From: Dale M. Wheeler (dalemw@teleport.com)
Date: Wed Apr 26 2000 - 10:47:15 EDT
<x-flowed>Carl Conrad wrote:
>At 11:25 AM -0700 4/25/00, clayton stirling bartholomew wrote:
> >So what is the point of all this? Don't take the divisions in your GNT too
> >seriously. The reasons for breaking the text at certain places in the GNT
> >have a lot to do with the history of synoptic research** in the last several
> >hundred years.
>
>
>(a) I would have to see the proof to take this proposition seriously with
>regard to verse-divisions in the GNT in general--on the surface it
>certainly strikes me as a highly dubious proposition, BUT
>
>
>(b) Absolutely valid is Clay's admonition: "Don't take the divisions in
>your GNT too seriously." Divisions of chapter and verse seem quite often to
>be very arbitrary (I have at times suspected that the real factor for
>chapters may have been the size of a block on a papyrus roll and (less
>likely, of course) for verses the length of space between the left and
>right margins of a block on a papyrus roll. In fact, I rather think the
>only textual divisions in the GNT to be taken altogether seriously or the
>divisions between books.
A couple of things...
First, when I first read what Carl said above, I thought he was referring
to papyrus scrolls, ie., continuous lengths of papyrus rolled up into one
long text scroll...after re-reading it, I'm not 100% sure, but I don't
think that's what he meant after all, since he seems to be referring to
width and not length. As an aside...the bulk of the earliest mss we have
are codexes (ie., book form), not scrolls (as many commonly assume).
Second, let me suggest that papyrus roll size may not have had anything to
do with versification/chapter division phenomenon...if you go back an look
at some of the early papyri mss, you'll already find spacing and occasional
markings in the text to indicate what have become our sentence, verse, and
chapter divisions in many cases (eg., p46). These things occur in mss
which are otherwise "continuously" written, ie., without spacing between
any of the other words.
Third, scribes of early mss either wrote the remainder of a word at the end
of a line, on the beginning of the next line (sort of like our hyphenation,
except without the hyphen), or they crunched together the last letters on a
line to make the word fit, or they just ended the line where the word ended
when they realized they couldn't get the next word on that line (sort of
like our ragged edge right margins today). I'm not sure that any of these
phenomena would produce "versification".
I used to be very skeptical about modern version versification, but I've
come to the conclusion that the breakdowns we see today really do have a
very, very long tradition behind them. Since we have no originals we can't
claim "inspiration" for the breaks, but many of them certainly do go back a
long way.
XAIREIN...
***********************************************************************
Dale M. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Research Professor in Biblical Languages Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan Street Portland, OR 97220
Voice: 503-251-6416 FAX:503-251-6478 E-Mail: dalemw@teleport.com
***********************************************************************
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