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Originally Posted by stephan huller
My guess is that the use of these 'signatures' developed from a deliberate attempt to obscure the differences between the Marcionite (Alexandrian) recension and the Roman Church with regards to the apellations 'Christ' and 'Chrestos.' I might be wrong. I am not married to this argument. It's just what I think suits the evidence so far until a better explanation comes along.
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Fair enough. So you put forward a scribal redaction date after Marcion - when precisely? 160 to 180 CE? Is there enough of a time period to place this redaction also after the earliest paleographically dated Greek papyri which exhibit these 'signatures'?
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I remember reading somewhere that in the first nomen sacrum were XC which appeared in the side of manuscripts checked for accuracy - XC = 'right' (one) or 'good' (one). These notations apparently appeared in pre-Christian Greek manuscripts. I wish I could track down what old book I read this in.
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One source
here (PDF) states
"The chi-rho device also appears in the margin
of a hypomnema on Homer, Iliad,
dated to the first century bce,
the chi-rho here a sign for
XPNCTOC (marking passages “useful” for excerpting).
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Yet in order for you to demolish this serious objection to your theory (i.e. the nomina sacra which are dated to the second and third centuries) you have to come up with some sort of explantion why this helps your fourth century argument. I don't see that you've done this.
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The explanation is very simple - the payri are from the 4th century. This explanation does not need to conjecture about handwriting to obtain a secure chronology. Namely that that papyri fragments recovered from Oxyrhynchus were deposted in the 14 or so Oxyrhynchus rubbish dumps in a direct relationship to the population demographics for the city of Oxyrhnchus, which take a huge explosion of high orders of magnitude in the mid-fourth century. That is, these fragments of papryi, manufactured to be part of a codex, not a scroll or roll, were deposted on the rubbish tips in the early to mid 4th century, when the city grew a city outside its walls.
This explanation that the papyri at Oxyrhnchus are from the 4th century is also consistent with another lesser known fact. Namely that more than half of the "christian related" papyri fragments are from non canonical texts or "Gnostic Gospels and Acts, etc". The sharp division between the orthodoxy of the NT Canon (even in the Constantine Bible version) and the heresy of the Gnostics indicates that Oxyrhnchus is more likely to have been a city which harbored the gnostic heretics and not the orthodox. The gnostic heretics were trying to copy the orthodox texts, but not in the cities, rather in more remote locales out of Alexandria, where the Greek resistance to "Orthodox Christianity" was being subdued by agents of the Emperor with great force.
Finally the fact that the papyri were purposed for codices also mitigates to the 4th century. Or would you have the Christians inventing the codex? Did Jesus carry a book around with him? If so, what was in the book Jesus carried according to Peter?
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Originally Posted by The Acts Of Peter And The Twelve (or was it Eleven or Thirteen?) Apostles
A book cover like (those of) my books was in his [Jesus = Lithargoel] left hand. |
10-19-2010, 06:25 PM
