Re: Markan conversation and spelling

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 06 1995 - 07:13:29 EST


At 5:18 AM 12/6/95, Bart Ehrman wrote:
> The postings on Markan style have been quite stimulating. I have
>two, genuine, questions.
>
>(1) Rodney Decker wrote:
>
> > The Greek of the NT has been described as conversational Greek
> >(in contrast to literary and vernacular Greek).
>
> THis is a judgment with which others have concurred. My question:
>How do we know, really, what conversational Greek was like?

Some help is provided by non-literary papyri from Egypt. I haven't done any
extensive exploring, but I've seen a couple letters from children to
parents that appear to be pure colloquialism to me. Another place to see it
is in literary dialogue, although you may not find it at quite the same
level as what we see in Mark, and I don't know if there's material that is
really contemporary with Mark in this category. I am thinking of the genre
of Mime; a good piece to look at is Theocritus #15 (I think that's the
right #), usually called "Women of Syracuse." This is practically a script
of the ongoing chatter between two women of Sicilian background who meet in
the home of one of the women and go downtown in Alexandria to view a
festival of Adonis taking place there. It's loaded with Doric dialect
stuff, but the style is conversational. It is from roughly three centuries
before Mark. There are other pieces in this genre, however, which lends
itself to colloquial diction; I just don't know enough of this particular
literature to know whether there are mimes extant from Mark's period--but
it certainly would not surprise me. One should remember that literary Greek
(not just Jewish and Christian religious materials) was being written by
and among people right in Palestine (one of the major poets of the early
Christian era is Meleager of Gadara!)

>(2) Edgar M. Krentz wrote:
>
> > In comparison to the non-literary papyri Mark stands out as one who [at
> > least in the text we have] spells correctly [little evidence of
> > itacism].
>
> Again, is there any way to know, really, whether Mark could spell?

I don't know about spelling, and I don't see how we could know without
having an autograph of Mark's work. We certainly can see spelling
confusions of all sorts in contemporary papyri from Egypt where they AY
sound may be spelled with an alpha-iota combination or with an epsilon
within the same text; or Itacism: you may find H, EI, Y, I used
interchangeably to spell the EE sound. What is "properly" spelled
LAMBANETAI you may well find spelled LAMBANETE and you must be careful in
the context and realize that this is not a 2 pl. active verb.

One of the awkward places in Mark that has always bothered me is the
old/new cloth passage (2:21): OUDEIS EPIBLHMA RAKOUS AGNAFOU EPIRAPTEI EPI
hIMATION PALAION: EI DE MH, AIREI TO PLHRWMA AP' AUTOU TO KAINON TOU
PALAIOU KAI XEIRON SXISMA GINETAI. This is certainly intelligible, but the
word-order of the second clause tends to confound almost every student I've
had upon first seeing it.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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