Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Peter Kirby wrote:

Secret Alias wrote:Since Ben has given up I'd love to hear from anyone else giving us an example of a shorter and longer version of a text in early Christianity where the longer text is acknowledged to be the most original. My bet is that we can't find one (i.e. we can't find an example of large sections being 'cut out' of a given text).

You know, I think you make a good point. We are far too sanguine about the seven letter Greek edition. It is, unsurprisingly, an example of inertia. Lightfoot and Zahn are still the touchstones for modern "consensus" on Ignatius, which mostly amounts to, "this is really complicated and so I'd rather not say anything definite as long as I can pursue my area of expertise without having to resolve these questions regarding the epistles of Ignatius." This is what passes for consensus in this field: some late 19th century debate that has since had a patina of dust settle over it and which nobody dares to disturb, so long as they can tiptoe around it.

If it pleases you and you can find the time, you should gather all the data you can for your hypothesis and publish, especially if you can enlist someone with proficiency in Greek and Syriac (that last one is the other reason that this tends to be a dead issue - Syriac experts are relatively rare in the field of NT and Christian origins).

The seven letter Greek edition has been challenged by modern scholars see for example
The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius
The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius
by J. Rius - Camps.
What remains a consensus is that the Syriac recension is an abridgment.

Andrew Criddle

... remains a consensus because nothing has been written about it. What? How many papers in a given year get published about things written originally in Syriac? This is an ignored topic for logistical reasons alone. Things are better now with respect to scholars able to read Syriac. But over the last two hundred years? That's how consensus's are formed.

andrewcriddle wrote:

Peter Kirby wrote:

Secret Alias wrote:Since Ben has given up I'd love to hear from anyone else giving us an example of a shorter and longer version of a text in early Christianity where the longer text is acknowledged to be the most original. My bet is that we can't find one (i.e. we can't find an example of large sections being 'cut out' of a given text).

You know, I think you make a good point. We are far too sanguine about the seven letter Greek edition. It is, unsurprisingly, an example of inertia. Lightfoot and Zahn are still the touchstones for modern "consensus" on Ignatius, which mostly amounts to, "this is really complicated and so I'd rather not say anything definite as long as I can pursue my area of expertise without having to resolve these questions regarding the epistles of Ignatius." This is what passes for consensus in this field: some late 19th century debate that has since had a patina of dust settle over it and which nobody dares to disturb, so long as they can tiptoe around it.

If it pleases you and you can find the time, you should gather all the data you can for your hypothesis and publish, especially if you can enlist someone with proficiency in Greek and Syriac (that last one is the other reason that this tends to be a dead issue - Syriac experts are relatively rare in the field of NT and Christian origins).

The seven letter Greek edition has been challenged by modern scholars see for example
The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius
The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius
by J. Rius - Camps.
What remains a consensus is that the Syriac recension is an abridgment.

And there are others who have certainly called the entire 7 letter Greek edition an outright forgery (Robert Joly) without, IIUC, thinking that the 3 letter Syriac recension preceded it.

I could name no more than 10 scholars today who could develop an argument for the primacy of the Syriac text. That's the real problem here. Technical abilities, creativity in short supply

Never a shortage of "themes of x" in Paul papers

The two separate issues (the genuineness of the middle 7 and the priority of the middle 7 to the shorter 3) ought to be kept separate, in my opinion. Obviously, arguing for the genuineness of the middle 7 automatically makes the shorter 3 an abridgement, but arguing that the shorter 3 are an abridgement does not, on the other hand, necessarily entail the genuineness of the middle 7.

Likewise, arguing for the priority of the shorter 3 does not necessarily have to entail their authenticity.

andrewcriddle wrote:The seven letter Greek edition has been challenged by modern scholars see for example
The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius
The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius
by J. Rius - Camps.
What remains a consensus is that the Syriac recension is an abridgment.

While it will not approach the level of a scholarly analysis, I have posted comparisons of the shorter & longer Greek texts of most all Ignatian letters, with corresponding English translations from the ANCL/ANF volume 1. The Greek texts were those floating around the internet and under some dispute by the folks who produce the TLG. I tried to break the text into sense units (not formally defined, mind you) from the two versions'

http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... tius+Greek

Separate files compare the English translation of the Syriac letters to the English translations of the Greek forms, broken down into the sense units I produced from the comparison of short and long forms. My initial impression is that the Syriac versions overwhelmingly tend to resemble the shorter Greek version over the longer. This ignores the cases where the shorter & longer texts are identical.

As for the Greek versions, I think they were produced by the same party, only the longer form was a revision of the shorter, changing the argumentation to suit the theological issues that were important at the time the revision was made. When corresponding passages are compared side by side, there are a considerable number of cases where the texts are identical (or nearly identical). These seem to be the things that the writer never waivered on. Where the corresponding passages that aren't identical are compared, we are essentially seeing progression in the thinking of the writer.

But what kind of writer was this fellow we call Ignatius? He seems to be rather simple. His demeanor reminds me of the mad-monk Epiphanius (bishop of Salamis), but possessing a much lower level of general education. One thing that Ignatius and Epiphanius could have shared in common was being monks who lived in isolated hermitages in the deserts. It seems that lectures given by monks like Epiphanius were attended by throngs of villagers who really seemed to enjoy his musings. I guess folks in the audience who were literate, say the local village scribes/lawyers or the monk's community leader, jotted down the words for the sake of posterity.

But what if the lectures were organized so that a set of basic creedal sayings were presented by the Recorder, and the rest is the monk's own commentary? In the Talmuds, the text of the Mishnah is cited, and the opinions of various teachers of note were recorded as Gemara, commentary. I doubt, based on dismissive attitudes towards Jews, whether this form of recording debates, based around common themes as the case seems to be, came from Jewish influence. I just think that this kind of entertainment (as it seems to have been for local villagers), may have been common practice in many regions of the Ancient Near East (ANE).

So there you have it: Ignatius was a monk living in a desert monastery in Asia Minor, so this is at least late 2nd or 3rd century CE.

DCH

Edit 2-28-16 in red

Ben C. Smith wrote:

andrewcriddle wrote:
The seven letter Greek edition has been challenged by modern scholars see for example
The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius
The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius
by J. Rius - Camps.
What remains a consensus is that the Syriac recension is an abridgment.

And there are others who have certainly called the entire 7 letter Greek edition an outright forgery (Robert Joly) without, IIUC, thinking that the 3 letter Syriac recension preceded it.

... I did not say otherwise.

But this is what these people do. Did anyone after Cureton take the Syriac recension that seriously? No of course not. It's always about 'the consensus' but where 'the consensus' is just an unconscious desire of a bunch of assholes to dictate 'what the truth is' by committee as opposed to what all the evidence actually says. IMO everything - and I mean EVERYTHING - comes down to Letter to Theodore in this field. Morton Smith finds a document. He spends a great deal of time examining it (like Cureton). But then it becomes more convenient for assholes to go back to the way things were before the discovery. I am not sure there is ever a massive cabal at work. Just a basic lazy agreement on the part of assholes that things would be better off the way they were before a given discovery.

Peter told a funny story on his Facebook page about life in the field of mathematics and I (or he I don't remember) noticed how different the field of humanities is to the field of mathematics where 'the truth' is solely determined by 'the truth' (as oppose to the collective will of a bunch of assholes).