In the previous post, we looked at the external evidence
regarding Jesus’ saying from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” found in Luke 22:34 . We saw that although this sentence is
included in 99% of existing Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke, the
copyists of six early manuscripts – Papyrus 75, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Bezae,
Codex W, Codex Koridethi, and 070 – did
not include it in the text, and because these particular manuscripts constitute
early representatives of diverse branches of the text’s transmission, this is
seem by some researchers – including James White of Alpha & Omega
Ministries – as evidence that the passage was not in the original text. On the other hand, we also saw that this
passage was used by over a dozen patristic writers in the 100’s, 200’s, and 300’s.
Either
these words were put into the text of Luke, or else someone took them out. A few theories have been proposed as attempts
to explain why and how someone would put these words into the text:
(1)
After someone in the early church noticed that Jesus made six
pronouncements from the cross, he decided that it would be an improvement if
Jesus had made seven statements from the cross, so he created one, or borrowed
an oral tradition, and put it into the text.
(2)
These words circulated in the early church as an agraphon, or unwritten tradition about the sayings of Jesus, and
someone, somewhere, decided to put them at this location in the text.
(3)
A copyist did not want Jesus to appear less forgiving than Stephen, who
prayed to Jesus as he was being stoned to death, “Lord, do not hold this sin to
their account” (in Acts 7:59-60).
Let’s
briefly look at each of these theories.
DID SOMEONE ADD THESE
WORDS DUE TO A DESIRE FOR THERE TO BE SEVEN SAYINGS FROM THE CROSS?
It is intrinsically
unlikely that anyone would deliberately invent a saying and insert it into the
text just to make the total number of sayings from the cross total seven. The notion that Jesus only spoke six words
from the cross could only exist after all four Gospels were considered a
distinct narrative unit – that is, after all four had been composed, collected
together, and recognized as specially authoritative – by which time, the
individual Gospels would have already circulated for decades, making it
difficult for any such novel insertion to suddenly appear and gain acceptance
from church leaders such as Irenaeus.
Recent
supporters of the idea that the sentence was added in order to bring the
number of Jesus’ sayings from the cross to a total of seven have pointed to the
order in which the sayings appear in Tatian’s Diatessaron (to the extent that it can be reconstructed); however,
changes in order in the Diatessaron occur often, and in this case the
re-ordering of the sayings from the cross appear to be a side-effect of
Tatian’s attempt at chronological harmonization of the four Gospels’ accounts;
they are not indicative of any instability in the text, as if the sentence was
floating around somewhere further along in Luke 23. Furthermore,
I cannot find any comment by any patristic writer about the significance of
there being seven sayings of Christ from the cross. Without question, people mildly appreciated groups
of seven when they found them in the text, but I know of no case whatsoever in
which any early Christian writer altered the text to create a total of seven of
anything. (And would this not be intrinsically
unsatisfying to the person making the alteration?)
DID SOMEONE CREATE AN
AGRAPHON, WHICH SOMEONE ELSE INSERTED
INTO THE TEXT?
Did someone
in the early church value an agraphon (an unwritten tradition consisting
of, or centered around, a saying of Jesus) so highly that he thought it
should be inserted into the text of the Gospel of Luke? That is the theory proposed by Bruce Metzger
in his Textual Commentary on the
United Bible Society’s compilation: “The
logion,” he wrote, “though probably not a part of the original Gospel of Luke,
bears self-evident tokens of its dominical origin.” However, there is no
physical evidence that this statement ever circulated in any form other than as
part of the text of Luke 23:34. The
statement, “Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do,” demands a narrative context: who
is being forgiven for what? It seems unlikely that this sentence would
ever circulate without a framework.
Several agrapha
were mentioned in patristic writings – but the intrusion of an agraphon into
the Greek text of the Gospels is exceptionally rare. Interpolations in Codex Bezae, and Codex W’s
“Freer Logion” between Mark 16:14 and 16:15 ,
are almost unique in this respect. Codex
D has interpolated sayings of Jesus after Matthew 20:28, after Luke 6:4, and
after John 6:56. These features – and a
few others which resemble parallel-passages – display the influence of a loosely
translated and interpolated Old Latin text, which is in the same codex on
alternating pages. But though attested
in Codex D, these readings are not in the Byzantine Text, indicating that either
copyists possessed considerable resistance against novelties in their
exemplars, or that only a very few copyists were reckless enough to insert them
in the first place, or both.
Consider
the curious incident of the saying about money-changers: Γίνεσθε δόκιμοι
τραπεζιται (“Be ye approved money-changers”).
Brook Foss Westcott (of Westcott & Hort fame) liked this saying so
much that he put it on a preface-page in his Introduction to the Study of the Gospels. Several patristic writers used it too,
including Clement of Alexandria (who referred to it as a saying of Jesus in Stromata 1:28), Origen, Cyril of
Jerusalem, Cyril of Alexandria, and even John
of Damascus in Orthodox Faith, Book
4, chapter 17 – a composition from the early 700’s).
