Ignatz: Krazy Kat or Krazy editors?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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DCHindley
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Re: Ignatius: Crazy Man or Crazy editors?

Post by DCHindley »

Another fine example of "Ignatius'" craziness. This time it is Magnesians. After spending a day or so on this, I am ready for some Milk of Magnesia(tm). There is no Syriac version. Seems I have irritated my gums due to overzealous water picking of food from between my teeth, so I was not up to trying to create witty commentary. I will leave that to others. Honest, if I can do it, you can do it better.

However, I will note that the letter displays some themes that are shared with the letter to the Ephesians, primarily fascination with the tradition of the Virgin Mary, and how her virgin birth of Jesus and his subsequent death & resurrection were "mysteries" that were hidden from the devil.

I use "scare quotes" in order to emphasize my suspicion that Ignatius was a 3rd century invention.

The author did not like the practice of Judaism at all. He complains about Christians observing the Sabbath by abstaining from work and even eating food prepared in advance and avoiding extended travel. He expounds on the idea popular in early Christian circles that Jesus "fulfilled" the Judean law, which the ancient prophets "saw" in advance by the help of the spirit of God and thus were inspired to drop hints as to the events that would transpire when Jesus would come. To Iggy, Jews should become more like Christians, and not Christians adopt Judean practices. There is a tie-in with the other thread about "Myths and endless genealogies" in 1 Timothy 1.

Until I started these Greek-English analyses of Ignatian epistles, I was sure that he was a real guy, the shorter Greek form being most original, although I thought there might be some interpolations like I still think happened to the Pauline corpus. Now I think that both the short and long versions came from the same "factory" (oh gosh, there I go again), although perhaps at different times (longer probably came after the shorter, IMHO).

See below, and marvel ... if you find errors of association or misalignments of Greek & English clauses, let me know and I'll correct them as I can. For some reason , Word 2010 seems to have trouble maintaining the number of paragraph marks in multi column/multi-cell tables, especially if they get large like these have.

Edit 9/12/15: I have created a new PDF to replace the original one, although I do not think there are any major differences other than a random misalignment of a line or two.
Attachments
(Ignatius) Magnesians (Shorter & Longer G-E analysis) .pdf
A new and improved sad example of amateur "scholarship", previous version downloaded a whopping 3 times!
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Last edited by DCHindley on Sat Sep 12, 2015 8:26 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Ignatius: Crazy Man or Crazy editors?

Post by DCHindley »

Secret Alias wrote:As far as I know I am the only person who has ever suggested the Syriac was near original. I think there was one additional layer likely written in Syriac. I think that was the original layer and then the Syriac and then the short Greek and then the longer Greek.
...
I hope you agree that there is something parallel here with the development of the Marcionite epistles to the orthodox ones. I think the expansion here (from Syriac to Greek) gives us some yardstick to measure how much the Marcionite were expanded.

When I was younger I did trace a motive for the expansion - i.e. the right of external churches (i.e. the community as a whole) to help name a successor to the deceased (or terminated) old bishop. I think this is the reason for the development of expansional material. Whoever created the Syriac text may well have done so for one reason and then the short Greek had another and then the longer Greek another.
The problem is that Magnesians, for which a Syriac version has not been found, shows the same odd propensity for the shorter & longer versions to say pretty much exactly the same thing at points, but say it using completely different language. Oh, there are many places where the shared wording is exact, but as many or more just use one or two different words or different grammatical forms of the same words. Other time the two versions are miles apart but covering the same ground. I cannot detect a theological basis for it, but I am dense and my gums hurt and draw my attention away from the prize.

I can't shake the idea that this could be due to "translation Greek" from a common non-Greek source, but there is also suggestions that the writer of the long version could either not hear clearly a lector in a scriptorium auditorium, or could not read an exemplar clearly, but this would only work in Greek. Take a look (either Ephesians or Magnesians will do at this point) and you'll see this use of different, but phonetically similar, Greek words between versions. The biggest difference between short & long Greek versions is the latter uses a far greater number of "scriptural" quotes and allusions (including from NT books, primarily Paul but also the Gospels, so NT is to him part of scripture).

At this point I am not about to relate this to the development of a Marcionite canon. I suggested to Ben that I am more inclined to think that Marcion made a commentary on a Gospel (probably a proto-Luke but he was also aware of some form of Matthew), mining the sayings of Jesus for things that he felt were contradictory in Judean scripture. I am not so sure this "data mining" extended to the letters of Paul, as these did not cite Jesus' words very extensively. He may have agreed with some of the higher Christological passages in Pauline letters that I think were added by a later redactor, so he may have simply limited himself to a commentary on the letters he thought most important (basically, letters to churches), to show how these had been "corrupted" by Judaistic theology.

IMO it was more likely that the opposite occurred, documents written from a (heterodox but not "Christian") Judaic POV were added to and commented upon by someone holding a relatively high Christological dogma. It is not unheard of in academia and scholarship in general to see exactly what one wants to see in the sources they study, and perhaps Marcion was no different. It doesn't make him a bad man.

