It has been asked, "What was the theological outlook of the 3rd century Sahidic Coptic translators?" While that cannot be known with absolute certainty, it is clear that many doctrines, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, had not yet been formulated or adopted by the churches, particularly the Egyptian churches. The most likely influence, if any, might have been Egypt's scholarly Origen, who wrote an early Commentary on the Gospel of John. (Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 9). Also see:
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/101502.htm
Not laboring under the burden of later doctrines developed by the church, it is interesting to find insights from the Sahidic Coptic version on theologically significant New Testament verses. For example:
Luke 23:43. Did Jesus say, "Today you will be with me in paradise," or "I tell you today, You will be with me in paradise"? The best Sahidic texts, as found in Warren Wells' Sahidica text, have the Coptic particle je after its word for "today." (For information on the Sahidica text, see):
http://sahidica.warpco.com/SahidicaIntro.htm
This is the equivalent of a comma after "today," giving the translation, "Truly I say to you today, You will be with me in paradise." This harmonizes with the Scriptural fact that "today" -- that day -- Jesus was not to be in paradise, but in the grave.
John 8:58. "I am." Sahidic Coptic finishes the statement, rending the Greek egw eimi here as anok tishoop, "I am existing." Since the Coptic sentence begins with empate, "not-yet," comparable to the Greek's prin, the sentence has the force of what Greek scholar Kenneth L. McKay titles the "Extension from Past." (A New Syntax of the Verb in New Testament Greek, 1994, p. 42) Therefore, both the Greek and the Coptic of John 8:58 may be rendered this way: "I have been in existence since before Abraham was born." Jesus is here addressing the matter of prior existence, not Godship. Equating John 8:58 with Exodus 3:14, where God calls himself "I Am" in the King James and other versions, stands on poor scholarship, since the Hebrew term used in Exodus, Ehyeh really means "I will be." Even the King James Version translates Ehyeh as "I will be," not "I Am," just two verses prior, at Exodus 3:12. So do the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate.
Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1. These verses are said in some circles to represent the "Granville Sharp Rule" that two nouns connected by kai (Greek, "and") and only the first noun has the definite article, it denotes unity or equality. Thus, in these verses, "the God and Savior Jesus Christ," applies to Christ the titles of both God and Savior. Was this the understanding of the Sahidic Coptic translators?
No. At Titus 2:13 the Sahidic Coptic text reads noute. mn penswthr ihsous pecristos, "God, and our Savior Jesus Christ." Thus, two Persons are in view, not one and the same. The Coptic translators did not know of a "Granville Sharp Rule."
And as for 2 Peter 1:1, the Coptic translators apparently had before them another Greek text, which read "Lord" instead of "God": "Our Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior." (For example, "Lord" instead of "God" is found in the Codex Sinaiticus of the 4th century, and also the Harclean Syriac version.)
Revelation 3:14. Is Jesus "the beginning" of God's creation, or as some modern versions say, "the Beginner" or "the Ruler" of God's creation? The Sahidic Coptic version has houeite as a translation of the Greek's arche, which only means beginning, first. (W. E. Crum, A Coptic Dictionary, p. 738) The Coptic translators made no effort to embellish the meaning of arche in order to serve a (non-existent at the time) Trinity apologetic.
By and large, the Coptic translators were literal and faithful expounders of the Greek texts they used.
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May Jehovah continue to bless you.
ReplyDeletewhat do you make of the textual variant in 2 Pet 1:1?
ReplyDeleteEvidence Scribes saw a GS construction and didn't like it? The Divine Name was there and scribes went different ways to "fix" it?
Excuse me but I am not sure where to post my questions and I may have posted this question somewhere else in your blogs,
ReplyDeleteBut does the Coptic (P Chester Beatty-813) have the book of Mark? - Does it have the long- short or no ending? just the “cliff hanger”? And Where can we find more information on the oldest Armenian (?)manuscripts, "The 99 out of one-hundred that do not contain the long ending”?
Anyway I have great trust in our Bible and the organization- that keeps sticking to the truth-no matter where it goes... they try to help us see the variations and disputations... they never lie to us- or tickle our ears. Truth, they keep sticking to it. And I am so glad the Coptic just continues to verify the truth!
Thank you very much.
