Read the Fine Print: The KJV and the Byzantine Text

             Many champions of the King James Version emphasize that before the Reformation ever began, the Textus Receptus was the most widely used text throughout Christendom, and that this shows the fulfillment of a divine promise that God would preserve what he revealed in his word – both in terms of its promises (keeping his word), and in terms of its verbal expression – in each generation for his people.  But this is wrong.

            The Textus Receptus – defined as the Greek base-text of the 1611 Authorised Version – has over a thousand readings that are not majority readings, and some readings in the TR  (such as variants in Acts 9:5-6, Luke 2:22 and Eph. 3:9) have very little valid manuscript support – none at all, in the case of Acts 9:5-6.  At such points, what is printed in the Textus Receptus was never the ordinary text of the ordinary church.

            The Westminster Confession of Faith has been used as the basis for regarding both the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text (which is very similar to the Textus Receptus without its minority readings) as the  New Testament in Greek that God, “by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages.”  “The text that the formulators affirmed was, historically, the Textus Receptus.   But we should be aware of how the Received Text was received – as a somewhat fluid quantity.  Consider, in selected segments, how the KJV’s Preface The Translators to the Reader describes various English translations that includes Tyndale’s and the Geneva Bible:

Segment 1:  “We do not deny, nay we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession, (for we have seen none of theirs of the whole Bible as yet) containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God. As the King’s speech, which he uttereth in Parliament, being translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and Latin, is still the King’s speech, though it be not interpreted by every Translator with the like grace, nor peradventure so fitly for phrase, nor so expressly for sense, everywhere. For it is confessed, that things are to take their denomination of the greater part; and a natural man could say, Verum ubi multa nitent in carmine, non ego paucis offendor maculis, etc. A man may be counted a virtuous man, though he have made many slips in his life, (else, there were none virtuous, for in many things we offend all) [James 3:2] also a comely man and lovely, though he have some warts upon his hand, yea, not only freckles upon his face, but also scars.”

             “Things are to take their denomination of the greater part.” – And the Textus Receptus was
much more pure than impure.  The KJV’s translators, though, must have understood that it did not need to be absolutely pure to be sufficiently pure enough to be considered the word of God, even with textual variations of the kind exhibited in the early English versions prior to 1611.  So although, in Romans  12:11, Tyndale used a Greek text that differed from the KJV’s base-text, this did not disqualify Tyndale’s version - “Applye youre selves to ye tyme” – from being considered the word of God.   Nor did his version of Acts 13:33 –  in which Peter is depicted quoting from the first psalm, rather than the second – condemn Tyndale’s entire New Testament as something impure and unfit to use.  Small variants – characterized as “warts,” and “freckles” and “scars” – even if they  change the meaning of a sentence, were not thought to disqualify a text, provided that it was harmonious with the general message of the New Testament. 

Segment 2:  “No cause therefore why the word translated should be denied to be the word, or forbidden to be current, notwithstanding that some imperfections and blemishes may be noted in the setting forth of it. For what ever was perfect under the Sun, where Apostles or Apostolic men, that is, men endued with an extraordinary measure of God's spirit, and privileged with the privilege of infallibility, had not their hand?”

            Again we see that “some imperfections and blemishes” in other versions of the New Testament made by Protestants did not disqualify them from being considered the word of God.  If the KJV’s translators did not regard those features as fatal, why do KJV-Onlyists insist that deviations from the Textus Receptus are fatal?  Particularly where the KJV echoes a minority reading, some deviations are improvements, resembling more accurately the text written by inspired authors. 

Segment 3:   “The like we are to think of Translations. The translation of the Seventy dissenteth from the Original in many places, neither doth it come near it, for perspicuity, gravity, majesty; yet which of the Apostles did condemn it? Condemn it? Nay, they used it, (as it is apparent, and as Saint Jerome and most learned men do confess) which they would not have done, nor by their example of using it, so grace and commend it to the Church, if it had been unworthy the appellation and name of the word of God.”

            Thus the KJV’s Preface not only affirmed the historical reality of the Septuagint (that is the “translation of the Seventy” referred to), but even grant it status as the word of God in spite of obvious deviations in meaning from the original Hebrew text.  The cry of “Ad Fontes” is thus balanced by the understanding that what the apostles used, the apostolic church may use also.  When a modern translation such as the NET prefers a reading in the Septuagint over the Masoretic Text, it is not necessarily a disqualifying feature.   (The Eastern Orthodox churches to this day appraise the Septuagint as their authoritative text, comparable to how Roman Catholics appraised the Vulgate as their canonical standard.)  Rather than the novel and extreme all-or-nothing approach of KJV-Onlyists, the KJV’s translators subscribed to the belief that a degree of variation did not disqualify a translation.

