Lindsfarne Gospels 7

And his fame went

throughout all Syria:

And they brought unto him

all sick people that were

taken with divers diseases

and torments,

And those which were

possessed with devils,

and those which were

lunatick, and

those that had the palsy;

and he healed them.
And there followed him

great multitudes of people

from Galilee,

and from Decapolis,

and from Jerusalem,

and from Judaea,

and from beyond Jordan.

Matt. 4:24-25 KJV

This is a comparison of the Latin Vulgate and the KJV. Look at how the ampersand has been placed at the beginning of several lines. The ampersand, which is still at this point a fairly transparent 'et' ligature, is attached onto the word which it precedes, as are the prepositions. This is about as close as I can get to the manuscript using the KJV. Here is the same passage in the TNIV.

News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them. 25 Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him.

Greek manuscripts do not usually space words in a line strategically; they usually just run on from one line to the next without much spacing. However, there are paragraph breaks and some organization of larger units. But I wonder if the visual organization of the text in the Lindisfarne manuscript might give us some idea of how the scribes perceived the passages they were writing.

Once again I don't want to read too much into this. However, I will show you one more example.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord

came upon them,

And the glory of the Lord

shone round

about them:

and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them,

Fear not

PS The spacing is not going to come out right in blogger, I can't predict the length of a line so I will have to fool around with this a bit. I think that I am going to be reasonably happy with this draft. I have wanted to know how to represent poetry better in blogger for some time. Here goes.