Did the collection of Pauline books he had access to include just letters to churches? Sure, I can accept that. David Trobisch seems to identify a core of Pauline letters to churches which were (later) augmented by the letters to individuals. Where in this augmentation process my proposed interpolator made his additions and commentaries, I don't know. I just do not think that Marcion had access to an "un-interpolated" text of the letters to churches, as he seems to have discounted some passages that effectively destroy arguments about the faith of Abraham justifying him before God, which I think are key to the whole "pre-interpolated" Pauline corpus.

Well, enough of the fancy-schmancy scholarly-like talk, time for beddie bye! :popcorn:
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Re: Ignatius: Crazy Man or Crazy editors?

Post by Ben C. Smith »

Thanks again, David.
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Aleph One
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Re: Ignatius: Crazy Man or Crazy editors?

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Secret Alias wrote:When I was younger I did trace a motive for the expansion - i.e. the right of external churches (i.e. the community as a whole) to help name a successor to the deceased (or terminated) old bishop. I think this is the reason for the development of expansional material. Whoever created the Syriac text may well have done so for one reason and then the short Greek had another and then the longer Greek another.

My guess was that the additions tend to focus on Church authority (on the bishop level)
I remember reading recently (can't recall where now, sorry :facepalm: ) someone arguing forcefully that the Ignatius epistles should be dated much later than the very early-2nd century date that is common. The primary piece of evidence for a later date (very late 2nd century, at minimum) was the letters' presupposition of a monarchical and highly developed church hierarchy, which didn't exist until deep in the 2nd century. It's interesting though that you point to precisely this topic as the subject of interpolations. I would be interested to see how excising such portions of the epistles might affect opinions on their dates of composition.

Also @Secret Alias: Obvious question, but how do you explain the early parts of genesis that have Yahweh creating the entire world and destroying it with flood and everything if the Jews didn't see their god as cosmocrator?
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Re: Ignatius: Crazy Man or Crazy editors?

Post by Secret Alias »

But remember everything before 2.4 is understood by Philo to be creation in the ideal realm
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
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DCHindley
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Re: Ignatius: Crazy Man or Crazy editors?

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Find attached a new version of my line by line Greek-English "analysis" of the shorter and longer forms of the letter of Ignatius to the Trallians.

He still seems to speak of a creedal formula to establish that Jesus was in fact born, died and was resurrected, and not simply in appearance.

I hopefully caught all the line misalignments (I just now found a whole mess of them that I had missed on the 1st pass).

:whistling:
Attachments
(Ignatius) Trallians (Shorter & Longer G-E analysis).pdf
Another exercise in futility ...
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DCHindley
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Re: Ignatius: Crazy Man or Crazy editors?

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I think I figured out why some of the lines between columns were misaligning on me. I re-saved the Win 2003 docs in "docx" format (MS Win 2010), made sure that each chapter section (I guess they could be called "rows") of all four columns had paragraph markers trailing the last line of text down to the line that ended the longest text in each chapter section (row), and only then saved them as PDF. The first two of the three letters analyzed so far have been corrected and attached to their original posts.

BTW, as I mentioned, I am no Greek expert, so there will be errors in the way I have analyzed these texts. If anyone finds these errors, please let me know (as a message or a PM) and I will make the correction(s) and post a corrected PDF.

Just don't tell me how much of an idiot I am for whatever excuse you come up with, as I already know that!

I make the best of what I got, a BA in Psychology (woo-hoo!), which included one year each of 1st year NT Greek and 1st year Classical Greek, and I probably only got "C"s in them.

The point is, if I can do this, if only to identify translator bias or note the differences in Greek words and see if I can detect patters between these two versions of Ignatian letters, YOU can too. Every one of the Greek words can be searched in Unicode format on the web (I prefer Perseus.org if it has a morphological listing for the word, as it will give you a complete definition of the word as found in Liddell, Scott, Jones and other lexicons).

If you want the original doc files (so YOU can do your own analysis), I will be happy to make them available.

I have a block party to attend. Έρρωσο.
Last edited by DCHindley on Sat Sep 12, 2015 9:10 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Ignatius: Crazy Man or Crazy editors?

Post by Ben C. Smith »

DCHindley wrote:Find attached a new version of my line by line Greek-English "analysis" of the shorter and longer forms of the letter of Ignatius to the Trallians.

He still seems to speak of a creedal formula to establish that Jesus was in fact born, died and was resurrected, and not simply in appearance.

I hopefully caught all the line misalignments (I just now found a whole mess of them that I had missed on the 1st pass).
Thanks, David! I am keeping all of these files of yours in a special folder of mine on my hard drive. :)

Ben.
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Re: Ignatius: Crazy Man or Crazy editors?

Post by DCHindley »

Σύγγνωτέ μοι,

I have attached a PDF of my Greek-English comparison of the shorter and longer forms of the epistle of Ignatius to the Romans.

Since it is 4:30 in the morning, I have not tried to compare the English renderings to the English translation of the Syriac form of the letter, like I did with his letter to the Ephesians and will also do with the epistler to Polycarp when I get to it, but this will come in time. These things are exceedingly tedious to do ...
Attachments
(Ignatius) Romans (Shorter & Longer G-E analysis).pdf
Iggy has a death wish ... I think this was the inspiration for the SAW movies.
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Re: Ignatius: Crazy Man or Crazy editors?

Post by Ben C. Smith »

Thanks again, David.

The longer and shorter versions seem closer for this one.
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