The peculiar case of the mustard seed and "the nest"

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mlinssen
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The peculiar case of the mustard seed and "the nest"

Post by mlinssen »

The parable of the mustard seed: it is going to be a very short one, and about one word only.
There's something strange in the canonicals:

Matthew 13:32 ... ὥστε (so that) ἐλθεῖν (come) τὰ (the) πετεινὰ (birds) τοῦ (of the) οὐρανοῦ (air) καὶ (and) κατασκηνοῦν* (perch) ἐν (in) τοῖς (the) κλάδοις (branches) αὐτοῦ (of it).”

Mark 4:31 ... καὶ (and) ποιεῖ (it produces) κλάδους (branches) μεγάλους (great), ὥστε (so that) δύνασθαι (are able) ὑπὸ (under) τὴν (the) σκιὰν (shadow) αὐτοῦ (of it) τὰ (the) πετεινὰ (birds) τοῦ (of the) οὐρανοῦ (air) κατασκηνοῦν* (to perch).”

Luke 13:19 ... καὶ (and) ηὔξησεν (it grew) καὶ (and) ἐγένετο (came) εἰς (into) δένδρον (a tree), καὶ (and) τὰ (the) πετεινὰ (birds) τοῦ (of the) οὐρανοῦ (air) κατεσκήνωσεν (encamped) ἐν (in) τοῖς (the) κλάδοις (branches) αὐτοῦ (of it).”

Matthew and Mark have an asterisk behind their verb, for good reasons:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/tex ... askhno%2Fw

κατασκηνόω

to pitch one's camp or tent, take up one's quarters, encamp, Xen.; generally, to rest, lodge, settle

Well, isn't that a remarkable word?
Needless to say, its only occurrence in the entire NT is in Matthew and Mark. I have never seen birds pitch a tent, but highly likely these two fellows did.
Luke's slightly different κατεσκήνωσεν is the same verb, and oddly, Acts 2:26 has the fourth and last occurrence of this verb, κατασκηνώσει: "will dwell (in hope)" is the translation, and the verse is a verbatim copy of Psalms 16:9.
σκηνή is the root word, tent. What a remarkably composite verb to use on this occasion, where birds do things in branches or trees or their shadow, isn't it?
46 occurrences of κατασκην in the Tanakh, and every single one of them is translated with "encamp": even said Psalms verse. The noun occurs a few dozen times in the NT and gets translated with tabernacle, mostly

Onto Thomas, and one single word: ⲥⲕⲉⲡⲏ

https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/coll ... 2899/rec/1

Third line from the bottom

It's a Greek loanword, and those have a metaphysical meaning in Thomas. Tufts has the following definition of its Greek equivalent http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/tex ... 3Dske%2Fph

σκέπη

a covering, shelter, protection, Xen.:—c. gen., ἐν σκέπῃ τοῦ πολέμου under shelter from war, Hdt.; ὑπὸ τὴν Ῥωμαίων σκέπην under their protection, Polyb.

The usual translations say "shelter (for birds of the sky)" and it is remarkable that this word is in this exact same spot, isn't it? It is the only time that it occurs in Thomas.
In the papyrus that we have, the Greek ⲛ and the ⲡ are not hard to keep apart, but I don't dismiss the possibility that the Greek was copied from a text where such was the case.
The word fits fine in Thomas who uses it in a double entendre: the branches might offer shelter to birds of the sky but they also might offer protection from them - and naturally, the second meaning is the vital one in Thomas: the whole story can be read in my Commentary.
But the canonicals? Granted, the application in Psalms 16:9 is fancy:

η σαρξ μου my flesh κατασκηνώσει shall encamp επ΄ in ελπίδι hope

But does the NT reach that literary level? Not by a mile, save for John perhaps.
Once again we see that the bible translations that we have are awfully free. Luke's one is actually "faithful" and perfectly in line with the Tanakh, but the different form in Matthew and Mark is yet another minor disagreement against Luke in a situation where the Synoptics are in major agreement

ⲥⲕⲏⲛⲏ is a Greek loanword in Coptic for tent, by the way.
This peculiar case is fairly different from the others, but I thought it would be amusing to dwell on one single word, for a change
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Re: The peculiar case of the mustard seed and "the nest"

Post by gryan »

Re: another word for nests, and another interpretation
Gospel of Thomas Saying 86

I asked a native American pastor if he noticed anything in the NT that others seem to overlook. He said that adult birds do not need nests to lay their heads. Nests are for raising baby birds. Adult birds sleep without any need of a place to lay their heads.
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Re: The peculiar case of the mustard seed and "the nest"

