Critique of Peter Head’s “Distigmai and Marginalia of Vaticanus”

by | Jan 14, 2010 | 1 Cor 14, Man & Woman

At the New Testament Textual Criticism Seminar of the Society of Biblical Literature meeting November 21, 2009 Peter Head presented a paper entitled, “The Marginalia of Codex Vaticanus: Putting the Distigmai in their Place.” This paper argued that all of the Vaticanus Distigmai should be dated to the sixteenth century and were penned by Juan Gines de Sepulveda. The famous aphorism derived from H. L. Mencken aptly describes Head’s thesis: “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

I have written a response to Peter Head and updated it several times.

The latest update is available in the March 17, 2010 post.

Images of the distigme-obelus mark, as before 1 Cor 14:34-35

by | Jan 14, 2010 | 1 Cor 14, Man & Woman

So you don’t have to just imagine what the distigme-obelus symbol looks like just before 1 Cor 14:34-35, I have provided photographs of it and another distigme-obelus at the end of Luke 14:24 just before the interpolation that likewise would have occurred immediately after the end of the line marked by the distigme-obelus or at the very beginning of the following line, namely the interpolation between Luke 14:24 and Luke 14:25, “many are called but few are chosen,”which is not in the RSV, nor is it mentioned in an RSV footnote). Below both of these distigme-obelus photographs are photographs of other shorter horizontal bars called paragraphoi from that same page. To see these photographs, click here. (more…)