Early Latin Witnesses to Paul - Free from Brill!

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Secret Alias
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Early Latin Witnesses to Paul - Free from Brill!

Post by Secret Alias »

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
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MrMacSon
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Re: Early Latin Witnesses to Paul - Free from Brill!

Post by MrMacSon »


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The Principal Pauline Epistles: A Collation of Old Latin Evidence, edited by H.A.G. Houghton, C.M. Kreinecker, R.M. MacLachlan, and C.J. Smith.

Introduction

The Old Latin Tradition of the Pauline Epistles

The evidence for the early Latin text of the Pauline Epistles is relatively sparse. Its history is similar to that of the rest of the Latin New Testament.1 An initial translation was probably made around the beginning of the third century, as witnessed by the consistent form of text in the biblical quotations of Cyprian. This was then revised in various ways in various places, sometimes with reference to a Greek text, sometimes based on internal criteria of Latin style.

Although this may have resulted in a number of different traditions, over the course of the fourth century a single form of text associated with North Italy gradually achieved an ascendancy. A revision of this version at the beginning of the fifth century produced the form of text later accepted as standard in the Latin Vulgate.2 It is therefore misleading to divide the Latin tradition of the New Testament into two separate forms, Old Latin and Vulgate. The Vulgate was a revision of an existing Latin text according to a Greek form: the Gospels were the work of Jerome in 382–384, but the reviser of the rest of the New Testament is unknown.

There may have been multiple early Latin translations, but the conclusion of editors of both Old and New Testament books in the Vetus Latina editions is that the surviving evidence appears to derive from a single initial version. Although the Latin tradition is best conceived of as a continuum, it is nevertheless a useful shorthand to use Old Latin (or Vetus Latina) as a catch-all designation for non-Vulgate readings, particularly those which are attested in Christian writings before the fifth century.

The reconstruction of the “text-types” of the different stages of the Old Latin tradition, based on scriptural codices and quotations in Christian authors from the first eight centuries, is the goal of the Vetus Latina edition. This is a difficult task. A combination of age and the hegemony of the Vulgate means that few manuscripts survive of the early versions; copies of biblical books made from the fifth century onwards may well be mixed texts combining Old Latin and Vulgate forms. The later form of text may also have affected the transmission of early Christian writings. It is only through the exhaustive collection and analysis of all surviving evidence that the fullest possible picture can be presented. As noted above in the Preface, the material in the present volume was assembled to give an overview of readings in the Latin tradition of the principal Pauline Epistles for the purpose of analysing the biblical text of early commentaries.

It is presented here to facilitate further study of the textual history of these writings and to provide a reliable account of the most extensive early Latin evidence, replacing the entries for the selected witnesses in the Vetus Latina Database . In this way, it is hoped that it may also eventually serve as the basis for the full Vetus Latina edition of these four letters, as well as an interim point of reference for Latin sources in editions of the Greek New Testament.

https://brill.com/downloadpdf/title/33054 [downloads directly]

1. For a fuller treatment of the whole corpus as well as specific observations on the Pauline
Epistles, see H.A.G. Houghton, The Latin New Testament. A Guide to its Early History, Texts,
and Manuscripts
(Oxford: OUP, 2016).

2. A summary of scholarship on the origin of the Vulgate version of the Pauline Epistles is given
in the contribution of Anna Persig to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the Latin Bible.

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Irish1975
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Re: Early Latin Witnesses to Paul - Free from Brill!

Post by Irish1975 »

Galatians 1:4 has “nequam” (worthless) where the NA28 Greek is πονηροῦ (wicked, evil). Lesser witnesses have “malo” or “maligno.”

“…in order to deliver us from the present worthless age” is a significant alteration. It is more consonant with Galatians 4:1-10, where humanity has been in bondage to the elementary spirits of the cosmos, which are “weak and worthless” (4:9). There the apostle does not describe a situation of bondage to wicked beings, but of bondage to the Law, and its seasons and cosmic mediators, which might be appropriate for children but not for mature sons of the Father.

I don’t have my NA28 nearby, but does anyone know if there are Greek mss. that support this reading?
gryan
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Re: Early Latin Witnesses to Paul - Free from Brill!

Post by gryan »

Gal 2:5 Vulgate
quibus neque ad horam cessimus subiectioni

To whom we yielded not by subjection for an hour

The apparatus says this (underlining is mine):

Present: 51 54 58 61 64 67 75 76 77 78 88 89 135 MAR AMst HI AU PEL THr
quibus neque ] quibus nec 51 61 77 78 PELB THr, lac. 64 67, om. 75 76 89 MAR

I can guess that "om." means "omitted" (since I happen to know some of the Old Latin texts omitted quibus neque).

But what does "lac." mean?
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Irish1975
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Re: Early Latin Witnesses to Paul - Free from Brill!

Post by Irish1975 »

"lacuna" probably (hole in the papyrus)
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