005_Tam_co_570-588 13/02/15 12:48 Pagina 573 WHEN PAPYRI AND CODICES SPEAK: REVISITING JOHN 2,23-25 573 in this paper, the majority view is not without its problems. Fur- thermore, the alternative view briefly mentioned by Moloney and Borchert has not been given enough attention. Given some of the key terms used in 2,23-25 for what I call “apprehending” Jesus, namely, seeing, knowing, witnessing, and believing, the role of John 2,23-25 in its preceding context deserves revisiting. John 2,23- 25 may well be a precious gem neglected in Johannine scholarship. II. Evidence from the Earliest Manuscripts To re-examine the role of 2,23-25, I suggest that the earliest tex- tual evidence should be consulted. Recent scholarship has shown that the earliest biblical manuscripts, both papyri and codices, in- cluding those for the Gospel of John, are carefully prepared 25. These manuscripts all betray evidence of sense-unit delimitations, which can help us see the picture from another perspective. The lines of an ancient Greek text are usually thought to be writ- ten in continuous blocks, uncluttered and unbroken, what is called scriptio continua. However, unlike an ideal classical literary manuscript, this is not true for the earliest biblical manuscripts 26. Scribes/copyists did introduce sense-unit divisions. This system of di- vision cannot have arisen out of lectionary uses since the sense-unit division predates them. Further, lectionary use alone fails to explain why the lengths of divided sections could vary so significantly 27. 25 For instance, see L.W. HURTADO, The Earliest Christian Artifacts. Manuscripts and Christian Origins (Grand Rapids, MI 2006); J. CHAPA, “The Early Text of John”, The Early Text of the New Testament (eds. C.E. HILL – M.J. KRUGER) (Oxford 2012) 140-156. 26 Compare Aland and Aland’s incorrect comments, “The scriptio con- tinua of the original [New Testament] texts not only ignored the division of words, but naturally also lacked any punctuation”, K. ALAND – B. ALAND, The Text of the New Testament. An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism (trans. E.F. RHODES) (Grand Rapids, MI 21989) 287. See the criticism of P. COMFORT, Encountering the Manuscripts. An Introduction to New Testa- ment Paleography & Textual Criticism (Nashville, TN 2005) 53. 27 See G. GOSWELL, “Early Readers of the Gospels: The Kephalaia and Titloi of Codex Alexandrinus”, Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 6 (2009) 137 n.11; J.R. EDWARDS, “The Hermeneutical Signifi-