Ben C Smith

Yes. Much of what we have from antiquity is represented only in late documents.

Perhaps that is because it was offered not as an excuse but as an expression of healthy skepticism.

You are correct. I know very little about it. It is on my to-do list. (Feel better?)

I appreciate your efforts in this area.

What is the line between conflation on the one side and actual text of Matthew with many, many Lucan parallels on the other? I did not think that a conflation had to be a perfect 50-50 mix.

Sorry to have disappointed you.

Now, I do take exception to any charge of bias against medieval documents. Take a look at some of the collections of fragments on my website (the Jewish-Christian gospels, for example), and you will see that I push things deep into the medieval period.

Yes. Very aware. But the New Testament is a very important exception to this general rule.

My skepticism is very specific here. This is what I wrote that apparently offended you:

When we have all those fragments from centuries II-III and all those complete texts (yes, including the Syriac and Old Latin texts) from centuries IV-V, not to mention the patristic evidence throughout all those centuries, I would just need a very good reason to skip ahead into the medieval period to trump those earlier manuscripts. (Note, I do not need a good reason to skip ahead to read the medieval matter, and even to use it, just to trump much earlier evidence with it.) You mentioned our current Old Testament, which is a good case in point. I am all in favor of reevaluating every available part of that text in the light both of the LXX and especially the DSS. Those very, very early manuscripts are an historical gift, and we ought to use them.

Now, this skepticism on my part about the medieval Hebrew Matthew may be completely misguided and I may recant it later, but I am just letting you know where I am on the matter so far.

Look, I am very open to all of this. If you think that I have shut out the possibility that the western text, the Aramaic gospels, the Diatessaronic witnesses, and the Jewish-Christian gospels preserve earlier material than the eastern text, then you are mistaken. If you think that I am above using Marcion (whose gospel apparently lacked the first two chapters of Luke and much of the third) to reconstruct an original Luke, you are again mistaken.

But your criticism of my lack of knowledge of Shem Tov is well taken. I have very little exposure to it as yet. I would also like to know a lot more than I do about the Diatessaronic stuff. All in good time.

Cheers.

Ben.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Dear friends,

In this article, I will examine the Codex Bezae's version of Mark 1:32-34, beginning with the Greek Bezae. Further on, the Latin part of Bezae will also be considered, as well as the other Old Latin versions of this passage.

I have stated before my belief that this part of Mark is based on Luke, and the following seems to provide some additional evidence for this thesis.

The key feature in this whole passage, of course, is whether or not the healing powers of Jesus have really been 'exaggerated' in Luke (as well as in Matthew), or perhaps they may have been somewhat reduced in Mark -- based on the idea that our canonical Mark is not really as early as most people assume, and that Luke (along with Matthew) actually preserves the earlier version of the narrative.

So here's the Greek of Codex Bezae. The layout below is the same as what one finds in the original Codex (verse numbers have been added). The differences from the standard text of Mark are underlined.

[32] oyiaV de genomenhV, ote _edusen_ o hlioV,
eferosan proV auton pantaV touV kakwV econtaV
_nosoiV poikilaiV_, kai touV daimonizomenouV.
[33] kai hn olh h poliV episunhgmenh
proV thn quran _autou_. [34] kai eqerapeusen _autouV_,
kai _touV_ daimonia _econtaV_ exebalen _auta_
_ap autwn_, kai ouk hfien _auta_ lalein
oti hidisan auton. [kai eqerapeusen pollouV
kakwV econtaV poikilaiV nosoiV,
kai daimonia polla exebalen].

And here's my literal English translation of the above, with the differences likewise underlined.

[32] When it became evening, as the sun did set,
they brought to him all who were sick
_with various diseases_, and who were demoniacs,
[33] And the whole city was gathered together
near _his_ door. [34] And he healed _them_,
and _those_ who _had_ demons, he cast _them_ out
_from them_, and he would not permit _them_ to speak,
because they knew him. [And he healed many
who were sick with various diseases,
and many demons he cast out].

The last sentence above is put in square brackets, because it looks like a later addition to the text.

So what we see here, in my view, is an earlier text of Mark, to which an addition has been made, i.e. the sentence in square brackets. This added sentence,

"And he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and many demons he cast out."

creates a redundancy in the Bezan text; it is clearly a duplicate of the previous material. And this also happens to be exactly the same Greek text as what we find here in the canonical Mk!

So if we remove this bracketed duplicate material, what remains appears to be an earlier text of Mark.

Hence, what we see here overall, in Bezae, is the Gospel of Mark that is still in the process of being edited, or at least this is how it seems to me.

