

P.S. - Nazaroo, you seem to keep referring to Comfort & Barrett's work as the "Primary Edition" of the manuscripts you've listed. That would be incorrect. I don't believe that Comfort & Barrett's work is a "Primary Edition" of any of the manuscripts it contains.

Nazaroo

We'll comment on Ben's post shortly.
I won't bicker about what you think you meant. My answers to your questions stand fine as they are.

I am amazed at the impatience people seem to have. I responded to your request with EIGHT entire posts complete with photos and a basic analysis of P66 within a half-hour of you opening your thread.

I can't speed things up any faster than that, so you may as well slow down.


Again, I'll try to clarify when I come to deal with Sinaiticus.

But for God's sake don't muddy the waters any more. There are not four different types of 'dots and spaces' or combinations thereof.

It really is a lot simpler than that, although not as simple as Ben above has made out.

The two basic cases are these:

(1) Dots incorporated into the text on the first pass by the original scribe.

(2) Dots added AFTER the page was penned. Many of these dots can be easily differentiated on the basis of two things:

a) the original scribe didn't allow a space for them, and so they are not a true "space and dot" but just a dot added later by an unknown hand.

b) they are often in the margin or at the end of a line.

The obvious problem with this second group of dots is that they can be given no credible authority since they can easily be distinguished from the original scribe, but cannot be associated with certainty to any other scribe or even the age in which they were added.

For instance, Codex Sinaiticus has been worked over by a dozen or more hands over almost eight centuries, and anyone of those 'correctors' or even other unknown parties could have added the dots, at any time between the 5th to the 15th centuries.

Because of this, the second group of dots, those added by later hands, cannot be given any authority, or even a fixed single meaning or purpose.

So the obvious procedure is to ignore the dots subsequently added by later parties and only consider the dots that can definitely be or with high probability be assigned to the original scribe. These dots can be granted the same date and authority as the original scribe who executed the manuscript in about 320-330 A.D.

On the contrary, I have *never* referred to Comfort and Barrett's work as the Principal Edition of either P66 or Sinaiticus. Tischendorf is the Principal editor of Sinaiticus, and I have obviously referred to him occasionally.

The Editor Principus of P66 is by Martin, although its listed by Comfort and Barrett anyway, in case you were disappointed by Waltz's online Papyri list which omits P66 for some unknown reason (probably and oversight).

There have been many good books and articles on P66 since its publication, but you can find a bibliography anywhere on the net.

Riverwind

Common' Nazaroo...you seem too intelligent to think people are really buying this stuff. You know you haven't presented any good argumentation or answers yet, and all the stalling is just irritating people. I think you're smart enough to know that in spite of your protests to the contrary.

So, that brings me to one of two conclusions (yeah, false bifurcation and all...whatever), either you're delusional or you're just intentionally playing games with people. I prefer to think the latter.

I'm usually for the underdogs who think they've discovered or understood something from a unique perspective, but so far you haven't helped yourself at all.

Nazaroo

First of all, hats off. You seem to be the only other person willing and able to provide useful information toward this discussion.

However, we can tighten up the methodology here. As I mentioned in the previous post, we have to distinguish carefully and clearly between dots that can be established as by the original hand of the scribe who penned Sinaiticus, copying it from an older exemplar, and the confused and unverifiable markings of subsequent 'correctors'.

And in that direction, we would have to methodologically eliminate the dot at the end of the line (the second one) in your first example, even though I personally tend to think this particular dot is probably by the original scribe, since failing to fill a line is as rare as putting a dot inline to the text.




This second picture and its 'dot' must be dismissed as secondary and the probable addition of a subsequent corrector, since the original scribe allowed no room for it in his original draft. It is useless, and one of the reasons why it is so important to eliminate and/or treat separately the activities of subsequent layers of tampering.




Your third example is a 'real' one. (although the second dot in this photograph is a useless insertion).

However, an incredible clue as to the purpose of the 'single dot' is shown by this second added dot. It is obvious that here the dot indicates indeed a textual variant, and the corrector is using the dot to show the insertion point of the word "palin", because he believes it to have been wrongly omitted by accident.

Again, methodology is the key here. While 'suspended dots' may be "all over" Sinaiticus, few (less than a third) can be identified as by the original scribe.

The actual 'dot density' is extremely important, because it clearly establishes that the dots are not normal or standard punctuation or breathing-marks.

What readers of this thread will not be able to tell from these close-ups is that one page of Sinaiticus contains three or four times as much text as a single page from P66.

Since there are about the same number of legitimate dots on a page of Sinaiticus as on a page of P66, this means that P66 has four times as many dots as Sinaiticus per unit of text.

So a more careful analysis then reveals that dots are not "all over Sinaiticus" with even a quarter of the frequency of P66. And P66 hasn't enough dots to allow any claims of a grammatical function for the dots.

They are clearly secondary to punctuation and rare; in the case of Sinaiticus, four times as rare as in P66.



Unfortunately we cannot so easily dispense with Tischendorf as we would like. Many of the photos of pages of Sinaiticus are difficult to read, and can only be double-checked by comparison to Tischendorf's transcript. It must be remembered that Tischendorf examined Sinaiticus and collated more than any other textual scholar, either living or dead.

Operating with the photos alone would be like putting out one eye in order to explore the continent of Africa.

Nazaroo

Obviously you've lost interest in the actual textual problem, and fallen into the habits of others on this board.

I guess we're done this conversation then.