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MS. 88 as Evidence for a Text without 1 Cor 14.34–5

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Philip B. payne
Philip B. payne
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PO Box 580, Edmonds, WA 98020–0580, USA
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Extract

This critical note explains the most likely origin of the dislocated text at the end of 1 Corinthians 14 in the Greek twelfth century AD minuscule 88.1 There are four distinctive features of this passage in ms. 88.

1) Cor 14.36 follows immediately after 14.33.

2) Cor 14.34–5 follows 14.40.

3) Cor 14.34—5 is a distinct unit separated from v. 40 by a double slash on the base line in the space normally occupied by letters. The words on each side of this double slash are much farther apart than any other adjacent words on this page, so the original scribe must have inserted the double slash before writing w. 34–5. (See line 15 of the enlarged photograph, p. 158.) The end of v. 35 coincides with the end of a line. (See line 22 of the enlarged photograph.) Nothing follows on this line after its closing punctuation dot,2 even though each of the remaining three lines on this page extends one or two more letters beyond this dot. The next line, which begins chapter 15, is the only line on this page to be indented.3

4) There is a corresponding but smaller double slash above the last letter of 14.33.4 (See line 6 of the enlarged photograph.) It is placed at a sharper angle than the double slash before vv. 34–5 to help it fit between the lines of text. Another larger double slash, at the same level as the Greek letters on the last line of v. 33, is in the right margin where it is easy to see.

Type
Short Studies
Information
New Testament Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , January 1998 , pp. 152 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

1 The full-page and close-up photographs of 1 Corinthians 14 in ms. 88 at the end of this article are from the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III in Naples, Italy, reproduced here with permission.

2 Most of the dots marking punctuation in ms. 88 are highlighted with red ink. The larger red spots coincide with major punctuation breaks. The highlighting around the dot at the end of 14.35 is the largest red spot on this page. This highlights that 14.35 ends a logical unit and helps set 14.34–5 apart as a distinct unit.

3 The indentation is about the width of a typical epsilon.

4 Both here and after v. 40 the double slash precedes a punctuation dot.

5 Eusebius, H.E. 6.23.2 records the employment of women stenographers in Origen's scriptorium at Caesarea. Since most scribes were male, ‘he’ is used throughout this study where a pronoun is used to identify a scribe, but ‘he’ is used generically without intent to specify either a male or a female scribe.

6 Cf. also Wire, Antoinette Clark, The Corinthian Woman Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul's Rhetoric (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990) 151Google Scholar: ‘the scribe…immediately recognized the error in it earlier omission and inscribes two short slashes on the line of writing to signify a necessary reversal of order before writing the words about the women. The scribe then puts similar marks some lines before to show where the words on the women belong, but these slashes must be squeezed in above the line.’

7 Wire's attempt on p.150 of Corinthian Woman Prophets to defend the possibility that ms. 88 resulted from accidental being copied to be credible, including the following six: 1. It had the vaiant ‘churches’ in the plural. This variant is so rare that it is not noted in either the Nestle–Aland or the UBS NT text. 2. The word ‘churches’ in both v. 33 and 35 was the last word in its line. 3. Even though the skipped text was one contiguous unit, the corrector split it into two parts, putting ‘of the sai8nts’ in the right hand margin after ‘churches’ in v. 33, but putting vv. 34–5 in the lower margin. 4. ‘Of the saints’ was put in the right margin at the end of v. 33 in such a way as to obscure the sign marking where vv. 34–5 should be inserted. No scribe could be expected to obscure his own insertion sign. 5. 1 Cor 14.34–5 is put in the lower margin without any mark to alert future copyists that it is out of place. 6. The last line above the lower margin coincided with the end of the chapter, namely the end of v. 40.

8 Cf. Fee, G. D., The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987) 700,Google Scholar ‘displacements of this kind do not occur elsewhere in the NT’.

9 Wire, , Corinthian Women Prophets, 151,Google Scholar acknowledges this, apparently realizing that her suggestion critiqued in footnote 7 is not realistic.

10 Cf. Fee, , 1 Corinthians, 699 n. 1Google Scholar, ‘the entire Western tradition’ has w. 34–5 after v. 40.

11 UBS Greek NT 4th rev. ed., 10*.

12 Furthermore, if, unexpectedly, the scribe had a Western text and deliberately preserved this reading even though he noted that it was wrong, it would be surprising that he ignored so many other distinctively Western readings.

13 Wire, , Corinthian Women Prophets, 151.Google Scholar Ms. 88 also seems to follow Ψ and to be followed by in its reading of επιτετραπται and υποτασσεσθαι1 Cor 14.34.

14 Most clearly argued by Fee, , 1 Corinthians, 699–710.Google Scholar

15 This is argued by the present writer in ‘Fuldensis, Sigla for Variants in Vaticanus, and 1 Cor 14.34–5’, NTS 41 (1995) 240–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Clement of Alexandria, Paed. 3.11, cf. Strom. 4.19; cf. Payne, , ‘Fuldensis’, 247–8.Google Scholar

17 Cf. Payne, , ‘Fuldensis’, 247–8Google Scholar and a detailed discussion of evidence for an original text without 1 Cor 14.34–5 in Payne's forthcoming Man & Woman, One in Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997).Google Scholar

18 If, improbably, he had been aware of the Western placement, this would simply confirm his choice that the end of v. 40 is the most natural break in the after v. 36 to insert vv. 34–5 that were missing from the manuscript he was copying.