Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

They have treated the Divine Scriptures recklessly and without fear. They have set aside the rule of ancient faith; and Christ they have not known. They do not endeavor to learn what the Divine Scriptures declare, but strive laboriously after any form of syllogism which may be devised to sustain their impiety. And if any one brings before them a passage of Divine Scripture, they see whether a conjunctive or disjunctive form of syllogism can be made from it.

14. And as being of the earth and speaking of the earth, and as ignorant of him who comes from above, they forsake the holy writings of God to devote themselves to geometry. Euclid is laboriously measured by some of them; and Aristotle and Theophrastus are admired; and Galen, perhaps, by some is even worshipped.

15. But that those who use the arts of unbelievers for their heretical opinions and adulterate the simple faith of the Divine Scriptures by the craft of the godless, are far from the faith, what need is there to say? Therefore they have laid their hands boldly upon the Divine Scriptures, alleging that they have corrected them.

16. That I am not speaking falsely of them in this matter, whoever wishes may learn. For if any one will collect their respective copies, and compare them one with another, he will find that they differ greatly.

17. Those of Asclepiades, for example, do not agree with those of Theodotus. And many of these can be obtained, because their disciples have assiduously written the corrections, as they call them, that is the corruptions, of each of them. Again, those of Hermophilus do not agree with these, and those of Apollonides are not consistent with themselves. For you can compare those prepared by them at an earlier date with those which they corrupted later, and you will find them widely different.

18. But how daring this offense is, it is not likely that they themselves are ignorant. For either they do not believe that the Divine Scriptures were spoken by the Holy Spirit, and thus are unbelievers, or else they think themselves wiser than the Holy Spirit, and in that case what else are they than demoniacs? For they cannot deny the commission of the crime, since the copies have been written by their own hands. For they did not receive such Scriptures from their instructors, nor can they produce any copies from which they were transcribed.

19. But some of them have not thought it worth while to corrupt them, but simply deny the law and the prophets, and thus through their lawless and impious teaching under pretense of grace, have sunk to the lowest depths of perdition.

The Homeric epics were analyzed for signs of nonauthorial (and therefore illegitimate) insertions from an early date. By the fifth and sixth
centuries BCE, historians suspected that certain lines in the Iliad and
the Odyssey had been interpolated by two Athenian boosters of Homer,
Solon, and Pisistratus, for the sake of glorifying Athens, while early
rhapsodes supposedly added others.19 At the Library of Alexandria in
the third century BCE, librarians strove to “put [texts] in order,” in part
by locating “spurious” passages.20 The system of critical signs instituted
by Zenodotus, first librarian of Alexandria, called for marking dubious
verses with an obelos; he deployed this horizontal dash next to lines that
he read as interpolations while using brackets to mark longer passages
of uncertain authority.21 Similar concerns about textual purity persisted
in the Roman Republic and Empire. The great Roman grammarian
Aelius Stilo reintroduced Alexandrian critical signs in his effort to standardize the corpus of Plautus’s plays, in part by finding and deleting
interpolations.22 Later on, questions of textual authenticity and suspicion of illicit interpolation dogged Virgil’s Aeneid as they had Homer’s
epics, particularly in the case of the notorious “Helen episode,” a likely
interpolation into Book II of the Iliad that was not transmitted in any
pre-fifteenth-century copy.23 The practice of seeking out and condemning
interpolations in so-called “canonical” texts implies that such insertions
were frequent enough––and disruptive enough––that constant vigilance
was required to fend them off. In the world of ancient textual criticism,
the major concern seems to have been to preserve “authorial” control
over the borders of a written text, whether it was an epic or a play.

12. The same writer [Dionysius of Corinth] also speaks as follows concerning his own epistles, alleging that they had been mutilated: As the brethren desired me to write epistles, I wrote. And these epistles the apostles of the devil have filled with tares, cutting out some things and adding others. For them a woe is reserved. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at if some have attempted to adulterate the Lord's writings also, since they have formed designs even against writings which are of less account.

A scribe (or an associate) would ideally review his copy, comparing it to the exemplar he had used, and correct any mistakes of transcription. But this was not always done or done well, and it was incumbent on subsequent users of a book to examine the manuscript carefully and compare it, if possible, with one or more manuscripts of the same work in order to identify defects or differences and then to correct them. Absent a comparable manuscript, a reader had to judge the accuracy of the text by internal considerations. But in either case, determining the correctness of the text was a matter of educated conjecture.

Arguments are—normally—compounds of assertibles. They are defined as a system of at least two premises and a conclusion (D. L. 7.45). Syntactically, every premise but the first is introduced by ‘now’ or ‘but’, and the conclusion by ‘therefore’.

If it is day, it is light.
But it is not the case that it is light.
Therefore it is not the case that it is day.

Such a form of speech is satisfying, because the significance of contrasted ideas is easily felt, especially when they are thus put side by side, and also because it has the effect of a logical argument; it is by putting two opposing conclusions side by side that you prove one of them false.

Such, then, is the nature of antithesis.