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           When the alternative to the KJV were limited mainly to the Living Oracles, the Revised Version, the American Standard Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New American Standard Version, and the New International Version (1984) – some fans of the KJV could validly argue that these versions were not to be used on the grounds that their New Testament base-text was Alexandrian, not Byzantine (and thus not the same text that was “kept pure in all ages.”  Already in 1982, though, the New King James Version entered the market, and now there are other English New Testaments that are Byzantine-based such as the Eastern Orthodox Bible’s New Testament and the English Majority Text Version (EMTV) and the World English Bible and the Modern Literal Version and the Text-Critical English New Testament.  If the translators of the KJV were alive today, they would probably consider these versions the word of God just as they considered the versions by Wycliffe and Cranmer and the Geneva Bible to be the word of God.  King James Version Onlyism, as a dogma, is not justifiable.

 

 

 

The Russians Are Coming! 091 and Much More

As Katie Leggett recently reported, the Russian Library of the National Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg has released a collection of 35 manuscripts and made a collection of most of them available to view online.   The oldest along them is 091, a fragment of the Gospel of John from the 500s.   The minuscules are GA 1338, 1826, 1858, 2159, 2267, 2269, 2273, 2274, 2275,  2311, 2500, 2534, 2535, 2536, and 3003.  The lectionaries are l 623, l 840, l 844 (from 861) , l 1431, l 1432, l 1481, l 1483, l 1484, l 1485, l 1485 (900s), l 1486, l 1487, l 1488, l 1488, l 1841, l 1842, l 1843 (1000s), l 1844, l 1845, l 1846, l 2344, l 2344.

Let’s meet the new image from 091 today.  091’s text is officially a representative of the Alexandrian text-type (“Category II” according to K. Aland).  Let’s test that with this portion.  Transposing the Byzantine Text of John 6:38-42 over the fragment, its text looks very Byzantine!  091 reads εκ, not απο, in v. 38.  But it agrees with P66 P75 B A D L W in the non-inclusion of πατρός after πέμψαντος με in v. 39.  (Sinaiticus is something of a train wreck here due to the scribe’s parableptic mistake skipping from the πέμψαντος με in v. 39a to the same words at v. 39b.) 

If this fragment were all of 091 we had, it could be classified as Byzantine as readily as Alexandrian.

Review: New Testament Textual Criticism for the 21st Century

Charles L. Quarles

The Director of the Caskey Center for Biblical Text and Translation, in Wake Forest, South Carolina USA, has given the public a new resource that promises to shine a bright light on a field that is often overlooked and minimized in modern Christian academia.  Resisting the temptation to treat the field as a mere branch of apologetics, Dr. Charles L. Quarles efficiently presents in 161 pages the purposes, materials, and methods used in the field of New Testament textual criticism, and gives readers examples of his own detailed analysis in three specific textual contests (Matthew 16:2b-3, John 1:18, and Colossians 1:12) and invited consideration of many more (without gauging importance according to their length) such as those in Matthew 19:4, Mark 7:2, Luke 7:31, John 8:20, Romans 14:19, Hebrews 10:38, and James 1:12.  No variants from the Petrine Epistles, Jude, or Revelation are covered.

Quarles’ volume has much less well-masked propaganda that Metzger & Ehrman’s obsolete The Text of the New Testament:  Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration.  Whereas Metzger adhered to the untenable theory of the Lucianic recension for his entire academic career, Quarles appears up-to-date and does not suffers from an excess of Hort-echoing like his predecessor.  Rather than badger his readers with reminders of how awful the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text are supposed to be, Quarles reports that Western Christian academia in general has treated the case for Byzantine Priority with relative disinterest so far. 

Unfortunately he seems to have assumed, in the course of Part One, some points that he himself acknowledges as tentative by the end of the book.  For example he asserts that “no satisfactory explanation for this disappearance [ i.e., the disappearance of predominantly Byzantine manuscripts prior to Chrysostom] has been offered,” but this is not true:  the simple historicity of the enforcement of Roman policies under Decius, and again under Diocletian, resulted in the destruction of Christian writings of all kinds.  This, and the effects of humidity upon papyrus everywhere, except in Egypt’s exceptionally dry conditions, explains the lack of early Byzantine manuscripts outside Egypt.  

