18 December 2019

Breakfast with the Bishop: Only for English Hellenists

A friend has shown me a Catholic devotional tract which quotes Matthew 11: 30 with an implied Greek subtext to gar okhron* mou khreston ... estin.

Ah, the wonders of Text Crit! How many hours of unalloyed fun it provides! How fortunate I am to have been taught it in my youth over many short hours by that wonderful Canadian George Kilpatrick ... whose own 1958 edition of the NT, incidentally and unaccountably, omits in its apparatus criticus to record this v.l..

How can such a densely significant Variant Lection fail to remind the English reader of the famous Punch cartoon by George du Maurier (1895), and the immortal words therein of the chinless Mr Jones?

I bet Housman would have devised a superb emendation. Kilpatrick, who was the Dean Ireland Professor in this University as well as being a Staggers Man, once gave me, as a Birthday Present, a copy of Housman's On the Application of Thought to Textual Criticism.

Pure gold.

*Ovi scilicet interiora lutea, secundum Aristotelem.



1 comment:

Sprouting Thomas said...

Does this mean that on occasions when Matthew 11:30 appears in the lectionary, we ought to bring out that good old hymn "Onward Christian Soldiers", full of fresh significance?

By the way, father, you may not be aware of this website where polytonic Greek can be very quickly and painlessly typed up and copied. http://www.typegreek.com/