Tense-Form Reduction and the Use of ἐποιήσατε in Codex Bezae 67 Matthew and Mark is not upon Jesus’ pronouncement of judgment, but rather upon the state of written Scripture and Jesus’ positive assertion of what the Jerusalem temple was meant to be, i.e., a “house of prayer”21. The comments above on the discourse structure and textual emphasis of Codex Bezae are intensely relevant to proposals regarding Bezae’s particular angle on the Markan temple cleansing tradition. In an article from 1984, George Rice suggests that Bezae possesses a group of variants in Mark’s Gospel reflecting an anti-Judaic bias in which “confrontations between Jesus and the religious leaders are intensified”22. For Rice, one of the passages that reflects this bias is the temple cleansing episode. Rice’s assertion is based solely upon two omissions in Bezae at Mark 11,15: (1) the article τούς before ἀγοράζοντας, and (2) the verb κατέστρεψεν with reference to Jesus’ turning over of the seats of the pigeon sellers. Rice believes that the lack of the article indicates that “the buying and selling was done among the merchants. This, then, removes the worshipers who bought offerings within the courts of the temple from being the object of Jesus’ wrath, and centers the wrath upon the merchants”23. However, this statement (1) probably reflects a misunderstanding of the Greek article,24 and (2) in no way intensifies Jesus’ confrontation with the Jewish religious leaders specifically.25 Regarding the omission of κατέστρεψεν, Rice appears to suggest that the act of “over turning the seats of the pigeon sellers” is somehow less intense than “casting them out”. Thus, for him, the (ed.), Approaches to Cognition through Text and Discourse (TLSM 147; Berlin 2004) 99- 122. This idea of “maximal foregrounding” relates to Porter’s notion of “frontgrounding”. Porter has been criticized recently for his use of the term “frontground” by some wishing to restrict grounding to the background/foreground opposition (see esp. B.M Fanning, “Greek Presents, Imperfects, and Aorists in the Synoptic Gospels: Their Contribution to Narrative Structuring”, in Steven E. Runge [ed.], Discourse Studies and Biblical Interpretation: A Festschrift in Honor of Stephen H. Levinsohn [Bellingham, WA 2011] 167-86). The essence of such criticism seems to be that the term “frontgrounding” appears nowhere in the linguistic literature. Interestingly, Wårvik—a Finnish text and corpus linguist—stresses near the outset of her article that the distinctions of background/foreground “cannot be viewed as a simple dichotomy, but they ought to be seen as a scale with maximal foregrounding at one end and maximal backgrounding at the other” (p. 100). Thus, I see no reason that Wårvik’s comments on “maximal foregrounding” cannot be equated with, or at least closely related to, Porter’s “frontgrounding”. 21 Mark’s version, of course, adds πᾶσιν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν. 22 Rice, “Is Bezae a Homogenous Codex?”, 44. Parker has critiqued Rice’s (and Epp’s, whom Rice follows) entire approach to determining theological biases in Bezae (see Parker, Codex Bezae, 190). 23 Rice, “Is Bezae a Homogenous Codex?”, 45. 24 See Porter, Idioms, 103-14. 25 For this to be true, one would need to see as the merchants in Mark 11,15 as identical to the religious leaders. But the leaders are clearly identified as οἱ ἀρχιερεῖς καὶ οἱ γραμματεῖς in v. 18, thus making it highly unlikely that the leaders are the ones actually doing the buying and selling.