Slimboyfat,
Your post caught me on line while I was looking at other developments. As a result started looking at some of the sources to which you refer.
Admittedly, for me this is a difficult one to confirm or deny. I have not been looking at Coptic or have any near term plans to get acquainted with it. But all the same, I don't think Layton Bentley's (or Bentley Layton's ?)sample translation makes a compelling case.
To recap, we had looked at 70 or 80 cases of "truly I say to you", etc. throughout the Greek NT. Then you added another example from Acts 20:26 where "today" and "day" were used together in a construction that would convey exactly what it is supposed would be conveyed to the "good thief" - if the case were a sworn testimony as it was in the case Paul in Acts. To be clear, the Acts version of the statement had simeron and imera, the good thief version had only simeron.
Looking up the nature of the Coptic under discussion, it is described as " a reference tool for students of the classical dialect of Sahidic which was used in literary texts between the 4th and 8th centuries". In an 5 page review of the grammar,
Layton, Bentley A Coptic Grammar - Review of ... www.bookreviews.org/pdf/4325_4307.pdf
The second edition of Bentley Layton's Coptic Grammar is highly recommended for students of Egyptology, Coptology, early Christian history, and textual ...
- even though the book is praised as being of great help to students, there are also provided a string of "caveat emptors". So far as I can tell, about practically everything the author has devised.
In the review the closest thing I can find to a summary of this view is the following:
Setting aside broader problems associated with the parts-of-speech model and the
ordination of clauses, Layton’s categories seem to work rather well; at the very least,
most of them are a “useful fiction” that, even if they do not map the territory of Sahidic
Coptic properly, indicate what the territory is and that it should be mapped. Indeed,
Coptic Grammar offers in one volume most all of the recent advances in Coptology, so
that the reader is presented with a linguistic theory whose whole is, perhaps, more
significant than its parts.
The recent interest in Coptic has been as a result of finding the Nag Hamadi manuscripts and some first cut translations thereof of so-called Gnostic Gospels. Sometime ago I ran into one enthusiast of the subject wondering what would happen if the one or two renown experts got run over by buses on the way to work. Would we still be reliant on their findings of what these texts supposedly said or could novices pick up from there? "Picking up from there?" Your citation illustrates what he was talking about.
In short, it is hard for me to understand how Coptic texts that are not well understood will give us insight into Greek texts that have been around continuously. Greeks themselves seem never to have had an underlying suspicion about what Luke 23:43 said. The description of the Coptic in question is later than extant Greek manuscripts. Whether Coptics of this school viewed those words the same way as the WTBTS does - or that is simply a conclusion of Bentley based on his developing grammatical principles - that would be another investigation, perhaps that has been discussed some already.
But you will also have to tell us about the intensive study that the translation department in Brooklyn has been doing on decyphering Coptic manuscripts - and drawing conclusions from them. That should be interesting too.
