In the previous post, I described
some passages in the Gospels where the rival variants may receive different
treatment in future editions of the critical text of the Greek New Testament,
and/or in English translations based on it – including a few passages where the
editors may adopt readings with no Greek manuscript-support, as the editors of
the 28th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum
Testamentum Graece recently did in Second Peter 3:10. Today, let’s look at a dozen passages in the
rest of the New Testament which may be similarly vulnerable to the effects of
thoroughgoing eclecticism.
● Acts 6:9 – The scholar Friedrich
Blass (1843-1907), in the course of his detailed study of the Greek text of
the Gospels and Acts, detected something abnormal about the mention of
Libertines in Acts 6:9: why did Luke
resort to Λιβερτίνων, a Latin-based term, rather than simply write Ἀπελεύθεροι? And why, followed by various geographically
based terms, is this one not also geographically based?
Such questions elicited a search for
answers. Blass discovered that he was
not the first reader to hum upon encountering the term Λιβερτίνων in this verse. A long line of researchers, going all the way
back to Beza, had sensed that something about this word was amiss.
Blass was informed by J. Rendel
Harris that in the Armenian version, the reference was not to Libertines, but
to Libyans. How, though, could a
reference to Libyans ever be
misconstrued as Libertines? And if the Armenian version’s base-text had
referred to Libertines, how did the
Armenian version end up with Libyans? With remarkable determination, Blass dug a
little deeper into this puzzle, and discovered, among the Latin poems of
Catullus, the use of a rare term that satisfied his curiosity; transliterated
into Greek, it is Λιβυστίνων – inhabitants of the area west of Cyrene
This conjectural emendation
resembles the extant text; it fits the context, it makes sense, and it
introduces nothing problematic. Future
editors may reason that the rareness of the term Λιβυστίνων provoked early
copyists to misread it, and also provoked the translators of the Armenian
version to loosely approximate its meaning with a more familiar term.
● Acts 7:46 – Working within the extant evidence,
textual critics must choose between the statement that David asked to be
allowed to find a dwelling-place for the God
of Jacob (a reading supported by Codices A, C, E, 1739, the vast majority of
manuscripts, and broad versional evidence), or a dwelling-place for the house
of Jacob (which is the reading in the Nestle-Aland compilation, and which is
supported by a small cluster of early manuscripts, including Papyrus 74,
Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Bezae).
The Alexandrian reading is certainly
more difficult, because it seems to say that David asked to build a house for a
house. Even when the second “house” is
understood to refer to the nation descended from Jacob, the problem does not go
away, since the temple was for God, not for the people, who were not looking
for a new residence in the days of David.
The reading οἴκω (“house”) has been
considered too difficult by some textual critics, including Hort, who
wrote in 1881, “οἴκω can hardly be genuine,” but rather than accept the
Byzantine reading, he proposed that probably neither reading is original. Instead, he conjectured that the original
text was τω Κυριω (“the Lord”), which was contracted to ΤΩ ΚΩ, which was
misread by inattentive copyists as ΤΩΟΙΚΩ.
If future editors of the Nestle-Aland compilation are unwilling to adopt
Hort’s conjecture, they might at least acknowledge the force of his admission
of the implausibility of the Alexandrian reading, and adopt the other reading,
for which the diversity of the external support is very impressive.
● Acts 12:25 – In the description of the action taken by Barnabas and
Saul in this verse, there is a four-horse race, so to speak:
ἀπο Ἰερουσαλὴμ (“from Jerusalem”),
supported by Codex D, Ψ, 614, several Old Latin copies, a significant minority
of Byzantine manuscripts, the Vulgate, et
al.
εἰς Ἰερουσαλὴμ (“to Jerusalem
ἐξ Ἰερουσαλὴμ (“from Jerusalem
ἐξ Ἰερουσαλὴμ εἰς Ἀντιόχιαν (“from Jerusalem Antioch
The most difficult option is the
variant with εἰς, because (1) when
last seen in the narrative (in 11:30 ), Paul and Barnabas were already going to
Jerusalem Antioch Jerusalem NASB states, “And Barnabas and Saul returned
from Jerusalem ESV reads identically (as of 10:00 p.m. , August 4, 2017 ):
“And Barnabas and Saul returned from Jerusalem Jerusalem
Nobody (other than avid advocates of
the Peshitta) seems to think that the longest reading is original, because it
looks like just the sort of textual adjustment that a copyist might make to alleviate
a difficulty. The contest, then, is between
εἰς, ἐξ, and ἀπο. Theoretically, if, in
a scriptorium where a group of copyists worked from dictation, their supervisor
read ἐξ, a copyist could mishear it as εἰς – but the theory works as well in
the opposite direction.