Even though the Coptic Bible supports the beliefs of Jehovah's Witness's, they made their conclusions originally from the Greek text which means that there is proof in the Greek text itself.
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ReplyDeleteHello, I would like to know from the source for the texts of the COPTO for the Old Testament, a URL, if I had one, dictionaries and a more reliable Coptic grammar book, if you could pass that data to me.
ReplyDeleteI'm Spanish speaking, it's very hard to find
I've got the Warren Wells' Sahidica text from Internet. And I want to know which is the best Sahidic Text which you said. There are several manuscripts dated at 4th century.（Wikipedia） But I could'nt get these text.
ReplyDeleteThe Cpotic Sahidica Text which I've got reads in two way. In one Text, “je”（that）is after “today”, and in another one, “je” is before “today. In the Warren Wells' Sahidica text, “je”（that）is after “today”.（"Sahidica - A New Edition of the New Testament in Sahidic Coptic" 2000-2007, p.222/644；“http://www.biblical-data.org/coptic/Sahidic_NT.pdf”）So, if you know the manuscript of the best Sahidica Text, please load up. In the Web above, the manuscript on the luke is “PPalau Rib. Inv.Nr.181 collated against Pierpont Morgan Library M-569”, but, this is not on the Wikipedia. I guess that “M-569”is the original. According to a Web, the “PPalau Rib. Inv.Nr.181” contains complete Text of Luke and Mark in Sahidic.
ReplyDeleteHorner renders John 8:58 as written, “Before Abraham became, I am being,” preserving the present ἐγώ εἰμι. The apparatus alongside lists the ancient versions (Syriac, Bohairic, Sahidic, Ethiopic, Armenian, etc.) and records no reading that converts ἐγώ εἰμι into a past-tense form. The Sahidic itself (“anok … ti-šoop”) is likewise a present existential—“I am existing”—not an English perfect such as “I have been.” Recasting John 8:58 as merely “I have been in existence” drains the verse of the very force that both the Greek and the Coptic deliberately maintain, and it ignores John’s recurring absolute “I am” sayings that echo the LXX’s divine self-identifications.
ReplyDeleteThe same point undercuts the other examples. In Luke 23:43 the Sahidic complementizer je introduces the content of “I say” rather than functioning like an English comma, and the fixed NT idiom “Amen, I say to you …” elsewhere never pairs “today” with “I say.” The broad Greek witness—and the sense of the promise—supports “Today you will be with me in Paradise,” which the Coptic accommodates when read as Coptic, not as imported English punctuation.
Treating the Sahidic as if it overrules the Greek in Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1 reverses the proper direction of argument. In Titus 2:13 a single Greek article governs “the great God and Savior of us,” naturally yielding one referent—Jesus Christ—in a context where “appearing” language elsewhere in the Pastorals refers to Christ. Sahidic often inserts ⲙⲛ simply to keep long title strings readable; its presence does not manufacture two subjects. In 2 Peter 1:1 the Sahidic manuscripts that read “Lord” follow a known Greek variant; that does not cancel the better-attested Greek “our God and Savior Jesus Christ,” nor does it imply a principled reluctance to call Christ “God.”
Revelation 3:14 fares no better. The Sahidic ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ does indeed mean “beginning,” but like Greek ἀρχή it can denote source or principality, not “first-created.” In Johannine and Pauline usage (cf. Col 1:16–18) Christ is the origin and head of creation—the one through whom “all things came to be”—which is the opposite of a creaturely reading. A literal Sahidic rendering here does not diminish that high Christology.
Finally, the claim that the translators were “literal and faithful” precisely because they were unencumbered by "later" (?) doctrine cuts both ways. The Sahidic Prologue itself ascribes full deity to the Son in 1:18 in many witnesses (“ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡϣⲏⲣⲉ ⲛⲟⲩϣⲧⲉ”), and it preserves Thomas’s direct address “my Lord and my God” in 20:28 with the expected definite possessive. In 1:1c the indefinite predicate before the definite subject—ⲛⲉ ⲟⲩⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲡⲉ ⲡϣⲁϫⲉ—is precisely how Sahidic makes a qualitative claim about essence while maintaining personal distinction, mirroring the Greek anarthrous predicate θεός. A Trinitarian reading therefore does not import "later" (?) dogma into Coptic; it reads Coptic and Greek on their own terms. Horner’s page, with its present “I am being” at John 8:58, actually illustrates the point: the earliest witnesses consistently preserve language that ascribes to the Son the mode of existence that belongs to God Himself.
