From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 04 1995 - 22:18:30 EST
I have just been on the phone with Fred Danker, who tells me he's been very
busy with proofs of the new BAGD (I asked him WHEN? He wasn't making any
promises, and of course itdoesn't all depend on him, but he thought it
might get out by the end of 1996!)
I asked him specifically our question about whether the entry on
Junia/Junias had been changed; he said, "Oh, yes, that's been fixed; it
turns out that the evidence is pretty overwhelming in favor of IOUNIA, the
feminine form, in Rom 16:7. I did not tell him until after he had told me
this that Edward Hobbs had threatened never to drink scotch with him if
this hadn't been corrected, to which he replied that Edward had better be
prepared to buy and to be careful about his brands!
Although I have been aware that Fred is a St. Louisan since his days at
Concordia and later at Seminex (and in fact, took a Ph.D. in Classics at
Washington U. well before I arrived here), my only run-in with him
previously had been during my chairmanship of our department when he was
trying to get our library to make a xerox copy of a missing link volume of
inscriptions from Pergamum. While I was certainly well aware of how much
this Hellenistic lexicography depends upon the new papyri coming out of the
Egyptian sands and slowly being cataloged, dated, and decoded, I really
hadn't been aware of the importance of the epigraphic data for establishing
just such matters as how common a name like IOUNIA or a putative masculine
form like IOUNIAS might be. While I'm sure that the list-people who are
deeply involved in NT textual criticism are well aware of how dependent the
whole field of NT scholarship is upon patient and arduous labors of
lexicographers, papyrologists, and epigraphers. And of course there are
errors in their end-products, but we owe them a huge debt of gratitude.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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