The first phrase in Mark 6:22 says different things depending on which version is read:
Mark 6:22 (NET): “When his daughter Herodias34 came
in and danced . . .”
Mark 6:22 (NRSV): “When his daughter Herodiasq came in and danced . . .”
Mark 6:22 (NIV): “When the daughter ofa Herodias came in and danced . . .”
Mark 6:22 (NRSV): “When his daughter Herodiasq came in and danced . . .”
Mark 6:22 (NIV): “When the daughter ofa Herodias came in and danced . . .”
Mark 6:22 (CSB®): “When
Herodias’ own daughterp
came in and danced . . .”
Mark 6:22 (ESV): “For when Herodias’ daughter came in and danced . . .”
Mark 6:22 (ESV): “For when Herodias’ daughter came in and danced . . .”
Mark 6:22 (KJV): “And when the daughter of the said Herodias
came in, and danced . . .”
Whose
daughter danced for Herod? Was it his
own daughter, or the daughter of Herodias?
The first-century historian Josephus
reports (in Antiquities of the Jews,
Book 18)) that Herodias’ daughter was named Salome and that she was Herod’s
grand-niece, not his daughter. Matthew
14:6 affirms that she was Herodias’ daughter.
Not only was the dancer not Herod’s physical daughter; she
was not Herod’s daughter under Mosaic Law, either: her mother Herodias, after marrying Herod II
(the son of Herod the Great and Mariamne II), had divorced him, and – against
Jewish Law – married his brother, Herod Antipas. As Josephus
stated: “Herodias took it upon herself
to confound the laws of our country, and divorced herself from her husband
while he was alive, and was married to Herod Antipas.” It was because of this violation of Jewish
law that John the Baptist, according to Matthew 14:3-4 and Mark 6:17-18, had
spoken out against the unlawful marriage – with the result that Herod Antipas
had John the Baptist imprisoned.
With that background in mind, we come to the textual
problem. As the superscripted numbers
and letters in the NET, NRSV, NIV, and CSB suggest, the difference in these
translations’ rendering of Mark 6:22 is due to a difference in
manuscripts. The footnotes in the NRSV,
the NIV, and CSB are (as usual) too vague to do much more than confuse their
readers.
Quite a bit more data is found
in the NET’s textual note, in which the annotator explains that the NET’s
editors chose to have their translation say that the dancer was Herod’s daughter despite the “historical difficulties” that it involves. Or to put it another way: even though Matthew says that Herodias was
the dancer’s mother, the NET’s editors chose to adopt the reading in which Mark
says otherwise, because it is the most difficult reading – difficult, because it is erroneous – and thus the reading which copyists were most likely to alter.
(By the way: what
are the odds that the similarity between Metzger’s references to “historical
and contextual difficulties” and “external attestation” in his comment on this
variant-unit, and the NET annotator’s references to “historical difficulties”
and “external attestation,” rather than being sheer coincidence, is the result
of the NET’s annotator attempting to summarize Metzger’s comments? Rather high I think.)
Let’s take a look at the rival variants that are found in
Mark 6:22:
● τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτου Ἡρῳδιάδος – “his daughter Herodias” – is supported by À B D L Δ 238 and 565.
● τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτου Ἡρῳδιάδος – “his daughter Herodias” – is supported by À B D L Δ 238 and 565.
● τῆς θυγατρὸς τῆς Ἡρῳδιάδος
– “the daughter of Herodias” – is supported by family 1, 15 minuscules, and by four
Old Latin manuscripts (aur, b, c,
and f – that is, VL 15 (Codex Aureus
Holmiensis, copied c. 775), VL 4 (Codex Veronensis, copied at the end of the
400s), VL 6 (Codex
Colbertinus, copied in the 1100s), and VL 10 (Codex Brixianus, copied in
the 500s)). Allied with them, according
to the textual apparatus in the fourth edition of the UBS Greek New Testament, are the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript, the
Peshitta, the Palestinian Aramaic version, the Sahidic version, the Bohairic
version, the Gothic version, the Armenian version, the Old Georgian version, and
the Ethiopic version.
● τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτῆς τῆς
Ἡρῳδιάδος – “the daughter of Herodias herself” or “the daughter of this same
Herodias” – is supported by about 99% of the Greek manuscripts of Mark,
including Codices A C K M N U Γ Θ Π fam-13, 33, 157, 579, 700, 892, 1010, 1195,
1241, 1424, and 2474. Allied with this
mainly (but by no means exclusively) Byzantine army of witnesses are the
Harklean Syriac (produced in 616), the Vulgate (produced in 383), and Old Latin
manuscripts a, d, ff2, i, l, q,
and r1 – that is, VL 3
(Codex Vercellensis, copied in the late 300s), VL 5 (the Latin section of Codex
Bezae, copied in the 400s or 500s), VL 8 (Codex Corbeiensis
Secundus, copied in the 400s), VL 17 (Codex Vindobonensis, copied in the
late 400s), VL 11 (Codex Rehdigeranus, copied in the early 700s), Codex
Monacensis, copied in the 500s or 600s), and VL 14 (Codex
Usserianus Primus, copied c. 600).
● τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτῆς
Ἡρῳδιάδος – “her daughter Herodias” – is supported by Codex W and a smattering
of minuscules.
The Byzantine reading, supported by a very wide array of evidence, including hundreds of Greek MSS. |
It
should be noted that the second reading (“the daughter of Herodias”) and the third
reading (“the daughter of Herodias herself”) mean basically the same thing. Both refer to the dancer as the daughter of
Herodias. Only the first reading says
that the dancer was the daughter of Herod – a claim that appears to contradict
both Matthew 14:6 and Josephus’ statements.
In other words, by adopting this reading, the Nestle-Aland/UBS editors
appear to have placed an erroneous statement into the text.
Why,
then, did the editors of the current edition of the Nestle-Aland compilation
adopt a reading which makes Mark appear to contradict his fellow-evangelist
Matthew and the historical data from Josephus?
Because textual critics tend to accept the principle that the more
difficult a reading is, the more likely it is to be original – which means in
this case that the first reading is more likely to be original because it is
the variant that copyists would be most likely to attempt to adjust. That, at least, was the reasoning at the
conclusion of the NET’s defense of the reading:
“It most likely gave rise to the other readings as scribes sought to
correct it.” (So much for the annotator’s “embarrassment of
riches,” when he declares that at this point in the text, 99.9% of the coins in
the treasury are most likely counterfeit!)
The "his daughter" variant in Codex 037. |
Neverthless,
Metzger, instead of promoting the reading with αὐτου on internal grounds,
stated that the UBS Committee narrowly decided in its favor due to the external evidence, stating in his Textual Commentary, “A majority of the
Committee decided, somewhat reluctantly, that the reading with αὐτου [i.e., the
first reading], despite the historical and contextual difficulties, must be
adopted on the strength of its external attestation.” This illustrates that “reasoned eclectic”
approach of the UBS editors is, to a very large extent, eclectic in name only,
favoring the joint testimony of a very small team of manuscripts over virtually
everything else.
The Tyndale House edition of the Greek
New Testament, however, reads τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτῆς τῆς Ἡρῳδιάδος (“the
daughter of Herodias herself”), and its apparatus does not even include an
entry to alert readers of the existence that a textual contest exists at this
point. Many other compilations of the
Greek New Testament agree with the reading in the Tyndale House edition at this
point, including not only the Robinson-Pierpont
Byzantine Textform, but also the Greek New Testament compilations prepared
by J. M. A. Scholz (1829), by Karl Lachmann (1831), by J. M. S. Baljon (1898),
by Eberhard Nestle (1904), by Alexander Souter (1910), and the 1969 edition of
the Nestle-Aland compilation.
In
addition, when we compare the four rival readings side-by-side –
● τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτου
Ἡρῳδιάδος
● τῆς θυγατρὸς τῆς Ἡρῳδιάδος
● τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτῆς τῆς
Ἡρῳδιάδος
● τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτῆς
Ἡρῳδιάδος
– it becomes clear that the
second and fourth readings can be explained as the effects of momentary carelessness
on the part of copyists whose exemplars contained the third reading: the second reading was produced by a copyist
who accidentally omitted αὐτῆς when his line of sight drifted from the ς at the
end of θυγατρὸς, and the fourth reading was produced by a copyist who
accidentally omitted τῆς when his line of sight drifted from the ς at the end
of αὐτῆς to the ς at the end of τῆς.
Thus all of the witnesses for the second, third, and fourth reading may
be considered allies which favor τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτῆς τῆς Ἡρῳδιάδος, directly or
indirectly.
Yet
the NET’s annotator claims that this is not adequate external support. Whatever approach is reflected by such claims,
it is not really eclecticism.
Some
clarity about the reliability of the main witnesses for the reading with αὐτου
(“his”) in 6:22 may be gained by considering some of their readings in nearby
passages.
■ In
6:17, the copyist of Codex
Vaticanus did not include the words τὴν γυναῖκα (the words are added in the
margin by a corrector).
■ In
6:22b, À B C* L Δ and 33 and a smattering of minuscules read
ἤρεσεν instead of καὶ ἀρεσάσης which is supported by all other Greek
manuscripts. The editors of the
Nestle-Aland/UBS compilation preferred the Alexandrian reading here – and in
doing so, they rejected the testimony of Papyrus 45, the earliest
manuscript of this part of the Gospel of Mark.
Although P45 is extensively damaged in chapter 6, this reading is
preserved. This constitutes an agreement
between the Byzantine Text and the earliest manuscript of this part of
Mark.
■ In
6:22c, the words in the opening
phrase are transposed and slightly different in Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, C* L and
Δ – ὁ δὲ βασιλεὺς εἶπεν – instead of the usual εἶπεν ὁ βασιλεὺς. These manuscripts disagree with the word-order
in the earliest manuscript, Papyrus 45, in which ν [the final surviving letter
of εἶπεν] ὁ Ἡρώδης was written before Ἡρώδης was corrected (above the line) to βασιλεὺς.