A narrow claim has been making the rounds: because the Sahidic Coptic of Revelation 3:14 uses ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ (houeit), “beginning,” the verse must teach that Jesus is the first creature God made. That claim looks tidy until one reads Coptic as Coptic. Once the word is examined within the Coptic lexicon, morphology, and genitive syntax actually used in the verse, the argument unravels. Sahidic ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ does not force a creaturely reading; it comfortably carries the senses “beginning, first, foremost, head,” and in the construction found at Revelation 3:14 functions as a titular, qualitative noun designating primacy with respect to God’s creation. Far from being a linguistic trump card for a subordinationist Christology, the Coptic is fully compatible with the traditional understanding that Christ is the origin and head of creation.
ReplyDeleteThe starting point is the form of the title in the Sahidic text. In Revelation 3:14 the seer is instructed to write to Laodicea: “the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, ⲙⲙⲉ ⲡⲉϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ ⲙ̄ⲡⲥⲱⲛⲧ ⲙ̄ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ, says these things.” The phrase ⲡⲉϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ is a definite nominal head (“the ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ”), followed by a two-step genitive chain, first with ⲡⲥⲱⲛⲧ (“the creation” as a verbal noun) and then with ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ (“God”). In other words, the title is cast not as a participle or adjective but as a substantive appositive, coordinated with “Amen” and “Witness.” In Coptic discourse, epithets in such apposition typically identify status or role rather than enumerate facts of biography. Translators of Sahidic since the nineteenth century have therefore rendered the sequence by a neutral, literal phrase such as “the beginning of the creation of God,” without prejudging whether “beginning” here points to source, primacy, or temporal priority. George Horner’s critical edition prints just that in the literal column and, in the apparatus, aligns it with versional and patristic evidence that treat the expression as a title rather than a predicate of creatureliness. The question, then, is not what the English should be, but what the Coptic noun means in such a title.
Lexically, ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ is a well-studied Sahidic word. It descends directly from native Egyptian. The older nominal base ϩⲏⲧ means “front, forepart, beginning,” and yields adverbial and verbal expressions like “to be first” and “from the beginning.” The specifically Sahidic form ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ functions both as a noun (“beginning”) and as the ordinal “first.” Standard reference works state this succinctly. W. E. Crum glosses the noun as “beginning, first,” notes its adverbial frames (“in the beginning,” “from beginning”), and indexes examples where it clearly denotes primacy as well as temporal inception. Dawoud’s Arabic–Coptic lexicon does the same, but goes a step farther and lists idioms in which the noun extends to social rank: “first,” “eldest,” “chief.” That extension is not a modern theologian’s flourish; it is a predictable development in Egyptian. The word’s etymological ancestry reaches back to hieroglyphic and demotic forms that mean “foremost, first, chief,” a semantic field the Coptic inherits overtly. When native speakers used ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ, they were not confined to a single, purely temporal value. The range spans “beginning,” “the first one,” and by metaphor “the head” of a class or series. The lexeme’s flexibility is visible even in basic lemmatized corpora: one and the same lemma is tagged as a numeral (“first”) in some contexts and as a common noun (“beginning”) in others, depending on morphology and syntactic slot.
That inherent range already blunts the claim that ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ “only means beginning.” It does not. In Sahidic narrative and expository prose alike it regularly labels the starting point of a span of time, but it just as naturally names the first or foremost member of a set. Crucially, when it functions as a title with a genitive complement—precisely our verse’s construction—the complement often defines a domain over which primacy is asserted. This can be seen in two kinds of evidence. The first is purely biblical. Job 40:19 in many Sahidic witnesses calls Behemoth “ⲡⲉϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ ⲙ̄ⲡⲗⲁⲥⲙⲁ ⲙ̄ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ,” a clause indistinguishable in shape from Revelation 3:14, except that it uses the loan ⲡⲗⲁⲥⲙⲁ for “work/formation.” No one translates Job 40:19 as “the first-created thing of the Lord’s creation” in the sense of a mere timestamp. The natural sense is “chief of the Lord’s works,” that is, preeminent specimen. The second kind of evidence is non-biblical Coptic. In documentary and literary texts alike, ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ and its feminine ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ can label the “first” in rank or honor, the “eldest” in a family, or the “head” of a class. That is why dictionaries list “eldest” alongside “first.” The leap from “first in time” to “first in rank” is not a theological gloss; it is the word’s own life.
