Today we will explore a subject that has a bearing on the following twelve questions:
● Matthew 27:17: did Pilate describe Barabbas as if Barabbas
was also called Jesus?
● Mark 1:1: did Mark describe Jesus as the Son of God, or
not?
● Luke 23:42: Did the dying repentant thief call Jesus
“Lord,” or not?
● John 1:18: does the author refer to the only-begotten
Son, or to the only-begotten God?
● John 9:35: did Jesus ask the no-longer-blind man if he
believed on the Son of God, or on the Son of Man?
● Acts 20:28: did Paul refer to the church of God
● Romans 14:10: Did Paul mention the judgment seat of Christ,
or the judgment seat of God?
● First Corinthians 10:9: Did Paul say that the Israelites in the days
of Moses tempted Christ, or that they tempted the Lord, or that they tempted
God?
● Philippians 4:13: Did Paul specify, “I can do all things through
Christ who strengthens me,” or should the final phrase be, “through the one
who strengthens me”?
● First Timothy 3:16: did the original text refer to “God manifest
in the flesh,” or not?
● First Peter 3:15: who should we sanctify as Lord in our hearts: Christ, or God?
● Jude 1:5: did Jude state that the Lord saved a people
out of Egypt
It is not my intention to resolve
any of these textual contests today. Instead I want to explore a scribal
mechanism which may have been involved in their creation: the
reverential use of contractions to write sacred names. These contractions, which appear in almost
all New Testament Greek manuscripts, are called nomina sacra (singular: nomen sacrum), sacred names.
Other contractions can be found in
Greek manuscripts. The words και (and)
and περι (about) are often abbreviated; in chapter-lists which precede each
Gospel in many manuscripts, περι is typically shortened to its first two
letters, written vertically, as the first word of chapter-titles. And very frequently, when the letter νυ is at the end of a line of text, it
is represented by an overline instead of being written. The nomina
sacra, however, form a special class of contractions; they were not made in order to
conserve time or materials, but as expressions of reverence.
Even before any New Testament books
were composed, copyists of books of the Old Testament already treated the name of God with special reverence.
In Hebrew, this name consists of four Hebrew letters, and for this
reason is known as the Sacred Tetragrammaton.
In some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, when the Sacred Tetragrammaton appears,
it is written in its own distinct script; the copyists used ordinary lettering
elsewhere but for the name of God, paleo-Hebrew letters were used. 11Q Psalms, a scroll of Psalms,
has many examples of this.
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| The Sacred Tetragrammaton |
In intertestamental times, the Old
Testament was translated into Greek; the most popular Greek translation was known as the Septuagint. In
the first half of the 200s, the patristic writer Origen, in his Homily
on Psalm 2, as he commented about the second verse, made this observation
about some copies of the Septuagint: “In
the most accurate manuscripts, the name [i.e., the name of God] occurs in
Hebrew characters – not in modern-day Hebrew, but in the very ancient
lettering.”
In Greek manuscripts of Old
Testament books produced by Christian copyists, the name of God was replaced
with the Greek word Κυριος, or with the contraction ΚΣ, accompanied by a line
above the letters. Other copyists,
however, continued to give the name of God special treatment. For example, in P. Oxy 3522 (a fragment with
text from Job 42:11-12, produced in the first century A.D.) and Papyrus Fouad 266 (a fragment with text from portions of Genesis and Deuteronomy, produced in
the first century B.C.), the name of God is repeatedly written in paleo-Hebrew
letters, even though the main text is Greek. The Nahal Hever Scroll of the Minor Prophets also clearly displays the use of paleo-Hebrew (or paleo-Aramaic) letters reserved for the
Tetragrammaton.
In a Greek fragment of Leviticus among the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q120), the Sacred Name is treated differently: the copyist wrote neither the Hebrew
Tetragrammaton nor the contraction for Κυριος; instead he wrote ΙΑΩ, a series
of Greek vowels which could be used to vocalize the Tetragrammaton; these
letters served as a proxy for the Tetragrammaton itself. (The IAW-vocalization is also found on some
charm-talismans.)
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| P. Oxy 3522 (See the detail at the Oxyrhynchus Online website) |
Even later, in the 400s-500s, some
copyists of Greek manuscripts still gave the Tetragrammaton special treatment. This is seen in a fragmentary palimpsest of portions of Aquila's Translation of First & Second Kings found at the Cairo Genizah in the 1800s and published by F. C. Burkitt in 1897. (It was found with some other palimpsests.) In the lower writing, which consists of text from First & Second Kings (or, Third & Fourth Kings, using the
Septuagint’s titles), the Tetragrammaton, written in Hebrew letters, is repeatedly
embedded in the Greek text.
