The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Supplements to CofE 1563 & Damantory clauses UR

When Jesus first says this (He repeats it directly to His own apostles and disciples later in a different context, during their final visit to Capernaum, Mark 9 and parallels), He has just told the audience that they’re personally responsible for their sins even if they don’t act externally on it. They can’t just sit around hating on their brother: it’s still murder. They can’t just sit around committing adultery with women in their heart: it’s still adultery. (And of course, notice how Calvs and even some Arms get around the hatred-of-brothers remark, effectively standing up like the lawyer attempting to justify himself and challenging “So who is my brother?”–a concept that, if at all valid, would have to apply equally well to committing adultery, too!)

The admonition about mutilating one’s self, which would be against Torah, answers the expected excuse ‘But I just can’t help it! It isn’t my fault, my body keeps leading me to do it!’ Either take responsibility for your thoughts, and do something about those (i.e. repent and seek God’s help, as difficult as that may be), or else if you’re going to make that excuse then follow through with the logic of your excuse and mutilate yourself!–which Jesus would know violates Torah, too.

It’s a typical Synoptic irony statement. (Jesus can also be seen doing this kind of thing in GosJohn, but it happens so much more often in the Synoptic reports that scholars tend to classify it by the Synoptics. Sometimes to the exclusion of being ignorant of it happening in GosJohn, too. :wink: )

When Jesus repeats it later at Capernaum, He’s doing so in the context of His apostles being raging egotists who are contending with each other over which of them is the greatest, and oppressing other disciples of Jesus for not following them. As one of the strongest statements they’ve previously heard from Jesus, it’s appropriate that Jesus should repeat it as a warning to them: they’re sinning by leading the little ones who trust in Christ to stumble by their behavior. (Moreover, Christ points out in directly related ways–reported differently in GosMatt and in GosMark–that God, even in His ultimate wrath, doesn’t have the same attitude about Himself that His apostles do about themselves.)

That’s brilliant Jason - absolutely great!!! It is amazing how often this/these texts have been used in the tradition of ‘sexual pessimism’ and misogyny to inculcate morbid self hatred. I remember being lectured on this one as an adolescent by a man in his middle years; never mind that it is specifically about adultery in the heart rather than desire per se; the effect was to make us youngsters all think that fancying the girls was displeasing to God. And the seemingly violent body soul imagery, understood without paradox, terrified me for some time.

A thing about the context here is, again, that I see Jesus speaking at first to religious legalists schooled in an honour shame mindset. Perhaps even the ‘eye that offends’ refers to the tradition of keeping women separate from men and veiling or at least partially covering their faces – which can be just as over sexualising as anything we see in the ‘decadent West’ today. All of this attention to externals breeds an easy legalism for men.

The most extreme examples of legalism I’ve met in my time is when working with Deobandi Muslims from Bangladesh and Pakistan – these are inspired by the Saudi tradition of Islam (although those I have met influenced by the Sufi traditions have been very different in their outlook, as have the moderate liberal Muslims I have met who have often be very fine people). Often it seems to me that with some of these Deobandi men, being a good Muslim is about obeying the letter rather than the spirit of the law; so you can be a really amoral person, but still a respected member of your community if you live up to the externals (and I have one dear female friend who suffered horribly at the hands of this legal externalism and was cast out by her community). I once read a really shocking example of this externalism happening among mullahs in a certain part of the world who visit prostitutes (which is forbidden) marry then before having sex with them, and then divorce them afterwards (thus fulfilling all of their religious legal obligations while still behaving amorally).

Let us who are without sin cast the first stone – and I’m sure we’ve all met amoral fundamentalists on a sin binge thinking that they are saved anyway and so can always return to Christ (never mind the people they hurt along the way): and of course, I’m sure we’ve all met liberal Christians who are just too easy going and morally lax –Jesus’ statement applies to them too - but I feel it was the legalistic mindset that Jesus was first addressing here with this striking and paradoxical statement.

I also wonder about the meaning o f ‘lust’ here – as anger is not hatred, sexual desire that arises spontaneously is not lust per se. And my experience people who think that to feel sexual desire is itself a sin are more likely to fixate upon the desire when it arises. I think there has to be a ‘nurturing with intent’ for desire to become lust and for anger to become hatred. I think Jesus knew/knows this too.

