We Don't Need No Punctuation

by Doctor Science

In my earlier post about I Corinthians 11, I said I was convinced by Evangelical translator William Welty's reading, that Paul was telling the Corinthians head-coverings (for men or women) don't really *matter* all that much theologically, but that in any case women should make their own decisions according to their own consciences.

I like Welty's reading not just because it makes Paul non-misogynist, but because it reads smoothly, Paul's argument hangs together and makes sense. But the trouble is that it's untraditional: for at least 1700 years, these passages have been read to prove that women *ought* to cover their hair in church, and to adopt an attitude of general subservience to their patriarchal masters.

How good a writer can Paul be, really, if he was being consistently misread for so long? -- and misread not merely by the naive, but by the most intelligent and educated minds in Christendom, for *centuries*. It makes Paul look like a poor writer, and/or makes all the smartest people in Christendom look like poor readers.

And not just down the centuries, either. As Fred Clark (slacktivist) said,

Did that [I Cor 11:10] make sense to the Christians in Corinth? Did they read that and think, "Ah, yes, of course. Because of the angels. It's all so clear now ..."?

I think what Fred is overlooking is that the Corinthians didn't "read" the letter, and that Paul didn't "write" it, not in the way we mean those verbs.

Here's how we know:

This is how I Cor 11:10 appears in the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest complete editions of the Bible. It was written in around 330-360 C.E.; it may well be one of the 50 copies of the Bible ordered by Emperor Constantine the Great. The Codex Sinaiticus Project has put extremely high-res photos of each page of the book online, good for hours (or decades!) of fun. I enhanced the contrast in this image to make it easier to pick out the letters.

As you can see, one of the fun things about these old manuscripts is that they're written in scriptio continua -- just a string of letters with no breaks, so the verse becomes "FORTHISCAUSEOUGHTTHEWOMANTOHAVEPOWERONHERHEADBECAUSEOFTHEANGELS" (the script is all uppercase). Now imagine reading a whole book like this.

It should be obvious that this kind of writing isn't intended to be read silently, by a single person sitting alone -- your brain would melt. It's meant to be read aloud by someone who has already heard it read, who needs to be reminded of the exact wording but not of every detail of the presentation. It's more like the script for a play than it is a book as we know it.

And it's more like a script of Shakespeare's than of Shaw's. Shakespeare included very few descriptions of actors, set, action, or props, not because he didn't think about such things but because he didn't have to. He knew what the play looked like, and so did the people working with him, they just needed to be reminded of the words. Shaw, though, wrote very detailed introductory descriptive paragraphs for his scenes, because he knew his plays would be put on by people he would never speak to, and he'd have to give them detailed descriptions -- while Shakespeare could get away with waving his hands "go like this".

Paul would have "written" his Letter to the Corinthians aloud, dictating it to a secretary or scribe -- the only part written in his own hand was I Cor 16:21, the "autograph". Indeed, Paul was such a *dynamic* person that it's hard for me not to imagine him pacing about, gesturing dramatically, and emoting as he dictated: *performing*, as any charismatic preacher does. The letter wouldn't have been mailed to Corinth, but hand-carried by a trusted messenger, one who would have heard Paul working on the letter. In Corinth that messenger would have read the Letter aloud to the congregation there, probably more than once, and he would have done his best to imitate Paul's original performance, putting in all the tone or emotion Paul intended for each line. When the Letter was copied and redistributed, those copies would have been carried to various congregations and read aloud there by people who had heard the Letter read in Corinth, and so on through the world and years.

This image of St. Paul writing is from a 9th-century manuscript made at the Abbey of St. Gall. It's more historically accurate than most such images, which depict Paul as a hard-working, solitary scholar, because here he's shown using a a wax tablet, how people jotted down notes during Paul's time and for over a millennium after.

And the standard practice of his day was to do this without punctuation. Punctuation is a substitute for breath, it's how we take mere writing and add back the qualities of the voice: timing, pauses, emphasis, emotion. When texts were really scripts, ways to ensure consistency in oral performance, punctuation didn't seem necessary. Since everyone *heard* the Bible before they read it -- which most never did -- the voice had never left the text, voice and text always seemed to go together.

That's why one of the first systems of punctuation was developed at the Library of Alexandria, one of the few places in the ancient world where readers would encounter many texts they'd never heard read aloud.

But though it's possible to transmit para-textual meaning -- emotion, sarcasm, asides -- without textual evidence like punctuation or emoticons, it's fragile: it depends on the ease with which all the messengers in the chain of readers can "get" the emotion you're trying to convey. This is particularly a problem for a writer like Paul, who was by nature a preacher, a master of the spoken word who could be sarcastic, matter-of-fact, angry, self-deprecating, and sublimely beautiful, all in the course of one letter. Paul put a *lot* of emotional expression into his writing -- so there was a lot that could be lost, if his read-aloud-ers didn't follow him.