In addition, while patristic evidence is lacking for sustained strings of distinct Byzantine readings in patristic writings, that is due to (1) the tendency of the Byzantine, Alexandrian, and Western transmission-lines to agree, and (2) the absence of patristic ante-Nicene evidence from many locales where the Byzantine Text dominated soon afterward.  Are we so fixated on the Egyptian text, merely because the writing-materials have endured thanks to the dry weather of Egypt, that  in the middle of the doctrinal disputes of the second half of the 300s the Gothic version and the Peshitta arose brimming with novel readings and that the churches, rather than protest and riot,  welcomed the novelties and tossed aside the texts handed down to them by their persecuted predecessors?  Liturgical adjustments aside, such a wholesale replacement seems unlikely.

Back to the book though:  the last section of Part 1 superbly reviews the tools for New Testament textual criticism, sampling the best parts of the author’s earlier 40 Questions About the Text and Canon co-written with L. Scott Kellum.  New features in the Nestle-Aland compilation such as the blank diamond (♦) are included.  Online tools are also described and links are given to the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Muenster, Germany, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts in Texas, the International Greek New Testament Project, and the Center for New Testament Textual Studies at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and more.

The second part is a delightfully balanced presentation about how to evaluate external and internal evidence, blended with an investigation into Matthew 18:15.  Quarles is a strong advocate for Hort’s dictum that “Knowledge of documents should precede final judgment upon readings,” and he appeals to it repeatedly.  He very candidly acknowledges however that the foundation of Hort’s transmission-model – that the Byzantine text emerged as a combination of the Alexandrian and Western text-types – was incorrect:  “Text critics have recognized that the old text-type approach is problematic and must be abandoned.”    Without the acceptance of text-types Hort’s model cannot exist.

Instead of shifting the text-critical train into reverse and shouting a loud apology to Western Christendom for leading to public down the wrong path by a phantom theory for generations, though, Quarles proceeds to make a case for retaining the popular “reasoned eclectic” approach which happens to produce the same results as Hort’s approach 99% of the time.  Nevertheless he affirms that “The testimony of multiple witnesses is usually more trustworthy than the testimony of a single witness” – and (with the Tyndale House GNT and the SBLGNT) recommends ἀμάρτήσῃ εἰς σέ in Matthew 18:15.  

Over and over the reader is shown that it is crucial to engage one’s intelligence when weighing internal considerations against each other.  Nevertheless, while Quarles’ most detailed analysis is made to three small contests in Part Three, he expresses his position about many others as if they are fully settled, content to leave some details vague and some assertions unbalanced in the interest of brevity.  For instance regarding the contest between ΘΣ and ΟΣ  in First Timothy 3:16 he states, “The reference to Jesus’ incarnation in the verse understandably prompted a Christian scribe to mistakenly read the Ο as a Θ.”  It is equally understandable however that any scribe could in a moment of carelessness fail to add the crossbar, just as people writing by hand have  occasionally failed to cross the lowercase “t” and thus wrote about limes instead of times.

An interesting development in the evaluation of internal evidence is that conflations are downplayed; consideration of scribal subvocalization is given as much emphasis.  A degree of subjectivity is likely to be unavoidable when readers attempt to apply Quarles’ cogent-sounding statement (p. 89), “Textual critics should prefer readings that initially seem difficult but make better sense after further study.”   How difficult does a reading need to be before it merits being rejected as a palpable mistake?  The reading τῆς Ἰουδαίας in Luke 4:44 is used as an example of a superficially difficult reading – but not a very persuasive one inasmuch as the longevity of the writing-materials seems to have been given too much weight (i.e., the age of the ancestor shared by Α D Byz 700 Vulgate Peshitta it^a it^e it^aur Syriac Harklean^margin  Armenian Georgian Ethiopic was not necessarily later than the shared ancestor of P75 01 03 019 032 892 Sahidic).    A reading may be intelligently salvageable without this becoming commendable.  I wonder what Quarles does with the readings of 01 in Matthew 13:35 and Luke 1:26.

Without telling Quarles’ conclusions about Matthew 16:2b-3 and John 1:18 and Colossians 1:12 in Part Three, I am confident that there is plenty to both dismay and delight readers whether they favor the readings of supermajorities or tiny minorities of witnesses. 