But even
though this saying circulated in the churches for over 500 years (and here we
are, still discussing it!), how many copyists inserted it into the Greek text
of Scripture? Inasmuch as it appears in
no Greek manuscript of any part of the New Testament, the answer seems to be zero. This does not bode well for the plausibility
of the theory that typical copyists were open to the idea of putting additions
of any kind into the Greek text of the Gospels.
DID SOMEONE THINK
THAT JESUS SEEMED TO BE LESS FORGIVING THAN STEPHEN, AND CREATED THESE WORDS TO EVEN THE SCORE?
The idea that someone in the early church created Luke
23:34a so that Stephen would not appear more altruistic than Jesus has several
problems. First, nothing in the account
of Stephen’s martyrdom in Acts 7 matches the phrase, “for they know not what
they do.” Second, while the statement of
Stephen and the statement in Luke 23:34a are conceptually similar, they are
diverse where vocabulary is concerned.
Third, inasmuch as Stephen made his statement a gasp away from death, a
person desiring to create a parallel in Luke’s narrative of Jesus’ crucifixion
would be more likely to insert it at the point of Jesus’ death, not more than
three hours earlier. Fourth, the actions
of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke are repeatedly emulated by Jesus’ followers in
the book of Acts; to whatever extent Stephen’s statement in Acts 7:70 resembles
Luke 23:34a, it is just the sort of resemblance that points to Luke as the
author.
These
proposals do not plausibly explain the ancient and widespread presence of
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” in the text of Luke. In addition, an internal feature of the
passage constitutes subtle but forceful evidence that it was written by
Luke: it exemplifies Luke’s distinct
emphasis on ignorance (the term “ignorance” is used here in its technical
sense, not in a derogatory sense) as an extenuating circumstance capable of
eliminating or reducing a perpetrator’s guilt.
Some
examples of this emphasis may be listed:
among the Evangelists, Luke, and Luke alone, records the saying of Jesus
in which He establishes different measures of judgment for those who know their
master’s will, and for those who do not know it. In Acts 3:14-7, Luke records Peter’s
statement that although members of his audience had “killed the Prince of
life,” they had acted in ignorance, and so had their rulers. He proceeds to invite them to repent. In Acts 13:27, Luke records Paul’s statement
that the inhabitants of Jerusalem
and their rulers handed Jesus over to be executed “because they did not know
Him.” And Acts 17:30 – part of Paul’s address to the Athenian
philosophers – states, “God overlooked these times of ignorance, but now
commands all men everywhere to repent.”
The probability
that someone in the 100’s perceived and mimicked what Eldon Epp has called
Luke’s “Ignorance Motif,” and expressed it in a 12-word insertion (with syntax
consistent with Luke 11:4), seems very far lower than that alternative
explanation that Luke wrote these words.
OR: DID SOMEONE REMOVE THE PASSAGE BECAUSE HE THOUGHT THAT THE JEWS HAD NOT BEEN FORGIVEN?
A strong motivation existed for early copyists to omit these
words: a desire to avoid the impression that Jesus’ prayer had been rejected. About 40 years after Jesus’ crucifixion,
Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, and it was devastated again in the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Hundreds of thousands of
Jews were killed; many others were enslaved, and they were deprived of their
homeland. The pagan jibe can easily be written: “Is this what happens when Jesus asks for people to be forgiven? Their city is laid waste, and they and their
families are slain or enslaved? His
intercession does not seem very effective.” Even without a pagan around to express the objection, an ordinary
reader could perceive a difficulty when comparing Christ’s prayer to the
history of the Jews in the century that followed.
Many early
Christian writers considered the Jewish nation corporately responsible for Christ’s
death; they interpreted Matthew 27:25 as if it referred to all Jews. Compositions such as Melito of Sardis’ Easter Homily, a.k.a. Peri Pascha (c. 170) display this interpretation
very clearly. Melito, in the course of addressing the Jews in a diatribe, says,
“You did not recognize the Lord; you did
not know, O Israel , that this one was the firstborn of God” – but he also insists
that the Jews should have known, in light of the prophecies about the Messiah.
Origen,
writing Against Celsus (Book 4, chapter 22), similarly
regarded the destruction of Jerusalem
as divine retribution. And about 150
years after Origen wrote, John Chrysostom, in Homilies Against the Jews (better titled, Sermons Against Those Who Partake in Jewish
Customs), preached that the Jews, collectively, were in a situation similar
to that of Cain – guilty but unwilling to admit that they had done wrong – and he
advised that Christians should not even pray for them, alluding to Jeremiah
7:16 and 15:1 as justification.
So when
Chrysostom (or someone whose works have been mixed up with the sermons of Chrysostom) commented on Luke 23:34 in Homily on the Cross and the Robber, he began with the obvious question: “Did He forgive them the sin?” – and
Chrysostom’s answer was that forgiveness was given to those who repented – to
Paul, and to the multitudes of Jews who became Christians in the book of Acts –
but then, judgment fell.
Hippolytus
found a simpler solution in the incomplete composition Demonstratio Contra Judaeos; he concluded that Jesus’ prayer
was on behalf of the Gentile soldiers who did the actual work of crucifying
Him.
The unknown
author of the Didascalia Apostolorum (c.
250) resorted to a more reckless course:
he altered Jesus’ prayer to make it conditional, like Jesus’ prayer in
the Garden of Gethsemane, adding the phrase “if it be possible” – the implication
being that just as it turned out to not
be possible to let the cup of suffering pass, it was likewise not possible to
forgive those responsible for Christ’s crucifixion, in light of their
non-repentance.
This use of
the destruction of Jerusalem as an
interpretive lens was not limited to commentators of the early
church, but also was employed by copyists.
Eldon Epp, in his book, The Theological Tendency of Codex Bezae Cantebrigiensis in Acts, devoted a chapter to the
subject of anti-Judaic tendencies in the text of Codex D – i.e., in the Western
Text that is displayed in Codex D. Epp
showed that a scribal tendency to alter features in the text that could be
understood to excuse or reduce the guilt of the Jews for Jesus’ death is discernible
in the Western Text. (C. K. Barrett
wrote a response to Epp’s claim, challenging it, but Barrett’s answers, for the
most part, are far from effective; it is like watching someone turn “they killed him” into “those evildoers deliberately rebelled and
killed him” and then be told that the person making the changes was just
trying to make the sentence more clear.)
Westcott
and Hort, in 1881, had little reason to suspect that the text found in their favorite
manuscript could be contaminated with Western readings. However, the discovery of the Glazier Codex (G67) of Acts shows that the Western Text was used at an early period in Egypt . (Although James White has spread the claim
that “Every one of the papyrus manuscripts we have discovered” represents the
Alexandrian text (see KJV-Only
Controversy, page 152, 1995 edition), that is simply false; papyri that
have a text that is not Alexandrian include P29, P38, P45 (which is quite a
substantial manuscript), P48, P54, P59, P69, and P88.)
Codex
Glazier’s Egyptian text confirms the antiquity of the anti-Judaic tendency that
is displayed in the text of Codex Bezae’s Greek and Latin text: in Acts 10:39, it is not enough to say simply
that “they” killed Jesus; there is, in the Glazier Codex, an alteration,
specifying that the Jews rejected Him
and killed Him. (According to Epp, this reading is supported by the Old Latin Codex Legionensis, MS VL 67. Unfortunately this variant was not selected
to be mentioned in the apparatus of the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.)
Without
further ado, let’s consider what all this implies:
● The scribes
who made the Western form of the text of the Gospels and Acts in the 100’s and
200’s had a bias against the Jews, regarding them as corporately responsible
for Christ’s death and understanding the destruction of Jerusalem as evidence
that God had not forgiven them. This affected
their treatment of some passages.
● Various
patristic writers in the 100’s and 200’s (and later) express the opinion that
the Jewish nation as a whole could not have been forgiven for Christ’s
crucifixion; those who accept Luke 23:34a tend to feel obligated to explain
that it does not mean that the Jews were forgiven then and there.
● Some
writers altered the text of Luke 23:34a to make it interlock with their
understanding that the destruction of Jerusalem
signaled that God had not forgiven the Jews. (The Didascalia
added, “if it is possible;” Gregory of Nyssa and others changed “forgive” to
“bear with.”)
● In Codex D – the flagship Greek
manuscript of the Western Text – Luke 23:34a is absent. The copyist of D did not create this reading;
it is also shared by the Old Latin Codex Vercellensis and the Sinaitic Syriac;
these three witnesses echo an older form of the text.
● The
Western text, and its creators’ anti-Judaic sentiment, circulated in Egypt ,
as shown by the Glazier Codex and other evidence.
Thus
considerable force drives the hypothesis in which Egyptian copyists around the
end of the second century were aware of two forms of the text of Luke 23:34 –
one (echoed by Sinaiticus, C, L, 33, 892, et
al) that contained “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,”
and one (echoed by P75 and Vaticanus), that did not. But a review of the allies of P75 and B in
this case – D, a, d, the Sinaitic Syriac – informs us that this originated as a Western reading.