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| Enough of this page of Aquila's translation has survived to show that when it was intact, it featured the Tetragrammaton in II Kings 23:16. (Transcription and Plate from F. C. Burkitt.) |
Unfortunately, the lines containing
Second Kings 23:24 are not readable in the photograph provided in Burkitt’s
book. Assuming that Burkitt’s transcript
is correct, and noticing that the lines of Greek in the manuscript are not
justified on the right side, this raises a new question: why wasn’t there room for the Tetragrammaton
to be added? Or to put it another
way: why didn’t the copyist simply start
the Tetragrammaton on the next line?
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| P. Berlin 17213, at the Papyrus Databank of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin |
Before tackling that question, let’s
look at a feature in Papyrus Berlin 19:17 -19, has been assigned to the 200s. In verse 18 (on the recto), after the word δεομαι, there is
a small blank space. Normally there
would be a nomen sacrum here. In Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert
(published by E. J. Brill), Emmanuel Tov proposed that this blank space
“denotes a closed paragraph after Gen. 19:18,” but he grants (in a table on
page 266) that it is “possibly space left for divine name,” that is, we may see
here a blank space reserved for the nomen
sacrum ΚΕ (or the Tetragrammaton) that was never filled in.
Similarly,
as Tov reported on page 226, in the Dead Sea Scroll fragment 4QpIsae,
“A space was left open in 6 4 where MT (32:6) has a Tetragrammaton. This space may have been left for a
Tetragrammaton, to be filled in possibly by a different scribe (or was the
Tetragrammaton omitted intentionally, indicated by a space in the middle of the
line?).”
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Pages 226-229 of the
Kacmarcik Codex, produced in 1344,
contain a guide to writing
the nomina sacra.
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Tov also observed that in the Dead Sea Scroll 11QPsa, “It appears that the scribe left irregular spaces,
and that at a later stage someone, possibly the original scribe himself, penned
in the Tetragrammata, sometimes squeezing them in between the surrounding
words.” Tov also noticed the extra space
surrounding the occurrences of the Tetragrammaton in P. Fouad 266b. He concluded:
“The above evidence shows that at least in some Qumran texts, the Tetragrammaton was filled in
after the writing of the main text, and this was also the case in one
manuscript of the LXX.” [Bold print added.] (This explains
why the copyist of Papyrus Berlin
The practice of leaving blank
spaces, to be filled in later with the Tetragrammaton, developed as an improvement of the scribal custom of
reserving one pen exclusively for writing the Tetragrammaton. As an alternative to putting down the primary
pen, picking up the reserved pen, testing it, and writing the Tetragrammaton
with it, putting it down, and picking up the primary pen again, over and over, efficiency
was greatly increased by leaving blank spaces, and then, when the text was
proof-read, inserting all the occurrences of the Tetragrammaton with the specially
reserved pen.
Did this phenomenon have something to do with the origin of nomina sacra in New
Testament manuscripts? I believe that it
did, to a limited extent. As I describe
the effects of this phenomenon, keep in mind that we can’t interview the
ancient copyists; some things have been deduced and some of the deductions are
calculated guesses.
Very early in the
transmission-history of the Gospels, Christian copyists developed four names to
be treated in a manner congruent to the Judaic treatment of the Tetragrammaton;
the first four Christian nomina sacra
probably appeared as a group: ΚΣ ,
ΘΣ, ΙΣ, and ΧΣ. It
was at this early stage that some Christian copyists (probably copyists who
were already engaged in the production of copies of the Septuagint), modifying the
practice of leaving space for the Tetragrammaton and adding it in a second
copying-stage, left overlined space for these four words in the first
copying-stage, and they were added during the proof-reading stage. Occasionally the proof-reader worked from
memory and interchanged the names, or failed to insert a contraction in the
space reserved for it.
The next words to become nomina sacra were Πατηρ, Υιος, and Πνευμα. Following this, the group of contracted words
was expanded to include words that were components of titles of Christ – the
Son of Man, the Son of David – or which were paralleled in the
Gospels by a sacred name (as, frequently, Matthew refers to the kingdom of heaven where Mark refers to the kingdom
of God). The contraction of Σωτηρ probably began at
the same time, in the same way; it was considered a title of God and/or
Christ.
The contractions of “Jerusalem Israel
The answer might have something to
do with Greek numerals. The Greek
numerals from 1-999 were written as combinations of the 24 letters of the Greek
alphabet, combined with three obsolete letters to make the system work. Thus, as shown in the accompanying chart,
each letter had a numerical value. This
was no secret code; it was the normal way to write numerals.
