... circa 274 AD, Syriac palimpsests hidden in the Bible ~

Discussion in 'Fred's House of Pancakes' started by asjoseph, Dec 12, 2024.

  1. asjoseph

    asjoseph Samuel, '04 Ruthiemobile

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    ... amazing find! Burst of scholarship, hasn't been this much enthusiasm in theology, since advent of Calvinism! Our democrat friends aren't going to appreciate this:

    A New Chapter Of The Bible Was Found Hidden Inside 1,750-Year-Old Text

    Imagine what paper must have cost, 274 AD -


    Samuel, '04 Ruthiemobile
     
  2. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    Interesting article. I do have friends who favor the Democratic party, and I wonder ... what about this will they supposedly not appreciate?
     
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  3. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    'rub them in their hands', shocking! whatever will we do?:eek:
     
  4. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Only here to see if people actually know the word 'palimpsest'. Not disappointed.
     
  5. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    watching 'the queen' right now, she just used it. and i read it in a book last week, had to look it up
     
  6. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Ecologists have borrowed palimpsest to describe places where previous vegetation etc. was removed but something of the past remains.
     
  7. Mr.Vanvandenburg

    Mr.Vanvandenburg Senior Member

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    After passing through a few click bait ads, they still don’t say anything except it aligns with current writings of Matthew 12. Although I stopped scrolling after a while, realizing it was nothing more than click bait. When they keep the story going slowly step by step, not saying anything new, you know it’s click bait to get paid by the advertisers.
    What do you have to say about elects total lack of harmony with the teachings of Jesus? Couldn’t be more opposite. Looks like we have 4 years of Great Deception again. That’s fine, the Law kicks him out on schedule.
     
  8. srellim234

    srellim234 Senior Member

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    As is typical of this kind of garbage, note that not a single "scholar" is identified. If there was any credibility to it there would be names and institutions attached to this "research" so it can be properly peer-reviewed.

    The OP continues to demonstrate he cannot deal in actual facts, only stuff that is fabricated to match his own delusions about the world.
     
  9. ETC(SS)

    ETC(SS) The OTHER One Percenter.....

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    meh.
    Palimpsest.
    Recycling: 'old school.'
    Non-vegan paper WAS pretty expensive back then considering how it was made - and inflation has been going on for a lot longer than the current administration!
    A foot of parchment (the good stuff!) was worth up to 40 denarii a linear foot.
    Back then, a denarius was famously worth a day or two's "unskilled labour.'
    According to the Googles these coins were silver and struck to around 75 grams (about 1/6th of an ounce in 'freedom units.')

    It's worth a little bit less now- even though precious metals always seem to make a comeback when incompetence and government policies collide.

    SO....just as some artists famously 'recycled' their canvasses hundreds of years later, it's probably not that much of a leap of imagination to think that the same thing happened before paint and canvas - OR they they may have been somewhat inefficient at it.
     
  10. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    Huh ... I didn't find it so bad. Maybe because I generally browse with JavaScript off, so I'm sort of blissfully unaware of ads a lot of the time.

    While that article appeared recently (2 December 2024), it's re-reporting of news from two-ish years ago, earlier seen in, for example, this article from April 2023:

    New Chapter Of The Bible Found Hidden Inside 1,750-Year-Old Text | IFLScience

    But that 2023 article was shorter, and didn't have much to say about the textual differences, other than that the disciples "began to pick the heads of grain, rub them in their hands, and eat them", while the version that has come down to us omits the detail about rubbing in the hands.

    The recent, longer article doesn't go in as much detail on what exactly changed in the text. The emphasis is more on what this shows about the variations and rewrites the text went through, some maybe just at the hands of unnamed scribes, on its way to becoming the present-day gospel. The article's angle seems pretty well summed up in those closing paragraphs, with "It’s a reminder that the Bible, far from being a static document, was shaped over centuries by human hands and decisions."

    True, that conclusion may be nothing new to modern-day biblical scholars, but it's still interesting when more history turns up. I still don't see what any of my Democratic-leaning friends would find objectionable about it.
     