And I think that's what happened. I'm now convinced that Paul was almost as feminist as Jesus himself, seeing women as co-workers in the fields of the Lord, willing to hear them pray and even preach in public.[1] But by the time Tertullian was writing, about 150 years later, Paul's original meaning was essentially inverted. It was just too hard for generation after generation of (male) readers to say, "the woman should make up her own mind". Collectively and probably unconsciously, they decided they must have been hearing it wrong, and in time it seemed reasonable for even First Timothy to seem authentically Paul-like. A leader like Paul or Jesus can only push an idea so far, after that it depends on the ability of his followers to accurately hear what they're saying and pass it along.

To summarize:

1. St. Paul: possibly not as sexist as he's drawn.
2. Evangelicals: can read the Bible in critical and novel ways.
3. Reading the Bible: not as simple as all that.
4. Punctuation: your friend.
5. Feminism: in unexpected places.

Punctuation saves lives. This sign (no particular source, it's all over the internet) demonstrates why the earliest known punctuation was on a monument: because signs and monuments are intended to be text separate from the voice, to endure beyond a train of read-aloud transmission.

---

[1.] If you've heard that "St. Paul is the one who said women should be silent in church", that's based mostly on I Timothy, which most serious scholars agree was *not* written by Paul, but by someone later who thought this was the sort of thing Paul would have said.

The other verses people are talking about are I Cor 14:34-35. But interpreting those verses turns out to be a studded field of land mines and hand grenades. Briefly, these verses are in different places in some of the best, earliest "witnesses" (=copies of the text), so it's possible that they were not written by Paul, but were added later. If you don't think they're an add-on, you have to get pretty pretzel-like to reconcile them with I Cor 11, where Paul clearly expects women to "prophesy" in public. And the main reason for the contortions? Making I Corinthians agree with I Timothy!

The late Robert Nguyen Cramer argued that most New Testament copies were amended to be less feminist, part of a general "smoothing-over": copyists were willing to paraphrase verses, to make them sound better or agree more closely with other parts of the Bible. And for them, "sounding better" included "less feminist". The text of the King James Version and Martin Luther's New Testament translation were both based on such texts.

Comments

[JakeB]

Next you're going to tell me "It is better to marry, then to burn" is the proper rendering!

Anyways, this is very interesting, although I feel somewhat irritated at having to think Paul was less of a pusbag than I used to.

[Hartmut]

We know that St.Hieronymous subtly changed the wording in some places to suit his ideology (several times). And his version is the one the RCC insists on being the one and only valid for the church.
---
Abraham a Sacnta Clara remarked that a shifted colon can turn scripture into heresy:
'Resurrexit. Non est hic.' => 'Resurrexit non. Est hic.' (HE has risen. HE is not here => HE has not risen. HE is here) makes a bit of a difference when spoken by the angel inside the tomb of Christ.

[doretta]

The misogynist Paul has been brought to you by the same people who brought you the absurd notion that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about homosexuality. Textual ambiguities are not required.

[the once and future cleek]

originalism!

[Barry]

"How good a writer can Paul be, really, if he was being consistently misread for so long? -- and misread not merely by the naive, but by the most intelligent and educated minds in Christendom, for *centuries*. It makes Paul look like a poor writer, and/or makes all the smartest people in Christendom look like poor readers."

That statement assumes that the 'readers' didn't have ulterior motives. The assumption of female subservience is baked into the foundations of almost all human societies, and has been in the Middle East for long before the Bible was written.

[Jed Clampett]

Exegesis is like trying to get from the peninsula to the mainland. Questions abound:

Why a duck? Whya no chicken?

Paully, the Walrus was Frank.

[doretta]

Right, Barry. It doesn't require poor writers or poor readers or even bad faith. It only requires unexamined cultural assumptions, which are not exactly a scarce commodity in any collection of humans. Those assumptions trump text almost without fail.

[Tony P.]

One nice thing about being an atheist is: you don't have to care whether Jesus or Paul or even Tertullian have been mis-punctuated.

Still, ancient texts do hold a certain fascination. It's interesting to know what Archimedes, Euclid, and that crowd had to say, many centuries ago. Modern fans of mathematics typically have to rely on translations of transcriptions of decayed manuscripts, of course, just like modern fans of religion do. To establish exactly what Pappus had to say about the centroid of a given section, you have to take the word of somebody who can authenticate an ancient manuscript, read Ancient Greek, and know enough geometry to do a decent translation. To know what Paul had to say about women in church, you have to take the word of similar authorities.

