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Acts 15:1
#1
Acts 15:1 usual reading in English

"Some men came down from Judea and began teaching the brethren, "Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved."

> DMW$A* = (of Moses)
*my assumption of aramaic reconstruction

Acts 15:1 Aramaic reading:
"But men from Jihud came down and taught the brethren, If you be not circumcised after the custom of the law, you cannot be saved"

DNMWSA = (of the law)


=

D- MW$A* = (of Moses)
DNMWSA = (of the law)

What you guys think..... a close enough to mistake one for the other?
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#2
Very nice example - especially considering that the D and N in the old DSS font look very similar.

Are there any variants among the Greek texts that show the alternate reading?
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#3
Shlama all--

Well, I have looked at my resources and it seems the Greek has gone universally with ETHOS rather than NOMOS for this line. In this context, both words mean the same thing.

But it does kind of beg a deeper question of what I sometimes have called an "implied wordplay". I am using this idea rather broadly in this case. Usually what I mean is a synonym substitution screams pun. So to give an example in English, most of us have heard Ben Franklin's quip that "We must hang together or most assuredly we will hang separately". If Franklin had said "strangled with rope separately" it would lose its cleverness in one way but in another it would make you double take to "fight" to get to the pun, in effect "translating" strangled with rope back into "hang".

So part of me wonders if the Greek redactor(s) were picking ETHOS in a sense to AVOID this observation or linkage because it went against their grain as it were. I don't know for sure at all. But I sense something is going on with this. The reason I can't be sure is that ETHOS is not exactly a rare word in the Greek NT whereas on the Aramaic side when I have suspected an implied wordplay those words tend to be rare.

We need to study this more.

Shlama w'burkate
Andrew Gabriel Roth
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