Post by Charles Wilson »

Josephus, War..., 5, 3, 2:

"But Titus, intending to pitch his camp nearer to the city than Scopus, placed as many of his choice horsemen and footmen as he thought sufficient opposite to the Jews, to prevent their sallying out upon them, while he gave orders for the whole army to level the distance, as far as the wall of the city. So they threw down all the hedges and walls which the inhabitants had made about their gardens and groves of trees, and cut down all the fruit trees that lay between them and the wall of the city, and filled up all the hollow places and the chasms, and demolished the rocky precipices with iron instruments; and thereby made all the place level from Scopus to Herod's monuments, which adjoined to the pool called the Serpent's Pool..."

Compare with:

Mark 8: 22 - 26 (RSV):

[22] And they came to Beth-sa'ida. And some people brought to him a blind man, and begged him to touch him.
[23] And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the village; and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands upon him, he asked him, "Do you see anything?"
[24] And he looked up and said, "I see men; but they look like trees, walking."
[25] Then again he laid his hands upon his eyes; and he looked intently and was restored, and saw everything clearly.
[26] And he sent him away to his home, saying, "Do not even enter the village."

Curious indeed, Mlinssen! If we accept the meanings implied in your reference:

"a covering, shelter, protection, Xen.:—c. gen., ἐν σκέπῃ τοῦ πολέμου under shelter from war, Hdt.; ὑπὸ τὴν Ῥωμαίων σκέπην under their protection, Polyb.", we find another piece of the Puzzle. On the view that "Bethsaida" => "Bezetha", we tie together Vespasian, who brought sight to a blind man with his spit, "I see men; but they look like trees, walking", and the very clever translation, "...he looked intently and was restored, and saw everything clearly."

I'm certain he did see everything clearly.

"And he sent him away to his home, saying, 'Do not even enter the village.' "

Jerusalem is to be Road-Graded, and the blind man is not even allowed to go into the village and offer praise to "Jesus" but is told to return to his HOME.

The Blind Man is Zakkai, perhaps? Perhaps even Josephus? Can't say for certain on that one but this is another story altogether, not about the birds nesting in the trees. This is at the end of Jerusalem and the Temple. Even the Blind Man could see that.
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Re: The peculiar case of the mustard seed and "the nest" (P75 and Chester Beatty)

Post by mlinssen »


Luke 13:18 Ἔλεγεν οὖν “Τίνι ὁμοία ἐστὶν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ, καὶ τίνι ὁμοιώσω αὐτήν;
19 ὁμοία ἐστὶν κόκκῳ σινάπεως, ὃν λαβὼν ἄνθρωπος ἔβαλεν εἰς κῆπον ἑαυτοῦ, καὶ ηὔξησεν καὶ ἐγένετο εἰς δένδρον, καὶ τὰ πετεινὰ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ κατεσκήνωσεν ἐν τοῖς κλάδοις αὐτοῦ.”

That's what we have now, here's what Chester Beatty II has:

THE CHESTER BEATTY BIBLICAL PAPYRI DESCRIPTIONS AND TEXTS OF TWELVE MANUSCRIPTS ON PAPYRUS OF THE GREEK BIBLE
FASCICULUS II
THE GOSPELS AND ACTS
BY FREDERIC G. KENYON


https://chesterbeatty.ie/assets/uploads ... xt-Opt.pdf

The book is almost a century old so the font can't be copy-pasted, and I don't feel like transcribing the Greek, so here's a screenshot:
Chester Luke 13-19.png
Chester Luke 13-19.png (671.04 KiB) Viewed 1819 times
Highlighted what is added in the MSS, bold what is absent, underlined what's different, separated by /
Again, I have just pasted the Greek here so forgive me the presence of diacritics, please:

Luke 13:18 Ἔλεγεν οὖν “Τίνι ὁμοία ἐστὶν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ, καὶ τίνι ὁμοιώσω αὐτήν;
19 ὁμοία ἐστὶν κόκκῳ σινάπεως, ὃν λαβὼν ἄνθρωπος ἔβαλεν εἰς τον κῆπον αυτοῦ, καὶ ηὔξησεν καὶ ἐγένετο εἰς δένδρον μεγα, καὶ τὰ πετεινὰ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ κατεσκήνωσεν ἐν τοῖς κλάδοις αὐτοῦ.”

