Dale Wheeler has added to this thread (now about defunct), quite helpfully.
But a further comment is necessary on accents, lest his warning be
misunderstood.
He writes:
>> On the second discussion, Mk 5:29--not defending BDF, NA, LJS, per se.
First, its a *bit* of an overstatment that the old mss don't have *any*
markings on them at all (Edward and Carl understand this; I fear that some
beginners may take this a bit too literally), and sometimes these markings
may in fact make *tense* distinctions, as well as other things. I doubt
that this passage is marked, however. <<
Let's be clear about what the old MSS. have in the way of accents-- they in
fact do not have them! None of our papyri have them (though one papyrus
of Homer from 1st c. has them--considered a strange fluke, probably a
reciter's study-text). And none of our old uncials (before the seventh
century) have them, with the sole exception of D, which has circumflexes
thrown in here and there.
Dale is right that they have "markings"; these are occasional accents
inserted by correctors of the MSS., centuries later. But the original hand
of every one of them (with the slight exception of D, as above) is accent-
free.
Dale continues:
>> But that brings up another issue;
the text editors don't make these decisions in a vacuum. Most of the time
there is a history which stretches back a long way as far as punctuation,
etc. on the texts; it'd be interesting to see what the history of this
passage is in the Greek mss as soon as there started to be any markings
on this word. <<
Dale refers to the modern editors, of course, and he is right. (Sometimes
they REJECT that tradition, as when modern editors turned Junia into a man,
a sex-change we have discussed at great length before.) But if they accept
that tradition, they are accepting only a WRITTEN tradition, which means a
tradition which begins in the seventh century at the earliest. Neither
Dale (I suspect) nor I are willing to become Pharisees and argue for an
oral tradition of the correct accents for the written text, going back to
Moses (oops--I mean the authors of the NT).
Edward Hobbs