Thoroughgoing eclecticism turns the
race into a five-horse contest. Hort
suggested in 1881 that the original word-order has been garbled by copyists,
and that the original text read τὴν εἰς Ἰερουσαλὴμ πληρώσαντες διακονίαν, so as
to merely report that Barnabas and Saul returned, having completed their
service in Jerusalem. F. F. Bruce, whose
confident
comments about the reliability of New Testament manuscripts have been
thoroughly recycled by many apologists, did not refuse to embrace a conjectural
emendation in this passage; he held that in the original text there was no
prepositional phrase at all, and that marginal glosses have impacted the text
in Acts 12:25 in all extant manuscripts.
Although textual critics often regard a higher degree of difficulty as a quality of the most-likely-original reading, it is possible
that future editors may regard the currently printed reading here as simply too difficult, and either adopt ἐξ, or
adopt ἀπο, or resort to conjectural emendation.
● Acts 20:28 – Bruce Metzger dedicated a full two pages of his Textual Commentary to a consideration of
this passage. The initial question is,
did the original text refer to “the church of God
If that contest is decided in favor
of Θεοῦ (on the grounds that this is supported by ﬡ, B, the Vulgate, the
Peshitta, and a significant minority of Byzantine manuscripts, including the Textus Receptus), then a second question
arises: did Luke report that Paul stated
that God purchased the church with His own blood? Many an apologist has used this verse to
demonstrate Paul’s advocacy of the divinity of Christ, inasmuch it was neither
the Father, nor the Spirit, whose blood was shed. Hort, however, expressed a suspicion (which,
it seems, was first
expressed in 1797 by Georg Christian Knapp) that at the end of the verse,
following the words διὰ τοῦ αἴματος τοῦ ἰδίου (“through His own blood”), there
was originally the word υἱοῦ (“Son”).
It is possible that future editors,
may decide that the inclusion of υἱοῦ in this verse is required by internal
evidence, and that it is feasible that the word υἱοῦ was accidentally lost very
early via a common parableptic error (when a copyist’s line of sight drifted
from the letters ΙΟΥ at the end of ἰδίου to the same letters at the end of υἱοῦ. Already, the Contemporary
English Version, advertised as “an
accurate and faithful translation of the original manuscripts,” has the
word “Son” in its text of Acts 20:28b: “Be like shepherds to God’s church. It is the flock that he bought with the blood
of his own Son.” A footnote informs the
CEV’s readers about the meaning of the extant text.
● First Corinthians 6:5 – The Greek
evidence, from Papyrus 46 to the Textus Receptus, is in agreement about how this
verse ends. However, the Peshitta – a
Syriac version traceable to the late 300’s (followed by a period of
standardization), but possibly earlier – disagrees. The reading in the Peshitta implies that its
Greek base-text included the phrase καὶ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ (“and a brother”).
The momentum for this reading is
drawn from a grammatical oddity in the usual Greek text. The first part of Paul’s statement in this
verse is something to the effect of, “Is there not even one person among you –
just one! – who shall be able to judge between” – and that’s where the
difficulty appears, because the Greek text just mentions one brother, whereas
the idea of judgment between two parties seems to demand that more than one
brother should be mentioned.
The KJV’s translators, although the Textus Receptus reads ἀνα μέσον τοῦ
ἀδελφοῦ αὐτοῦ (“between his brother” – which is clearly singular), concludes
the verse with “between his brethren” (which is clearly plural). The NET
is similar (“between fellow Christians”); the difference is due to the NET ’s enlightened gender-neutral treatment of
the term ἀδελφοῦ, not to any new feature in the Greek base-text. The CSB,
the NIV,
and even the NASB
likewise render the text as if the verse ends with a plural word rather than a
singular one. All such treatments of the
text make the problem all the obvious:
the first part of the sentence, in Greek, anticipates two brothers, while the second part of
the sentence mentions only one.
In light of such strong internal
evidence, Michael
Holmes, the compiler of the SBLGNT, recommended the adoption of a conjectural
emendation at this point, so that καὶ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ (“and the brother”) appears
at the very end of the verse. It is
possible that future compilers of the Nestle-Aland text will concur. If that happens, it will have hardly any
effect on English translations, most of which already translate the passage as
if the wording proposed by Dr. Holmes is extant in the manuscripts.