DeleteThe grammar of Revelation 3:14 reinforces this lexical picture. The title appears in a genitive nexus: ⲡⲉϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ ⲙ̄ⲡⲥⲱⲛⲧ ⲙ̄ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ. Coptic genitive ⲙ̄ licenses multiple relations—possession, source, composition, domain, and, with abstract heads, objective or qualitative specifications. With an abstract deverbal like ⲡⲥⲱⲛⲧ (“the creating/creation”), the genitive chain is not partitive. If the translator had wanted to say “the first of God’s created things,” the natural Coptic would have been partitive with a plural, for example “the first of the creatures of God,” using a pluralized concrete noun such as ⲛⲥⲱⲛⲧ or a loan like ⲛⲓⲕⲧⲓⲥⲓⲥ. Instead, the head noun governs a singular abstract: “the beginning of God’s creation.” Abstract genitives of this kind in Sahidic are routinely read as “beginning with respect to” or “beginning as regards,” and when used as epithets they are effectively titled statements about principle, origin, or headship. The phrase therefore situates the subject—here, the one who speaks to Laodicea—at the front of the divine creative work, not among its products.
Two further features of the verse’s Coptic make a creaturely reading linguistically strained. First, the noun is definite with the masculine article: ⲡⲉϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ. In predicates and appositions that confer a role or office, definiteness with a generic head is the default way to signal a known category or function. “The Amen,” “the Witness,” “the Beginning” stand in parallel and read as titles. It is hard to make sense of “the beginning of the creation of God” as a personal title if one insists it means “the first thing God created.” Titles do not ordinarily consist of a timestamp about one’s origin; they do, however, commonly use abstract nouns for functions (“teacher,” “judge,” “foundation,” “cornerstone,” “firstborn”). Second, the sequence ⲙⲙⲉ that links the epithets shows we are in the register of honorific apposition, not narrative identification. In that register, even unambiguous temporal expressions become reified as roles, as when ϩⲓⲧⲉϩ (“in the beginning”) functions as a formula of divine work, not merely a point on a clock. The translator’s choice to render ἀρχή with the native ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ rather than a Greek loan therefore tells us that he wanted an Egyptian word that already carried both temporal and hierarchical primacy. That is the opposite of narrowing the meaning to “first made.”
Proponents sometimes reply that Coptic lexica gloss ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ as “beginning, first,” not “ruler.” True, the glosses are brief; dictionaries are not miniature commentaries. But even within the lexica the word family ties “beginning” to “firstness” and “foremost,” and in Egyptian languages “foremost” is a regular way of saying “chief” or “head.” Crum’s entry points the reader to “be first” and “who is principium,” signaling that the noun denotes the principle or origin of something, not necessarily the earliest item in a series. Dawoud, which translates into Arabic and thus must disambiguate for a Semitic audience, explicitly includes “eldest” and lists the idiomatic prepositional frames with which the word behaves like a status term. Coptic Scriptorium’s lemmatization corroborates this, tagging the same lexeme as a numeral in ordinal use and as a common noun in abstract or titular use. Nothing in the lexica confines ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ to the meaning “first thing made.”
DeleteThe same conclusion follows when one asks how a Sahidic translator would have said “first created thing” if he had wanted to. Where the New Testament speaks of Christ as “firstborn of all creation,” the Sahidic transparently uses the Greek loan ⲡⲣⲱⲧⲟⲧⲟⲕⲟⲥ with a partitive genitive. There the genitive object is a concrete set (“of all creation”), and the head noun is a rank term that places the referent within the set as first member. Revelation 3:14 is not built that way. It neither borrows the rank term “firstborn” nor casts “creation” as a class of creatures. It uses a native Egyptian noun for “beginning, first, head” and an abstract deverbal for “creation,” combined in an appositive title. The grammar points away from “first product in a set” and toward “first principle with respect to a process and its results.”
