The Great Debate

Comment

Comment by Nathan Mark Devore 21 hours ago

Or at least used a carbon

Comment by Moquary 1 day ago

They should have just xeroxed it...

Comment by Liam S. 1 day ago

Herb, NICE! I love these old passages. Interesting how things can be miscopied, and errors found and corrected over time. Thanks for sharing.

Moquary - There is much debate over the identity of John of Patmos. Some argue that There were two or three Johns, others that there was just one John the Evangelist. There is an entire sub section of textual study devoted just to the authorship of the Johannine works. My use of the phrase "John of Patmos" simply indicates the location where it is believed a John (maybe the Evenagelist in exile, maybe another) was staying when he wrote the revelation. Justin Martyr, in the 2nd century, maintains that all 3 Johns (the gospel, the epistle and the revelation) were the same man. Modern scholars cannot agree.

Comment by Herb Munson 1 day ago

Interstingly, Irenaeus in the second century, a century before the fragment we're talking about here ... already knew of the 616 variation and discounted it as an error:

"Such, then, being the state of the case, and this number being found in all the most approved and ancient copies [of the Apocalypse], and those men who saw John face to face bearing their testimony [to it]; while reason also leads us to conclude that the number of the name of the beast, [if reckoned] according to the Greek mode of calculation by the [value of] the letters contained in it, will amount to six hundred and sixty and six; that is, the number of tens shall be equal to that of the hundreds, and the number of hundreds equal to that of the units (for that number which [expresses] the digit six being adhered to throughout, indicates the recapitulations of that apostasy, taken in its full extent, which occurred at the beginning, during the intermediate periods, and which shall take place at the end), - I do not know how it is that some have erred following the ordinary mode of speech, and have vitiated the middle number in the name, deducting the amount of fifty from it, so that instead of six decads they will have it that there is but one. [I am inclined to think that this occurred through the fault of the copyists, as is wont to happen, since numbers also are expressed by letters; so that the Greek letter which expresses the number sixty was easily expanded into the letter Iota of the Greeks.] - Adv. haer. 5.30

Tim McHyde says, "In this rather obscurely expressed passage, Irenaeus was proposing (even in the second century - a century BEFORE this oldest surviving copy!) that old, Greek copies of Revelation contained an error of copying in which the Greek letter xi with gematraic value 60 was wrongly copied into the Greek letter iota with number value 10."

Comment by Moquary 1 day ago

Ah... I see said the blind man as he picked up a hammer and saw.

John of Patmos and John the Evangelist are not the same person, though? Is any other biographical information known about the former?

Comment by Liam S. 1 day ago

Moquary - the revelation of John of Patmos was probably written in 95 AD or so. But the oldest existing copies are fragments like these, dating from several hundred years later.

Comment by Kirby Gehman 1 day ago

664: The Neighbour of the Beast ?

Comment by Moquary 1 day ago

But John was writing the Gospel in the early 2nd century AD.

Comment by Liam S. 1 day ago

@ Michael and Nathan. The papyrus fragment is here:

http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/POxy/beast616.htm - written by John in the late 3rd, early 4th century.

Comment by R J Costello on March 8, 2010 at 5:00am

666
Just thought that I would note that the current number of members of this group is... 666
Spooky

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