PUNCTUATIONINTHENEWTESTAMENT By Roger L. Omanson

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Bible scholars, as BR readers know all too well, spend a lot of time quibbling over what the Bible says.

Many of the disagreements arise because we do not have a single original text to work from. For the New Testament, the earliest manuscripts date to around 200 C.E., but they are only a scrap or two. Most existing manuscripts come from the fourth century C.E. or later, and all of these are copies of copies of copies. Variations among the manuscripts are often blamed on the copyists, who may have changed passages for stylistic or theological reasons or tried to harmonize differences among different passages, or who may simply have made mistakes.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had the original manuscripts? Then we’d know the precise words Paul used to excoriate the Corinthians, say, or just how Mark described Jesus’ miracle working in Galilee.

Or would we?

Unfortunately, even if we had a letter in Paul’s own hand, there still would be much to debate. For in the days of Paul and the other New Testament writers, and indeed for the next few centuries, people wrote in a style called scriptio continua, that is, without any breaks between words, sentences and paragraphs, and without any punctuation at all.1 Texts flowed in continuous streams of letters, leaving modern copyists and translators with significant decisions to make about every sentence, every clause, indeed every word of a manuscript.

Modern translations of the New Testament are usually based on a widely accepted critical Greek text, such as the United Bible Societies’ The Greek New Testament2 or the Nestle- Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.3

But the editors of these editions do not always agree on where breaks and punctuation marks should appear. And translators sometimes depart from the segmentation and punctuation found in these critical texts based on their own understanding of the New Testament writings. Their decisions can create real differences in meaning, as is shown by comparing several modern translations.

Let’s look at some examples, punctuation mark by punctuation mark:

Accent Marks

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The most minute punctuation marks can have a surprisingly strong impact on our understanding of the biblical world. For example, Romans 16:7 mentions a person named either ’Iounian or ’Iounißan, whom Paul describes as 041“prominent among the apostles.” The difference in names might not seem like much, but the shift in accent marks transforms this name from Junias (RSV, NIV, NJB), a shortened form of the man’s name Junianus, to Junia (GNB, NRSV, REB), a woman’s name.a Is this person a man or a woman?

Some interpreters, considering it unlikely that a woman would be among those referred to as apostles, argue that the name must be Junias. However, the female name Junia occurs more than 250 times in Greek and Latin inscriptions found in Rome alone; the male name Junias never appears. Further, when the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament first began to be accented, copyists wrote the feminine Junia. Thus the extrabiblical evidence suggests that Paul was referring to a woman. If the biblical name is Junia, then it provides a direct challenge to the common assumption that women were not included among the apostles in the early church.4

Quotation Marks

Like any letter writer, Paul sometimes quotes the letters he is replying to. The final words of 1 Corinthians 7:1 may be a quotation from a letter that the Corinthians wrote to Paul—a quotation with which Paul disagrees in the next verse:

1Now for the matters you wrote about. You say, “It is a good thing for a man not to have intercourse with a woman.” 2Rather, in the face of so much immorality, let each man have his own wife and each woman her own husband.

1 Corinthians 7:1–2 (REB)

or

1Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: 2“It is well for a man not to touch a woman.” But because of…

1 Corinthians 7:1–2 (NRSV)

However, these may just as well have been Paul’s own words of advice. This understanding is reflected in nearly all traditional translations:

1Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto 042me: 2It is good for a man not to touch a woman.

1 Corinthians 7:1–2 (KJV)

Here we find two diametrically opposed translations, with no quotation marks to let us know whether Paul did or did not believe it was good for men to “touch” (a euphemism for sexual intercourse, as the REB translation makes clear) women.

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Imagine a news report stripped of its quotation marks: It would be impossible to know who said what to whom. We find the same problem in Acts 1:16–22, in which Peter is speaking to Jewish believers in Jerusalem about Judas. Without any quotation marks, it is extremely difficult to differentiate between Peter’s speech and the author’s own words.

Verse 19 of this passage includes a reference to Aramaic—the language of Jews in Palestine in Peter’s day—as “their” language. This is odd, because Peter is addressing the Jews; it seems he would h