68 Wally V. Cirafesi omission of κατέστρεψεν adds to the episode’s “intensity”. This assertion is unconvincing. To the contrary, the exclusion of κατέστρεψεν would seem to take away an intriguing detail from Mark’s account. Instead, the verb’s omission—and thus Bezae’s omission of detail—coincides well with what is actually present (in contrast to what is omitted) in the Bezan text of Mark. Rather than seeing the Markan temple cleansing support for an anti-Judaic bias, the reduced narrative detail and the reduced aspectual semantics (ἐποιήσατε) signal just the opposite: the Jerusalem temple is affirmed as an οἶκος προσευχῆς through a quotation from the Jewish Scriptures, and Jesus’ pronouncement of judgment upon Jews buying and selling in the temple stands in a less salient textual position. 4. Conclusion This short study has proposed an explanation of the textual variant ἐποιήσατε at Matt 21,13//Mark 11,17 in Codex Bezae based on the concept of tense-form (aspectual) reduction. It was suggested that the reading in both Gospels represents a scribe’s meaningful aspectual choice (whether conscious or unconscious), since there seems to have been no limitations placed on him by either the text’s Latin counterpart or his own understanding of the Greek verbal system. Lastly, it was demonstrated that the scribe’s choice—especially at Mark 11,17—to reduce the aspectual semantics from the most marked Perfect πεποιήκατε to the least marked Aorist ἐποιήσατε undercuts the notion that the temple cleansing in the Bezan text of Mark supports Bezae’s anti-Judaic bias or its intensification of Jesus’ confrontation with the religious leaders in the Gospel. Wally V. CIRAFESI 2683 Piper Lane Springfield, IL USA 62707 wvciraf@yahoo.com