The final editor of Bezae's text seems to have been revising the older text of Mark, while having the 'updated' canonical Mark in front of him. And so, this final editor seems to add this duplicate material from the canonical Mark, thus creating a redundancy that we now see in Bezae.

In any case, we can observe that the earlier part of this Bezan text,

"And he healed them,
and those who had demons, he cast them out
from them"

"kai eqerapeusen _autouV_,
kai _touV_ daimonia _econtaV_ exebalen _auta_
_ap autwn_"

is quite similar to what we find in Luke. In particular, the words /eqerapeusen autouV/ = "he healed them", are exactly the words of the canonical Lk.

Thus, similarly to Lk, all the sick are healed, and not just some of them, like we find in the canonical Mark.

Also, similarly to the canonical Lk, in this earlier part of the Bezan Mk, all the demons have been cast out.

But further, some canonical material had been added to the Bezan Mk, as well, which specifies that not all of the sick are healed, and not all of the demons have been cast out -- and all this happens to create a bit of a contradiction with what was stated above.


THE OLD LATIN VERSIONS OF THIS PASSAGE

As usual, the Latin part of Bezae follows the Greek very closely. These two texts, the Greek and the Latin Bezae, seem to have been harmonised at some stage -- perhaps even before the Codex Bezae had been actually produced.

Thus, the duplication that we see in the Greek Bezae is repeated exactly, or almost exactly, in the Latin side of Bezae.

We also have ten other Old Latin manuscripts of this part of Mark (as listed in the standard edition of Julicher), but none of them feature the redundancy that we find in Bezae.

And yet, many of these surviving Old Latin manuscripts of Mark do happen to support Latin Bezae in various details of this passage.

Overall, there's a remarkable amount of variability within this pericope, that we find in these Old Latin manuscripts of Mark. This alone indicates that this whole passage was being heavily edited along the path of its transmission...

In the Old Latin, we find quite a few transpositions within this pericope (as well as a few additions). For example, the part about Jesus casting out the demons had been moved around quite a bit in various Old Latin manuscripts. And the Bezan feature of Jesus "casting out the demons" -- rather than him "casting out many demons" -- also finds support in various Old Latin manuscripts. So these are some additional parallels to how this passage appears in Luke, i.e. some more signs that Mk was originally based on Lk.

But a full analysis of all these eleven Old Latin versions of this passage would be a big task in itself, and I will not attempt it here.

All the best,

Yuri.

Ben C Smith

Very interesting, Yuri. Thanks for this.

If a text of Mark, or of any of the other gospels for that matter, already had Jesus healing all, what in your judgment was the motivation for a later editor to demote all to many?

Ben.

S.C.Carlson

It's not really a demotion. It is an instance of the so-called "inclusive many." In TDNT 6:541, J. Jeremias explains:

Stephen

Ben C Smith

Help me out here. Do you think then that the Greek πολλοι has a less partitive flavor to it than the English many? (I have had cause to suspect this before, but have never nailed it down.) Mark says that all came, and many were healed. Matthew says that many came, and all were healed. These two English sentences, to me at least, sound quite different in emphasis. Would the Greek then be conveying the mere idea that the absolute number of healings was immense, completely bystepping the partitive notion that it was relatively many of those available for healing that were healed?

I have refrained from using this passage as evidence for Marcan priority simply because Mark seems to do the same thing elsewhere, and it could thus be called a Marcan redactional tendency. Now it looks like I ought to refrain also because it really connotes nothing either less or more than what Matthew is saying.

Thanks.

Ben.

S.C.Carlson

You can also see the "inclusive" sense in Rom 5:15b, where οἱ πολλοὶ ἀπέθανον, the "many" who have died must equal the πάντες ἄνθÏ?ωποι "all people" in verse 12. Jeremias in his TDNT article indicates that the inclusive usage is a Semiticism.

That's right. Mark 1:34 is one of favorite passages cited in favor of Markan priority, but it doesn't really work out that way. (Another one is Mark 6:5.) There are a lot of bad arguments for Markan priority out there.

Stephen

Ben C Smith

Yuri will like you for saying that.

Might I ask which you consider to be the good arguments for Marcan priority?

Ben.

S.C.Carlson

Goodacre's examples of fatigue.

Ted Hoffman

Yuri,
I love the OP. Beautiful! I will read the rest later.

Ted Hoffman

Goodacre cannot provide non NT examples of editorial fatigue. It appears it is strictly an NT phenomena - contrary to the fashion in which Goodacre introduces it.
But to be clear, I agree with Carlson that EF is a good illustration of Marcan priority.
The length of Mark, IMO, also is another indicator. Editors/plagiarists tend to embellish, expand and smoothen out the hypotext.