Where Orthography Affects the New Testament Text

Beginning Greek students are often shocked when they discover the gap between the formatting of their modern, printed New Testaments and our earliest Greek New Testament manuscripts. The letters are all “uppercase,” there are few if any spaces between letters, accents and breathing marks are nowhere in sight, iotas aren’t written subscript, and punctuation is rare as well.

Having now been introduced to scriptio continua, the first question they ask is usually “How on earth could they read it?” This is quickly followed by two more questions: “Then who decides where to put all these things in our print editions and doesn’t the decision affect interpretation?” Last year I found myself telling my first-year students that editorial decisions about formatting only rarely affect interpretation (cf. Mark 4.3; Rom 9.5; Eph 5.21–22).

Rom 9.5 in P46

This is probably true in the grand scheme of things. But, almost as soon as I said it, I knew there must be far more examples than I’m actually familiar with. In prepping for a new Greek class this semester, I wanted to close the gap on my ignorance. So, I started compiling a list of places where matters of orthography—especially punctuation, accenting, spelling, and word division—affect the translation or interpretation.

Non-enclitic indefinite τίς again

In THGNT the editors have accepted non-enclitic indefinite τίς in a number of instances. I’ve mentioned this type of indefinite here and its appearance in GNT has generated discussions here and here.

One case where we vary accentuation is Matthew 21:3:

καὶ ἐάν τις ὑμῖν εἴπῃ τί

In our edition τις is always enclitic after ἐάν, not that we ever observed that pattern until we’d finished editing. We also notice that the accented form is clause final, which might be a reason for greater prodosic prominence.

Now for some manuscripts. I start with 478 (C10). This is nice because it shows us the use of the grave for the indefinite. This is less common than the acute for the indefinite, but it shows that when Erasmus, Stephanus and others printed grave indefinites in their editions, they weren’t just making things up.

Vaticanus (03) is hard to read but I reckon the acute is faintly there for the second indefinite.

G (011) is beautifully clear with the second acute.

So is K (017).

115 has no acute.

560 does for the second.

As does 788, with a correction on εαν.

And 1424, with what I would count as an error on εαν.

What I would conclude from this (which is a pattern we typically found in editing) is that the accents in the more carefully accented manuscripts were reasonably consistent with each other as to which instances of indefinite τίς they accented. Therefore either they inherited a common accenting tradition or they had a common feel about the language and did it independently. Either way, that gives us access to an earlier form of the language. The fact that consistency on these matters can be found in manuscripts already in the 9th century points me to an earlier period.

The accentor of Vaticanus in particular is learned and, I believe, gives us a window into debates which simply do not survive in the epitomes of grammarians. Compare Herodian with B’s accentor’s treatment of the different cases of ιχθυς, οσφυς and οφρυς.

Some accents to note

Romans 16:5 Ἐπαινετὸν τὸν ἀγαπητόν μου not Ἐπαίνετον τὸν ἀγαπητόν μου.

03

06

104

757

1424

Matthew 7:10 ἰχθῦν αἰτήσει not ἰχθὺν αἰτήσει (of course this affects the nominative and accusative singular of ἰχθῦς and ὀσφῦς elsewhere).

03

011

017

021

But 

481

1424

In assessing the differences between witnesses, we can take into account how smart, consistent, deliberate and grammatically knowledgeable each scribe was in matters of accentuation. The accentor of Vaticanus (B 03) is particularly deliberate and accents ἰχθῦς, ὀσφῦς and ὀφρῦς consistently, including for the genitive singular, e.g. Luke 11:11, against Herodian’s rules:

In this it was isolated, so we didn’t follow it in the THGNT. Minuscules tended to replace circumflexes with acutes and graves. This is but a grammatical trifle, but we had fun discussing it in preparing the THGNT and learning from Patrick James, who is, according to Dirk Jongkind the only person he knows who truly knows ancient Greek.

With thanks once more to CSNTM and the Vatican Library for images.

On the disappearance of accented indefinite τις

Nowadays students are routinely informed that there’s only one accent which matters in Greek: τίς, τί and related forms  mean ‘who’ and ‘what’, while τις, τι etc. mean ‘a certain’.

That’s probably true as far as the texts which modern students read, but it’s wrong from a manuscript perspective, wrong historically, and wrong if you care about how the NT was pronounced.

Two passages to illustrate:

Matthew 11:27 where modern editions tend to print οὐδὲ τὸν πατέρα τις ἐπιγινώσκει ‘nor does anyone know the father’

However, this is not what the manuscripts contain and we can see how the accent has dropped out during the history of printed editions:

GA 03

GA 560

GA 757

GA 788

GA 1424

Erasmus 1516

Stephanus 1550

Mill 1707

John 13:29 where modern editions tend to print ἵνα τι δῷ ‘that he [Judas] might give something’

GA 560

GA 771

GA 788

GA 1424

GA 2907

Erasmus 1516

Stephanus 1550

Mill 1707

Grave accents marking indefinites are also found in manuscripts, but they are much rarer than acute ones. The strong distinction between accented forms for a question and unaccented for an indefinite is artificial. It all depends how much emphasis there is on the indefinite. Manuscripts do not always agree on this, but on many occasions they present wide agreement against modern editions in seeing an indefinite form as marked. I say, let’s bring back the accent.

