CARM - cjab 2022
https://forums.carm.org/threads/codex-sinaiticus-the-facts.12990/page-5#post-997431
There is no consensus.
And show me a quote about "two strands of Greek text".
"The Greek text was unknown in modern times until the discovery of Codex Athous. The text is preserved in four substantial manuscripts, none of them complete. Codex Athous (A), dated to the fifteenth century, contains almost the entire text, from the beginning to the end of Sim. 9.30.3, thus about 95%.3 The leaves were discovered in 1855 on Mt. Athos and the facsimile edition published in 1907. The text was thought by many at first to be a retroversion from Latin, but only with the subsequent discovery of another Greek text in Codex Sinaiticus was A vindicated as an edition of the original Greek text."
The Shepherd of Hermas, Carolyn Osiek, Edited by Helmut Koester, 1999
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1200 Years of Materialities and Editions of a Forbidden Text
DOI:10.1515/9783110641042-016
- License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- In book: Antike Texte und ihre Materialität (pp.309-330)
Authors:
Paolo Cecconi
Shepherd of Hermas: "The contents, the stylistic differences and, as revealed below, the same textual transmission confirm the existence of those two autonomous Revelations at the origin of the present Shepherd. Today scholars agree that a unique author wrote the Shepherd in two different times of his life between 138 and 144. Later, either the same Hermas or unknown members of the Christian community of Rome joined both Revelations together and created thus the present Shepherd. The Shepherd has had soon a broad reception and was therefore the object of several hard critics. Indeed already at the end of the 2nd century, the aforementioned Muratorian Fragment suggested a private reading of the Shepherd discouraging its reading during the liturgy. The reason of that critic was Hermas’ theory of a second repentance una tantum after the baptism in order to grant the sinners a second chance of salvation. After the Muratorian Fragment, Fathers of the Church and theologians criticized the Shepherd or had a positive opinion about it."
"
If I take into account only the Greek sources of the Shepherd, their number exceeds thirty.
The textual transmission of the ‘Greek’ Shepherd is extremely rich until the 7th century, then reveals a huge lacuna until the 13th century and ends in the 14th century. According to the recent but not updated analysis of D. Batovici,
"Hermas is preserved on a similar scale only to the best represented biblical texts: compared with the numbers offered by the latest published standard edition of the Greek New Testament, N. Gonis’ count of 23 Greek continuous papyri for Hermas is topped only by John (30) and Matthew (24), followed at some distance by Acts (15), and Romans (11) and Luke (10). The rest of the NT books are represented by one digit numbers, and no less than seventeen of them are listed with fewer than 5 papyri. Hermas is therefore considerably better attested in the Greek papyri than most Christian texts, scriptural and non-scriptural."
(Batovici 2016, 20–36. Concerning the given data on Hermas, see: Gonis 2005, 1–17, which was updated by Choat/Yuen–Collingridge 2010, 196.)
"The sources of the Shepherd are amazing not only because of their quantity but also because of their heterogeneity; indeed they belong to different media-forms and to different ideas and typology of editions.
"Re Codex Sinaiticus: A very unprofessional scribe wrote the text of the Shepherd; the other scribes and, laterm several correctors (who date between the 5th and the 7th centuries) emendated it. The correctors of Hermas are the so-called S1 (“a correction made in the production process, as part of the revision of the text after it had been copied, or a correction by the scribe in the copying process. These cannot always be distinguished”), S d (“a hand who rewrote faded portions of text, occasionally providing corrections”), and S ca (“corrector who revised the manuscript rather extensively between the fifth and seventh centuries”). The Codex Sinaiticus has played a significant role in the textual transmission of the Shepherd, because it is the point of contact of different textual lines; indeed the need to have a very luxurious book—as
the Sinaiticus is—created the preconditions for a review of the extant textual versions of Hermas.
The Codex Sinaiticus was an attempt to fix the still fluid Hermas’ transmission, and to establish an “official version” in the authoritative corpus of the Bible, but it produced “a hybrid text”, which reveals its “weakness” and its “imprecisions” if compared with other sources, like the P. Bodm. 38 and the Codex Athous Grigoriou 96, [D. Harlfinger and B. Mondrain revealed the identity of the scribe of this codex: the Papas Malachias of the monastery of Chora in Constantinople, alias the so-called Anonymus Aristotelicus, one of the most famous scribes of Aristotelian manuscripts, and dated the codex to
the 14th century] which have had different autonomous transmissions."
The Latin Vulgata translation was written at the end of the 2nd century as proven by a quotation of Sim. IX,31,5–6 in the pseudo-Cyprianic De aleatoribus. Its importance not only for the comprehension of the Greek Shepherd, but also for the history of the Latin Christianity is indubitable. In 1994 E. Dekkers listed about 28 sources from the 9th to the 16th century, which contain partially or completely the text of the Vulgata.73
Thanks to a quotation of Sim. IX,15 in the Vita Sanctae Genovefae (ca. 520 AD), scholars have dated the translation Palatina to the 5 th century. Ms. A. Vezzoni, Palatina’s most recent editor, suggested Gaul as its place of composition. Other quotations of the Palatina (Mandatum 4th
) are in the Collectio Canonum Hibernensis (8th century) and in the Collectio Canonum Fiscannensis (between 9 th and 10 th centuries).
The Palatina has today a very poor textual transmission; it is present only in a fragment of an 8th-century-manuscript, and two complete 15th-century-manuscripts."
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A COLLATION OF THE ATHOS CODEX OFTHE SHEPHERD OF HERMAS by Dr Spyridon P. Lambros/Robinson, 1888
"It is thus perfectly obvious that the tradition of the Greek text of one of the earliest Christian writers is in so defective a state, that its critical reconstruction has become a sort of guesswork, involving an appeal to the previously known Latin version, and even to the Ethiopic translation. Hilgenfeld, one of the editors, is fully justified in declaring that under these conditions
the restoration of the Greek text of the Hermas is a task beyond the power of any single man."
Mount Athos, very closely written in a hand of the fourteenth century.....
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The Shepherd of Hermas in Latin
Critical Edition of the Oldest Translation Vulgata 2014
Edited by Christian Tornau and Paolo Cecconi
The importance of the Vulgata as a witness of the text of the Shepherd is generally acknowledged, although its exact relation to the Greek tradition is not easy to determine. In some cases it confirms the reading of the codex Athous Grigoriou 96 (A) against the other witnesses..... the correction in the Codex Sinaiticus (S) proves that the longer Latin version was also present in the Greek tradition.
Differences between the Greek and the Latin versions might however also arise from the translator’s peculiar methods (both Vulgata and Palatina at times translate rather freely).....
Sometimes the Vulgata translator may have read a text that differs from all Greek witnesses known so far......
What seems
certain at least to us is that the translator or translators of the Palatina had a Greek text before him or them throughout and that they more or less carefully checked their new Latin text by comparing it with the Greek version they knew. This, we think, is proven by the simple fact that the Palatina translates several passages from the Greek that are absent from the Vulgata and that the omissions in the latter cannot always be explained as textual corruptions. Hence we must always reckon with the possibility that differences between the two Latin versions are caused by a different Greek text; it would be rash to treat the Palatina as just another witness of the Vulgata text."
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There is thus zero evidence from contemporary scholars that Hermas in Sinaiticus is a "retroversion from Latin".