● Galatians 4:25 – For almost 300 years, a scholarly debate has orbited part
of this verse. The phrase “Now this
Hagar is Mount
Sinai in Arabia ” is presently in the Nestle-Aland
compilation (as τὸ δὲ Ἁγὰρ Σινᾶ ὅρος ἐστιν ἐν τῇ Ἀραβίᾳ, though this is
contested by four slightly different rival forms). However, it has been proposed that the entire
phrase originated as a marginal note, and does not belong in the text. This
conjecture goes back at least as far as Richard Bentley
(a gifted British cleric, 1662-1742, who advanced the field of New Testament
textual criticism more than anyone else in his generation). Recently Stephen
Carlson, who has conducted a
stemmatics-based analysis of the text of Galatians, has argued in favor of
the same idea. (Robert Waltz, however,
retained the phrase in his
compilation of the text of Galatians.)
If future editors of NTG concur with Carlson, the phrase might be exiled
to the footnotes.
 |
| A Syriac manuscript at Saint Catherine's Monastery displays an adjustment of the text of Hebrews 2:9. (Charley Ellis pointed out this feature of the MS to me.) |
● Hebrews 2:9 – In Bart Ehrman’s 2005 book Misquoting Jesus, the author noted that
instead of reading χάριτι θεοῦ (“by the grace of God”), a smattering of
witnesses supports χωρὶς θεοῦ (“without God”).
Origen, in the 200’s, was aware of both variants. Opposing an array of witnesses that includes
Papyrus 46, Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Claromontanus, the Byzantine Text, and broad
versional support, Ehrman proposed that χωρὶς θεοῦ was the original reading,
and that an early copyist altered the text so that it said something less
provocative – and this unknown copyist was so influential that his alteration
has affected almost all extant Greek copies of Hebrews.
As Ehrman noted in his book, the
existence of the variant χωρὶς θεοῦ has been accounted for by some textual
critics via the idea that it was written in the margin by someone who intended
for the phrase to be a qualification of the sentiment of the preceding verse –
the idea being that all things except God
were subject to the authority of Christ – an exception mentioned by Paul in
First Corinthians 15:27. Resisting this
proposal, Ehrman objected that if this had been an annotator’s intent, “Would
he not have written “except for God” (EKTOS THEOU – the phrase that actually
occurs in the I Corinthians passage) rather than “apart from God (CHŌRIS THEOU
– a phrase not found in I Corinthians)?”
Ehrman’s objection loses much force
when one observes that the phrase EKTOS THEOU does not, in fact, occur anywhere
in First Corinthians. Ehrman also
overstates the evidence when he claims that “Origen tells us that this [χωρὶς
θεοῦ] was the reading of the majority of manuscripts in his own day,” for Origen cites this reading
and then says that some copies have the other reading, χάριτι θεοῦ; nowhere
does Origen say that his collection of manuscripts at Caesarea was typical of
the manuscripts of Hebrews that existed throughout the world. Most readers of Ehrman’s book, however, will
probably not double-check his confidently worded assertions.
Centuries ago, the devout scholar John
Bengel (1687-1752) cautiously favored the reading χωρὶς θεοῦ and argued that
its meaning is not scandalous, but theologically profound. Bengel proposed that it was intended to mean
that the Son of God, and not God the Father,
tasted death for everyone – an idea that is consistent with the text of Hebrews
1:3, where, in Papyrus 46 and the Byzantine Text, Jesus is said to have made
atonement by Himself.
Another theory, wounded but not
killed by the grammatical quirk that it involves, proposes that χωρὶς θεοῦ is
original, and that the author intended to thus qualify the words ὑπὲρ παντὸς
(“for all”), so as to convey the idea that Christ tasted death for everyone except God. This is how Origen interpreted this variant,
without dogmatically deciding in favor of either variant.
Meanwhile, F. F.
Bruce proposed an alternative solution:
he conjectured that χωρὶς θεοῦ originated as a note in the margin, and
that subsequently a copyist replaced that note with one that read χάριτι θεοῦ,
and that both readings have slid into the text – in other words, Bruce suspected
that neither phrase is original!
● Hebrews 11:11 –As the list of
variants in the textual apparatus of the STEP-Bible shows, the textual
racetrack in Hebrews 11:11 is crowded with rival variants. This sort of contest is difficult for the
Coherence-Based Genealogical Method – the newly developed mapping-program used
by some of the Nestle-Aland editors – to handle. Researcher J. Harold Greenlee (a scholar in
the same league as Bruce Metzger), proposed
that the original text of this verse did not contain σπεῖρα or ἡ σπεῖρα (that
is, it did not specifically say that Sarah was barren). Michael Holmes’
SBLGNT likewise does not have σπεῖρα or ἡ σπεῖρα in its text.
