Wives, SUBMIT yourselves to your own husbands

Paidiske said:

I would say it's the number of early witnesses. If you have lots of late witnesses, but they're all copies of one early witness, they really don't amount to anything much in terms of evidence.

Click to expand...

The difficulty with that argument is that the 94 percent or so are not based on just one, because they have some variation among themselves, and are from a wide geographic distribution. They were also the text being used by the church.

But I am not arguing for the position in this case. I am just noting the dynamics of the argument. I could see it going either way. And I don't think it matters much to the meaning of the text.

Paidiske said:

No notes, but this is one site I use. Greek New Testament Reader with Word Parsing, Morphology, and Dictionary, Lexicon. I hadn't looked into its underlying scholarship in detail, but apparently it's not always consistent with the NA. It is on this verse, though.

Click to expand...

Thank you.

tall73 said:

The difficulty with that argument is that the 94 percent or so are not based on just one, because they have some variation among themselves, and are from a wide geographic distribution. They were also the text being used by the church.

But I am not arguing for the position in this case. I am just noting the dynamics of the argument. I could see it going either way. And I don't think it matters much to the meaning of the text.

Click to expand...

I know it's slightly more complex than "one scribe made edits that got lots of copies." But for someone apparently encountering this idea for the first time, I was trying to keep it relatively simple.

Personally I lean towards the critical position, because it makes much more sense to me, logically, than the alternative. I think big picture it does matter, because it feeds into all sorts of other questions.

But I also think it matters in this text, because the idea that verse 22 is really just unpacking one specific implication of verse 21 puts the emphasis on verse 21, and makes that the necessary starting point for understanding the whole passage (rather than, for example, the way I've seen some people argue that verse 21 is concluding the prior thought and verse 22 is the beginning of a new section. That's harder to argue if verse 22 needs verse 21 in order to make sense!)

I agree vs 21 is important to the section.