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  • From: "David @ Comcast" <davidinglis2 AT comcast.net>
  • To: "Corpus-Paul@Lists. Ibiblio. Org" <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Corpus-Paul] Stichoi in P46 - A professional scribe?
  • Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 14:40:39 -0800

On page 207 of 'The Text of The Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts',
Comfort & barrett write with regard to the scribe of P46: "He was a
professional scribe, because there are stichoi notations at the end of
several books." However, has anyone noticed that these line counts appear
to bear no relation to the actual number of lines in P46? A count of the
lines in C&B's text vs. the stichoi gives the following (unless I've
miscounted):

Stichoi C&B Count
Rom 1000 Approx 1075 (Missing pages prevent accurate
count)
Heb 700 900
1 Cor N/A 1266
2 Cor 600 785
Eph 316 362
Gal 375 308
Php 225 244
Col 1xx 228

As can easily be seen, whoever wrote the stichoi seems to have made a very
bad job of counting. This raises the following possibilities:

1) The scribe was not a professional, and was (apparently) very bad at
counting. However, if not a professional, why bother with stichoi at all?
2) The stichoi were calculated by someone else (as suggested by C&B).
However, if this was the case, why make such a mess?
3) The stichoi were copied from the exemplar (or exemplars). This would
indicate that the scribe was not a professional, because a professional
would not use someone else's stichoi.

IMHO this last possibility seems to fit the evidence best, and is supported
by other evidence from the MS itself of the scribes lack of professional
ability (e.g. many people have commented on the scribal errors). Also, see
http://www.cs.tcd.ie/Micheal.MacanAirchinnigh/Web%20Pages/ME_FEIN/TAIGHDE/Ch
esterBeatty/p46.html for evidence that the scribe had difficulty keeping his
lines straight (as originally suggested to me by Dr. Jeremy Duff).

If I am right, the difference between the stichoi and the actual line counts
(sometimes more, sometimes less) suggests that the scribe was not copying
from a single exemplar. Instead, it indicates multiple exemplars, with
different page and/or text sizes, leading to wide variations of characters
per line, and hence the line count differences. If so, this then gives a
very simply explanation for why the scribe had such apparent difficulty
calculating how many pages he needed - the different formats of his
exemplars meant his line counts were way off!

Does anyone have any comments on this suggestion?

Dave Inglis
davidinglis2 AT comcast.net
3538 O'Connor Drive
Lafayette, CA, USA





  • [Corpus-Paul] Stichoi in P46 - A professional scribe?, David @ Comcast, 02/29/2004

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