A MEGA tree! Isn' that most wondrous, how Luke mimicks Thomas here?
"habitually" he put-forth outward [dop] a(n) great [al] branch

P75 has exactly what our Greek has:

https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Pap.Han ... r.Verbi%29
1B.8r

Screenshot attached, I have marked the verse with red lines at its start and end:
Mater verbi P75 Luke 13-19.png
Mater verbi P75 Luke 13-19.png (1.3 MiB) Viewed 1819 times
Evidently, I will argue that the Chester Beatty precedes the P75, and that the adjective mega got left out later, as it was too evidently a pointer to Thomas / Marcion. Changing a branch to a tree, fine - but changing a great branch into a great tree is rather obvious plagiarism, of course.
Alas, no Matthew or Mark version in the Chester Beatty, or P75. But this is yet another occasion where an early manuscript shows a greater verbatim agreement with Thomas than what we have now.
And again, the question poses itself: how could Greek copies of his text exist, dated around 50-140 CE (for what it's worth) that must have had those details as well, as the Coptic Thomas, so eagerly dated late by apologists and chums, has them as well?
I mean, it would have been impossible for Coptic Thomas to get those details from the canonicals, given how they obfuscated any and all traces to Thomas along the way


[EDIT: Needless to say, a tree can do without an adjective, but a "branch"? The Coptic says ⲧⲁⲣ, https://coptic-dictionary.org/entry.cgi?tla=C4440 - 'branch, point' and although that highly likely is a wordplay on the Coptic ⲧⲏⲣ, https://coptic-dictionary.org/entry.cgi?tla=C4445 - 'all', it needs an adjective: the branch is so ... that it offers Shelter to/ Protection from birds of the heaven.
Let's try it without: "... Whenever However if she "should" fall upon the earth which they do-work [dop] him
"habitually" he put-forth outward [dop] a branch, and he come-to-be [dop] Protection of birds of the(F) heaven"

That's feeble, there's something missing. Of course we know the content by heart by know and our brain tells us that a word is missing, but still: the word of choice doesn't sustain the imagery just by itself, a branch is little more than a twig in everyday language]
Last edited by mlinssen on Thu Aug 05, 2021 10:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The peculiar case of the mustard seed and "the nest"

Post by mlinssen »

Got myself a real NA28 now, and it is attested to as early as the IIIrd and as late as the XIIIth

Needless to say, it is clear why it got erased from memory

I'll be doing a few Thomas-canonicals parallels with the Coptic in one hand, and NA28 in the other. And at the end there will be one big table with MSS for a nice cross comparison.
Anyone could have done this in the past 6 decades, why does it take an amateur like me to get to learn all this stuff and implement it?

And how come it is accepted to wave with ordinary bibles? The thousands of parallels that I have read - and none with NA in hand. Now that is amateurish. Even Gathercole is dead silent about it, and has a conspicuously short comment on the parable of the mustard seed: 3 flimsy pages!!!
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Re: The peculiar case of the mustard seed and "the nest"

Post by mlinssen »

gryan wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 1:30 pm Re: another word for nests, and another interpretation
Gospel of Thomas Saying 86

I asked a native American pastor if he noticed anything in the NT that others seem to overlook. He said that adult birds do not need nests to lay their heads. Nests are for raising baby birds. Adult birds sleep without any need of a place to lay their heads.
Interesting as that may be, the word "nest" most certainly is not in Thomas - nor in the canonicals, for that matter.

Matthew: κλάδοις
Luke: κλάδοις
Mark: σκιὰν

κλάδοις means 'branches' - how very interesting, isn't it? The branch of Thomas turns into a great tree in Matthe and Luke, yet they let the birds "seek protection" in its branches. And of course, the verb κατασκηνοῦν bears great and grand similarity to the word in Thomas that is only one letter off.

σκιὰν according to https://biblehub.com/greek/4639.htm means shadow, yet in a figurative way: 'properly, the shadow of a looming presence; (figuratively) a spiritual reality (good or bad) relating to God's light or spiritual darkness.'

It would be really, really nice if bible translations stopped to be bible interpretations. My next life work (slap it onto the pile) is a Greek-English interlinear of the NT that just says what it says
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Re: The peculiar case of the mustard seed and "the nest"

Post by gryan »

mlinssen wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 12:07 pm The parable of the mustard seed: it is going to be a very short one, and about one word only.
There's something strange in the canonicals:

Matthew 13:32 ... ὥστε (so that) ἐλθεῖν (come) τὰ (the) πετεινὰ (birds) τοῦ (of the) οὐρανοῦ (air) καὶ (and) κατασκηνοῦν* (perch) ἐν (in) τοῖς (the) κλάδοις (branches) αὐτοῦ (of it).”

