The Scribes and the Book of Revelation: How Do You
Copy a Book Full of Bad Grammar?
Page 4 of 4
4. How Do You Copy a Book Full of Bad Grammar?
Now at last we get to our big, juicy rabbit. How do you copy a book
full of bad grammar? On the one hand, if you revere the text, you will
feel the urge to copy carefully and not change a single letter (and
since the third century, New Testament manuscripts show this degree of
care). But on the other hand, bad grammar is bad grammar, and if you
love good grammar, you might follow the urge to correct it.
How do the scribes of Revelation in fact handle their urges? We shall
look and see.
What about the two barbarisms we talked about earlier? What happened
to them as they came through the transmission process?
Here is the first one: “Behold, I have set before you an open door,
ἣν οὐδεὶς δύναται κλεῖσαι αὐτήν—which no one is able to close it” (3:8).
The scribes get a very good grade here, for they almost universally
preserve the barbarism. But there are two ways to fix it: (1) Change ἣν
to καὶ: “and no one is able to close it.” 1611 and a few others follow
this urge. (2) Omit αὐτήν: “which no one is able to close.” 1006
א C and a few others correct the
text in this way.
Here is the other one: “And the woman fled into the wilderness, ὅπου
ἔχει ἐκεῖ τόπον—where she has there a place (12:6).” This barbarism is
easily fixed by removing ἐκεῖ, leaving “where she has a place.” About
half of the manuscripts do this: C 2329 and the manuscripts with the
Andreas commentary.
There are plenty more barbarisms, but let us move on and have a look
at a few solecisms.
Here is one in 2:20: “But I have against you that you tolerate
the woman Jezebel, the one calling herself a prophetess and she teaches
and deceives my servants—τὴν
γυναῖκα Ἰεζάβελ ἡ λέγουσα ἑαυτὴν προφῆτιν καὶ διδάσκει καὶ πλανᾷ
τοὺς ἐμοὺς
δούλους.” This is the text as found in
א* A C 2053 2329 and a few others.
There are two problems here. One is that since
γυναῖκα
is feminine accusative, any inflectable modifiers have to be feminine
accusative, too, and
ἡ
λέγουσα isn’t. So that’s a clear solecism. The other problem is
that you have in series a
participle and two finite verbs: “the one calling
herself a prophetess and she teaches and deceives.” This is
awkward, since it is smoother to express coordinate ideas in similar
language. Only a few manuscripts have the original reading. Most follow
the urge to fix it, either partly or completely: (1) Change
ἡ
λέγουσα to accusative so it agrees with its noun:
τὴν
λέγουσαν, as is found in
2050 1854 a corrector of א
and the manuscripts with the Andreas Commentary. This is the partial
fix. (2) The complete fix is to replace the participle with a finite
verb: ἣ
λέγει (“Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and teaches and
deceives”) 1006 1611 1841 2351 and the manuscripts of the Koine type.
In 7:4 a substantive in the genitive case is modified by a participle
in the nominative case:
τῶν ἐσφραγισμένων . . .
ἐσφραγισμένοι. This is
bad. But about half of our manuscripts preserve it (the ones with the
Andreas commentary), while the other half change the modifier to make it
agree:
τῶν ἐσφραγισμένων . . .
ἐσφραγισμένων (2351 the
ones of the Koine type).
Another example of the same kind is 20:2:
τὸν δράκοντα, ὁ ὄφις ὁ ἀρχαῖος,
where you have a dependent in the nominative modifying a noun in the
accusative. The reading is only supported by A and few other
witnesses. All the rest correct it to read
τὸν δράκοντα, τὸν ὄφιν τὸν ἀρχαῖον.
Maybe the most famous grammatical oddity in the
book is this name for God: ὁ ὢν καὶ ὁ ἦν καὶ ὁ ἐρχόμενος (1:4 and a few
other places). The scribes do not dare to change this, although it is
very un-Greek. In the first place it is treated as indeclinable—that is,
whatever case it is supposed to be in, it stays put in the nominative.
In the second place, in the middle of the expression a finite verb takes
the article. The English Bible renders it in correct English: Grace to
you and peace from “him who is and who was and who is to come.” To make
the surface oddities show up, we have to have something like, “Grace to
you and peace from he who is and the he-was and he who is coming.” But
that is not as mellifluous as John’s Greek, where it really sounds
rather grand.
Conclusions
Those are only a few examples out of many. But time
is on the wing, and my feet are tired, and your—you are tired. It is
time to bring this formal little talk around to some conclusions,
although the informal talk, if you like, can go on into the night.
1. The language may be low and contain barbarisms
and solecisms, but the ideas and visions are high and wonderful. That is
why Dionysius had a little bit of a tender conscience even to point it
out. The author of Revelation was a great artist who accomplished
stupendous effects with no assistance from the grammarians. Good for
him! “As if Shakespeare could spell!” (Brenda Ueland).
2. The tendency is to fix the bad grammar, and you
find the manuscript tradition doing this. But another tendency is to
preserve. Therefore, at any place where there is bad grammar, you can
expect it to be fixed somewhere in the tradition, but not everywhere.
Since there is the tendency to preserve as well as the tendency to fix,
the manuscript tradition preserves both the original text somewhere and
the fixes somewhere.
3. The readings which identify the Koine text are
self-evidently secondary. In Revelation the eccentricities of grammar
are internally consistent: they can be described (and have been) as a
coherent and regular system of bad grammar. By no conceivable means can
you account for a book in normal Greek being transformed by scribal
transmission into eccentric Greek with internal consistency. But it is
quite easy to account for a book in eccentric Greek being normalized in
kind of a casual way.
4. And yet the secondary readings are themselves quite old. Just look
at א and p47.
5. Naturally when we read and interpret any book that we are serious
about, we want to be able to trust what the text is. In the case of
Revelation, the bad grammar sets off a cascade of departures from the
original text as the scribes try to fix it. These departures themselves
prove the original text they were trying to fix and therefore serve to
verify the text as effectively as a unanimous manuscript tradition
would.
6. But really, getting back to the original text is not the only
thing textual criticism is good for. We don’t have to throw away the
variants when we have chosen one reading as original. The full and complete
study of any text has to include the variants, too. The variants are our
direct connection with the people who over the past two millennia have
devoted themselves to the text. One simple variant can take us back in
our imagination to a scriptorium with bright, open windows on the coast
of the Mediterranean
where a room full of scribes are bending over their copies and some of
them hear “washed” while others hear “loosed.” The variants are often
our earliest commentary when a scribe found something ambiguous and
decided to make it clear. And even where the variants only multiply
confusions, they at least signal that here confusion reigns. Textual
criticism is a most human scholarly discipline. In the text we
are in the presence of the prophet who heard the seven thunders. But
when we are down among the variants, we are in the presence of persons
like ourselves, laboring away to hear a word from God.
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