medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dear Kerry,
On Sunday, March 26, 2006, at 3:24 pm, you wrote:
> This is the medieval discussion list--whatever Jesus said, during
> the middle
> ages it was believed that he spoke all the beatitudes as they are
> recorded in
> the Latin Bibles.
Except, of course, when it was believed by speakers of Coptic, Syriac,
Armenian, Greek, Georgian, Old Church Slavonic, and doubtless other
tongues also in use in the Middle Ages that the authentic form of the
beatitudes was that given in _their_ bibles. Or when it was believed
by those whose bibles preserved the Aramaic at Matthew 27:46 and Mark
15:34, especially if they had a commentary tradition that transmitted
some knowledge about biblical languages, that Jesus spoke a Semitic
tongue that they probably thought of as 'Chaldean'. To write as though
the only texts of the Bible that were read medievally were written in
Latin arrogates for that tongue a universality that it did not then
possess and implies, ahistorically, that non-Latin medieval Christian
cultures are unworthy even of mention (let alone thought). And it is
false to imply that in the Latin Middle Ages no one read Origen or
Jerome or Augustine on the various languages of the Bible, or thought
(as some -- e.g. Bacon, the 13th-century Dominicans of Paris -- clearly
did) that their texts of the Bible could use correcting.
> This requires commentary on the text as it is,
> regardless of
> its alleged prehistory!
The text "as it is" is a congeries of texts in different languages and
with variant readings in those languages. Including, as the page you
find irritating points out, variant readings in the particular Greek
text in question. It may not take much textual criticism to evaluate
those variants and to decide in favor of 'kamelos' ('camel') rather
than 'kamilos' ('rope'; the discussion adduced by Stan Metheny seems to
have these backwards) as the original reading of the synoptic gospels
in the manuscript tradition that is known to us. But, the readings
being multiple, it does take at least _some_ textual criticism.
> [quoted out of order]... Either way in this case the Greek
explanation doesn't
> work because
> Jesus was not speaking Greek.
No, but the texts that we have to work with in this instance are Greek
(plus, if we wish, translations from the Greek). Since Jesus spoke in
Aramaic, we have either an accurate Greek rendition of what he said or
a faulty one. At least one of the hypotheses about verbal agreement
among the synoptic gospels assumes verbal copying from one gospel to
another. On that view, there _could_ have been an error in the first
Greek text that then found its way into the others as they were being
composed. The "Greek explanation" may be invalid. But it is not
invalid for the reason that you give.
Best,
John Dillon
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