Boid on the word episimon in Irenaeus

I still haven’t worked out the terminology of the argument misleadingly quoted by Irenaeus, but I’m still trying. This is what seems clear. The original author says something or someone is the episimon, that is, the sign or marker, of the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. As the exposition stands, the letter is not named.

If this can’t be solved, I suggest saying something that means that the Hebrew (not Greek) name Simon samech-yod-mem-vav-nun is the symbolic name of a real person, used because of its resemblance to the Hebrew and Aramaic word siman, meaning a sign.

This means I don’t think Irenaeus directly invented the name Simon, but rather that he took an existing title of a person and treated it as a personal name. Then it had to be assumed that there was some person bearing Simon as a name. I think that where the argument got obscured was when the word siman used in something about Jesus being a visible sign, siman, of the sixth letter, and therefore symbolically titled Simon, was translated into Greek. The word siman would have been rendered as episimon, deliberately echoing the name Simon. In the course of transmission it would have become unclear WHAT it was a sign of, because the name of the sixth letter was dropped, perhaps due to ignorance. This means I agree with you that it is likely that someone originally did an honest job of turning the argument into Greek, but that the exposition was corrupted. It could have been in two stages, the first accidental, the second deliberate. An early unintentional corruption could have been due to someone thinking in Greek forgetting that the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet is ouaou or digamma, not zêta, and leaving out the part of the argument that was not understood. Perhaps the fact that the older name ouaou is the same as the name of the Hebrew and Aramaic sixth letter in the phonetic transcription system of the period caused confusion when the scribe thought the word ouaou must refer to the Hebrew letter, having forgotten that what was called digamma in his time had earlier on been called ouaou.

I will have another go at this on Monday.