John 17:9 - A Glitch in the Matrix

          In John 17:8 there is an interesting textual variant which, as far as I know, receives no attention in the footnotes of any major English translation.  It is not noticed in the UBS Greek New Testament (4^th edition), although Metzger made a brief commend about it in his Textual Commentary on the GNT.

          Following ἔλαβον, the words καὶ ἔγνωσαν (“and knew”) are absent in ﬡ*, A, D, W, 0211, pc, a, d, e, q, ac², vg^ms, pbo, and the Gothic version.  The Old Latin presented with Beuron numbers = VL 3 (Vercellensis), VL 5 (Bezae), VL 2 (Palatinus) VL 13 (Frisingensis/Monacensis) and VL 16 (Fragmenta Curiensa).

          This has to have been a very early variant, considering that it somehow spread to early representatives of Alexandrian, Western, and Byzantine transmission-lines. Since there is more or less no way to connect these particular witnesses closely through a textual relationship, logic seems to require positing a scenario in which the omission of καὶ ἔγνωσαν was elicited in the minds of two or more scribes independently in separate transmission-lines.  In other words, more than one early scribe fell to the temptation to relieve a perceived difficulty by removing the ostensibly problematic text.  The suspicion of Marie-Joseph Lagrange – that καὶ ἔγνωσαν was omitted because it seemed to collide with John 6:69 – is probably correct.