All the best

Dick

Thanks for a fascinating thread, guys. I don’t have a lot to add, but I’ve enjoyed reading thus far. I have a question, though.

Ann Nyland translates Matt 19:1-12 like this in her “The Source” NT:

Nyland claims that these were the two forms of divorce available to Jewish society in Jesus’ day, and that the Pharisees were asking Jesus’ take on the controversial “Any Matter” form of divorce introduced by Rabbi Hillel, in which the husband could divorce his wife for any complaint, even something so slight as burning a meal, and marry another. She says that Jewish religious leaders of the day were fond of foreign women and also of getting a “new model” ever so often as they tired of their old wives. This was, in Jesus’ time, the most popular form of divorce as there would be no court case and the husband had only to write a certificate of divorce and dismiss his wife. Unlike the “General Sexual Morality” divorce, this form of divorce was available only to the male.

So my question is, what do you think? Is she right?

Hi Cindy -

I’ve not read Nyland - but this certainly chimes with everything I have read about the context of these sayings.

Blessings

Dick

P.S. What do you all make of Jesus’ saying about in the ressurection there is no marriage (perhaps Origen was also influenced mistakenly by this in his striving for an asexual state (it just struck me that this might be the case)

Cindy,

I hadn’t noticed the “Any Matter” phraseology before, but I don’t doubt that’s the correct cultural reading. Considering how often Jesus usually took stances similar to the school of Hillel, it must have been a shock to hear Him affirming the Shammai school on this one! :laughing:

Dick,

I can see good arguments going either way there. I’m inclined to think, especially in comparison with OT texts, that Jesus meant that in current society it often happened that the best way to protect the women was to give them (and for them to be given) in marriage, but that this would not be necessary in the resurrection, even though marriage and procreation (and thus sexual activity) would still be occurring. But I respect the broader church tradition, exemplified by my teacher Lewis, that sexual gender will be kept but not used.

In any case Jesus was refuting the notion that ideally a woman belongs to a man like property (specifically in marriage, but also thus otherwise.)

Good one Jason - so there’s another sexual pessimism clobber text beautifully explained (there are some others). By the way, the excellent biography of Lewis - ‘Jack’ - was by George Sayer. (I’ve read the Four Loves - and Lewis was no sexcual pessimist)

All the best

Dick

I think I should exaplin that by ‘sexual pessimism’ I mean the body hating and misogynisitc traditions of Jerome and Augustine. I didn’t invent the pharse - but cannot for the life of me remember who did.

There may be other texts which can be twisted or misumderstood to support this tradition but the only ones I can think of at the moment are the several sayings where Jesus appears to be attacking the biological family unit (although I don’t think he was doing this at all); and St Paul’s use of the term ‘flesh’, along with his advice that ‘it is better to marry than to burn’ all of which need a bit of unpacking (and I thought RIchard Beck’s blog on the meaning of ‘body’ in St Paul was excellent).

Any thoughts on these Jason? (if you’ve got the time - I can wait until another time) -

All the best

Dick

Actually the line of investigation and discussion opening here - to my mind a necessary and frjuitful discussion - concerns the last thread topic I wanted to raise on this site - ‘The World, the Flesh and the Devil’.

I made a promise to myself to talk this over with Drew before starting it (when I see him in late April I hope). It’s nowhere near as involved a topic as the ‘Abrogation of the 42nd’ - at least in my view - but I would like to put it on hold until late spring (unless anyone else want to give it the full treatment before; and then I’ll add any thoughts I’ve had that have not been covered after Easter, and after I’ve read Peter Brown’s book - I hope).

All the best

Dick :slight_smile:

[note: mod edited to remove an accidental double-post. More recent version is kept below. :slight_smile: ]

Here’s an email giving some corrections and clarifications about stuff that I’ve said on the main thread. I think many of you will find this information useful – not only in the context of my specific research here that builds on Drew’s original research.

The 42 Articles

Before Christmas I accessed a notable and thundering Conservative Reformed/Calvinist website at

reformed.org/sacramentology/ … b_007.html

The article at this page of the site concerns the English Anabaptists during the Reformation – and is very hostile to the Anabaptist story, and scandalously biased in my view. However, at least the article is properly footnoted – even if it takes persecution texts at face value without asking any further questions etc.

