I've just noticed something while studying Greek manuscripts and was wondering if someone can help clear this up for me
It stems from this verse:
Mat 5:18
" For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled "
I look this up in several Greek concordances and it says the following:
Tittle
κεραια keraia {ker-ah'-yah} from a presumed derivative of the base of 2768;; n f AV - tittle 2; 2 1)
a little horn 2) extremity, apex, point 2a) used by grammarians of the accents and diacritical points.
Jesus used it of the little lines or projections, by which the Hebrew letters in other respects similar differ from one another; the meaning is, Vnot even the minutest part of the law shall perishV.
" lines and projections " in Hebrew would likely be tagin or dagesh , while in Greek this refers to the literary convention of the " titlo "
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Next concordance said:
Tittle
Strong's Concordance
keraia: a little horn
Original Word: κεραία, ας, ἡ
Part of Speech: Noun, Feminine
Transliteration: keraia
Phonetic Spelling: (ker-ah'-yah)
Short Definition: an apostrophe
Definition: a little hook, an apostrophe on letters of the alphabet, distinguishing them from other little letters, or a separation stroke between letters.
HELPS Word-studies
2762 keraía –
properly, a little "horn," i.e. " 'a little
hook, an
apostrophe' on letters of the alphabet, distinguishing them from other like-letters, or a 'separation stroke' between letters" (Souter); a
tittle (
KJV).
[
"Tittle" comes from the Latin, titulus – the stroke above an abbreviated word – and later, any small mark.
"In
Vay. R. 19 the guilt of altering one of them is pronounced so great that if it were done the world would be destroyed" (so McNeile).]
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A tittle then is used over sacred names / objects in Greek manuscripts, known as a " nomen sacrum " ( sacred name )
The words themselves are
abbreviated
Metzger lists 15 such expressions from Greek papyri: the Greek counterparts of:
God,
Lord,
Jesus,
Christ,
Son,
Spirit,
David,
Cross,
Mother,
Father,
Israel,
Savior,
Man,
Jerusalem, and
Heaven.
These
nomina sacra are all found in Greek manuscripts of the 3rd century and earlier, except
Mother, which appears in the 4th
So what I am curious about here, is the fact that New Testament authors took the common abbreviated Christogram
ΧΣ
...which is normally written with the " little horn " ( titlo )
and they affixed the letter stigma ϛ, (στίγμα), which is originally a common Greek noun meaning "a mark, dot, puncture", or generally " a sign ",
to the Christogram
ΧΣϛ
...which they then wrote a titlo ( little horn ) over
However ΧΣϛ ( 666 ) does not seem to belong on the list:
God,
Lord,
Jesus,
Christ,
Son,
Spirit,
David,
Cross,
Mother,
Father,
Israel,
Savior,
Man,
Jerusalem, and
Heaven
...yet it was clearly written as it belongs on this list, as a " sacred name / object "
So did New Testament authors know something we don't ?
I would also raise the question of academic / theological bias, because people are clearly choosing to overlook this, and if you recall the start of this post clearly says:
" For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled "