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  11. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    @ChapmanF goes all scholarly on us, by reference to IFLScience :p. Sadly, double-likes are not enabled here.
     
  12. Mr.Vanvandenburg

    Mr.Vanvandenburg Senior Member

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    it could be said in a couple sentences about rubbing the grains in their hands. With a description of the technology. Not to go on and on leading past ad after ad. I’m sure people see these type of articles as click bait. The extra word have no effect on the meaning. They say that through endless scrolling and I saw the end about variations by scribes. It didn’t vary much.
    No one knows what happened in those days. Maybe the head scribe told the lesser scribe to stop adding rubbed the grains, as it wasn’t in the original copy. So he erased it. It can’t be concluded one way or the other.
    I wouldn’t call finding rub the grains in their hands a new chapter as was first said.
     
    #12 Mr.Vanvandenburg, Dec 15, 2024
    Last edited: Dec 16, 2024
  13. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    Agreed, "new chapter" in the headline wasn't warranted.

    Headline writers going beyond the story like that is pretty common everywhere....

    I don't know if rubbing the grain was the only textual difference, or just a selected example.
     
  14. Mr.Vanvandenburg

    Mr.Vanvandenburg Senior Member

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    We can’t assume the erased one was correct. Since copying was the goal, they put a lot of care into copying, not changing. It seems to me more likely the erased text was inaccurate rather than the later.
    For someone to change a religious text in those days was heresy. They didn’t go light on heretics.
     
  15. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    This seems to be from rather earlier than "those days", though. If from around 274, these were writings being passed around and cobbled together by adherents of an upstart religion who had little power to "go light on heretics" or not, and had more worries about the existing power structures not going light on them. It's still a generation before Christianity becomes anybody's official religion (Armenia's), and a century before it becomes Rome's. The Codex Sinaiticus won't be along for another three generations or so.

    This is also maybe a quarter century after Origen may already have snarked about the "negligence" or "perverse audacity" of copyists. (I'm not sure where to find that quote exactly. Origen did write a Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, but I haven't run across an online English translation where I can find those exact words. On the other hand, the Commentary, in the online translation I found, does mention some places where different Matthew manuscripts used different words.)

    In the third century, it seems, if you were a person finicky about codifying scripture, you could snark about changes those pesky copyists were making, but there wasn't a lot else you could do about it.
     
    #15 ChapmanF, Dec 16, 2024
    Last edited: Dec 16, 2024
  16. Mr.Vanvandenburg

    Mr.Vanvandenburg Senior Member

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    Good research. I think since most societies then were authoritarian, you could be put to death for anything the authority figure wanted. Rubbed the grains seems like not much to make a story about, but these guys making life work out of finding the copies seem to be excited about it.
     
  17. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    I'm guessing the grain-rubbing was chosen for the article as one representative example, and what the guys are excited about in general was just the sense of how fluid the texts were in those early centuries before everything got codified into a canon in the words we're familiar with.

    The other examples I just saw last night in Origen's commentary (never looked at it before) were also fairly slight differences in wording (did something happen "that very day" or "that very hour"? were the apostles "commanded" or "charged" to do something? etc.) Haven't seen examples that would turn centuries of teaching on its head or anything.

    I did notice in Origen's commentary that he seemed sure that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written in that order, which isn't the way modern scholarship has it going down.
     
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  18. AzWxGuy

    AzWxGuy Weather Guy

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    Was this "rubbing in the hands" to separate the seed grain from the chaff? This is an often used analogy where something worthwhile or worthy is separated from worthless.
     
  19. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    Have to go back and ask whatever copyist thought it read better with that part in it.

    Anyway, a lot of copyists seem to have agreed that words kinda like these are in Luke:



    Merry Christmas!
     
  20. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Palimpsests are suddenly all over the place:

    Searching for hidden medieval stories from th | EurekAlert!

    Link there is to journal Gripla. I had no idea that any journals were (now) published in Icelandic. Mjög gott.

    ==
    I had a source for calfskin vellum and asked my PhD school if they would print my diploma on that instead of plain ol' paper. Answer = no.