Given the strong male presence in the pictures that head the homepage to this site - lots of tasty blokes in sharp suits looking strong and patriarchal - I reckon I stumbled into hard ‘headship of the male’ territory when I accessed it :wink: . However, one thing I am grateful to ‘the boys’ who contribute to this site for is some precise information on the 42 Articles (because, in the absence of access to a University Library I had not been able to find the original text for these). The boys tell me that -

Rev. Prof. Dr. Philip Schaff has pointed out that “in the Forty-two Articles of Edward VI, there are four additional Articles – on the Resurrection of the Dead, the State of the Souls of the Departed, Millenarians, and the Eternal Damnation of the Wicked.” These Articles, Schaff added, are: “against the Anabaptist notion of the psychopannychia (40)”; and “against the millenarians (41),” compare “the Augsburg Confession where the Anabaptists and others are condemned.” All of these additional Articles, as Maclear and Williams have explained, refer to the heresies of "the Anabaptist sect whose theories had previously been denounced.

The citation is from Schaff ‘Creeds III p. 514. – which I have checked and verified. So we can now see that Article 40 spoke against soul sleep (or ‘psychopannychia’ as Schaff exotically refers to it);, and Article 41 spoke against the millenarians with the associated doctrines of perfectionism and antinomianism (and Schaff draws the parallel with the Augsburg Confession that I have had reason to dispute on the main thread)

There is a rather charming irony in this Conservative Reformed site quoting approvingly from Schaff. Schaff was a German American Church Historian – a colossus in f his knowledge of the Creeds of the Church. He was a Calvinist by tradition, but as with Barth in the twentieth century he had a truly Ecumenical vision - and it appears that he was a Christian Universalist!

For more on Schaff’s Universalism see

churchcrucified.org/agapewik … lip_Schaff

If you ever wish to consult Schaff on the Creeds – and his work is still respected by scholars today – these are available online for free at -

ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds2.iv.i.iv.html

Anne Boleyn

I have said that Anne Boleyn was executed explicitly for adultery and implicitly for as a witch. I stand by this. However the actual charge against her was treason (explicitly for having committed adultery against the King – an act of treachery against Majesty – and implicitly also for carrying on with others when she should have been providing the King with a baby boy and male heir). Adultery was not a capital crime in English common law. The other implication, that she was a witch came from insinuations that she had beguiled the King with her charms away from his virtuous first wife Katherine, from the information that she was seemingly born with six fingers on one of her hands, and that after giving birth to a healthy girl child in Elizabeth, her latter pregnancies resulted in miscarriage and stillbirths sometimes badly deformed (These were terrible times; Heiko Oberman comments in his unforgettable biography of Luther that when Luther’s wife gave birth for the first time his brother Reformers waited anxiously around her bed – if the child had been stillborn or deformed this would probably have spelled the end for the Protestant Reformation). Anne was highly manipulative as a court flirt– and she had been brought up to be this way by her ambitious father Sir Henry Bullen. It seems that she was very unkind to Katherine of Aragon. The facts surrounding the accusations of adultery brought against her are difficult to establish; had she made love to other men trying to become pregnant, thinking that the King might be impotent but that her failure to produce a boy child had already put her life in danger? Whatever else may be true of her – she died a hero. Standing before her headsman on Tower Hill she praised her kind and Christian Prince Henry and commended him to God’s good pleasure. It is thought that in so doing she was protecting the future of her young daughter Elizabeth.

Erasmus and the English Humanists

I’d like to clarify some issues about Erasmus and England. He visited here in 1499, 1505, and during an extended stay spent in Cambridge from 1509 -14. After this his huge and loving correspondence included many English scholars and would-be Humanists.

