mlinssen wrote: ↑Sun Aug 30, 2020 1:00 pm
Hi Ben, I'm not looking for MSS with IS or IHS, and the superlinears in Coptic are usually used to stress vowels: the Superlinear Stroke, or Syllable Marker, divides syllables.
Then there's the long Superlinear Stroke, at the end of a sentence that represents the missing N.
And then there's, finally, the long Superlinear Stroke for IC and such
As I mentioned above, I was referring to the Greek. I am aware that Coptic uses overstrokes for various purposes, I am not completely sure what those purposes are, and the Coptic manuscript is later than all three Greek manuscripts anyway. Therefore I was pointing out that ΘΥ, ΠΡΑ, and ΑΝΩΝ all bear overstrokes in the Oxyrhynchus fragments of Thomas, and coincidentally they are also all abbreviations of longer words. But, then, what about ΙΣ and ΙΗΣ? They both also bear overstrokes in those same fragments. And Greek script does not use overstrokes like Coptic does; any kind of stroke in Greek besides an accent is a scribal marker of some kind, with the exception of a weird stroke which sometimes represents a final
nu in some manuscripts. So what could that mean? Could it mean that both ΙΣ and ΙΗΣ are also abbreviations of longer words?
Papyrus was scarce, and on coins and in stone we see abbreviations used all the time: they save space, time and energy. But to answer your question: ΘΥ naturally didn't come before θεοῦ, nor ΠΡΑ before πατέρα, nor ΑΝΩΝ before ἀνθρώπων. There was the word, and then there was the abbreviation, and not the other way around.
Excellent, because there was
also a word Ἰησοῦς, conjugated in Greek as Ἰησοῦ for the genitive and the dative and as Ἰησοῦν for the accusative, before ΙΣ (genitive and dative ΙΥ, accusative ΙΝ) and ΙΗΣ (genitive and dative ΙΗΥ, accusative ΙΗΝ) are attested.
I am looking for the source: the beginning. Where is the word Jesus, or Greek Jhsous (I'm lazy, sorry) in the earliest MSS?
I cannot speak to all of the available manuscripts, but I will give you some examples I currently have access to.
1
Let us start with papyrus Fouad 266, dated to the first century BC:
The page image, to which I have manually added the photo of the fragment, comes from Zaki Ali,
Three Rolls of the Early Septuagint, Genesis and Deuteronomy, pages 108-109. Obviously the fragment is not in the best shape, but I can easily make out the tops of the final four letters of ΙΗΣΟΥΣ, right where we would be expecting the name Joshua/Jesus in this text:
Deuteronomy 31.2-3: 2 And he said to them, “I am a hundred and twenty years old today; I am no longer able to come and go, and Yahweh has said to me, ‘You shall not cross this Jordan.’ 3 It is Yahweh your God who will cross ahead of you; He will destroy these nations before you, and you shall dispossess them. It is Joshua/Jesus [יְהוֹשֻׁעַ, Ιησοῦς] who will cross ahead of you, just as Yahweh has spoken.”
Papyrus Fouad 266, column 65, fragment 96 (Deuteronomy 31.2-3):
XX 2 [καὶ εἶπεν πρὸς αὐτούς ἑκατὸν καὶ εἴκοσι]
XX [ἐτῶν ἐγώ εἰμι σήμερον οὐ δυνήσομαι ἔτι]
XX [εἰσπορεύεσθαι καὶ ἐκπορεύεσθαι יהוה δὲ]
08 [εἶπεν πρό]ς μ[ε οὐ διαβήσῃ τὸν Ιορδά-]
09 [νην τοῦτ]ον. 3 יהוה [ὁ θεός σου ὁ πορευ-]
10 [όμενος π]ρὸ προσώπ[ου σου αὐτὸς ἐξο-]
11 [λεθρεύσε]ι τὰ ἔθνη τ[αῦτα ἀπὸ προσώπου]
12 [σου κ]αὶ κατακλη[ρονομήσεις αὐτούς]
13 [καὶ Ἰ]ησοῦς ὁ πορε[υόμενος πρὸ προσώ-]
XX που σου καθὰ ἐλάλησεν יהוה.
This is not ΙΣ or ΙΗΣ; this is the full Greek name of the Hebrew hero Joshua/Jesus.
2
Next up, two papyrus fragments, the older of which dates to a few years BC:
These come from volume 2 the
Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum.
3
There are two ossuaries bearing the Greek name Ἰησοῦς (well, one of them has Ἰεσοῦς, a not unheard of misspelling of Ἰησοῦς) which date to century I:
These come from volume 1 of the
Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae & Palaestinae.
