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Re: orion Response to F. Cryer



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Lemche´s and Jack Kilmon´s responses point to the difficulties that have
accrued around these ideas for centuries. The notion of autograph copy was
actually worked out, I think, by the Bollandist fathers and others
centuries ago, but the term itself is only about 150 years old and means
simply "in the author´s own handwriting", more or less. Of course, whether
the document in question is the author´s fair copy, assembled from his
drafts (the conception breaks down, as Jack aptly notes, when we are
dealing with written concretion of orally dictated material), or whether it
is a virtually identical copy of that fair copy executed by a copyist is
really only determinable if we knew the former´s handwriting in detail. So
there will always be room for doubt. Nevertheless, errors are the classical
Leitfaeden: words that don´t make sense as written, but presuppose the
usual copyist´s blunders: d for r (or the reverse), y for w (or ditto), k
for b (in some scripts) or the like. In the DSS, these are sometimes
detected by later hands, who have written in corrections. Some of the
scribal practices Malachi Martin and, later, Emanuel Tov have written about
may even have to do with the planned Gestaltung of an envisioned next
generation of the texts in question: paragraph here, space there, and so
forth: indicating that the texts as they lie before us are self-conscious
ingredients in a process of copying and redaction.
In conjunction with the DSS, it is not only the case that such indications
of copying and redaction are everywhere present. It is also the case that
although we possess fragments of duplicates of many texts (Genesis, with at
least 19 mss; Deut with at least 29, and so forth), it has so far not
proved possible to point to a single text which might have served as their
origin, although, admittedly, that is also a difficult issue, given the
fragmentary and to a large extent non-overlapping condition of the
fragments. This is why Tov contents himself with such general
characterisations as "proto-LXX" or "proto-MT", or LXX-type, MT-type, and
the like.

best regards,

Frederick H. Cryer
Assoc. Prof. for Research
Univ. of Copenhagen
Faculty of Theology
Købmagergade 44-46
1150 København K.
e-mail: fc.dss@pop.teol.ku.dk
fax: (045) 35 32 36 52