Mark 4:31 ... καὶ (and) ποιεῖ (it produces) κλάδους (branches) μεγάλους (great), ὥστε (so that) δύνασθαι (are able) ὑπὸ (under) τὴν (the) σκιὰν (shadow) αὐτοῦ (of it) τὰ (the) πετεινὰ (birds) τοῦ (of the) οὐρανοῦ (air) κατασκηνοῦν* (to perch).”

Luke 13:19 ... καὶ (and) ηὔξησεν (it grew) καὶ (and) ἐγένετο (came) εἰς (into) δένδρον (a tree), καὶ (and) τὰ (the) πετεινὰ (birds) τοῦ (of the) οὐρανοῦ (air) κατεσκήνωσεν (encamped) ἐν (in) τοῖς (the) κλάδοις (branches) αὐτοῦ (of it).”

Matthew and Mark have an asterisk behind their verb, for good reasons:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/tex ... askhno%2Fw

κατασκηνόω

to pitch one's camp or tent, take up one's quarters, encamp, Xen.; generally, to rest, lodge, settle

Well, isn't that a remarkable word?
Needless to say, its only occurrence in the entire NT is in Matthew and Mark. I have never seen birds pitch a tent, but highly likely these two fellows did.
Luke's slightly different κατεσκήνωσεν is the same verb, and oddly, Acts 2:26 has the fourth and last occurrence of this verb, κατασκηνώσει: "will dwell (in hope)" is the translation, and the verse is a verbatim copy of Psalms 16:9.
σκηνή is the root word, tent. What a remarkably composite verb to use on this occasion, where birds do things in branches or trees or their shadow, isn't it?
46 occurrences of κατασκην in the Tanakh, and every single one of them is translated with "encamp": even said Psalms verse. The noun occurs a few dozen times in the NT and gets translated with tabernacle, mostly
Interesting. I gave this a second read this morning. I'd never dwelt on the word κατασκηνοῦν* before.
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Re: The peculiar case of the mustard seed and "the nest"

Post by mlinssen »

gryan wrote: Fri Aug 06, 2021 6:08 am Interesting. I gave this a second read this morning. I'd never dwelt on the word κατασκηνοῦν* before.
I'm a newbie, of course, and don't know what the asterisk means. No note to it in Berean, in NA28 it represents Consistently cited witnesses and that still doesn't elucidate much

I have been going by Thomas' Coptic and comparing that to the Koine Greek, gryan. The usual way to get over your midlife crisis is to get a new toy, be that a sports car, a young girlfriend, or both - yet I seem to have drawn the short straw ROFL

No, it's a dumb stoopid crazy verb of course, to pitch your tent in a tree when you're a bird. The Koine is crooked as hell here, but fortunately our bible interpreters managed to mislead everyone by assigning the dogmastic translation to it! It goes entirely unnoticed unless you read the Koine with a proper dictionary in hand, although I must say that I'm surprised by biblehub here: https://biblehub.com/greek/2681.htm

Very forthcoming, whereas this could have easily been obscured as the verb is only used for this parable, in all of the NT
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Re: The peculiar case of the mustard seed and "the nest"

Post by gryan »

mlinssen wrote: Fri Aug 06, 2021 6:33 am The usual way to get over your midlife crisis is to get a new toy, be that a sports car, a young girlfriend, or both - yet I seem to have drawn the short straw ROFL
I can relate! There is something about "being in the driver's seat" both literally and metaphorically that consoles one in midlife. And I could go on about the attraction of a young girlfriend, emphasis on young. I'm 60.

But I drew the short straw a long time ago, in my early 30s, when it slowly became clear my wife's body was not giving us children. When I opted to stay with the wife of my youth (who is a wonderful lovable person who happens to be a well-read scholar), and accept childlessness, I was given a lot of free time that people with children don't have. It was in those years that I discovered internet as a place to discuss scripture, and happened onto Crosstalk where Stevan L. Davies was leading a study of Mark/Thomas parallels.

Years later, I began reading Paul's third heaven story, which lead to "the thorn in the flesh" and to Paul's use of flesh phrases in Galatians. I was truly disoriented when I realized I was seeing things that made sense in the Greek, but that were not in the standard Galatians commentaries. I was further surprised, when I was able to consult with a leading Paul scholar who was good enough to read my exegesis of the flesh phrases of Gal 4:12-14, and he said "your grammar is good." My Greek grammar is lousy, in general, but on that passage, after a long enough period of time, it was indeed good enough. When he suggested I look at the passage in the context of Galatians as a whole, my heart sank. I was not interested. But he made it clear that if I didn't do it, nobody would. He, himself was not going to take on the project and neither was he interested in further consultation with me.