This distinction is reinforced by comparison passages where the same Sahidic word group occurs. When Sahidic John 1:1 says “in the beginning,” the phrase is ϩⲛ ⲧⲉϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ. The base noun is the same. It does not identify a creature; it names the starting point of all things. When Sahidic Acts 11:15 says “when I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell,” the narrative uses an aoristic form of the Greek verb “to begin” plus the noun ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ in a temporal adjunct (“at the beginning”). The reader immediately recognizes the family resemblance: ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ is the word for “beginning” whether temporal, ordinal, or titular. None of these places treats it as a label for a manufactured object. In the book of Job, as noted above, the identical title pattern “ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧⲉ of X” clearly communicates preeminence in a domain, not creaturely origin. Revelation 3:14 stands with those usages. The translator did not create a novel meaning to serve a dogma; he wrote in the idiom of his language.
Once this profile is clear, the insistence that the Sahidic “only means beginning” becomes question-begging. At best it conflates two different questions: what the base noun’s default gloss is and how the specific construction behaves in a title. In Coptic, as in many languages, abstract nouns in genitive chains in apposition are not literal labels pasted onto individuals but stylized ways of asserting a claim about status. Readers meeting a sequence such as “the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation” do not hear “the first thing God made” any more than they hear “a chronological claim” when someone is called “the foundation of the house.” They hear “origin,” “source,” “head,” the one in whom something has its principium. That is why early translators who knew Coptic did not feel compelled to force the phrase into “first-created.” They simply reproduced the Coptic, confident that their readers would understand “beginning” in its ordinary breadth.
It is sometimes said in reply that the Coptic translator did not know or care about later doctrinal debates and therefore would never have “embellished” ἀρχή into “ruler” or “origin.” That is a red herring. No one is asking the translator to embellish anything. The point is that ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ itself, as a native Egyptian word, already covers temporal and rank primacy and is the natural equivalent for Greek ἀρχή in both senses. Choosing it is not a doctrinal maneuver; it is the straightforward correspondence one expects in the Sahidic version across the New Testament. In Revelation 3:14 specifically, the translator preserves the balance of the source by using a word that, like its Greek counterpart, can name both the origin of a process and the primacy of the one related to it. If he had intended to say “the one God created first,” the language gives him easy ways to do so that he does not use.
DeleteA final linguistic observation completes the picture. The noun the genitive governs in Revelation 3:14 is ⲡⲥⲱⲛⲧ, the standard Sahidic verbal noun for the act and result of “creating, making.” It is not a collective plural for creatures. In Sahidic, when one wants to speak about “creatures,” one either pluralizes an appropriate concrete noun or borrows a Greek abstract as a count collective. The singular ⲡⲥⲱⲛⲧ is a mass/abstract that denotes the creative work as such. A genitive dependent on “beginning” and headed by such an abstract strongly pulls the phrase toward “origin of the creative work” rather than “first item of the created set.” Put differently, the Coptic construction itself points to relation-to-process, not membership-in-class. That is a grammatical fact, not a doctrinal preference.
When the dust settles, the Coptic evidence does not support the claim that Revelation 3:14 in Sahidic identifies Jesus as the first creature. The noun ϩⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ is a native Egyptian term with a well-attested range: “beginning,” “first,” “foremost,” “head.” In titles with a genitive, it can and often does denote primacy within a domain or the source from which something proceeds. The verse’s appositive structure and abstract genitive make that reading the natural one. The translator did not “embellish” anything to fit a later creed; he used the exact Egyptian word that mirrors the source’s ambiguity and that Coptic speakers regularly used to mark both temporal and hierarchical priority. And when the Sahidic translators did want to speak of someone as the first member of a created set, they had other idioms at hand and employed them elsewhere. On strictly Coptic linguistic grounds, then, Revelation 3:14 reads as a Christological title of primacy and origin with respect to creation, not as a statement that the Son is the first product of it.
