(continued from the above post)
But I didn't exactly say that, did I? Nor did I "infer it." I said in Hebrew, there is a relativizar,
אֲשֶׁר אֶֽהְיֶה. The relative pronoun
אֲשֶׁר literally means "who". This was taken into Greek as the attributive participle.
The attributive participle in Greek has an equivalent function to a relative clause. Any of the grammars will tell you that in most cases the best English equivalent is a relative clause. The attributive participle is adjectival, as is the relative clause.
This statement is not accurate, as I have said before. Abbot (often quoted) has mischaracterized the middot as a "stop," when in fact Dionysius the Thracian tells us, "There are three dots: final,
middle, underdot. And the final dot is a sign for a complete thought,
while the middle is a sign taken up for a breath, and the underdot is a sign for a thought which is not yet complete, but is still wanting." The middot marked the end of a brief clause or κόμμα (
komma), if that sounds familiar to you at all. Thus as Metzger notes, "the most that can be inferred from the presence of a point in the middle position after σάρκα in a majority of the uncial manuscripts is that scribes felt that some kind of pause was appropriate at this juncture in the sentence." (p. 99). Of course, Dionysius the Thracian was not a Christian at all.
Both p27 and p46 are defective. No interpunct is present in Aleph, B*, F, K, 0285 (6th century), 0319. Uncials A, B(c), C, L, Ψ, 040 (high dot after "amen"), 049, 056 (high dot after "amen") have a middot; Codex G has a middot after both "over all" and "God," a reading also found in later minuscules. 623 and 2110, though classed as minuscules, have an uncial text and both contain a middot (noted also below).
D (06) arranges the text as follows:
καὶ ἐξ ὧν ὁ Χριστὸς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα
ὁ ὢν ἐπὶ πάντων θεὸς
εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας
ἀμήν
As I noted elsewhere, only a few uncials are cited incorrectly as high dots: B, L, 0142 and 0151. However, these are not correctly cited. In B, high dots actually occur above the letter height, whereas here there is a middot added by a later hand; the original text had no punctuation here. 0151 is a commentary manuscript that typically uses a middot and a space to break off a verse from the commentary, which begins on a new line. The end of the sentence is actually signified by a double point. In 0142, since there is a high dot after "amen," it is easy to discern the punctuation is a middot since it occurs in the middle position of the letter (the same as is found in preceding clauses).
Only L looks like a high point, but it also stands in other places where the sentence is incomplete and there is a comma after θεὸς. Since Greek punctuation began undergoing evolution after the 7th century AD (L is from the 9th century), the way punctuation is used was already beginning to change. The majority of minuscules have a middot, comma, or no punctuation at all.
So as I said before, the ancient manuscripts actually evidence a pause for a breath, not a break in the sentence. There's no real manuscript evidence to support a period.