Markan Christology and the Omission Of υἱοῦ θεοῦ in Mark 1:1 63 Hurtado maintains, “some scribes may well not have understood fully either the function or even the technique involved”74. Judge and Pickering rightly conclude that “reverence for certain words played a part” in the origin of this scribal practice but later on “it gathered its own esteem and was followed for its own sake”75. Therefore, the later major uncials like Codex Sinaiticus would have employed the nomina sacra only by convention and not to call special attention to various terms76. Regarding Head’s second contention, the beginning of a new day of work for copyists cannot be equated with starting to copy a new scroll or book of the Bible. There are no indications that when a scribe concluded transcribing a particular Biblical book, his work for that day was finish- ed. Furthermore, if we consider the corrections to the manuscript of Codex Sinaiticus, we discover additional errors in the beginning of Mark such as the skipping of the short word καί before ἐβαπτίζοντο in Mk. 1:5 and an apparent example of homoioarcton in 1:11 with the omission of ἐγένετο before ἐκ which is again corrected by the διορθωτής77. If Peter Head and Bart Ehrman are correct, one would expect substantially fewer textual problems at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, but the Stutt- gart Electronic Bible in its discussion of textual problems omits only four verses (1:12,17,19,22) of the 45 verses of Mark 178. Finally, with regard to the Book of Revelation in Codex A, Philip Comfort reports that “Codex A is full of accidental omissions, especially in the first half of the book. The scribe of A seems to have been very fatigued and / or inattentive when copying the first half of Revelation”79. Therefore, the alertness of an individual scribe does not depend upon what part of a document he is copying. Larry Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins 74 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2006) 128. Edwin A. Judge and Stuart R. Pickering, “Biblical Papyri Prior to Constantine: Some 75 Cultural Implications of Their Physical Form”, Prudentia 10 (1978): 7-8. Philip Comfort, Encountering the Manuscripts: An Introduction to New Testament 76 Paleography and Textual Criticism (Nashville: Broadman and Holman 2005) 253 contends that “Scribes wrote these names with special regard, and readers (lectors) uttered these names with special attention in church meetings as they read the Scriptures aloud,” but Hurtado, Christian Artifacts, concludes that they were particularly if not exclusively a visual phenomenon and that “Robert’s suggestion that lectors of biblical texts may have made some gesture of ‘obeisance’ where the nomina sacra appear has no corroboration in anything that I know of early Christian reading and worship practices”. Another example of homoioteleuton found early in a gospel is at Lk. 2:15. See J.W. 77 Burgon and E. Miller, The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels (London: George Bell and Sons 1896) 36. Stuttgarter Elektronische Studienbibel, eds. Christof Hardmeier, Eep Talstra, Bertram 78 Salzmann (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft 2004). Metzger investigates 13 variants in his Textual Commentary on Mark 1. Comfort, Encountering the Manuscripts, 319. 79