005_Tam_co_570-588 13/02/15 12:48 Pagina 574 574 JOSAPHAT C. TAM Rather, this system of division reflects “a concern to guide and fa- cilitate reading of the texts” 28. Although these sense-unit divisions are only of a “rudimentary kind and follow no universally acknow- ledged system” 29, i.e., they are not consistently and uniformly used across all these manuscripts, individual copyists did tend to classify in varying ways different degrees of divisions. Even though a scribal convention was not yet fixed, the practice of marking sense units, as it is claimed, was already developing. What is more, these divisions are not arbitrary. They require the copyist’s judgment and reflect “exegesis of the text in question” 30 as they attempt to influ- ence the ancient readers’ reading process. They are interpretations by themselves. Thus, for instance, Peter Williams, tracing the divi- sion of the opening verses of John 1, has argued convincingly that 1,1-18 was never treated as the prologue of John in the eyes of an- cient copyists 31. Therefore, for the purpose of the present study, it is worthwhile to examine all the earliest manuscripts so as to de- termine how the sense-units were perceived by individual copyists. In light of this, the earliest available Greek manuscripts containing the last part of John 2 and the early part of John 3 are chosen, which are Codex Alexandrinus (A), Codex Washingtonianus (W), Codex Vaticanus (B), Codex Sinaiticus (a), Papyrus Bodmer XV (î75), and Papyrus Bodmer II (î66), all dated within the first three cen- turies of the New Testament era 32. cance of Chapter Divisions in Ancient Gospel Manuscripts”, NTS 56 (2010) 417. 28 HURTADO, Earliest Christian Artifacts, 177. 29 TURNER, Greek Manuscripts, 8. Also G. CAVALLO – H. MAEHLER (eds.), Hellenistic Bookhands (Berlin 2008) 19-24. 30 HURTADO, Earliest Christian Artifacts, 181, 185. As Silviu Tatu com- ments, these divisions are themselves “a window into the interpretation world of the community that generated the text”. S. TATU, “The Abraham Narrative (Gen. 12:1 – 25:11) in Some Ancient and Mediaeval Manu- scripts: The Exegetical Implications of Delimitation Criticism”, The Im- pact of Unit Delimitation on Exegesis (eds. R. DE HOOP – M.C.A. KORPEL – S.E. PORTER) (Pericope: Scripture as Written and Read in Antiquity 7; Leiden 2009) 263. 31 P.J. WILLIAMS, “Not the Prologue of John”, JSNT 33 (2011) 375-386. 32 Unfortunately, 2,23-25 is absent in the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, C.