Mark 1:6

Mark 1:6 tri,caj {A}

Instead of reading, as do all other witnesses, that John the Baptist was clothed with “camel’s hair” (tri,caj kamh,lou), D and it^a read “camel’s skin” (de,rrin kamh,lou). Although Turner ² considered the latter to be the original text of Mark, Lagrange ³ pointed out that camel’s skin is much too thick and hard for Bedouins to think of using it as clothing. Consequently, it appears that scribes who exchanged de,rrin for tri,caj did so without any firsthand knowledge of Near Eastern customs. It may be, as Moulton and Milligan ⁴ suggested, that the word is a corruption derived from Zechariah 13:4. The argument ⁵ that the absence of the following words (“and had a leather belt around his waist” (kai. zw,nhn … auvtou/) lacking in D and several Old Latin witnesses) means that the original text of Mark (assumed to have been de,rrin) was accommodated to and expanded from Matthew 3:4 is less probable than that through scribal inadvertence a line of text fell out between kai. … kai, or between kamh,lou … auvtou/.

² C. H. Turner, Journal of Theological Studies, XXVIII (1926—27), p. 151.

³ M.-J. Lagrange, Évangile selon saint Marc, 5th ed. (Paris, 1929), in loc.

⁴ The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament (London, 1930), p. 142.

⁵ So Ernst von Dobschütz in Eberhard Nestle’s Einführung in das Griechische Neue Testament, 4th ed. (Göttingen, 1923), p. 7.