I'm outside the academy with a flesh phrases of Galatians project that nobody is interested in but me.
Nevertheless, I'm pressing on to the goal of a coherent reading of the flesh phrases of Galatians as if the Borean/Greek New Testament were a new sports car, and as if the elusive original meaning Paul's flesh phrases were a young girlfriend in the passenger seat.
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Re: The peculiar case of the mustard seed and "the nest"

Post by mlinssen »

mlinssen wrote: Fri Aug 06, 2021 6:33 am
gryan wrote: Fri Aug 06, 2021 6:08 am Interesting. I gave this a second read this morning. I'd never dwelt on the word κατασκηνοῦν* before.
I'm a newbie, of course, and don't know what the asterisk means. No note to it in Berean, in NA28 it represents Consistently cited witnesses and that still doesn't elucidate much

I have been going by Thomas' Coptic and comparing that to the Koine Greek, gryan. The usual way to get over your midlife crisis is to get a new toy, be that a sports car, a young girlfriend, or both - yet I seem to have drawn the short straw ROFL

No, it's a dumb stoopid crazy verb of course, to pitch your tent in a tree when you're a bird. The Koine is crooked as hell here, but fortunately our bible interpreters managed to mislead everyone by assigning the dogmastic translation to it! It goes entirely unnoticed unless you read the Koine with a proper dictionary in hand, although I must say that I'm surprised by biblehub here: https://biblehub.com/greek/2681.htm

Very forthcoming, whereas this could have easily been obscured as the verb is only used for this parable, in all of the NT
Let me rephrase that, and tell a little story

In elementary school, I read a lot - over a thousand books. After i had finished the kids section I moved up a notch. I ended up reading War and Peace and such, just because they were nice fat books that took a while to finish - needles to say, I understood nothing of the deeper meanings behind them

One of the in between books was Karl May - of course, I read all his books. Never knew that he was German, a book is a book and when it's in Dutch it's Dutch, life can be simple at that age. Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, loved them.
One sentence that apparently impressed me was "the Civil War was a black page in the history of our country". Dunno why, it just stuck.
I remember telling my Dad that same evening the exact same - me, an 8-year old or so, no idea how old i was, no idea what I was saying, I guess I was trying to impress him. My Dad was a very kind and smart man, an English teacher. His response? "Oh yeah!" and I was satisfied...

Moral of the story? My content was completely out of context, of course, we've never had a Civil War in the Netherlands - and it was clear that I got those words from somewhere, and that they were important to me; and my Dad saw and knew and felt that

Likewise, there are anomalies in the NT, "crazy content", and this is one of them: birds that pitch their tent in a tree.
That content must have been important to them, because they preserved it in an alien context, or rather, imported alien content into their context.
The main two reasons for that, in my experience, are Scripture (the Tanakh) and Thomas (or Marcion, which I treat slightly identical - the narrative version of Thomas that closely resembles that of Mark and Luke).
Scripture usually is easily to recognise; most often it is referred to as "it is / was written", sometimes the author is even mentioned, be it correctly or not, and occasionally the words are even verbatim quotes. They are quite proud of doing that and they like to wave their flag of Scripture, in order to demonstrate that they root from Judaism.
Thomas has no such labels, they really are not proud of quoting Thomas, that doesn't serve their goal - their entire goal is to obfuscate that they quote from him, the goal is to pretend that his quotes are theirs - so there are never any pointers to their origin.
Except for the content itself - and as a rule, whenever there is a funny word: is it advertised by them? If Yes, then it is Scripture; if No, then it is Thomas

There are exceptions to rules, like the Latin loanwords; it is unthinkable that the Latin loanword (derivative) flagellum is used for the actual event itself, whereas the native Greek mastigo is used for its predictions; there are other stories behind the NT, and they point to their writers / editors, in stead of the used source(s)

But, yes, since I've found my Berean Interlinear, I use nothing else. And now I've found my NA28, thanks to Andrew, I'll use both at the same time. And I really feel like that is the bare minimum of ammunition that one should carry when researching the NT, even though that threshold is fairly high - but technically one wouldn't need to know Greek with these two in hand, although I'm really happy that I had a few years of it!
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