Calilasseia

First a correction - it was the Bible Code I intended to refer to, not the Da Vinci Code (though I gather that's subject to some debunking as well).

Second, some references for debunking the Bible Code:

Reference 1

Reference 2

Reference 3

Reference 4

How many more do you want me to find?

Oh, from Reference 4, we have this interesting quote:

Actually, I suspect that I could find "secret messages" of the same kind in my Microsoft Windows NT Resource Kit programming manual if I wanted to - after all it's a hefty tome that's twice the size of War And Peace.

Given that it's possible to do this with English texts, in which the spelling of words remains largely constant due to the systematic removal of inflection and its replacement by sentence position for grammatical function, it should be only logical to conclude that it is even easier in the case of a Hebrew text where the vowels have to be supplied artificially before one can begin. No need for conspiracy theories to support this contention. Dave Thomas's computer program will pull out all kinds of phrases from any sufficiently long text in real time if you set it up to do so. In other words, those 'secret' messages are simply an artefact of pattern recognition and basic statistics. Of course, someone who knows this but chooses to be less than scrupulous in revealing the underlying mechanism can make a fair amount of money from the exercise, as Drosnin did.

Third, I see you're back to snipping things that you decide are of no interest. I'll leave it to others to determine what that says, but if you have such disdain for the efforts of others on this forum, why do you bother even turning up if our output is so manifestly worthless to you?

Julian

In the course of my own studies I frequently find that I need to consult facsimilies of uncial Greek manuscripts. Since my Greek is not all that good I find them quite hard to read, however, I do eventually muddle through. I did notice that I could the all-uppercase-no-spacing sentence of the OP at near full speed. It would seem that familiarity is a key factor. As for many key terms we luckily have nomina sacra which are a tremendous help, especially in unial mss. The word 'christ' was one of the original nomina sacra and is therefore not likely to ever have been 'mistranslated' although it could certainly have dropped out due to periblepsis (h.a. or h.t.) or manipulated due to theological tendencies.

Julian

gstafleu

If we look at a current Greek version of the NT, we see something like this:
So the whole of Matthew has:

1. Been divided into chapters, with chapter numbers
2. The chapters have been divided into verses, with verse numbers
3. The verses have been divided into sentences, with periods and capitals (or have they, couldn't find any examples in the first few Mat chapters in Scrivener, perhaps here verse=sentence?)
4. The verses have been divided into words with spaces

(BTW, I'm not claiming this is a flow chart, dividing into words will usually come before division into sentences, for example.)

AFAIK, none of this can be found in the original MS's (except perhaps 1?). The question now is: is all of this sufficiently straightforward and unambiguous that the amount of introduced errors is minimal? According to Roger, the answer is "yes" in the case that the person who does it is a native speaker. But I don't think that when the steps above were actually executed (somewhere between the 9th and 15th centuries?), those who did it were native speakers of Koine, were they? So the question about the error rate resulting of the operation remains unanswered, I think.

Gerard Stafleu

Julian

Don't forget about diacritics, they were added, as well.

gstafleu

Diacritics were usually place above the letters, right? That's probably where the later tradition of higher diacriticism comes from. (Sorry, just couldn't resist.)

Gerard Stafleu

Roger Pearse

Are you sure about this? (I don't think so, myself).

The chapter divisions are not authorial. Dividing literary texts into chapters or kephalaia is an under-researched area of scholarship, but happens in the west in the 6th century. Cyril of Alexandria in the preface to the Commentary on John talks about it as an innovation.

The ones in the bible are the work of Stephen Langton in the middle ages. The gospel was divided into sections in ancient times, for use with the canons of Eusebius.

Verse divisions were done at the renaissance, and on horseback, by a printer, Stephanus.

I've seen paragraph divisions in the papyri so these exist. I'm not sure about sentence divisions, but I think they existed and are probably authorial. Anyone?

Word division is not authorial, I believe? Do the papyri demonstrate it?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Julian

I don't think that gstafleu is saying that the changes he lists are authorial. The facts are, of course, that none of the points that he lists are authorial (including my point regarding diacritics) since our earliest sources show none of the features, indeed, such features seemed wholly unknown (or quite rare, at least. See below.) in the time when the biblical books were written. I would also argue that the features listed would reduce the amount of error induced by transcription much in the way that a drawing is easier to reproduce when overlaid by a grid.

However, all that being said, I seem to recall hearing Larry Hurtado talking about scrolls (papyrus) with some features of punctuation/spacing/etc. I think it was in The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (or via: amazon.co.uk) but I cannot be sure since I haven't read it. I did ask him about the number of scrolls that displayed such features and how many didn't but didn't get an exact answer. It would seem that a progression from uncial text in monolithic blocks to modern-style divisions and writing was a gradual one that started at a fairly early stage.

Julian

gstafleu

Yes, that is what I was trying to say, sorry for any confusion. My point was that I thought, and Roger seems to confirm this, that by and large these additions were not done by native speakers, and hence Roger's observation about native speakers not being bothered by their absence does not apply.
Agree, once these features were added they probably reduced the error rate of transcription. My question (and I think Clivedurdle's) is: did the introduction of these features introduce any errors with respect to the intention of the old MS's, or was it so clear where what should be done that the error rate was minimal?

Horseback? That doesn't seem an environment for unencumbered cogitation. I take it the word divisions were done before that, or did our rider make those in his strides as well?

Gerard Stafleu

Roger Pearse

No, I agree, and sorry for the confusion. Rather I queried the idea that sentence division came later than word division.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Julian

Remember that these changes were wrought upon mss stage by stage. If someone were to apply all of those features when transcribing a ms from uncial to modern, one could see a heightened propensity for error but, as it were, it would have been added bit by bit and mss of various stages would have existed side by side. There are many errors in mss and many reasons for them, this re-formatting was probably a rather insignificant contributor.
While I must confess my inability to comprehend the beginning of this part of your post, it can be observed that word division did happen gradually, albeit far less so. Spacing seemed to have been sporadic at first. Maybe spacing was placed in certain places for breathing or other pauses. I am not sure. Hurtado claims (to the best of my memory) that the spacing indicated that the scroll was designed to be read out loud. Probably not a bad theory.

Julian