[Copious thanks should be given to the CSNTM for providing images used here and to Peter Montoro for his work in reviewing enclitic vs non-enclitic accents for the Greek New Testament in preparation at Tyndale House, Cambridge, under the editorship of Dirk Jongkind.]

Why the Complutensian Polyglot Did Not Use Greek Accents for the NT

John 1.1-14. Note the dot under the
superscript ‘c’ before εγεννηθησαν
in the second line from the bottom.

From John Lee’s translation (emphasis added):

So that you may not be surprised, diligent scholar, or be displeased with us that in the present Greek printing of the New Testament, in a way different from that of the Old, only the letters, without the breathings and accents, have been set in print and published, we have thought it important that the reason for this be made clear to all at the outset. It is as follows.

That the most ancient of the Greeks were accustomed to write with out these points (κορθφαί) on the letters is too clear to need many testimonies. For certain old copies (ἀντίγραφα), not a few in number, clearly show this, such as poems of Kallimakhos and the verses of the Sibyll, and carvings of great age on stone in the city, engraved simply with letters alone. So it is quite evident that, in that first bringing into being of the Greek language, the placing on of these small strokes and marks was not devised, nor contributed to the full completeness of the said language in any way.

Since also all acknowledge that the whole New Testament, apart from the Gospel according to Matthew and the Epistle to the Hebrews, was written down in the Greek language from the beginning just as it was imparted by the Holy Spirit, we too decided piously to preserve the archaic antiquity and majesty therein of the same language, and to publish the book without the least addition whatever, in the manner of the ancient writings, so that we may not seem to have introduced novelty into something so holy and full of revered lofty thought, by means of alien and new operations imposed on it. Moreover, if the truth be told, the lack of breathings and accents could cause no obstacle to those with any training at all in Greek letters. I mean this with reference to the pure thought of what is said.

Instead of accents, the editors used “a simple mark” (κεραία) in polysyllabic words to show where the accent would go if it had been included. This is to aid pronunciation.

Interestingly, the vocabulary referencing system between Greek and Latin includes small dots under the reference letter to indicate ambiguous Greek meanings. See the dot under the ‘c’ before εγεννηθησαν in John 1.13.

The translation above is from John A. L. Lee, “Dimitrios Doukas and the Accentuation of the New Testament Text of the Complutensian Polyglot,” NovT 47, no. 3 (2005): 250–90.

For more on the Complutensian Polyglot, see here.

Why It Is Helpful to Include Accents in Transcripts

A real summer topic (with an apparatus error in NA28 thrown in for good measure). When transcribing a New Testament Greek manuscript for exercise, I encourage my students to include accentuation and breathing marks. Of course this slows things down considerably, and accents occur only occasionally in the earliest manuscripts. But they are a source of information and consequently help us in our understanding of scribal behaviour. Let me give you three reasons, each with an actual example.

1) Accents and breathings help us see how the scribe understood the text. Take for example P104 (P.Oxy. 4404), 2nd century.



Twice in Mt 21:35 a relative pronoun is provided with a spiritus asper, and I recall having seen a number of these in Sinaiticus (I think it was in John's gospel). It may be that relative pronouns such as ον were marked out to avoid confusing it with a word-final syllable. There is no doubt that P104 wanted to make things crystal clear.

2) It can help us avoid collation errors. A good example is Ψ(044) in Mk 10:12. The manuscript is cited by NA27/28 in support of the reading αυτη. And indeed these four letters do appear before απολυσασα:



But look at the accents, αὐτῆ ἀπολύσασα, which is not quite like the text αὐτὴ ἀπολύσασα. A second look at the manuscript reveals why. It is not the nominative but the dative we have here, ἠ ταύτην καὶ ἐν αὐτῆ ἀπολύσασα. (iota subscript not in manuscript; we would write αὐτῇ).



The reading itself is not completely clear to me, but certainly it is incorrect to cite Ψ(044) as direct support for the reading 'αὐτὴ'.

3) Accents can help us to think about the prehistory of certain corrected passages. Here is an example from X(033), Jn 1:32. The text in its corrected form gives καταβαίνoν.



The transcript of the IGNTP John project gives the nonsense form καταβαινυν as the original version. One could question this on space considerations alone. But attention to accents steer us in the right direction. Why καταβαίνον instead of the correct καταβαῖνον? I think this is because the scribe of X(033) originally wrote the masculine participle καταβαίνων (which fits the spacing much better), and correctly accented. The -ω- was later corrected to an -ο-, yet the accent remained untouched (Tregelles transcribed the manuscript here correct back in 1850).

These are only a few real-world examples; I am sure there are many more out there which have escaped notice. I don't think there is any excuse not to include accents and breathings by the first hand in transcriptions when these occur only sporadically (such as P104). Admittedly, there are practical considerations in favour of ignoring such signs, given where we are in transcribing the corpus of NT manuscripts. However, tools that we use for transcribing should at the very least have the option to include these accents and breathings.