The difference between math and religion is: math has no particular use for authority, thank God.

--TP

[JakeB]

@ Tony--

I don't hold much brief for Chomsky (for the eye of Sauron effect he had on linguistics for many years), but one anecdote of his I've always appreciated (quoting at length from Triumph of Democracy, courtesy of
http://www.chomsky.info/books/responsibility01.htm ):

"To make all of this more concrete, let me comment in a very personal way: in my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I've done work in mathematical linguistics, for example, without any professional credentials in mathematics; in this subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught. But I've often been invited by universities to speak on mathematical linguistics at mathematics seminars and colloquia. No one has ever asked me whether I have the appropriate credentials to speak on these subjects; the mathematicians couldn't care less. What they want to know is what I have to say. No one has ever objected to my right to speak, asking whether I have a doctor's degree in mathematics, or whether I have taken advanced courses in this subject. That would never have entered their minds. They want to know whether I am right or wrong, whether the subject is interesting or not, whether better approaches are possible -- the discussion dealt with the subject, not with my right to discuss it.

But on the other hand, in discussion or debate concerning social issues or American foreign policy, Vietnam or the Middle East, for example, the issue is constantly raised, often with considerable venom. I've repeatedly been challenged on grounds of credentials, or asked, what special training do you have that entitles you to speak of these matters. The assumption is that people like me, who are outsiders from a professional viewpoint, are not entitled to speak on such things.

Compare mathematics and the political sciences -- it's quite striking. In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is the concern for content."

[wj]

Another way to put it is:

If a field allows for ideas to be clearly proved or disproved, then credentials are irrelevant. Because the ideas can be judged objectively on their merits.

But when a field does not provide the possibility of disproving new ideas, credentials are the only available way to decide whether a new idea is worth considering.

That is why the social sciences call themselves "sciences." Not because they actually are sciences, in the sense of having an extensive body of ideas which can be empirically proven or disproven. But because they aspire to be sciences -- that is the direction they want to go.

They aren't there yet. And the insistance on credentials inhibits them getting there. The social sciences would do better to recall that the basics of the sciences were laid down by people with no credentials the field. In fact, mostly the earliest steps were taken by engineers, i.e. totally empirically. And the next steps were taken by amateurs: guys with no special training in the field, but with a willingness to look at the evidence and come up with explanations which would suggest further experiments to confirm (or refute) them.

P.S. Just for reference, while I do have degrees in (Mechanical) Engineering, I also have degrees in Anthropology (odd double major back in college). I've been on the inside, and have some idea whereof I speak on this.

[Patrick]

I dunno, man. I suspect that credentials are going to get you further than "look[ing] at the evidence and com[ing] up with explanations which would suggest further experiments to confirm or refute them" when asking questions like, "If we invade Iraq, will the Iraqis accept this Chalabi guy as a strong man and happily implement democratic reforms? Or will we just touch off a decades long insurgency?"

I guess technically invading was an experiment that did refute one particular theory, but presumably the idea is to come up with an answer before you invade, not after.

[wj]

That's always the problem with credentials: whose credentials do you decide to accept?

And science generally tries to do experiments to prove or disprove theories before building a bridge and just seeing if it collapses. (Not that bridges never collapse. Just that the idea is to test theories out in ways that don't get people hurt.)

Invading Iraq on the theory that the troops would be greated with flowers was not a test of the theory; it was action assuming the (untested) theory was correct. Like the theory that bombing Iran will cause them to stop working on nuclear weapons. Yes, it worked on Assad. But that was a different culture, and may not really be a good test of the theory that bombing is a solution.

Especially when there is some reason to believe (not know, but suspect) that Iran really isn't actually trying to build a bomb at the moment. Just provide their own nuclear industry . . . while, admittedly, positioning themselves so that they could. Just as some of their neighbors have.

[liberal japonicus]

'eye of Sauron', I like that.

This paper, an extension of a review of a book about Chomsky by Christine Behme, might be worth a read

[bob sykes]

So much for an inspired text. And you haven't even got to the names of God, all 60 ofbthem.

The Catholic Church and the Jews insist that a plain reading of the Bible is impossible. It must interpreted by an authoritative tradition. They have a point. The Jews predate the Old Testament, and the Catholic Church predates the Christain Bible, which it created. Protestants disagree, and there are 39,000 Protestant sects. At least the snake handlers have the plain authority of Mark.

There is no reason to takr any part of the Bible seriously.