Corpus-Paul

["David C. Hindley" <DHindley AT compuserve.com>]

On 05/20/99, ""Ian E. Rock" <irock AT caribsurf.com>" wrote:

> It seems to me that the argument for partition theories of 2 Corinthians
> lie in finding sequential thought or thematic patterns in the body of
> the letter, and then splicing the text and placing these pericopes in
> sequence.  

This has been my approach to examining all epistles in the Pauline corpus. 
The tough part is deciding what constitutes a discontinuity. While I have 
personally decided to bracket off -all- the colae that are not -essential- 
to the arguements that start before them yet end after them, this does not 
appear to be the practice of most others.

Even so, this kind of approach can (and in my case does) identify a large 
pool of potential interpolations. These sorts of interpolations (if they 
indeed are interpolations) appear to me to be additive, that is, they exist 
to modify or explain an already existing text.

These do not have to be already existing texts that have been grafted into 
another, although in some cases (like the credal formulae) this may be the 
case.

> I have already noted to Dr. Hughes that one issue that has
> not been resolved in his argument is the change in tense of the text
> (from 1st person singular to 1st person plural) between some of these
> splices.  

This, I think, is a separate issue from possible interpolations deduced 
from the method outlined above. In this case (i.e., changes in person) we 
have to look at the real possibility of intergrated sources.

> Dr. Sykes in his article examines the difficulty faced in editing
> multiple rolls of text, albeit his article does not allude to the
> possibility of cutting and pasting of the text. 
 
I too had thought about "cutting & pasting", but had always put off serious 
inquiry due to an unfamiliarity with how text would be layed out in scrolls 
and codices. But just as someone today can inscribe lines about passages in 
any text, perhaps with notations as to how these might fit into a broader 
interpretive scheme (most everyone's bible has these), so could ancient 
writers or editors. If one wants to later incorporate these into a treatis, 
we just find the marked references and copy them.

The sheer number of apparent sources in apocalyptic literature (e.g., 1 
Enoch, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, Revelation) suggests to me that one or more 
processes had been developed to do this.

Dave Hindley
Cleveland OH
dhindley AT compuserve.com