His 1499 visit to England was important *in turning his attention from the study of Latin classical literature towards theology and the study of Greek encouraged by John Colet *- the native Christian Humanist. So it was the Englishman Colet who gave the initial spur that lead to Erasmus eventual translation of the Greek New Testament. (Words given in italics here and below are lifted from ‘The History Today Companion to British History’ p.182 - entry on Colet -and pp. 289-90 – entry on Erasmus; the author of both entries is Eamon Duffy, the renowned authority on religion in Tudor England who I have and will quote on the Anglican Burial Service)

John Colet had studied at Oxford and on the continent. *After ordination in 1496, he lectured at Oxford on St Paul’s Epistles *(from the New Testament Greek rather than from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate), establishing himself as a leading English Humanist. He became Dean of St Paul’s in 1501 where his outspokenness on reform lead to frequent serious confrontations with the then (Catholic) Bishop of London. In 1518 he founded St Paul’s school which because of its statutes remained distinctively free from clerical control. It seems that as Colet had influenced Erasmus in terms of evangelical scholarly pursuits, Erasmus in turn had influenced Colet in ideas about church government. Erasmus vision of a tolerant Christianity went hand and hand with his view that the power of the clergy over the laity should be minimised and that power within the church should be exercised in a collegial fashion – as in Convocations - rather than according to the dictates of centralised Papal authority.

Erasmus’ Greek New Testament Textus Receptus

Erasmus’ edition of the Greek New Testament with his own translation/paraphrases into Humanist Latin (1516) and later revisions had a Europe wide impact, providing a new view of the biblical text for many of the future Protestant Reformers.

I am no scholar of the New Testament in Greek. However, I have read a useful, if longwinded, article at Tentmakers on Erasmus’ translation which can be accessed at –

tentmaker.org/Biblematters/K … ersion.htm

This article was written with a polemical purpose, - to debunk the authority some fundamentalist Christians give to the King James’ version of the Bible, which uses ‘hell’ far more often than any other translation - but it chimes with stuff I have read elsewhere. The writer sates that -

**…As I understand it, one of the big reasons why folks have this special fondness for the KJV is that it is based on the Textus Receptus, which they claim is based on the great majority (90%) of the more than 5,000 extant Greek manuscripts. This understanding is important to their claim that the Textus Receptus is based on the oldest Greek manuscripts – the ones closest to the autographs. The reasoning here being that the nearer a manuscript is to the originals time-wise, the less likely it is to have been corrupted by repeated copying, editing, etc. Seems to make sense.

…For those who like to know the details, Erasmus drew his basic text from three 12th century miniscules – Greek manuscripts penned using lower case letters, a practice that began in the 9th century. He consulted three other miniscules and a few late manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate. None of them were very close to the autographs in terms of time.
The serious Bible scholar and textual critic might wish to know specifically which manuscripts Erasmus used. For his basic text he used, according to the standard manuscript identification system: 2e (12th/13th cent.), 2ap (12th cent.) and 1r (12th cent.). The miniscules he consulted were: 1eap (12th cent.), 4ap 15th cent.), and 7p (11/12th cent.).**

So OK, it does seem that Erasmus access to Greek texts was very limited – and that all of the texts he did have access to were late Byzantine manuscripts. This make s me think that his lexical scholarship was almost certainly too limited to appreciate the different meanings of ‘aionos’ in New Testament and Classical Greek (and any notions of Universalism he had came from Origen rather than his from his Biblical Scholarship).

Although the King James translators drew heavily on earlier English translations to paraphrase the New Testament Greek – for example the translations by William Tyndale, MiIes Coverdale, and by the scholars who produced the Geneva Bible – Erasmus Textus Receptus was their only reference point for the Greek text. Tentmakers note that the KJV version of the Bible contains 54 usages of hell; 31 in the Old Testament, twenty three in the New – and the site rightly notes that this greatly exceeds the number of times ‘hell’ occurs in any later translations made from earlier texts and with better lexical scholarship. It would be interesting to find out how many times Jerome uses Latin equivalents for ‘hell’ in his Vulgate translations and how this compares to the number of times ‘hell’ equivalents are used in Erasmus’ Latin paraphrases of his Textus Receptus (I can’t find the answer to his anywhere).

The KJV is obviously partially inspired by Magisterial Protestant ideology – and this goes half way to explaining its excessive use of ‘hell’ when the Greek indicates otherwise (while a lack of sound lexical scholarship explains the other half). The opening dedicatory epistle of the KJV to that ‘Most Dread Majesty’ James I -the vainglorious and strutting successor to Elizabeth - sets the tone. However, the KJV is also a fountainhead of the English language and of English literature throughout the English peaking world.

