only in about fifty cases against NAC) point either to two recensions of some older original (Bousset) or to a text based again upon some older revised text (Weiss). Q approximates rather to the cursives in text. But its archetype usually tallies with SAC, and is allied somehow to the text behind the so-called “Coptic”?! version (cf. Goussen’s ‘Theolog. Studia, fasciculus I.”: Apoc, S. fohannis apostoli versio sahidica, 1895, pp. iv.-vii.), like a small group of cursives (Bousset’s Q rel.). In no one MS. or group of MSS. is a neutral or fairly accurate text preserved. This is mainly due to the interval which elapsed before the Apocalypse became generally canonical, particularly in the East; its text was less carefully guarded during this period than any other portion of the N.T., and even by the time that the NAC text (or texts) came into being, the book had not secured its canonisation throughout the Eastern churches. In addition to this, the grammatical irregularities and anomalies? which studded its pages tempted many a scribe to correct and to conform the text. Systematic emendation of this kind must have begun very early (Weiss, pp. 144 f.).
This paucity and conflict of uncial evidence lends additional weight to the versions and patristic citations, especially as they reflect a text or texts which cannot be taken to be identical with, and yet must be older than, those underlying the MSS. Often, indeed, the versions themselves reproduce some of the most patent errors in the MSS., while the patristic texts are sometimes too
11η the textual notes = Sah. (i.e., Sahidic): a further fragment is edited by J. Clédat in Revue de l’Orient Chrétien (1899), pp. 263-279. Gregory (pp. 546-547) throws both this and the later Bohairic or Memphitic version (= me.) back into the second century, but this is probably too early a date. All the extant fragments of the former are printed in Delaporte’s Fragments Sahidiques duiN.T. (Paris, 1906). For the latter, cf. Leipoldt in Church Quart. Rev., 1906, pp. 292 f.
2These are not invariably Hebraisms, as Viteau and the older grammarians argue, but it is almost uncritical at the opposite extreme to rule out Hebraisms entirely. The Apocalypse is so saturated with the original text and the Greek version of the O.T., that there is more likelihood here than elsewhere in the N.T. of a grammatical solecism being due, directly or indirectly, to the influence of Semitic idiom. Even though a parallel instance can be adduced in some cases from the papyri or the κοινή elsewhere (cf. Helbing, p. iv.), this merely suggests a possible origin for the phrase in question. Besides, the Apocalypse is a piece of literary art. Where its eccentricities are not due to ignorance of Greek or to reminiscences of Hebrew idiom, they are deliberate violations of grammar and syntax in the interests of rhetoric or faith. That Greek was spoken in these Asiatic townships, although native dialects lingered in the country, is shown by L. Mitteis in his Reichsrecht und Volksrecht in den Ostlichen Provinzen d. rim. Kaiserreiches (1891),
ΡΡ. 23 f.