Tomorrow I will go to the SBL International conference. This time the conference will take place in Helsinki, Finland.
The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), founded in 1880, is the oldest and largest learned society devoted to the critical investigation of the Bible from a variety of academic disciplines.
I plan to participate in 2 seminars.
One will be on textual criticism of the New Testament. My presentation will be about 1 Cor 14:33b and its syntax. In my conference abstract I promised to demonstrate 6 different syntactical reading of 1 Cor 14:33b. But in fact there are 7.
So, let us see, how it goes for me. I would like to publish my research afterwards - after I will get the feedback from the experts in the field of textual criticism. Despite my 2 Master Theses with this method I count myself more of an amateur in this field (there is no textual criticism on my diploma supplements). Let's see if I survive.
Here I publish my abstract (note, there are 6+1 readings):
1 Cor
14:33b without vv34-5: internal evidence
and its 6 possibilities
The
background of this topic is my in-depth research on 1 Cor 14:33b-34 with a focus
on v 33b and its place in the oldest Greek and Latin manuscripts. In my study
presented at the SBL International Meeting in Vienna in 2014, and in my article[1]
published in the NTS in 2017 I displayed external evidence for a separation of
1 Cor 14: 33b from vv 34-35. Following the study on external evidence, this
presentation aims to continue the discussion on a place of v 33b and its
syntactic function now focusing on internal evidence. The main question is: if
v33b is not to introduce Mulieres Taceant,
how shall we read and reconcile it with the context? In the first part of the
presentation I will outline (at least) 6 different exegetical reading
possibilities of v 33b that are found in the scholarly literature (i.a.
Westcott and Hort, von Harnack), as well as argumentation from the Greek syntax
for each of them. In the second part of the presentation I will discuss the
following issues of syntax and semantics: Is v 33b a prepositional phrase or a
subordinate clause assuming that the verb is elliptic? What are the two things ὡς
compares to each other? How common it is for Paul to introduce a new sentence
with ὡς and how Paul uses ὡς in a verbless clause elsewhere in 1 Cor. The goal
of this presentation is to advance scholarly discussion on the role of v 33b in
the context.
[1] Aļesja Lavrinoviča,
"1 Cor 14.34–5 without 'in All the Churches of the Saints': External Evidence,"
New Testament Studies Volume 63 Issue 3, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