I have seen one telling comment on ideological intent in the KJV and I quote it here to sign off this post -
‘When the court translators working in the hire of King James chose to translate antistenai as “Resist not evil,” they were doing something more than rendering Greek into English. They were translating nonviolent resistance into docility. The Greek word means more than simply to “stand against” or “resist.” It means to resist violently, to revolt or rebel, to engage in an insurrection. Jesus did not tell his oppressed hearers not to resist evil. His entire ministry is at odds with such a preposterous idea. He is, rather, warning against responding to evil in kind by letting the oppressor set the terms of our opposition’

(‘The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear’, edited by Paul Loeb).

All the best

Dick :slight_smile:

Yes, the opening sentence of the article gives a clue that the text you are about to read might not be completely unbiased…

like a virus :laughing:
Reminds me of the hilarious book “Hell under Fire” (Christopher Morgan and Robert Peterson Eds Zondervan 2004) which opens its introduction by describing universalism and annihilationism as “two aberrations”).

I love this, so ironic! And the “boys” seem to offer no explanation as to why four of the 42 articles were dropped, they just take them as “gospel”. Further unbiased historical analysis follows…

Hmmmm. Don’t get me started! What may be helpful here is the fact (if it is correct) that Anabaptism rather than Roman Catholicism was seen as the main threat to Reformed orthodoxy. A shot in the dark - perhaps this is because the Anabaptists were better connected with the teaching of scripture and of the early church fathers than the Catholics were. What do you think?

Anyway must get back to my day job. Thanks again Dick for a great post, especially the info about Erasmus, Ann Boleyn and the KJV bias.

Cheers, Drew

[Note: mod edited to remove an accidental double-post. More recent version was kept below. :slight_smile: ]

Hi Drew –

Yes the ‘boys’ site is indeed a godly lesson in daftness. You’ve hit the nail on the head with the key note being set in the opening sentence with te word ‘contagion’ – which is ‘like a virus’ as you say. As Norman Cohn, Rene Girard and others have shown, the metaphor of ‘contagion’ is always the ‘tell tell’ sign that we are reading a ‘persecuting text’. Heretics, political dissidents etc, throughout history are always described in such texts as ‘viral’ – like a cattle plague; and as the corpses of infected cattle need to be piled high and burnt to get rid of contagion, so the burning of heretics protects the doctrinal purity of the faithful and/or the political purity of the party; and God’s punishment of the wicked will simply be an extension of this process of exclusion/quarantine and purification by fire (not purification of wicked individuals by these means but keeping the pure in a pure state by the same).

The other features of all persecution texts is that in the process of ‘justice’ –

There is no counsel for the defence and the roles of council for prosecution and judge are merged

Witnesses against the accused are not cross examined – their testimony is taken at face value

The accused often ends up agreeing with the charges brought against them verbatim– because of any combination of having been worn down by torture, or sleep deprivation, or infection and starvation in prison, and/or because of the sheer overwhelmingness of the proceedings against them and the loneliness of being cast out of all human community. I note that after the show trials in Stalin’s Russia, dissidents would often face death shouting, ‘Long Live Stalin!’
T
hat’s astute observation Drew . I don’t expect you’ve read Cohn or Girard – only gloomy souls like me with time on their hands do this. However, it just goes to show their insights are accessible and chime with a keen, natural and compassionate intelligence. In the light of the above they recommend that we need to treat such texts with a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’.

(And I would say to anyone else reading this post that – ‘If even in your most fleeting and most occasional waking dream you imagine God’s judgement in the terms described above, you need to sit more easily with yourself and accept God’s merciful acceptance of you – warts and all – more readily. The picture lurking in the back of your mind is a mistaken one which you need to question and re-imagine– for this picture is of the judgement of ‘the Accuser who is the Prince of this World’)

Again you are right about their failure to mention the abrogation of the 42nd. Curious eh? Christopher Hill plays a similar trick for Marxist ideological reasons.