In all three of these variant-units, the SBL-GNT, compiled by Michael Holmes,
supports the Byzantine reading. So does
the Tyndale House GNT. The SBLGNT also
reads τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτῆς τῆς Ἡρῳδιάδος (the daughter of Herodias herself). Clearly not everyone is convinced that the
Alexandrian witnesses are especially reliable in this particular passage.
Having
established that the support for τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτου Ἡρῳδιάδος is extremely
limited, and that the supportive manuscripts seem to be less reliable than
usual elsewhere in the verse, let’s turn to a couple of issues concerning the internal
evidence.
First,
how would copyists start with τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτῆς τῆς Ἡρῳδιάδος and end up with
τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτου Ἡρῳδιάδος? Such a
transition is not difficult if an early copyist had an exemplar with the
reading found in Codex W (τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτῆς Ἡρῳδιάδος), and, with Herod
prominent in his mind as the focus of the previous verse, inattentively wrote
αὐτου instead of αὐτῆς. The few
subsequent copyists who preserved the resultant reading τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτου
Ἡρῳδιάδος rationalized that Mark must have used the term “daughter” to refer to
a step-daughter, and that the dancer, like several members of Herod’s extended
family, shared a name with another family-member.
Second,
is it plausible that Mark wrote τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτου Ἡρῳδιάδος? The answer is firmly no. Introducing the dancer as Herod’s daughter,
fully aware that she was Herodias’ daughter (as Mark affirms in 6:24),
immediately after explaining that Herod’s marriage to Herodias was not valid,
would be like saying that a man and a woman were committing adultery, and then
saying that the woman’s daughter was nevertheless the daughter of the adulterer –
and that she happened to have the same name as the adulteress. It is extremely unlikely that Mark would ever
drop such a statement upon his readers without explanation; it is much more
likely that an early copyist made a simple mistake, which a small number of
disciplined copyists perpetuated.
Third,
how would copyists be likely to adjust the text if they found τῆς θυγατρὸς
αὐτου Ἡρῳδιάδος in their exemplars and considered such a statement (that the
dancer was Herod’s daughter, and that she was named Herodias) historically
erroneous? Their first resort would be
to conform the Markan text to the parallel-passage in Matthew 14:6 – but such a
conformation to ἡ θυγάτηρ τῆς Ἡρῳδιάδος does not seem to have been attempted by
any copyists. The only obvious scribal
recklessness in Matthew 14:6 is displayed in Codex Bezae, where the text reads
αὐτου (“his”) instead of τῆς, and Ἡρῳδιὰς instead of Ἡρῳδιάδος.
These three considerations in unison attest that the
Byzantine reading at this point in Mark 6:22 is original, and that the
Alexandrian reading is a mistake, albeit not quite so nonsensical that every copyist would recognize it as such. (It might be worth mentioning the possibility, however speculative, that in an ancient exemplar, αὐτου was omitted from verse 21 after μεγιστᾶσιν (an omission attested by Codex Bezae and by MSS 1 and 1582), and after the missing word was supplied in the margin nearby, it was misinterpreted as if it was intended to replace the similar word in verse 22 rather than supplement verse 21.)
Presently,
readers of the CSB and NIV only encounter the English echo of a scribal mistake
in Mark 6:22 in their Bible’s footnotes, and ESV-readers do not encounter it at
all. But as long as these three versions
are subject to constant revision, there is a very real possibility that in a
future edition of the ESV or CSB or NIV, the English text of Mark 6:22 may be
changed to resemble the errant text found in the NET and NRSV, corresponding to the errant text in the Nestle-Aland compilation.
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Thank you for this summary of the evidence. I was reading the NET translation with footnotes and wondering how a rather illogical reading turned out to be accepted as original.
ReplyDeleteIf the Alexandrian ancestor, like Vaticanus, lacked γυναῖκα at Mark 6:17, then it might not have been completely obvious that Herodias had been Philip's wife. In any case, someone might have assumed that a daughter of Herodias would have been daughter to Herod, since Herod was Herodias's husband. Women were usually defined by their relationship to male family members, so it is unsurprising that someone would change αυτης to αυτου. As you know, we see much the same thing in John 11:1, were manuscripts made the identical change, to define Martha as Lazarus's sister, rather than as Mary's sister. So I agree with your conclusion.
ReplyDeleteI like the translation, "her own daughter". Is seems to be saying that the girl was the daughter of Herodias, but NOT of Herod.
I am wondering whether Herod and Herodias in their marriage had children! This would have given us an idea how their children were referred.
ReplyDeleteIn most reading in the bible, I have seen that it is often said: " the wife gave Him a child", which suggest to me that children's relationship is ascribed to their fathers.
But at the same time, it intrigued me why the emphasis or the mention of "Herodias daughter " in a situation where people are in a marriage! Was this mention meant to draw attention that the daughter was not Herod's in his marriage with Herodias?
Hi James,
ReplyDeleteYou blog post gets it right! Thanks! I referred to it in note 18 of my article in TC. See here: http://jbtc.org/v28/index.html
I hope the editors of NA29 will take note.