In the second-century composition The Epistle of Barnabas, 9:7, the author mentions an allegorical,
Christ-centered interpretation of Genesis 14:14; the author interpreted the unusual
term “dedicated” (or “trained”) to mean that they were circumcised. The number 318, he says, illustrates a
pattern of salvation; the idea is that just as Abraham’s servants rescued Lot
from captivity, Jesus on the cross rescues souls held captive by sin, and this
is shown by considering the component-parts of the quanitity of 318: “300” is the cross-shaped letter tau (300) and the letters iota and eta are the first two letters in the name Ιησους (that is, “Jesus”
in Greek).
In addition to the idea that Jesus and the cross, together, had a
spiritual significance, the numerical value of the word σταυρος may have had
something to do with its adoption as a nomen
sacrum. Using the normal list of
numerical values, the total value of the letters in σταυρος is 1,270. But if the first two letters are combined as
the obsolete letter stau, or stigma, then the numerical value of
ϛ+α+υ+ρ+ο+ς = 6+1+400+100+70+200 = 777, which, to copyists in the 100s, might
be seen as a sufficient reason to place it alongside Jesus’ name (the numeric value of which is 888) among the nomina
sacra.
Four Peripheral Subjects:
(1) Three-letter Forms
The main nomina sacra (ΚΣ , ΘΣ, ΙΣ, ΧΣ) do not
always appear as two overlined letters. The
copyist of Papyrus 45 switched between two-letter and three-letter forms. In Papyrus 66, two-letter forms are used. In Papyrus 46, three-letter forms (such as ΚΡΣ
, ΙΗΣ, ΧΡΣ usually consisting of the first two letters plus its
last letter) are used. This might be explained in a number of
ways: (1) The three-letter forms might be the original
forms of the nomina sacra, or (2)
Copyists slightly expanded some nomina
sacra to make them a little easier to read, or (3) In a location where
Greek and Latin were both spoken and written developed, some of the Latin nomina sacra were expanded to lower the
risk that one would be confused with another, and a sense of tidiness motivated
scribes to similarly expand their Greek counterparts.
(2) The Copyist of Codex Vaticanus and the Nomen Sacrum for Πνευμα
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| The copyist of Papyrus 66 probably did not read the contraction for PNEUMA in his exemplar. |
We don’t know. Perhaps the copyist held what Larry Hurtado has called
a “binitarian” approach to devotional expression, and was not quite willing to express the same level of devotion to the Holy Spirit that he gave to the Father and the Son. Or, perhaps the copyist felt that the status
of Πνευμα as a nomen sacrum caused
too many interpretive difficulties, because the word often refers to unclean spirits and to the human spirit (but he could have chosen to not contract the
word in those passages, like some other copyists). Likewise he may
have felt that references to ordinary men, fathers, and sons were best left
uncontracted, and to avoid making case-by-case decisions according to context,
he decided not to contract any of them.
Or, possibly, the copyist of
Vaticanus carefully followed exemplars which had been made in an era when
only ΚΣ , ΘΣ, ΙΣ, and ΧΣ were contracted – exemplars so early that they sometimes exhibited signs of the very first stage of
the usage of nomina sacra in copies
of New Testament books, when copyists left blank spaces for the nomina sacra,
to be added during proof-reading. Several
variants in Vaticanus may support this idea; its reading in James 5:14 (where Vaticanus does not have the words του Κυ)
is particularly interesting.
(3) Unusual Treatments of Nomina Sacra
Ludwig Traube, on page 22 of his
groundbreaking 1907 book Nomina Sacra (written in German), mentioned the
unusual treatment given to some of the nomina
sacra in Codex N (022), a deluxe Gospels-manuscript probably produced in
the mid-500s. Its text, written on
purple-dyed parchment, is mostly written in silver ink, but the nomina sacra Κς, Θς, Ις,
Χς, Πηρ, Υς, and Πνα are written in gold. The production of such manuscripts, in such a
format, must have involved two stages of production – the first using silver,
and the second using gold. (The use of
gold and silver ink, besides being a display of imperial wealth, may have been
inspired by a statement in Josephus’ Antiquities
of the Jews, Book 12, chapter 2 (which in turn seems to be dependent upon
The Letter of Aristeas, part 176), stating that when a group of men from Eleazar the high priest
visited Ptolemy in Egypt, they brought with them parchment copies of the Law,
written in golden letters.)
