DCHindley wrote: ficino wrote: Do you have a methodology, David? Authorial intention, deduced only from the text that we have, covers a lot of bases and a lot of anomalies. I've looked in some discussions of textual criticism but haven't found general canons of prudence for cases of suspected interpolation.
No formal principles, other than connecting parts of the text that appear to be telling one story and "bracketing off" what appears to intrude. The Revelation is a bit of a different animal than the Paulines, where I have the most interest, but Revelation has a large number of aporia (anomalies) that beg some sort of explanations.
Thanks for explaining and provoking, David. I don't really care about this verse, or even about Revelation. It has always struck me as the sort of thing whose author must have once been the most picked-on kid in the ancient equivalent of eighth grade.
I do care about textual criticism. Having spent many years working on Greek, I have to say that the translations that connect "from the foundation of the world" to "has been written," not "slaughtered," seem forced. Word order matters a lot in Greek, especially if a text will have been recited a lot to groups. Someone hearing this will most readily think the prep phrase qualifies what precedes, "slain/slaughtered." But I can't press that point of translation.
I am not persuaded, in any case, by the argument that "the book of life of the lamb slain before the foundation of the world" is so weird that some parts must be interpolated. It's a much simpler hypothesis to suppose that the author just is (perversely?) obscure in places than to posit additional entities. The idea that the slain lamb should have a book of life doesn't seem to contradict the tenor of what is said about the lamb elsewhere in Rev. The lamb is mentioned throughout, from 5:6. He has his bride, his posse, and is full of wrath when his people get hurt. Why shouldn't he have their names in a book? As someone pointed out, the Lamb keeps the book of life at 21:27, and the lamb had the right to open the scroll of seven seals back at chapter 5. The lamb is too central a figure to have been interpolated - the interpolator would have had to rewrite the whole book. Maybe the letters to the churches once stood on their own; I don't know about that.
Is the idea of a SLAIN lamb in contradiction to the rest of Rev? No, because the lamb cannot but be equated to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is said to have freed us of our sins by his own blood, 1:5, and to have been pierced, 1:7. Once the lamb imagery begins, the choir sings of the lamb's purchasing a people by his blood at 5:9. Then we have "worthy is the lamb that was slain" at 5:12. The same things are true of the lamb and of Jesus Christ. The very image of lamb has sacrificial connotations.
Finally, is "from the foundation of the world" an impossible qualifier of "slain"? Maybe the prep phrase just does qualify "written." So to establish interpolation by this argument, one must show, first, that the prep must qualify "slain," and two, that the author could not have made it qualify "slain." It will take the deep-seated penetration advocated by Pasquali to establish that impossibility, since for starters, we would think that if the conjunction of the two units seems difficult to us, that difficulty is precisely a stroke against the interpolation hypothesis. Interpolators in general think they're improving the text; they don't normally introduce what they believe will muddy it. One has to show that the conjunction cannot have been made by the author.
So I think there is not good reason to set aside the unified MS. testimony to 13:8.
