From: Don Winterstein (dfwinterstein@msn.com)
Date: Wed Jun 04 2003 - 03:06:45 EDT
George Murphy wrote:
>
> If I may quibble: An expert on textual criticism may correct me but there
is no
> "reading" /kamilon/ = "rope" rather than /kamelos/ = "camel". It is
instead a "textual
> emendation" - i.e., a guess at what the text might originally have been.
That is a
> legitimate procedure when the text we have is in such disarray that it
doesn't make any
> sense - as is the case in some places in the OT, like parts of Job. But
otherwise it's
> not appropriate.
>
> & here's something I hadn't noticed before. On looking up /kamilos/ in my
> antique (1843!) Liddell-Scott, I find this note:
>
> "/a rope/: but probably invented merely to explain away the well-known
passage
> in the N.T., /for a camel to go through the eye of a needle/, etc., where
a rope might
> seem to us a more prob. image: but the Arabs have a proverb, /like an
elephant going
> through a needle's eye/; and /to swallow a camel/ occurs in N.T.; so that
this is
> needless."
>
> But this was written before the discovery of a lot of the koine documents
so
> don't rely on it without checking some newer reference.
Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (copyright 1977) says,
in part:
"kamilos, ou, ho, a cable; the reading of certain Mss. in Mt. xix. 24 and
Lk. xvii. 25..... The word is found only in Suidas [1967c.] and the Schol.
on Arstph. vesp. [1030].... "
I don't comprehend all of Thayer's abbreviations and annotations, but to me
this means that, apart from some NT manuscripts, the word is found in only
two other ancient manuscripts, one from around 1100 A.D. (Suidas) and the
other (possibly) from ancient Greece (Aristophanes?). So apparently it
wasn't "merely invented" but was very rarely used.
Don
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