JW interpreters sometimes argue that the Sahidic Coptic of Luke 23:43 supports the NWT’s punctuation, “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise,” because the conjunction ϫⲉ (je) occurs after the adverb ⲙ̅ⲡⲟⲟⲩ (mpoou, “today”). Warren Wells’s Sahidica indeed prints the familiar line: ⲡⲉϫⲁϥ ⲇⲉ ⲛⲁϥ ϫⲉ ϩⲁⲙⲏⲛ ϯϫⲱ ⲙ̅ⲙⲟⲥ ⲛⲁⲕ ⲙ̅ⲡⲟⲟⲩ ϫⲉ ⲕⲛⲁϣⲱⲡⲉ ⲛⲙ̅ⲙⲁⲓ̈ ϩⲙ̅ⲡ̅ⲡⲁⲣⲁⲇⲓⲥⲟⲥ. From this it is inferred that “today” is grammatically tied to the speech formula “I say,” yielding the NWT’s relocated comma. That inference rests on a misreading of Sahidic clause structure. In Sahidic, ϫⲉ is the default complementizer after verbs of saying; it looks forward to introduce the content of speech, and its appearance after a fronted temporal does not bind that temporal to the matrix verb. Once the ordinary behavior of ϫⲉ and of fronted adverbs is kept in view, the Sahidic line proves wholly compatible with, and rhetorically supports, the traditional reading: “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
ReplyDeleteThe Greek Vorlage offers no punctuation in the earliest witnesses. Modern commas encode interpretation rather than inherited marks. The Lukan formula ἀμὴν σοι λέγω is stereotyped; σήμερον (“today”) may in principle be taken either with that formula or with the promise that follows. The Sahidic translator reproduces the formula in the expected way—ϩⲁⲙⲏⲛ ϯϫⲱ ⲙ̅ⲙⲟⲥ ⲛⲁⲕ—and then places ⲙ̅ⲡⲟⲟⲩ (literally m- + p- + ϩⲟⲟⲩ “in the day”) just before ϫⲉ, after which the propositional content begins: ⲕⲛⲁϣⲱⲡⲉ ⲛⲙ̅ⲙⲁⲓ̈ ϩⲙ̅ⲡ̅ⲡⲁⲣⲁⲇⲓⲥⲟⲥ. That is not a special device for timestamping the act of saying. It is ordinary Sahidic information structure. Temporal adjuncts frequently front in Coptic, and when a matrix speech verb is followed by a ϫⲉ-clause, the fronted temporal naturally occupies the corridor between the formula and the complementizer. Grammars characterize ϫⲉ precisely as a clause-introducer after verbs of speaking, thinking, and perception, functionally comparable to Greek ὅτι in marking a boundary; it delimits the embedded clause and does not semantically bind preceding adverbs to the matrix predicate. This holds even against analogies to Greek ὅτι that JW apologists sometimes invoke: unlike ὅτι in Greek stylistic discussions, ϫⲉ in Coptic routinely follows fronted adverbials without retroactive binding, because its complementizer role is purely delimitative. Etymologically ϫⲉ descends from Demotic ḏd and Hieroglyphic r-ḏd (“with the words; that”), a trajectory reflected in the historical lexica (Coptic Dictionary Online, TLA C7055).
The internal mechanics of the verse confirm this. The narrative frame closes with the first ϫⲉ (“and he said to him, that …”). The formula ϩⲁⲙⲏⲛ ϯϫⲱ ⲙ̅ⲙⲟⲥ ⲛⲁⲕ is routine across the Gospels in Sahidic and Bohairic alike. The temporal ⲙ̅ⲡⲟⲟⲩ is fronted in its usual idiom, and the second ϫⲉ then opens the content clause: “you will be with me in Paradise.” Digital analysis reaches the same judgment: the Coptic Scriptorium analytic view of Luke 23 treats the second ϫⲉ as the conjunction that begins the embedded proposition, not as an enclitic fused to “today.” If the translator had meant to focalize the time of speaking rather than the time of fulfillment, Coptic offered other, clearer means; instead, he left the stereotyped “Amen, I say to you …” formula intact and placed “today” at the clause boundary where it most naturally scopes over the promise.
