Royse writes that this is “presumably an unusual genitive in –ας, for which there seems to be no parallel” (1). However, he must mean that there is no male parallel, for it is an ordinary genitive of a first declension feminine name (2).
The name is otherwise unattested as a female name, and the male form was extremely rare, with only two cases listed in the Lexicon of Greek Personal Νames, for example. It is therefore plausible that the scribe of P46 (or a predecessor) did not know whether to expect a male name or a female name, but they would know to expect a genitive. They would therefore know that if the name was female there would be a sigma following the final alpha, and there would be no such sigma if the name was male. It seems that, on finding the sigma they then naturally assumed that the name was female and took the word to end after the sigma, not realising that the sigma was the initial letter of the following word. The doubling of the sigma is therefore explicable if the scribe had no prior knowledge of Barnabas's gender.
Edgar Battad Ebojo did not consider the possibility that the scribe thought he was writing a female name, and wrote that the error resulted from "a visual difficulty with initial sigma immediately following an open vowel"(3). He cites 1 Cor 2:4 as another case where P46 doubles the sigma to create a text that makes no sense. However, this textual variant does not demonstrate a tendency of P46 since it is in the other early manuscripts as well. The only other example of P46 doubling an initial sigma is at 1 Cor 16:19, where the female name, Prisca, is changed to the (unattested?) male name, Priscas. As I mentioned in my last blog post, the name Prisca has an ambiguous gender in Rom 16:3 since it is in the accusative. Prisca there is mentioned before Aquila and is highly praised so a scribe might have made the sexist assumption that Prisca was male (even though it is a well attested female name) and, when reaching 1 Cor 16:19, the scribe would have been primed to read the sigma of σὺν as the last letter of Prisca's name, which precedes it.
There is therefore no tendency in P46 to double sigmas to make text that the scribe would have considered nonsense. We can therefore assume that at Gal 2:1 a scribe thought he/she was writing a woman's name, and at 1 Cor 16:19 a scribe thought he/she was writing a man's name. An interesting implication of this is that in neither case could the scribe have been familiar with the Acts of the Apostles, where the genders of the two people are unambiguous. The influence of Acts presumably explains why these errors are not seen in other manuscripts (all of which are later).
Barnabas's gender is unambiguous at Gal 2:13, but P46 has a textual variant there and things get complicated.
(1) James R. Royse, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri, NTTSD 36 (Leiden: Brill, 2008) 332.
(2) Compare, for example, ΜΑΡΙΑΣ (Matt 1:16; John 11:1; Acts 12:12).
(3) A scribe and his manuscript: an Investigation into the Scribal Habits of Papyrus 46 (P. Chester Beatty II – P. Mich. Inv. 6238). PhD thesis. 275-7.
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