Koine and Biblical and Medieval Greek • Re: Passive verb with object in Acts of John 98

Hi all, now that the weekend has come, I've had a chance to look up the underlying sources, and they lean heavily in favour of Michael's initial view (although not exactly the same). I've written up my notes below, in case of interest to others.

This problematic line is in a part of the Acts of John (secs 87 to 105) for which there is only one primary witness: a manuscript (‘C’) copied by a monk called John in 1319. Although there is a better witness for some extracts of this part of the text, from the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 (which condemned the text), unfortunately those extracts cut out at line 12 in sec. 98, just before this problematic line. So we are stuck with this sole witness C. I'm guessing the fact that the text was condemned at the Second Council of Nicaea as non-orthodox led to this dismal manuscript tradition (and is probably in turn the ultimate origin-story for this thread!).

Unfortunately C is full of errors. There are good notes on manuscript C in the critical edition (Acta Iohannis. Praefatio – Textus, ed. Junod and Kaestli, 1983): this critical edition was used by e.g. McCollum and Niedergall in their 2022 Greek text and English translation.

Manuscript C may have been transcribed via dictation (John listening to a priest called Alexios); ‘Cette hypothèse expliquerait en partie les très nombreuses fautes d’iotacisme et d’orthographe qui émaillent la copie de C … le texte établi sur la seule base de C reste souvent incertain, parfois même inintelligible …’ (Junod and Kaestli 1983, p. 27). The editors finish their attack on poor little John (the copyist) with a delightfully snarky finale: ‘On peut à bon droit se demander si le moine a relu sa copie … et si le texte ainsi transmis a été compris de beaucoup de lecteurs !’ (p. 29). Relevant here is the fact that, among John’s other frequent errors, he often confused ο and ω (ibid, p. 28).

So what does the sole witness (manuscript C) say here (line 14 of sec. 98)? τν πεπιγμένων, where the editors follow James’s emendation, producing τῶν πεπηγμένων. They emend the gibberish ἀνάγγη βιάβα, producing ἀναγωγὴ βέβαια. The apparatus gives lots of other possibilities, many of which were already summarised in the 1898 edition (which the TLG copy-typed, and which seems to have therefore become a common version online in the public domain):

https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_G4yd ... ew=theater

In the 2022 English translation, this then becomes: διορισμὸς πάντων ἐστὶν καὶ τῶν πεπηγμένων ἐξ ἀνεδράστων ἀναγωγὴ βεβαία καὶ ἁρμονία σοφίας ‘it is the boundary of all things, and of those that are fixed among the unsteady, a firm foundation and a harmony of wisdom’. (I take the first καί here as epexegetic, not adding a second item but explaining what a boundary of ‘all things’ actually means).

There is a good commentary on sections 94 to 102 (in which this problematic line falls) in the second volume of the 1983 edition (in French, sorry), pages 581 to 677. They note in particular that this part of the text has a different origin from the rest (p. 581), extensively uses parallelism based on synonyms or contraries (p. 584), and the use of special vocabulary throughout, reflecting its docetic and gnostic theme of denying Jesus’s suffering during the passion, despite the gospel account (which I have heard medical types say is a clear description of hypovolemic shock and pericardial effusion following massive blood loss – perhaps caused by the initial scourging by the Roman soldiers – explaining the gospel accounts of water flowing through his side wound, his thirst, etc.)

As an aside, another thought I was previously toying with was that the gibberish ἀνάγγη βιάβα words might be an interpolation of a lexicon reference. We know that there have been many Greek lexica over the centuries, focusing on unusual words (see Dickey 2007, pages 87 and following). Since ἀνέδραστος is not a super-frequent word, I was wondering whether ἀνάγγη βιάβα might be something like ΑΝΑΓΓ⊢ΒΙΑΒΑ (referring by way of headwords to a column of a Greek lexicon). ἀνέδραστος falls right between those, and so I was wondering whether ἀνέδραστος might be an entry in a lexicon column starting with a rare word like ἀναγγείωτος and finishing with a rare word like Βιαβάνα, where the reference gave the first 5 letters of each, with some symbol between that got corrupted to eta, and this got inserted into the text by way of gloss interpolation. However, I will always trust an editor’s view over mere speculation, and so I've dropped that thought-bubble in favour of the critical edition's reading.

Cheers, Chad

Statistics: Posted by cb — Sat Oct 26, 2024 12:04 am


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