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Repeatedly I was confronted by a candid regret that more research needs to be done in specific areas of research – the same sort of plea that John Burgon made over 120 years ago.  The dating of the supplemental pages of 032 is particularly significant, and Quarles’ observations should be considered through the lens of what Ulrich Schmid wrote in his chapter “Reassessing the Palaeography and Codicology of the Freer Gospel Manuscript” on pp. 227-249 of The Freer Biblical Manuscripts (2006 ed. Larry W. Hurtado).

The Appendices must not be overlooked, especially III (Problems with the Text-type Approach) – which tends to show that the problem is by no means fatal to the apparoach but comes down to an over-reliance on statistics, but that is something to explore elsewhere) and IV (Thoroughgoing Eclecticism, eulogizing the great J. K. Elliott).  The glossary, though, is too short. 

In conclusion, Quarles has provided an helpful and intriguing and up-to-date introduction to the field of New Testament textual criticism that raises as many little questions as it resolves – and that is not a bad thing. 

A few closing points:

On p. 79 the reinforcement of 03’s text is attributed to a “10^th- or 11^th- century scribe” but the basis for this date is not given; I suggest that a date several centuries later is plausible.

On page 31 in a footnote, “305” should read instead “304.”

On p. 65 all mention of the forgery 2427 should be removed.

Revelation 20:5 - A New Attempt to Change A Doctrinally Significant Text

The first half of Revelation 20:5 has been part of the English text of the book as long as the English text of Revelation has existed – until now.  It appears the same in the Byzantine Text and Textus Receptus:  οἱ λοιποὶ τῶν νεκρῶν οὐκ ἔζησαν ἄχρι τελεσθῇ τὰ χίλια ἔτη.   The meaning is plain:  “But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished.”

A quick review of Bible Gateway shows that English versions including the KJV, ESV, NKJV, NIV, NET, WEB, NASB, NRSV, NLT, CSB, CEV, and EHV include the entire verse. 

The first half of 20:5 is missing, though, in Codex Sinaiticus and in an interesting array of minuscules:   61 82 93 141 177 201 218 325 452 456 498 522 808 1424 1719 1734 1780 1795 1849 1852 1872 2030 2048 2053 2062 2138 2256 2350 2377 2494 2495 2582 2672 2681 2845 2847 2886 2917 and 2921.

Victorinus of Pettau (Ptuj in Slovenia) quoted the full text of 20:5 in a commentary composed around 260.  At the New Advent website his comments can be read in English:

“[20:4] And I saw thrones, and them that sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them; and I saw the souls of them that were slain on account of the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast nor his image, nor have received his writing on their forehead or in their hand; and they reigned with Christ for a thousand years.

[20:5] The rest of them lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. There are two resurrections. But the first resurrection is now of the souls that are by the faith, which does not permit men to pass over to the second death. Of this resurrection the apostle says: If you have risen with Christ, seek those things which are above.

[20:6] Blessed and holy is he who has part in this resurrection: on them the second death shall have no power, but they shall be priests of God and Christ, and they shall reign with him a thousand years. I do not think the reign of a thousand years is eternal; or if it is thus to be thought of, they cease to reign when the thousand years are finished. But I will put forward what my capacity enables me to judge. The tenfold number signifies the decalogue, and the hundredfold sets forth the crown of virginity.  For he who shall have kept the undertaking of virginity completely, and shall have faithfully fulfilled the precepts of the decalogue, and shall have destroyed the untrained nature or impure thoughts within the retirement of the heart, that they may not rule over him, this is the true priest of Christ, and accomplishing the millenary number thoroughly, is thought to reign with Christ; and truly in his case the devil is bound.”

The loss of οἱ λοιποὶ τῶν νεκρῶν οὐκ ἔζησαν ἄχρι τελεσθῇ τὰ χίλια ἔτη is explained by one of the most common scribal accidents:  a scribe’s accidental omission of material when his line of sight shifted from letters in his master-copy to the same (or similar) letter recurring further along in the text.  Anyone can see how such an accident, technically called parablepsis, occurred when a scribe’s line of sight jumped from the χιλια ετη at the end of 20:4 to the identical letters in this middle of verse 5:

⁴και ειδον θρονους και εκαθισαν επ αυτους και κριμα εδοθη

αυτοις και τας ψυχας των πεπελεκισμενων δια την μαρτυριαν

ιυ και δια τον λογον του θυ και οιτινες ου προσεκυνησαν

τω θηριω ουτε την εικονα αυτου και ουκ ελαβον το χαραγμα

επι το μετωπον αυτων και επι την χειρα αυτων

και εζησαν και εβασιλευσαν μετα του χυ [τα] χιλια ετη

⁵και οι λοιποι των νεκρων ουκ εζησαν αχρι τελεσθη τα χιλια ετη

αυτη η αναστασις η πρωτη . . . .

