Mark 6:33

[Paul Younan]

Shlama Akhay,

In the Greek NT tradition, many different kinds of mistakes happened because our Greek buddy Zorba did not have the careful textual tradition that his brethren the Semites did.

One of these types of mistakes is technically called by the (appropriately) Greek name homioteleution ("like-ending"). It means that there is a phrase in between two words that is left out inadvertently when a copyist's eye jumped from the first "like word" to the next "like word." It is actually a very common error in Greek manuscripts.

Now, study carefully the Byzantine Greek reading of Mark 6:33 shown below:



There are two textual traditions here which differ in the Greek ("Byzantine" vs. "Western"). The Byzantine reading is shown above. The "Western" reading omits the phrase that is highlighted in blue.

The reason is because a copyist's eye jumped from the first "kai" ("and") to the second, leaving out "and preceeded them."

Armed with this juicy tidbit of information, study the comparison of the Peshitta with Old Scratch below:



As you can plainly see, Old Scratch also (eh-hem) is missing the phrase:
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..."and they ran before them", which the Peshitta contains.

This demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that Old Scratch is a revision of the Peshitta to bring it into more agreement with the "Western" Greek manuscripts.