This constitutes preference for a
Byzantine reading (supported by ﬡ, A, and minuscules 33 and 1175, et al).
The effect of this textual decision (and some nuanced syntax-related
translational decisions) can be seen via a comparison of the text of the NIV
2011 (which adopts it) and the text of the 1973 NIV (which does not):
NIV 1973: “By faith Abraham, even though he was past
age – and Sarah herself was barren – was enabled to become a father because he
considered him faithful who had made the promise.”
NIV
2011: “And by faith even Sarah, who
was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered
him faithful who had made the promise.”
Whether future editors will continue
this trend remains to be seen, particularly because the loss of σπεῖρα can be
attributed to parableptic error, when a copyist’s like of sight drifted from
the last two letters of Σάρρα
(“Sarah”) to the same two letters in σπεῖρα
(“barren”).
● Hebrews 11:37 – In the list of the sufferings of spiritual heroes, one of
those things is not like the others:
they are all somewhat unusual experiences, except for ἐπειράσθησαν,
“they were tempted.” Some textual
critics have suspected that this word originated when a copyist committed
dittography – writing twice what should be written once; in this case, the
preceding word ἐπρίσθησαν (“they were sawn in two”), and that subsequent copyists,
not realizing the mistake in their exemplar, changed it into something
meaningful. Others have thought that
this relatively common term replaced one that was less common – perhaps ἐπάθησαν
(“they were pierced”) or ἐπράσθησαν (“they were sold”).
Presently the Nestle-Aland
compilation, deviating from the 25th edition, simply does not include
ἐπειράσθησαν in the text, adopting instead the reading of Papyrus 46, which is
very ancient. Papyrus 13, however, is
also very ancient, and appears to support the inclusion of ἐπειράσθησαν, in
which case it has a very impressive array of allies. I would advise readers to not get used to the
NTG ’s current form of this verse, for it
seems to be merely a place-holder that might be blown away by the appearance of
even the slightest new evidence, and even by an intrinsically appealing
conjecture.
● First Peter 3:19 – What may be the most popular conjectural
emendation of all time was favored by the erudite textual expert J. Rendel
Harris (1852-1941), who encountered a form of it in William Bowyer’s 1782 book Critical Conjectures and Observations on
the New Testament. The extant text of First Peter 3:19 says, “in
which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison.” Verse 18 refers to Christ, and nobody else is
introduced into the text, so verse 19 has been interpreted to mean that during
the time between Jesus’ death and resurrection, He visited the realm of the
dead – specifically visiting the spirits of those who had been disobedient in
the days of Noah, prior to the great flood – and delivered a message (ἐκήρυξεν)
to them.
Harris, however, proposed that the
original text was different. He thought
that Peter had in mind a scene that is related in the pseudepigraphical amalgamation known as the Book of Enoch (the first section of which is quoted by Jude in verses 14-15 of his epistle), in which Enoch
is depicted delivering a message of condemnation to the fallen spirits who
corrupted human beings so thoroughly that the great flood was introduced as the
means of amputating the moral infection they had induced.
Specifically, what Harris proposed
was that the opening words of the original text of 3:19 were ἐν ᾧ καὶ Ἐνώχ (“in which also
Enoch”), thus assigning the subsequent action not to Christ, but to Enoch. (A variation on this idea is that the
original text read Ἐνώχ instead of ἐν ᾧ καὶ.)
(It should, perhaps, be noted that
Irenaeus, in Against Heresies Book 4,16:2, took for granted the veracity of the tradition that Enoch had brought
God’s message to fallen angels; these fallen angels being the “sons of God”
mentioned in Genesis 6:2-4.)
How could the name “Enoch” have
fallen out of the sentence? In two ways:
1. If the original text were simply Ἐνώχ (without
ἐν ᾧ καὶ), then, in uncial letters, the χ was susceptible to being misread as a
και-compendium (that is, a common abbreviation for the word και (“and”)). A copyist could easily decide to write the
whole word instead of the abbreviation, and thus Enoch’s name would become ἐν ᾧ
καὶ.
2. If the original text were ἐν ᾧ καὶ Ἐνώχ, a
copyist, reading the χ as a και-compendium, could assume that the scribe who
made his exemplar had inadvertently repeated three words, and, attempting a
correction, remove “Ἐνώχ.”
