Friday, February 28, 2014

Chapter divisions, and questions about a solution

Last night, I went to bed wondering about a problem in one of the images in my last post. We have (apparently) a picture of Doubting Thomas, but the accompanying scriptural reference is (tentatively) John 22:


The problem is that the story of Doubting Thomas occurs in John 20, not 22. In fact, John only has 21 chapters.

I started to hunt about for some map that would show the relationship between modern chapters, Byzantine kephalaia, and whatever other system of capitulation might be out there, but no luck. As far as I can tell from looking at manuscripts, the Byzantine book of John was divided into 19 kephalaia.

One thing led to another, and the other thing led me the Wikipedia article on the Rohoncz codex, where I saw that many of the things I've been writing about in this series of posts have apparently been discussed by several Hungarian researchers since 2010, notably Tokai, Király and Láng.

This is great progress.  When I first looked at the RC, the predominant theories regarding it were highly implausible. I created a Yahoo group in June 2005 and posted some ideas about numbers and episodes, but became frustrated with the fact that I couldn't reliably embed images in messages. I posted sporadically after that time, but eventually put it aside, to return to it only this year.

If this has already been solved (as the Wikipedia article suggests), then I think I need to go find another mystery to work on.

Luckily I have a stack of them.

However, the Wikipedia article suggests a couple of things about the solution with which I disagree, so I will consider the RC to be partially solved until I see the full solution.

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