I note the unwitting testimony of this site is that a lot of the literature raising the tally ho for persecution of the Family of Love and the Anabaptists came from Calvinist pens. Also I love the reference to ‘Knox’s Britain’ – I always thought he was purely a Scot’s phenomena – and I pity poor Scotland for that (one of my Grandmother’s was Scottish so I feel it in my blood)

It certainly is interesting that the main cause of hatred for Calvinists was the Anabaptists – and the Bishop of Rome always took second place, although Catholics too were/are hated by sectarian Calvinists. The Continental Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists persecuted the Anabaptists virtually out of existence. Perhaps they were are at an unconscious level that the Anabaptists were following Christ more purely than they were – and so envy was part of their motivation. I think the conscious reason for their persecuting, besides the memory of the Munster debacle, was that their perception that since Anabaptist sdid not recognise the authority of Magistrates (although they did not wilfully ferment social disorder and disobedience after Munster) they were enemies of all good and godly order in the state. This was the reason for Luther’s hatred of the Peasants who thought they were rising in support of him. He thought he was living in the last days and that the good order of the state was necessary if the Gospel was to be spread and the elect of God gathered. His hatred of the Jews had similar roots – he could not comprehend their ‘stiff necked deafness’ to the Gospel’s offer of repentance in the end times. But neither titbits of contextual information excuse Luther’s hate filled persecuting zeal with its tragic consequences that have echoed through the centuries.

However, I have to hand one thing to Luther. As you may have guessed I see him as a complex man with partially redeeming features (I’d like to say the same of Calvin – I have tried to, even on this site, but I’m still not convinced). At first Luther did not persecute the Anabaptists. He only did so after the Peasant risings and then was palpably moved by their deaths as they died brave women and men certain of their faith. By way of contrast Calvin just had them killed without a second thought, and Zwingli had them drowned in wicked parody of the rite of adult baptism. And the Catholic Princes of Europe joined in the slaughter without scruple.

The only place in Europe where the Anabaptists were eventually tolerated – before many immigrated to America during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the persecuting zeal of America’s Calvinists was under control form other social forces – was the Dutch Free Republic. This Republic, administered by the Princes of Orange, comprised not only Holland, but also the Benelux countries and the Low land countries of what is now Northern France (that is, ‘Flanders’). I need to find out more about its history of tolerance, but I do know that in the first part of Elizabeth’s reign many of these lands were occupied by the Spanish Empire under the Duke of Parma and the Spanish Inquisition was in operation in them. I also know that Protestant England allied with Catholic France (France although Catholic was still an imperial rival of Catholic Spain) to help liberate the occupied Dutch lands. Perhaps the struggle against foreign occupation was the force that united disparate communities of Dutch Catholics, Calvinists and Lutherans together in a tolerant confederation against a foreign tyranny, and perhaps the memory of occupation made them more ready to provide a haven to persecuted minorities from elsewhere in Europe. This is my informed hunch – and I expect to have it confirmed by further reading. Also, of course, this was helped by the proud echoing memory of Erasmus ‘Dutch’ tolerant pan-European Christian Humanism – this much I do know.

Another thing I do know for sure is that the fragile peace of the Dutch Free Republic was only ever seriously threatened by one group – you’ve guessed it, they were the sectarian Calvinists wanting to bring all under God’s sovereignty. In addition I know that it was the Dutch Prince William of Orange who as William III of England sided with the forces urging religious toleration within the Anglican community and together they abolished the last remnants of religious persecution in England – although religious discrimination against Catholics and Non-conformists still persisted for a time (that’s a sneak preview of a detail from part 2 of this story which is really just a briefer appendix to part 1; and part 1 is now almost done even if it’s taking a bit longer than I thought).

I think the Anabaptists experience of persecution by Magisterial Protestants always made them sensitive to reading scripture in a way that gave proper emphasis to the social nature of sin. The Magisterial Protestant tradition only emphasised the personal nature of sin – people are depraved and therefore need to be controlled by a punitive state. The Anabaptists, by way of contrast, retained a tradition of reading scripture with a theology of ‘Powers and Principalities’ in mind – hence their reading of the Book of Revelation as social critique.

All the best Drew old chum (and wasn’t it fun having a laugh at the boys?)

Dick

I just wanted to say I am totally downloading a bunch of historical books from Schaff right this moment. :mrgreen:

(I’ve seen him reffed before, and I suspect Pelikan’s book on the Creeds is more up to date–which I own but haven’t gotten around to reading yet; but the geek in me nearly wet my pants at seeing how many of Schaff’s classic works I can download for free off CCEL. Oh, hey, I wonder if they have copies of the rare Winchester books on prophecy I’m missing?–vols 3 and 4… update: no, they don’t. Too much to hope from Calvin College I guess.)

