Thursday, October 26, 2023

Theodore Beza at Revelation 15:3

 At Revelation 15:3, Beza has a textual note in his 1598 text, which seems wildly inaccurate, at best: 

(Zoomed into the relevant portion)


(source)

Specifically, Beza asserts:

Sanctorum, τῶν ἁγίων. Vulgata seculorum, τῶν αἰώνων, contra Graecorum omnium codicum nostrorum fidem. Arethas autem habet τῶν ἐθνῶν, gentium.

This translates to:

"Of the saints, τῶν ἁγίων (of the saints). Vulgate of the ages, τῶν αἰώνων (of the ages), against the testimony (lit. faith) of all our Greek manuscripts (lit. codices). However, Arethas has τῶν ἐθνῶν (of the nations), of the nations."

In point of fact, there don't seem to any Greek manuscripts that support Beza's reading, the vast majority agree with the Vulgate, and the reading he attributes to Arethas (presumably the Greek commentator) is the minority (possibly the earliest) Greek reading.

I haven't done the work to sort out whether the τῶν αἰώνων (of the ages) or τῶν ἐθνῶν (of the nations) is the original, but I am troubled by Beza's bold and extremely wrong assertion.

Beza seems to be following Erasmus who, from his first edition, had the "saints" reading:

(source)

There is no explanation for this in Erasmus' annotations at Revelation 15:


(source).

Erasmus' source was a copy of Andrew of Caesarea's Commentary on Revelation, but Andrew's text follows the "nations" reading:


(source)

So, it seems that Erasmus may be the one responsible for this error (unless he had a copy of Andrew's commentary that itself contained a textual variant, of course - there are multiple manuscripts of the commentary in existence).  Another option is Erasmus back translating incorrectly from a Latin abbreviated form of seculorum (scm or perhaps sclm), thinking it was meant as an abbreviation of sanctum (scm), or some similar error of sight.  It's very hard to speculate, without knowing which precise manuscript Erasmus used here.  There is some interesting debate on that point, although I believe that there is a current scholarly consensus view on that question.

Incidentally, here are Hoskier's notes on this issue:


(source)

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