Against
the charge that the introduction of Enoch’s name “disturbs the otherwise smooth
context” (as
Metzger claimed in 1963) the answer may be given that a reference to Enoch
is not out of place, inasmuch as Enoch’s story sets the stage for the story of
Noah and his family, whose deliverance through water Peter frames as a sort of
pattern of the salvation of the church.
Future compilers willing to
engage in conjectural emendation might consider the internal arguments in favor
of the inclusion of Enoch’s name in First Peter 3:19 to be too attractive to
resist. If that turns out to be the
case, then it would certainly have some doctrinal impact, significantly diminishing the Biblical basis for the phrase “He descended into hell” found in the “Apostles’ Creed.”
● Jude verses 22-23 – Even though Tommy
Wasserman has collated every known Greek manuscript of the book of Jude,
plenty of questions remain about how that data should be interpreted. Like Hebrews 11:11, verses 22-23 of the Epistle of Jude verse have multiple rival variants. Here
I shall spare readers the fine details of the case, and simply note that it is
possible that future editors may discern here a threefold command, and that the
first command from Jude is to refute (ἐλέγχετε) those who cause divisions. Some copyists, with the earlier mention of mercy in verse 21
(ἔλεος) fresh in their minds, may have allowed their memory of it to complete the similarly started word in verse 22.
The reading with ἐλέγχετε is
supported not only by Codices A and C* but also by members of
manuscript-clusters represented by
minuscule 1739 and minuscule 1611; both of these clusters have special
weight (as the echoes of distinct and ancient transmission-lines) in the
Catholic (General) Epistles. Even though
the Nestle-Aland editors have already sifted through the text of Jude, they
might take another look at this variation-unit.
● Revelation 7:6 – More
than one commentator on the book of Revelation has admitted to being puzzled by
a feature of the list of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel
A conjectural emendation answers
both of those questions: in the original
text, the last portion of verse 6 did not refer to the tribe of Manasseh, but
to the otherwise unmentioned tribe of Dan, and an early copyist misread ΔΑΝ as
ΜΑΝ, and understood it to be an abbreviation of Manasseh’s name. Thus ΜΑΝ originated, and different copyists
with different orthography proceeded to spell out the name. The Bohairic version supports this idea; in
this verse the Bohairic text does not refer to Manasseh, but to Dan. Perhaps future advocates of thoroughgoing eclecticism, on the strength of
the Bohairic reading’s intrinsic appeal, will bring ΔΑΝ into the text.
In Conclusion . . .
Some readers, looking over these
passages, and the passages from the Gospels described in the preceding post, may
feel a measure of consternation, particularly because seven of them – in
Matthew 1:16, Matthew 28:19, Mark 1:1, John 1:18, Acts 20:28, Hebrews 2:9, and
First Peter 3:19 – have been used as a basis for establishing doctrine. However, only in the case of First Peter
3:19, and the teaching that Christ visited imprisoned spirits, could it be
argued that a doctrine stands or falls on the acceptance or rejection of a
particular reading or conjecture (and even then, a case could be made that Paul
teaches essentially the same doctrine in Ephesians 3:9-10, minus the
specificity in First Peter).
(Apologists for Islam may sense a different sort of consternation, inasmuch as even with the allowance of conjectural emendation in the picture, the application of thoroughgoing eclecticism elicits nothing remotely close to the level of textual alteration that would bring the doctrinal teachings of the New Testament into harmony with the teachings of the Quran. The charge, often made by Muslim apologists, that the New Testament agreed with the Quran until Christian copyists altered the text of the New Testament, simply lacks a historical foundation.)
It is sometimes said (because Bruce Metzger said it) that New Testament
textual criticism is both an art and a science. But it should be all science, and not art, because it is an enterprise of
reconstruction, not construction. Its
methods may validly be creative and inventive – even intuitive – but not its
product. Conjectural emendation is the
only aspect of textual criticism that involves the researcher’s artistic or
creative skill.
No conjectural emendation should
ever be placed in a compilation of the text of the Greek New Testament. At the same time, the task of proposing possible readings which account for
their rivals, or which otherwise resolve perceived oddities in the extant text,
serves a valuable purpose: to
demonstrate the enormous weight of the intrinsic evidence in favor of such readings in the
event that they are ever discovered in a Greek manuscript.
_______________
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Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, is Copyright © 2005 by Bart D. Ehrman, and published by HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York. All rights reserved.