To translate that terminology, this means he didn’t use all of every text, but jumped between texts for different portions.

Each miniscule has a different reference number, and four such texts are being discussed here. My apparatus seems to indicate only one of them still exists (the others having been lost by wars or other accidents in the centuries since the TR’s compilation). Thus they are no longer available for direct text critical purposes. (They can be sort-of reconstructed from the TR, but such reconstructions are speculative, especially since Erasmus had to use Latin for portions he was missing.)

The little letters after the numbers indicate the contents of the text, but in this case they also indicate which portions of the text he used.

So text #1 (the only one still extant) was his primary text for ®evelation (also borrowing from the Vulgate although the list doesn’t show it); and one of his secondary texts for the (E)vangels (i.e. the Gospels), (A)cts and the §auline letters. (My apparatus only lists this text for (e) now, so only the Gospels may currently survive from it.) His primary text for those was #2, supplemented by text #4 and #7. The list doesn’t show what he referenced for the ©atholic epistles. (I don’t recall offhand if EpistHeb is listed for apparatus purposes with the Paulines or with the Catholics, but my guess would be the Paulines.)

Incidentally, while 12th century is late relatively late by modern text crit standards, it’s still in bounds, and relatively early for “Byzantine” texts (which are mentioned as a group in text apparatuses for comparison purposes).

A Godly lesson in daftness indeed! Only sorry I couldn’t find the picture of the boys in their sharp suits. Still, its good that we can benefit from their work and at the same time enjoy a chuckle at their expense :slight_smile:
I may go quiet for a few days. Working away in the lovely principality of Andorra for the weekend.

Forgot to say, I haven’t read Girard - not sure my wee brain could handle him - but I do enjoy the books of James Alison, who builds on Girard’s insights.

Hi Jason -

That’s great to hear that you already wanted to get hold of Schaff’s big work :smiley: - and I hope you do find those other books online the slightly out of date but still reliable classics are often the loveliest to read in any field). I would never have heard of Schaff if I had not have chanced upon this here thread before Christmas. Everyone was talking about the Athanasian Creed – and I think this was an overspill from the really wonderful discussion you had about it on another thread. It seemed that Drew wanted to focus on the precise mater of history, which is when I joined up in his support. I felt bad about closing down the discussion about the AC – which I then knew little about - because I did not realise that the other discussion had already taken place. I did a Google search for the AC to find something out about it; and I soon found Schaff’s work from the ‘Theopedia’ link. So my serendipity that is now your serendipity grew out of your discussion of the AC. Wonderful eh?

All clarification about Erasmus and the Textus Receptus gratefully received. :smiley:

Hi Drew –
You have a lovely time in your sweet arcadia; I’m sure you can do with the break old chap.
Girard? I really am a pickle but I was just teasing you about this. You see when I did my initial and too brief lurking on this site I looked at another thread where you were being subjected to a volley of ‘clobber texts’. I would have come in to support you, because I could already see I liked you a lot. However… things needed to cool down there as you all know. You had cited James’ Alison’s fine essay – at least fine to my mind – on the first chapter of Romans (an essay that transcends the context of the specific moral issue he was writing about, because it deals with the danger of seeing idols outside of ourselves while becoming blind to the idols within). So I knew you were already well acquainted with Girard and were showing your implicit understanding of him a few posts back on this thread :wink: .

Do you forgive me for being a pickle :blush: ? I needed a bit of light relief, because although I’m enjoying writing here some of this stuff is very dark – although I think it is necessary that we have a reckoning with it together (I would have despaired by now if I hadn’t been aware of support from EU readers and my three regular correspondents).

All the best

Dick :smiley:

Oh by the way Drew - hope you had a lovely weekend. And just a note to say that I wasn’t really pulling your leg about Girard. I knew you had a knoweldge of his ideas but I was in that funny position when posting that althought I am addressing a specific person as often as not, I are also addressing a general audience and cannot assume previous knowledge of arcane matters of them all - if you know what I mean.

All the best

Dick :slight_smile: