MrMacSon wrote: ↑Mon Feb 27, 2023 2:28 am
Leucius Charinus wrote: ↑Sun Feb 26, 2023 9:32 pm
... whoever composed Paul also preserved (and had before them as they wrote) a "Christianised" LXX (that is an LXX with runes (
nomina sacra)
- Maybe. Maybe not.
That begs the question as to where a pre-Pauline "Christianized LXX" would have come from; unless you're positing very late writing of the Pauline letters.
The logic I invoke is that whoever wrote the NT (including Paul) was hellbent on importing legions of copy/pasted Greek material from the Greek LXX. This basically implies that they had to first construct an authoritative SOURCE version of the Greek LXX. Anything else would be prone to all sorts of errors. Consequently I think it reasonable that the establishment of a standard Greek LXX was the first priority. In this process, knowing that they were going to introduce 'runes' (nomina sacra) in the NT, they introduced runes into the LXX and thus "Christianised" it in a distinctive manner.
The direct link between the Old and the New is given by the 'rune' shared by Joshua in the Old and Jesus in the New.
I think this process is independent of the chronology. That is this process happened whether or not Paul was early or late.
Leucius Charinus wrote: ↑Sun Feb 26, 2023 9:32 pm
Generally speaking most commentators assign the 'runes' to an editor of the NT collection.
Nobody is. There is no general theory for the appearance of the 'runes'.
Michael Avi-Yonah wrote:"The use of abbreviations is, on the whole, as foreign to the Greeks as it is congenial to the Romans and Byzantines.”
I'd suggest that the use of these abbreviations is an indicator of Roman provenance. The Jewish writings used one major abbreviation. OTOH Roman culture was totally obsessed with the use of abbreviations in a myriad of forms.
p.11
The main categories of words commonly abbreviated (by the ROmans and Byzantines) are:
(1) Proper Names:
(a) of individuals: some greek and almost all Roman praenomina, names of Old and New Testament personages and saints, common Christian names.
(b) Collective: names of provinces, districts, towns, town-quarters, demotic names, names of phylai and Roman tribes, names of subdivision of synoecized towns.
(2) Administrative Terms:
(a) of individuals: titles of office, Roman, Late Roman and Byzantine, especially the imperial protocol; Late Roman and Byzantine honorific appellations of the various classes of officials, usually in superlative; provincial, municipal, and village functionaries; functionaries connected with local institutions, such as the prytanis.
(b) Collective: collective appellations of capital towns, towns, townlets, head villages and villages; generic appellations of town districts, town boundaries, etc; corporative municipal institutions, the assembly, the council; appellations of their resolutions.
(3) Military Terms:
(a) Individual: title of soldiers, lower and higher officers, commanders of irregular corps of auxiliaries.
(4) Commerce: Money in general, Greek and Roman denominations, weights and measures (of length and cubic), special signs used in the nilometers and in cadasters, names of goods, names of trades and professions, especially those of artisans.
(5) Religion:
(A) Pagan: names of gods, sacred functions and feasts, titles of priests, expressions of adoration and worship.
(B) Christian
(a) Individual: all degrees of secular and regular clergy, church servants and assistants, with their proper honorific appellations.
(b) Collective: religious bodies and institutions, churches and monasteries.
(c) Expressions relating to the Deity, divine attributes, the persons of the Trinity and the Virgin Mary, titles of saints, prophets and maryrs, phrases taken from prayers and liturgical formulae, terms refering to the Church and the Christian way of life and feelings.
(6) Funerary: expressions relating to the deceased, the fact of his decease, the length of his life; consoling words and phrases addressed to him; appreciations; terms refering to the tomb and burial.
(7) Dedicatory: expressions refering to the building; the act of building in general as refering to the building or the builder; special terms deonting the laying of the foundations or the completion of the structure; description of the architect, the founder or the construction; stock phrases used in dedication or on the lintel of churches or houses, especially the formula of Ps. cxxi. 8.
(8) General and various:
(a) Dating: terms connected with dating, general expressions for the divisions of time, names of days, months (Macedonian, Roman, Egyptian, and Attic), eras and other indications of period (eponymic regions, consulates or archonships, eras of provinces and towns, of Diocletian, era of indiction)
(b) Family relations and legal relations;
(c) common grammatical terms, pronouns personal and relative, conjuctions and prepositions;
(d) special technical terms relating to gladiators (...) their classes and prizes.
Michael Avi-Yonah,
Abbreviations in Greek Inscriptions
Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine
(Jerusalem: Government of Palestine, 1940)
As reprinted in
Abbreviations in Greek Inscriptions
Al. N. Oikonomides
Professor of Classics
Loyola University
Chicargo. Illinois
ARES Publishing 1974