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| Supposed distigmai-obeli in 03 |
I heard Payne give this argument in 2015 and wrote about my reaction to it back then. Here I thought I would add just a little to that.
The crux of the argument is that certain NT paragraphoi are longer than others and occur alongside distigmai (double dots). These “distigme-obelos” marks are then said to mark textual additions which Payne identifies, as before, using the NA apparatus. Payne does concede this time around that seven of his eight “distigme-obelos” symbols might also mark paragraph breaks, but he is quite confident that they are more than that. The upshot in all this for Payne is that 1 Cor 14.34–35 is not Pauline and the apparent inconsistency with 1 Cor 11 is thereby removed.
As before, I find the manuscript argument nearly impossible to believe.
All of Payne’s supposed obeli happen at natural breaks in the text, none of them are actual obeli like we find in the OT portion of Vaticanus (or in other MSS), and all look just like the other paragraphoi to the naked eye. The fact that Payne has to measure them in millimeters to show their distinctiveness only proves the point, in my mind. How could any ancient reader be expected to identify them without measurement?
Add to this the fact that seven of his eight “obeli-distigmai” texts do not actually include the supposed “added text” and the problems are just too much. The ancient reader would have no idea what text these marks were actually marking. The whole point of using an obelos, of course, was that you leave the questionable text in but mark it so that the reader knows what it is. In Payne’s system, the reader is left with no way to know what the symbols mark in 87% (seven of eight) of their cases. Payne’s system, as he envisions it, would never work in practice.
With scholars like Niccum and Miller, then, we should conclude that there is no semantic connection between these distigmai and paragraphoi.