Relatively few such ornate copies of
the Scriptures in Greek have survived to the present day. Purple Codices (which, besides the Greek manuscripts N, O, Σ, and Φ, also include the Gothic Codex Argenteus, Old
Latin i, Codex Vindobonensis 1235, and others) were being made not
only in the mid-500s but also earlier, in Jerome’s lifetime, for he complains
about them in his Preface to Job,
with words to this effect: “Whoever
wants to keep the old books, let him keep them, whether written on purple skins
with gold and silver, or in uncial letters, as they are called, with plenty of
lettering but not a lot of letters. Let
them leave to me and mine our modest little pages which are not so beautiful,
but are carefully proof-read.” Perhaps
Jerome realized that the copyists of the deluxe purple codices who added the nomina sacra (in Old Testament volumes,
such as the Psalterium Turicense, as well as in New Testament books) were thus
distracted from the task of proof-reading.
(4) Were the nomina sacra in P46 added during the
proof-reading stage?
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| In P46, the nomina sacra frequently are accompanied by extra space, which may indicate that they were added in a secondary copying-stage. |
Although the custom of skipping sacred
names in the initial copying-stage and adding them in the proof-reading stage
was probably limited to only a few generations in a few locations, it may have
endured long enough to be maintained by the copyist of Papyrus 46 (sometime in the late 100s), one of the
most important early manuscripts of the Epistles of Paul.
Repeatedly,
unnecessarily large space surrounds a nomen
sacra in P46, and this is accounted for by the theory that the copyist initially
left an overlined blank space at this point, and filled in the blank spaces in
a secondary copying-stage. Some
examples, from pages of P46 at the University of Michigan
Concluding Remarks
The nomina
sacra are a significant part of a manuscript’s meta-text. In
descriptions of a manuscript’s format and secondary features (such as
chapter-titles, section-numbers, lectionary apparatus, decorations, etc.), its
copyists’ treatment of the nomina sacra
should also be noted. Unusual treatments of the nomina sacra shared by manuscripts may indicate a link between them.
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| Nomina sacra were used not only in Scriptures, but also in inscriptions such as this one, from a mosaic in Megiddo which was part of the floor of a building used for Christian gatherings in the late 200s: “Akeptous, she who loves God, has offered the table to God Jesus Christ as a memorial.” |
(1) Even a text that is otherwise excellent may
not be reliable where nomina sacra
are involved; during the proof-reading stage of an ancestor-manuscript, when
the nomina sacra were added, the
proof-reader might have relied on his memory to a greater degree than the
copyist relied on his exemplar. (For
example, Codices B and À, in the hands of their initial copyists,
both read Ις Χς in Matthew 16:21.)
(2) Evidence of
secondary-stage insertion of nomina sacra, either in the production of an extant manuscript or in the production of a
manuscript’s ancestor, might be detected via the detection of nomina sacra which are uniquely out-of-place. (For example, ΚΩ where the text should
be ΚΥ in Matthew 21:42 in À, and ΠΝΚΟΣ in First
Corinthians 15:47 and ΧΡΥ in Ephesians 5:17 in P46.)
(3) Evidence of secondary-stage insertion of nomina sacra, either in the production
of an extant manuscript or in the production of a manuscript’s ancestor, might
also be detected via the detection of the loss of otherwise secure nomina sacra; the explanation being that
a copyist, in the secondary copying-stage, simply failed to notice the
overlined blank space. (See, for
example, the loss and subsequent insertion of Κε in À in John 13:6 and 13:9.)
(4) The text, as read with nomina sacra, must be considered when
evaluating rival variants. Sometimes a nomen sacrum could elicit a parableptic
error which would not be elicited without the contraction. For this reason, publishers of Greek texts
for textual critics ought to consider printing the nomina sacra in the text and in the apparatus.
(5) In a close contest between ancient rival
variants which both (or all) consist of nomina
sacra, when a form of Κυ is one of the readings, it should be
preferred, on the grounds that it is the less specific reading.
(6)
Inconsistencies in a copyist’s contraction or non-contraction of nomina sacra are sometimes opaquely arbitrary; something, though, they may indicate how the copyist, or the copyist
of his exemplar or ancestor-copy, interpreted the text. Similarly, anomalous treatments of nomina sacra may alert researchers to
other anomalies. (The non-contraction of
Ιησουν in Mark 16:6 in À, for example, is part of the copyist’s attempt
to stretch the text into the following column.)
(7) In passages where several nomina sacra occur in close proximity, a
contraction could be lost if the overlines were not neatly separated, as the
proof-reader, encountering what appeared to be one overline, casually assumed
that one overline implied that one name should be inserted.
(8) If
an overline and blank space were longer than necessary, the proof-reader might assume that two nomina sacra were
called for. This, rather than a natural
tendency for embellishment, may have contributed to expansions from one name to
two names.
1 comment:
Impressive/ interesting
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