John Piper |
Earlier this week, the following question was addressed at
the Desiring God
website/podcast: “How can I trust the
Bible if there have been so many add-ins, such as Mark 16:9–20 and John
7:53–8:11 and First John 5:7–8?”
John Piper, in his response, not only took for granted that
all three of those passages are spurious, but he also linked the validity of
his response to the validity of his view that all three passages should be rejected: “If there is a science that
can spot these three texts that he mentioned as not part of the original
biblical manuscripts, then that same science, in the same way, can perform the
same function for all the other passages. There is the answer.”
But Piper’s answer would still be problematic even if
commentators and Bible annotators were not seasoning their evidence-presentations
with gallons of bias in favor of the Nestle-Aland compilation. It is problematic, first, because although
one of the basic axioms of textual criticism is that manuscripts should be
weighed, rather than merely counted, the first thing that Piper did, in his
reply, was to count manuscripts:
If it were merely a matter of favoring textual variants that
are supported by over 80% of the manuscripts, then Mark 16:9-20 would be universally accepted (with support from over 99.8% of the Greek manuscripts), and so would
John 7:53-8:11 (with support from 85% of the Greek manuscripts). Clearly, the quantity of manuscript-support
is not very important to the textual critics who reject those two
passages. In the Nestle-Aland
compilation, two readings are in the text even though they have zero
support among Greek manuscripts.
When the textual critics who made the Nestle-Aland
compilation sat down to do their work, they did indeed have access to the
readings of thousands of manuscripts to consult and compare. But they ignored most of them. Most Greek manuscripts closely agree with one
another, and this large collection of manuscripts, displaying the Byzantine
Text, has been treated as a very large family that descended from a single
ancestor-manuscript, and for that reason, their collective weight is regarded
as the weight of that ancestor-manuscript.
This is why, in the apparatus of the UBS
Greek New Testament (the text of which is the same as the text in the
Nestle-Aland compilation), these hundreds of manuscripts are not listed
individually; they are given a single emblem, “Byz.”
Meanwhile, the flagship-manuscripts of the Alexandrian Text
– Vaticanus and Sinaiticus – are consistently listed individually, along with
whatever allies for them can be found.
And with astounding consistency, when a textual contest occurs between a
reading attested by a smattering of Alexandrian manuscripts, and a reading
attested by over a thousand Byzantine manuscripts, the compilers of the
Nestle-Aland text preferred the Alexandrian reading.
Daniel Wallace, as John Piper mentioned, has claimed that
“New Testament scholars face an embarrassment of riches compared to the data of
classical Greek and Latin scholars have to contend with.” However, when one examines Wallace’s own
approach to the text, it becomes obvious that he believes that in some passages
– at the end of Mark, and at Mark 1:41, for example –
almost every coin in the royal treasury is counterfeit.
The introduction of a
conjectural emendation into the text of Second Peter 3:10 reverses the meaning of the sentence. And consider the contest between ὀλίγως and ὄντως
in Second Peter 2:18. In 1966, ὀλίγως was
adopted and the UBS committee gave it a “C”
ranking, meaning, according to the UBS
Introduction, that “There is considerable degree of doubt whether the text or
the apparatus contains the superior reading.”
Metzger’s Textual Commentary, however,
stated, “ὄντως is far more likely to be secondary than ὀλίγως.” By the time the fourth edition of the UBS
Greek New Testament was printed, the
editors were more confident; the reading ὀλίγως was ranked as an “A” reading –
meaning, according to the Introduction of UBS 4,
“the text is certain.” But in NA28, that was thrown out the window: ὄντως appears in the text.
The Nestle-Aland compilation (and English translations that depend on it, such as the ESV ) is not as stable
as John Piper wants it to be. He wants
to assure his listener that the text of the New Testament is not going to
drastically change. Yet he says that 7%
of the New Testament’s text is in question – subject to revision in the event
of new discoveries or a change in the compilers’ views.