 

I note that in the UBS GNT 1966, there was no apparatus entry for Revelation 20:5, and in the UBS GNT 4^th edition, likewise, there was no apparatus entry for Revelation 20:5.   It is exasperating to see such a shift in the new compilation, particularly when no new pertinent external evidence has appeared.  I recommend that from now on translators of Revelation should use Wayne Mitchell's The Greek New Testament, 4th edition, or the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform, and set aside the unstable UBS compilation.   

 

 

 

 

 

Anomalies in Codex Beratinus (043)

Codex Beratinus (043), a copy of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark from the 500s, is semi-famous as the most unique of the Purple Uncials (022, 023, 042, and 080).  It is officially categorized as Byzantine (Category V) but its editor Pierre Batiffol noticed that its text is more accurately described as Mixed. 

Codex Beratinus contains only the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark, with several considerable lacunae (Matthew 1:1-6:3, 7:26-8:7, 18:23-19:3, and Mark 14:62-end). The codex contains 190 extant parchment leaves measuring 31.4 × 26.8 cm, or approximately the same size as those of Codex Alexandrinus, and have two columns per page, with 17 lines per page,^[1] in characters larger than the script in Codex Alexandrinus^[2] in 8-12 letters per line, applied in silver ink.^[3] The title and the first line in Mark are written in gold.^[4] The writing is continuous in full lines without stichometry. Quotations from the Old Testament are marked with an inverted comma (<).  

The text is divided according to the κεφαλαια (chapters) and according to the Ammonian Sections (smaller than κεφαλαια). On the left margin are inserted the numerals of the κεφαλαια and above the pages are inserted the τιτλοι (titles) of the κεφαλαια. The numerals of the Ammonian sections are given on the left margin, and a references to the Eusebian Canons were added by a later hand in the 8th century. A note in the manuscript states that the loss of the other two Gospels is due to "the Franks of Champagne", i.e. some of the Crusaders, who may have seen it while at Patmos, where it was believed formerly to have been.^[5]

The text of the codex is generally of the Byzantine text-type, but it contains the long Western addition after Matthew 20:28, occurring also in Codex Bezae:^[6] Aland gave it the following textual profile: 131¹, 83^1/2, 11², 18^s.^[1]

"But seek to increase from that which is small, and to become less from which is greater. When you enter into a house and are summoned to dine, do not sit down at the prominent places, lest perchance a man more honorable than you come in afterwards, and he who invited you come and say to you, "Go down lower"; and you shall be ashamed. But if you sit down in the inferior place, and one inferior to you come in, then he that invited you will say to you, "Go up higher"; and this will be advantageous for you."^[5]

In Matthew 21:9, the following interpolation occurs, shared only with syr^cur:^[6]

και εξελθον εις υπαντησιν αυτω πολλοι χαιροντες και δοξαζοντες τον θεον περι παντων ων ειδον

And many went out to meet him; all who were seeing [him] round about were rejoicing and glorifying God.

In Matthew 27:9, in the phrase επληρωθη το ρηθεν δια Ιερεμιου του προφητου (fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet) the word Ιερεμιου (Jeremiah) is omitted, as in Minuscule 33, a, b, syr^s, syr^p, and cop^bo.^[7]

In Matthew 27:16 it has additional reading ος δια φονον και στασιν ην βεβλημενοις εις φυλακην (who for murder and insurrection had been thrown in prison).^[8]

In Matthew 27:35, it includes ἵνα πληρώθη τὸ ῤηθὲν διὰ τοῦ προφήτου, Διεμερίσαντο τὰ ἱμάτια μου ἑαυτοῖς καὶ ἐπὶ τὸν ἱματισμὸν μου ἔβαλον κλῆρον along with 0250, 037, 038, 1424, 1582, 124, 348, 788, 1279, 1579, and 517.

This is a unique manuscript with an interesting textual ancestry.  It merits a lot more attention that it typically receives from researchers who belittle manuscripts with an essentially Byzantine text.

Matthew 26:28 - "This is my blood of the new covenant" . . . right?

