How Many Women?

How many women are standing by the cross in John 19:25? “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.” Is “Mary the wife of Cleophas” the sister of “his mother,” or are the two distinct women? Because it is unlikely that two sisters would both be named “Mary,” most commentators prefer the latter reading. But “sister” could refer to a sister in law or a cousin. It would help if we knew how often omission of the conjunction in a list in John is simply asyndeton as opposed to apposition.

A search program can’t answer this question directly, but it can help us gather data for more detailed examination by hand. We’d like to explore the relative frequency of two kinds of conjoined lists: those using asyndeton (like “apples, oranges, and grapes”), and those that insist on the conjunction between every pair of elements (for instance, “apples and oranges and grapes”). If John means us to see four women by the cross, he must be using asyndeton. If he never uses asyndeton, we should understand him to be referring to only three women.

To search for examples like “apples and oranges and grapes,” we need to look for sequences of the conjunction και. The conjunction is frequently used to join clauses together, and we don’t want to be distracted with these instances. So let’s search for successive instances of και with no intervening verbs. BibleWorks’ graphical search engine is the natural tool for constructing such a search, exhibited below.

(To download this query file, right-click here.)

Even though we only specify two instance of the conjunction, BW will find repeated instances of the pattern in a single verse, thus capturing longer sequences of και’s separated by non-verbs.

We limit the search to John (typing “l john”) in the command line, because this kind of stylistic feature might be author-dependent and we’re really interested in John’s usage. This limitation will give us instances in the gospel, the three epistles, and the Revelation. The search returns 143 verses, which is quite a few, but we can easily scan them. When we do, we find that John is not at all shy about repeating the conjunction. He does so with lists of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 nouns, and in one case with a list of 29 (Rev 18:12-13).

Of course, this enumeration looks for explicit repetition of the conjunction, and we want to find asyndeton. The BW query for this is a bit more complicated:

(Hints:

• If you can’t read this diagram on this page, right-click on it and select “View image” to see it full-size.
• To download this query file, right-click here.)

Across the middle of the figure, we are looking for a sequence of two nouns with no και between them, followed by και, and then by another noun. The nouns must agree in case, and we exclude any instances where verbs intervene in the overall structure.

This query leads us to 43 verses in the Johannine corpus. We do see instances of apposition, such as Rev 1:9 and Rev 18:8. But in no case do we have a construction of the form, “apples, oranges, and grapes,” where the nouns are distinct and the conjunction is eliminated between two of them.

These results suggest that John does not use asyndeton in conjoined lists. If he associates two nouns without a conjunction in between, he means us to identify them. In 19:25 he intends to call our attention to three women, not four, at the cross.

Interestingly, the comma johanneum (the trinitarian verse in 1 John 5:7 in Stephanus’ NT, BW text STE) does use asyndeton, which in the light of our results is an interesting confirmation of other abundant evidence that the verse was not written by John.