Once this
reading (or, rather, this omission) was known in Egypt ,
it was very difficult for scribes to resist adopting it, because it was consistent with
their understanding that the destruction of Jerusalem
implied that the Jews, collectively, were unforgiven. Rather than face the foreseeable jibes and
questions that the inclusion of these words would invite, they concluded that
such a statement could not be original, and so they adopted the omission (which
first emerged in part of the Western Text) into part of the Alexandrian
transmission-stream.
This
conclusion – that a scribal prejudice elicited the omission of Luke 22:34a, and
the adoption of the omission – is further confirmed by the observation that the
sentence is omitted in a smattering of Byzantine manuscripts. Rather than suggest that these particular
copies are somehow genealogically connected to manuscripts such as P75 and B,
this shows that a non-textual factor – scribes’ anti-Judaic prejudice – could independently
elicit the omission of this sentence in unrelated witnesses.
Inasmuch as “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” is in Luke 23:34 in a massive majority
of Greek manuscripts representing multiple transmission-branches, as well as in
massive versional evidence, and is supported by very ancient and very widespread
patristic evidence, and inasmuch as there is compelling evidence that its
rival-reading originated as the result of scribes’ prejudice against Jews, I conclude
that this sentence is original to Luke.
And since
it is inspired Scripture, let us not perpetually cause Bible-readers to question
its authority by introducing oversimplified footnotes, as if we suffer from the
delusion that such vague notes do justice to the evidence. Let us acknowledge that it is original – and
may we therefore be inclined to forgive, and to yearn for the forgiveness of
those who do not know their Master’s will.
14 comments:
This was a great exposition, James. Thanks for this amazing research.
Another homerun for Jesus and his word. Thanks James. You should debate mr James White on some of these matters; and while you're at it throw Dr. Dan Wallace in the mix. The body of christ needs your counter-balance to the current text-critical stant that embraces all things said by Metzger and Aland.
Thanks man, It requires a brotherly love. Pray for Sir James White.
God bless you guys
Isn't it true that the saying floats about in different manuscripts of the different Gospels (not just in Luke) and at different locations? If so, doesn't that suggest it's not part of Luke's autograph?
Also, just because a church father quotes the saying, it doesn't necessarily mean he's quoting any of the Gospels or even specifically the Gospel of Luke. Unless he indicates he's quoting a Gospel it's possible that he's citing a claimed or well known Dominical agraphon.
Thanks very much, James. That removed my doubt.
To be fair, it's approved that the saying matched with the gospel of Luke theological theme and connecting theme Luke trying to do in Acts. Even Bart Ehrman, the skeptic, agree with the theory that this is likely not an addition, but rather removal because of anti-Judaic sentiment.
https://ehrmanblog.org/did-jesus-pray-father-forgive-them-from-the-cross/
Luke 23:34a - Answering the Apologists (Part 1):
https://www.thetextofthegospels.com/2017/04/luke-2334a-answering-apologists-part-1.html?m=1
Thank you for your scholarly contribution to this topic. Another possibility that strikes me as at least plausible is that Luke, as a historian, could easily have known about the tradition and possibly omitted it from his account because he couldn’t substantiate it. However, because there is good reason to believe that Paul perhaps refers to Luke in 2Co 8:18 as “the brother whose fame in the things of the gospel has spread through all the churches”, it is possible that after penning the gospel bearing his name that Luke made many copies for distribution to the churches, from which his fame came. In the course of making those copies, is it not conceivable that various edits were made, just as authors may do today as new information becomes available that may update their work? Hence, it seems possible to me that later copies from Luke’s own hand included the statement after he became convinced of its authenticity. That's probably not very satisfying to some people's theology of scripture, but it seems both reasonable and human, and would easily explain the omission from some early manuscripts.
Not sure how to not post anonymously on this blog, but for more information about my understanding that Paul has Luke in mind in 2Co 8:18 in the post above, please see the first several paragraphs at my website https://inductivebible.org/?page_id=1523. CB.
Also, pardon me to come back at this. I already asked Mr James Snapp Jr and he confirmed to me that it (The prayer) didn't floating around on different manuscripts and locations.
For further, you can also read this research paper by Nathan Eubank regarding this. It's really extensive and also run deeper into the examination:
https://www.academia.edu/2190430/_A_Disconcerting_Prayer_On_the_Originality_of_Luke_23_34a_Journal_of_Biblical_Literature_129_2010_521-536
Also a research paper by Wesley Huff which did the same here:
https://www.academia.edu/35543936/Forgiveness_in_Luke_Acts_A_Close_Examination_of_the_Passion_Saying_of_Luke_23_34a_and_the_Prayer_of_Stephen_During_His_Martyrdom_in_Acts_7_60
Their research supported what Mr James Snapp explained on both of his posts (Part 1 & 2) here.
There is also an article with full citations in EvidenceforChristianity website that supports Mr James Snapp Jr research here:
https://evidenceforchristianity.org/is-luke-2334a-part-of-the-original-book-of-luke/
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