To Pass a Rope through the Eye of a Needle: The Influence of Byzantine Catenae and Homiliaries on the Greek, Church Slavonic, and Old Romanian Readings of Matthew 19,24 (original) (raw)
2021, A. Jouravel / A. Mathys (eds), Wort- und Formenvielfalt. Festschrift für Christoph Koch zum 80. Geburtstag, Peter Lang, Berlin: pp. 327-352
https://doi.org/10.3726/b18205
The "camel passing through the eye of a needle" is one of the most famous parables of Jesus in the synoptic Gospels (Mt 19,24, Mc 10,25, Lc 18,25). While the overwhelming majority of New Testament manuscripts attest the reading κάμηλος ("camel") in these verses, a small group of Greek witnesses, together with the early Armenian and Georgian translations, attest the variant κάμιλος ("thick rope"). Some Patristic and Byzantine authors even understood the first term, κάμηλος, as a type of nautical rope. Although clearly secondary, this interpretation led to some interesting exegetical elaborations in later Christian literature. This paper intends to retrace the history of this alternative reading in the New Testament manuscript tradition and discuss its reception in Patristic authors and in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine periods. In particular, I will focus on a few hitherto overlooked examples of this reception: the Slavonic translation of Methodius of Olympus' De lepra (CPG 1815), and the Slavonic, Greek and Old Romanian versions of Neagoe Basarab's Teachings to his son Theodosius (ca. 1520). 1 I sincerely thank Daniar Mutalâp (Bucharest), Anna Jouravel (Belgrad), Audrey Mathys (Brüssel) and Sergey Kim (Paris) for their useful comments and their invaluable support with various aspects of this article. All errors and inaccuracies remain my own. 2 [Anonymous], De divitiis § 18.2 (ed. Kessler 1999, 306); see the discussion in Brown 2012, 308-321. 3 E.g. Beza 1588, 46b (commentary on Mt 19,24). The variant κάμιλος and its meaning was possibly known to Beza, Stephanus, etc. through a few NT manuscripts (see below, n. 11 and 12), but also through the scholia to Aristophanes (Schol. in Vespas, ad 1035 f., Aristophanes 1498, 237a) and the early prints of Theophylact of Ochrid's Gospel Commentary (Theophylactus 1542). 4 See e.g. Talmud Bavli, Berakhot, 55b, Bava Metzia, 38b; in both cases the animal is an elephant (aram. pīlā). The expression in the Qurʾān (Q 7:40) also led to similar discussions among Muslim exegetes on the meaning of the root ǧml (Montgomery Watt 1972; Blachère 1974; Schub 1976; Samir 1978; Rippin 1980). 5 As part of the famous Florilegium Coislinianum (named after ms. Paris, BNF, Coisl. 294, s. XI/ XII, but extant in more than a dozen other Greek manuscripts). See Fernández 2018, with further bibliography. 10 All NT quotations follow the 28 th Edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece (= NA28), unless specified otherwise. The variant βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν found in both Methodius' and Neagoe's quotations is not attested in NT manuscripts,