In Matthew 26:28, as Jesus instituted the sacrament of communion, he told his disciples, “This is my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many for the remission of sins.”   Or did he?  Byzantine-based versions such as the KJV, NKJV, EOB, and MEV uniformly report that he did, but in the CSB, NIV, NLT, NASB, ESV, NRSV the word “new” is not included.  The Evangelical Heritage Version, the Easy-to-Read Version, J. B. Phillips (1960), the New Life Version, and The Voice and the hyper-paraphrase known as The Message both include “new” despite echoing plenty of non-Byzantine readings elsewhere.

The manuscripts for non-inclusion include P37, P45^vid, 01 03 019 Q Z [Z = the palimpsest Dublinensis, 035, from the 500s] 0298^vid 33.  Swanson erroneously presented Codex Y as if it also supports non-inclusion.  This is a variant-unit where the papyrus evidence has had a real impact:   in the 1800s Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf and Wordsworth favored inclusion; Alford had καινῆς bracketed. 

Bruce Metzger wrote that the UBS committee favored non-inclusion on the grounds that if καινῆς “had been present initially, there is no good reason why anyone would have deleted it.”  This is a bit amusing because even a novice can realize that καινῆς could easily be lost via parablepsis after τῆς.  Wayne A. Mitchell noticed this possibility in Scribal Skips.

The editors of the UBS and Nestle-Aland compilations assumed that Matthew’s text was harmonized to conform to the wording of Luke 22:20 (and First Corinthians 11:25).  However, an accidental parableptic loss explains the shorter reading without positing thorough scribal creativity that went in the opposite direction of their usual tendency.   

The question of whether Jesus explicitly said the equivalent of “new,” as Paul plainly wrote in his recollection of the institution of the eucharist, is a separate issue, perhaps one which boils down to  more of a preference for the inspired record of Jesus’ ipsissima vox, or the inspired verba understanding him.

 

Romans 10:17 - Whose Word Is It Anyway?

Neither :of Christ" or "of God" on 010!

What should be read at the end of Romans 10:17” – “word of God” or word of Christ”?

You can usually tell what kind of base-text is used in English versions of the New Testament by looking at the end of Romans 10:17.  Byzantine-based versions (KJV, NKJV, EOB, MEV, MLV, WEB) end the verse with “word of God”.  Alexandrian-based versions (ESV, NIV, CSB, NASB, NET, NLT, NRSV) end Romans 10:17 with “word of Christ”   The rendering in the New Life Version seems to be based on a third reading that ends the verse without either “God” or “Christ.”

The diverse array of support for Θεοῦ is good, including À¹ Alexandrinus 06¹ K P Ψ 049 33 1175 1241 1881 2200 the Peshitta, the Georgian version, and Basil Chrysostom Jerome and Theodore. 

The support for Χριστοῦ less in quantity but greater in terms of diversity:  P46^vid À* B C^vid 06* 6 81 1506 1739 1853, the Sahidic, Bohairic, and Armenian versions, and Augustine (in On Nature and Grace ch. 2).

The difference come down to a single letter – Χῦ or Θῦ.  Among modern-day compilations, Nestle-Aland/UBS, SBLGNT, and Mitchell GNT4 favor Χριστοῦ; R-P Byz and Hodges-Pierpont both favor Θεοῦ.   

The reference to the “word of Christ” or “message of Christ,” if original, occurs only here in the New Testament.  This is a slight point in favor of Θεοῦ because “word of God” is a Pauline (though not uniquely Pauline) expression (ῥῆμα Θεοῦ in Eph. 6:17).

Θῦ  fits the context better in light of Paul’s preceding use of Isaiah 53:1 and his immediately following use of Psalm 19, which both can be naturally categorized as divine messages, but only one of which is particularly Messianic.

Neither "of Christ" or "of God" in 012!

The shorter reading should not be casually rejected.  It is supported by F G and Old Latin witnesses f (VL 10), g (VL 77) and o (PEL(B))  and by Hilary Ambrosiaster and Pelagius.  An argument could be made that the shorter reading plausibly accounts for the rise of both rival readings:  a hanging reference to hearing the message would be very tempting for scribes to expand. 

Χῦ appears to be an early substitution that began in the Western transmission-line (and passing from the Old Latin into the Vulgate) and which was adopted into the early Alexandrian line.  The scribal tendency to change a general reference to Θς (“God”) or Κς (“Lord”) into a reference specifically to Christ or to Jesus repeatedly impacted both the Western and early Alexandrian transmission-lines.