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  • From: "David C. Hindley" <dhindley AT compuserve.com>
  • To: "Corpus-Paul" <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [Corpus-Paul] Re: Stichoi in P46
  • Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 21:36:44 -0500

Jim Miller says:

>>Presumably these stichoi came from one manuscript which had them. Why did
the scribe choose to add them to his eclectic copy? Was there a
demonstrable tendency for some copyists to include every extra word or
letter from this or that manuscript in order to have the most "complete"
copy possible? In other words, is P46 a rather long text with the
additional words of various textual traditions all put in it together?
If the copyist wasn't trying to get every possible extra from his source
manuscripts, why would he add the stichoi? To give the copy a professional
veneer?<<

Stichoi were, I thought, based on a set number of syllables, not lines.

One web site summarizes the matter so:

Stichoi and Stichometry

Greek sticos means literally "line" (with many of the same extensions the
English word has, e.g. a rank of soldiers or a line of a poem). In literary
circles, however, it had a more specific meaning: The standard Homeric line
of fifteen to sixteen syllables (about 35-50 letters). (This line is also
sometimes called an epos, but this usage was in disuetitude by New Testament
times.) This "standard line" came to have important implications. Seemingly
by the fourth century, the notion of stichometry, or measurement by lines,
was in existence (although it is officially credited to Callimachus c. 260
B.C.E.).

Stichometry had several uses for scribes and their patrons. It was the
ancient equivalent of a "word count," used to determine what a scribe should
be paid for a particular work. It could also be used to determine if a
manuscript had been copied fully and correctly. And it could even be used as
an approximate way to find quotations in a text. Thus it became standard
practice to determine the number of stichoi in works that were regularly
copied.

Stichometry seems to have been applied to the New Testament fairly early;
Eusebius quoted Origen as commenting on the stichometry of various books. By
the fourth century, we find Euthalius/Evagrius preparing an edition of the
Acts and Epistles based on stichographic principles (although sense, rather
than syllable count, had some part in the Euthalian edition; not all the
lines are exactly one Homeric stichos long. Thus these books are properly
arranged in cola et commata, rather than stichometrically). A stichometric
edition of the Gospels is also known, though its compiler is not.

Relatively few New Testament manuscripts were copied in stichoi; sense-lines
used too much expensive writing material. Still, there are books arranged in
sense-lines (e.g. Dea, Dp, Hp. In addition, Fp and Gp seem -- based on the
size and arrangement of letters -- to derive from an original in stichoi,
though the lineation has not been preserved directly; the same is true of
D). But the rarity of these manuscripts means that the stichometry of the
New Testament was not well-known; although manuscripts beginning with P46
include stichometric information (usually in colophons), the figures quoted
often vary significantly. The most common stichometry of the Gospels,
according to Kirsopp Lake (K. Lake, The Text of the New Testament sixth
edition revised by Silva New, p. 61), "gives 2600 [lines] for Mt., 1600 for
Mc., 2800 for Lc., and 2300 for Jo.; but these are probably corruptions of
2560, 1616, 2750, and 2024 respectively, which are found in several MSS.,
and imply the presence of xvi.9-20 in Mark, and the omission of
vii.53-viii.12 in John" (Lake does not, however, offer an explanation for
this supposed "corruption." Also, Scrivener gives 2740 rather than 2750 as
the number of lines in Luke). The table at the end of this document
summarizes various stichometries, including the "common" one, the partial
one in P46, and the early but rather defective one found in Codex
Claromontanus (Dp; note the absence of four of the Pauline Epistles,
although the omission of Philippians and the Thessalonian letters, at least,
are likely accidental). In addition to the canonical works, the
Claromontanus canon lists four extra-canonical works, Barnabas (850 lines),
Hermas (4000 lines), Acts of Paul (3560 lines), and the Revelation of Peter
(270 lines). The Revelation to John is listed among these semi-canonical
works, as is, amazingly, the Acts of the Apostles.

http://www.skypoint.com/~waltzmn/Divisions.html#stichoi

Anyhow, the number of stichoi could have been inflated if the scribe was
copying the manuscript for a fee based on the number of stichoi (and hoping
the buyer would not be smart orpatient enough to take the time to count them
himself). As stated above, the number of stichoi stated for certain books
varied, possibly due to differences in definition of stichoi (15-16
syllables vs sense units vs literal number of lines), and a dishonest scribe
could take advantage of that.

Respectfully,

Dave Hindley
Cleveland, Ohio, USA






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