4
The earliest of the Chester Beatty papyri, Chester Beatty Papyrus VI, which dates to early century II, contains parts both of Numbers and of Deuteronomy:
Here are the verses in question:
Numbers 26.65: 65 For Yahweh had said of them, “They shall surely die in the wilderness.” And not a man was left of them, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua [יהוֹשֻׁעַ, Ιησοῦς] the son of Nun.
Numbers 32.11-12: 11 “‘None of the men who came up from Egypt, from twenty years old and upward, shall see the land which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob; for they did not follow Me fully, 12 except Caleb the son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite and Joshua [יהוֹשֻׁעַ, Ιησοῦς] the son of Nun, for they have followed Yahweh fully.’”
Deuteronomy 3.28: 28 “‘But charge Joshua [יְהוֹשֻׁ֖עַ, Ἰησοῦ] and encourage him and strengthen him, for he shall go across at the head of this people, and he will give them as an inheritance the land which you will see.’”
So this manuscript uses ΙΣ, ΙΗΣ,
and ΙΗΣΟΥ for the Hebrew hero Joshua/Jesus. (ΙΗΣΟΥ is a dative of ΙΗΣΟΥΣ, and it has to be the dative here because it is depending upon the verb ἔντειλαι, from ἐντέλλω, which takes the dative for the person being enjoined/charged/commanded.) Thus it responds to the following query of yours:
There must be a text Ben, there must be a couple of very early texts that have a mix of IHS and IHSOUS - shouldn't there?
I came across another possible example in
Nomina Sacra in the Greek Papyri of the First Five Centuries, by A. H. R. E. Paap:
This manuscript apparently uses both ΙΥ and ΙΗΣΟΥ for either the genitive or the dative of ΙΗΣΟΥΣ, but I do not have access to it to check manually.
Overall, however, there are not relatively many manuscripts which use both the
plene version and the
nomen sacrum for a given item, because why would there be? Why would we expect a scribe to abbreviate inconsistently? It happens, but it is hardly going to be the default.
5
I have already shown you the following, but I want to put them here again to show how seamlessly they fit:
Both Ƿ
46 and Schøyen 2648 evince ΙΗΣ where we would expect either the name of the hero Joshua/Jesus or the name of an associate of Paul.
So, just like the words θεοῦ (which is in the genitive), πατέρα (which is in the accusative), and ἀνθρώπων (which is in the genitive) existed before the abbreviations ΘΥ, ΠΡΑ, and ΑΝΩΝ came to be used for them, respectively, so too the words Ἰησοῦς, Ἰησοῦ, and Ἰησοῦν existed before the abbreviations ΙΣ, ΙΥ, and ΙΝ came to be used for them. We have early examples of both the full name and the abbreviated form being used of Moses' henchman Joshua/Jesus in early texts. And most if not all of these abbreviations bear an overstroke, which means nothing alphabetically or grammatically to the Greek script.
The fragments of Thomas from Oxyrhynchus fit right in:
And why would one want to abbreviate the alleged word IHSOUS anyway?
That is a fair question, and there is plenty of debate about why the
nomina sacra came to be. The same question can be asked for the words God, Spirit, Lord, Israel, Man, Jerusalem, Savior, Father, Mother, David, and Son. Why would one want to abbreviate these words?
I'm trying to argue that it can't be an abbreviation for Jesus, as Jesus came later, and IS / IHS earlier. ....
Going by the earliest MSS, Jesus wasn't an existing word....
IS or IHS can only be an abbreviation of a longer word, and if there isn't a longer word, then IS is the word. ....
And that isn't Jesus. It can't be Ben, because an abbreviation exists only as a smaller copy of a longer word.
The Jewish ossuaries and papyri demonstrate that Ἰησοῦς already existed as a name. There are also some ostraca and a scad of literary evidence from Philo, Josephus, and many others (which I have not even touched in this thread). Ἰησοῦς existed as a name, and it existed as the Greek rendition of יְהוֹשׁוּעַ.
And in that Wikipedia list of yours, only Oxy 847 has both IS and IHS. As does the text of Thomas - which is highly interesting, given the fact that Oxy 847 is a GoJ!
My sources are and have been the list of NT manuscripts in the
Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum, Zaki Ali in
Three Rolls of the Early Septuagint: Genesis and Deuteronomy, the
Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, the
Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae & Palaestinae, A. H. R. E. Paap in
Nomina Sacra in the Greek Papyri of the First Five Centuries, the first few volumes published by Bernard P. Grenfell & Arthur S. Hunt of
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and a handful of articles I have saved to my external hard drive about this topic. I never mentioned papyrus Oxyrhynchus 847, nor did I use any list which contains it (except for the Oxyrhynchus volumes, of course, but I did not consult that one), whether from Wikipedia or from elsewhere.
Ben.