Independent Coptic usage makes this pattern explicit. Documentary Sahidic exhibits the very sequence “temporal … ϫⲉ … clause” without any speech verb in sight, proving that ϫⲉ does not retroactively attach the temporal to a matrix predicate. The seventh-century ostrakon O. Frangé 763 has ⲟⲩⲃⲱⲕ ϩⲟⲟⲩ … ⲥⲁ ϩⲟⲟⲩ ϫⲉ …, where “today … that …” is simply a temporal fronted to the boundary that ϫⲉ opens; in such contexts the only possible scope of the temporal is forward over the clause introduced by ϫⲉ. Literary Sahidic behaves the same way: Shenoute can write ⲙⲡⲉϩⲟⲟⲩ ϫⲉ … (“of the day, that …”), and in pseudo-Ephrem’s Letter the temporal likewise precedes ϫⲉ with forward scope: ⲕⲁⲡⲙⲟⲩ ⲉϥϩⲏⲛ ⲉϩⲟⲩⲛ ⲉⲣⲟⲕ ⲙⲡⲉϩⲟⲟⲩ ⲙⲛⲧⲉⲩϣⲏ ϫⲉ … (“Let death draw nigh unto thee by day and by night, that …”). Within the NT itself the translator uses identical structure where the sense is uncontroversially “today … [what follows],” for example in Sahidic Mark 14:30: ϩⲁⲙⲏⲛ ϯϫⲱ ⲙ̅ⲙⲟⲥ ⲛⲁⲕ ϫⲉ ⲙ̅ⲡⲟⲟⲩ ⲙ̅ⲡⲉϣⲧⲉⲕⲁⲗⲉⲕⲧⲱⲣ ⲙⲟⲩϯ ⲛⲥⲟⲡ ⲅ̅ ⲉⲕⲛⲁϫⲟⲗⲧ ⲉⲃⲟⲗ; here ⲙ̅ⲡⲟⲟⲩ stands after ϫⲉ, and no one doubts that “today” modifies the prediction “you will deny me,” not the speech formula. These parallels show that the order “today … ϫⲉ …” is a default clause interface with forward scope, not a specialized cue for “I say today.”
DeleteTextual criticism does not assist the NWT. The Sahidic wording at Luke 23:43 is stable across the principal witnesses and editions: Horner’s diplomatic text and apparatus register no variant that dislodges the temporal from its pre-ϫⲉ position or removes the second ϫⲉ; digital editions concord with them. Wells’s Sahidica, while invaluable for collation, simply perpetuates this stable Sahidic structure without innovation, underscoring that editorial punctuation—not the Coptic text itself—drives the modern dispute. On the translation side, George Horner renders the line in the traditional way—“Verily I say to thee, to-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise”—because Coptic grammar permits and the discourse favors it; Hans Quecke’s Sahidic Luke and the mainstream syntactic tradition stemming from Polotsky’s analysis of Coptic clause types align with this reading and do not impute to ϫⲉ any binding force that would compel the NWT’s comma.
Pragmatics and Lukan rhetoric reinforce the grammatical point. In Luke, “today” is a loaded salvation term that marks realized eschatology and immediate divine action: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (4:21), “Today salvation has come to this house” (19:9). Against that backdrop, the thief’s request to be remembered “when you come into your kingdom” projects hope into an undefined future, while Jesus’s answer brings it crashing into the present: “today you will be with me in Paradise.” Reading “I tell you today” renders “today” pragmatically redundant, because the initial ϩⲁⲙⲏⲛ already highlights the solemnity of the utterance; by contrast, letting “today” take scope over the promise makes the discourse maximally informative and characteristically Lukan (cf. BDAG, s.v. sēmeron, on its eschatological urgency).
The semantics of ϫⲉ settle the matter. Grammars and the historical lexica agree that ϫⲉ is a complementizer whose function is to open the embedded clause, not a particle that retroactively binds a preceding adverb to the matrix verb. That is why ϫⲉ appears after temporals even in non-speech environments, and why documentary and literary texts alike display “temporal + ϫⲉ + clause” with forward scope. Once that is granted, the presence of ϫⲉ after ⲙ̅ⲡⲟⲟⲩ cannot be marshaled to force “I tell you today.” The Sahidic permits the traditional reading grammatically, it makes best sense rhetorically, and it coheres with the translator’s ordinary habits. As such, Sahidic Luke 23:43 stands as a witness to early Christian emphasis on immediate eschatological hope, unmarred by later punctuational debates. The NWT’s punctuation reflects a theological preference—JW denial of an immediate post-mortem blessed state and a consequent drive to relocate “today”—rather than a conclusion dictated by Coptic grammar.