andrewcriddle wrote:I hadn't read your article properly sorry. I thought you were saying that their is a shared omission by homoeoteleuton between Claromontanus and Sinaiticus.
Shared omissions are common, and do not show much about relationship between mss, unless the omissions are very unusual (see the "peculiar error" section from Paul Maas.) Otherwise such cases show little more than a notch towards texttype affinity.
What we are talking about here are
direct elements that can connect one ms to another, linearly, source to target, similar to the the situation talked about by Paul Maas and used by Stephen C. Carlson in the 2427 analysis. They have a probability and time-geography element that show that one ms. was actually used in the creation of the other.
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Paul Maas in Textual Criticism (1958 English edition p. 4) states:
"Sometimes a witness can be shown to depend on another surviving witness from a single passage"
And Stephen C. Carlson, referencing the Maas section, pointed out that:
"line omissions in a manuscript are highly diagnostic of the manuscript's exemplar"
https://www.sbl-site.org/publications/a ... icleId=577
Maas gives three examples of such cases (we are most interested in the closeness to #3)
Sometimes a witness can be shown to depend on another surviving witness from a single passage.
viz. if the peculiar error in the descendant is clearly due to the external state of the text in the surviving exemplar,
e.g., where physical damage to the text in the exemplar has caused the loss of letters or groups of letters, and these letters are missing in the descendant without any visible external cause;
or where additions claimed as his own by the scribe of the exemplar reappear in the copy without any such indication;
or where in copying a prose exemplar a line has been omitted, destroying the logical unity."
Maas is giving three different examples of where a scribal feature can be decisive in showing manuscript connection and dependency. He is not saying these are the only cases, he is giving three examples. And one of the three is a line omission.
Now the Claromontanus-Sinaiticus case is similar to the third one. It does not have the "destroying the logical unity" component, since the text makes sense even with the omission.
However, as is pointed out in our papers, The Claromontanus-Sinaiticus connection has features that ADD to the staightforward fact of homoeoteleutons being feasible from Claromontaus to Sinaiticus omission, such as:
1) it is not just a line, it is a whole section.
2) being a textbook case of homoeoteleuton based on two identical lines in the model, needed line length
3) 300+ (the adjusted count, 240+ in the h.t. area) identical sequential letters between two supposedly diverse geographical and time manuscripts.
4) the unexpected short line after the h.t. And the indentation.
(There may be more.)
Thus, it is my assertion, for your evaluation, that the Maas description is 100% appropriate to apply to Sinaiticus from Claromontanus:
"Sometimes a witness can be shown to depend on another surviving witness from a single passage."
Then you add the additional homoeoteleutons that match with the two manuscripts (WIP, four are referenced in the paper) and the case is anywhere from extremely strong, to sealed.
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andrewcriddle wrote: What you are actually saying is that although the two manuscripts do not share a omission by homoeoteleuton it would be easy for the omission in Sinaiticus to be produced by a a scribe copying from a manuscript like Claromontanus. Frankly this is a very weak argument.
All you are showing is that you have not looked closely at the two manuscripts or read the supporting material carefully. There is far more here than "easy for the omission."
e.g. The manuscript Sinaiticus is copied from would have to have the exact same 240+ same letters as Claromontanus.
This ms would have to have the exact same line-length structure, that causes the h.t.
This ms would be expected to also share other quirks, like the next short line, that show up in Sinaiticus.
And, the unknown source ms. would have to have all this in common with Claromontanus ... despite being in a totally different geographical area (Sardinia is one major theory for Claromontanus) and a totally different time, centuries apart.
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andrewcriddle wrote:Textually Sinaiticus and Claromontanus are rather different (IIUC P46 has more interesting readings in common with Claromontanus than there are interesting readings shared between Sinaiticus and Claromontanus.).
We are not claiming that all of Claromontanus was used directly for Sinaiticus. Simply that the evidence is decisive (my word, academically that can be softened to compelling) that Claromontanus was a contributing manuscript. Btw, Mayer checked some of the papyri and found nothing that could lead to a Sinaiticus homoeoteleuton. By contrast, Claromontanus has a number of spots that fit extremely well as the source of the Sinaiticus text in those sections. The point is simply that Claromontanus was clearly the source for a good number of Sinaiticus homoeoteleutons, thus it was directly available to the scribe who wrote Sinaiticus, whether this was done in 400 AD, 600 AD, or c. 1840 AD. (Claromontanus and its daughter mss were available in strategic cities c. 1840 and the first direct historical note of the Sinaiticus NT was 1845.)
andrewcriddle wrote:In the passage at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 13 we can see for example that in verse 3
Sinaiticus reads
that I may be be burned while
Claromontanus reads
that I may glory. .
Interesting readings shared tells you little.
Homoeoteleutons that have corroborating factors can show you decisively the relationship of the two mss.
Steven