Kata Markon

[pmh15 AT cam.ac.uk (Peter M. Head)]

Dear Rick,

With respect, I don't think your argument re Mark 14.20 is very compelling.
Could Mark have expected any real reader to notice such a thing?

Your wrote: "The above manuscripts, in my view, are supported by some other
significant factors. First of all one of Markís earliest copiers, The
compiler of Matthew, does not include the second occurrence of "eis twn
dwdeka"."

Well, it is a bit much to take Matthew as a witness to the shorter form of
Mark's text without any further argument, when the dominant theory would
suggest that many manuscripts of Mark have been assimilated at various
points to parallel texts in Matthew (and on any view Matthew is patently
not a transcriber of Mark).

You also wrote: "Secondly, certain key words and phrases in Mark are placed
strategically througout the narrative and counted. One such word is dwdeka.
Now without going into great detail about how these words function in
Markís narrative I will simply say that whenever the count is close to 12
or 7 or 4 I generally am inclined to investigate variant readings on these
words or phrases."

I admit it would be quite a neat trick for Mark to use "seven" seven times
and "twelve" twelve times. But using such a dubious method to inform your
textual criticism seems to put the cart before the horse. It doesn't even
work for "seven" (which occurs twice in 8.20 and thus eight times overall).
You need to get rid of three "twelve"s to make it work.

NB. Matthew does seem to have twelve "twelve"s. Maybe he would be a better
bet for such a thing (he generally appears more interested in numbers than
Mark, maybe it has something to do with his previous employment).



Peter

Dr. Peter M. Head
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