There are some important textual contests within
that 7%. (By the way, I do not accept the claim that this proportion accurately represents the amount of instability in the New Testament text – but I overlook this detail in the interest of brevity.) Their outcomes are not likely to erase sentences
from the Apostles’ Creed, but they definitely have an impact on how one
interprets the passage in which they occur. Consider:
● The first half of Luke 23:34 says, “And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they
do.’” John Piper used these words as Scripture in a sermon he preached on January 27, 2002. (Perhaps he was convinced of their genuineness by “peculiar glory” emanating from them. More about that in a moment.) But in NA-27, these words are double-bracketed, just like Mark
16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11. The UBS 4
Introduction says that these double-bracketed passages “are known not to be a part of
the original text.” That is not trivial.
● It is difficult to see how the doctrine of inerrancy would
survive if the compilers of the Nestle-Aland/UBS
text decided to adopt (as Eberhard Nestle did) the reading of Codex Sinaiticus
in Matthew 13:35 , since it says that
Isaiah is the author of Psalm 78. It is
also difficult to see how the doctrine of inerrancy would survive if the NA/UBS
compilers decided to adopt the reading shared by Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (and
some other witnesses) in Matthew 27:49.
It is not my intention here to tour all the textual contests
that affect interpretation. I merely
mention these few as evidence that any promise that the scientific evidence
demands confidence that the text of the New Testament will not ever materially
change is poorly grounded as long as the text under discussion allows a few
manuscripts to outweigh all the rest.
The product of the text-critical methodology that has yielded 28
editions of Novum Testamentum Graece
is, and will always be, inherently non-definitive.
That approach does not preclude that in the event of
the discovery of several very early manuscripts, the text of the New Testament could
change, as we saw the text of Novum
Testamentum Graece change significantly in Luke 24 after Papyrus 75 was
discovered. The same methodology that
presently assigns overwhelming weight to Codex Vaticanus and its Alexandrian
allies is likely to assign overwhelming weight to newly discovered early
manuscripts. Thus there is no scientific
reason to absolutely preclude significant textual shifts.
Such a misapplication of Second Corinthians 4:6 renders textual criticism
superfluous and replaces it with subjective contemplation. Many Bible-readers see the glory of God
shining through the words, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to
all creation.” Many Bible-readers see
the glory of God shining through the words, “Neither do I condemn you; go and
sin no more.” Advocates of the KJV claim to see
the glory of God shining through the Comma
Johanneum. Mormons claim to see the glory of
God in their Book of Mormon, and Roman Catholics claim to see the glory of God in the book of
Tobit, and so forth. I don’t think we
really want to make subjectivism the crucial factor in textual contests.
But how else can one answer the listener’s question, as long
as one agrees with the methodology of the compilers of the NA/UBS
text? How can one believe that the NA/UBS
text, in its present condition, is the Word of God, considering that in the
future, its compilers might reject many of its present readings? It’s a question which I leave to advocates of
the NA/UBS compilation to answer.
The Byzantine Text |
In Mark 7:19, the difference between the Nestle-Aland text and the others is not a manuscript difference but a punctuation difference in that edition.
ReplyDeleteDempy,
ReplyDeletePlease consult the UBS apparatus: KaqarizWn versus KatharizOn.
James, shouldn't the link to Piper be:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/if-the-bible-has-been-added-to-can-we-trust-it
????
Hugh McCann,
ReplyDeleteThat is where the embedded link goes to when one clicks "Desiring God" in the post.
James, I had similar questions when I first saw this Q&A. But I think you've misread Piper. Scripture's "peculiar glory" is a separate question for him from the question of whether we have the original text. As the final paragraph says:
ReplyDelete"So, the real question becomes, then — and here is where I would leave us — the real question becomes not, Do we have the original words of the biblical authors? Virtually all of us agree that we do with the variance that we are not sure about affecting no manner of doctrine or ethics. The question now is: Do you see the peculiar glory of God shining through those words and confirming to your own mind and heart that these are the very words of God? That is the crucial question."
In other words, once TC confirms that we have a credible-enough text from the human authors, then we still need to ask whether we think that text has any "peculiar glory" that shows that text to be divine. It's a two-step process, not one. I get that you don't like the gait in his first step, but that doesn't affect how he takes the second.