Today’s hand-to-hand combat is a contest between the famous
and the infamous. In one corner is
Codex Alexandrinus (A, 02), a very important uncial manuscript of the Bible produced in the
400’s. Codex Alexandrinus’ Gospels-text
(which begins in Matthew 25:6; the pages are not extant up to that point) is
essentially Byzantine and thus Codex A constitutes the earliest
manuscript-support for many Byzantine readings.
In Acts and the General Epistles, Codex A’s text tends to be
Alexandrian. And for Revelation, Codex A
is regarded by many researchers as the best manuscript we have (though it is not perfect).
Codex A came to the attention of European scholars in 1627,
when it was presented to Charles I of
England
as a gift from
Cyril Lucar, patriarch of
Constantinople. (Ambassador-explorer
Thomas Roe was instrumental in the delivery
of the manuscript, which Lucar had intended to give to James I, who died before
the manuscript arrived in
England.) Although at some previous time the codex was,
according to a note in the manuscript, kept at
Alexandria,
this does not require that it was produced in
Alexandria. (One may wonder, had the codex arrived 20
years earlier, what its influence on the King James Version might have been.)
In the other corner is
Codex Montfortianus (61), a
manuscript which was probably made around 1520. It is presently housed at
Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Minuscule 61 is thus a few years younger than the earliest printed
compilations of the Greek New Testament!
Such a late manuscript would normally be little-known, but Codex
Montfortianus played an interesting role in a controversy about the
Comma Johanneum that occurred following
the publication of Erasmus’ first edition of the printed Greek New
Testament.
Erasmus’
first (
1516) and second (1519) editions of the Greek New Testament did
not include the
Comma Johanneum in
the text of First John. The
Comma Johanneum, which refers to the
Father, Word, and Holy Spirit as three heavenly witnesses, had become very
popular in
Europe due to its inclusion in medieval
editions of the Vulgate. Some scholars (especially
Edward Lee and Jacobus Stunica) protested against Erasmus’ non-inclusion of the
Comma Johanneum. The late Bruce Metzger wrote that in
response, “In an unguarded moment Erasmus promised that he would insert the
Comma Johanneum, as it is called, in future editions if a single Greek
manuscript could be found that contained the passage.” James White has similarly stated that
“Erasmus had promised, in his response to Lee, to include the passage should a
Greek manuscript be found that contained it.”
That story has been circulated by many commentators. (Even
Samuel Tregelles spread this story, back in the 1800’s.) However, researcher
Henk de Jonge, via
a detailed direct study of the relevant compositions, has shown that Erasmus never
made the promise described by Metzger, White, and many others. Instead, Erasmus, in a letter written in May
of 1520, in the course of explaining why he had not included the
Comma Johanneum, stated, “If a single
manuscript had come into my hands which attested to what we read [in the
Vulgate], then I would certainly have used it to fill in what was missing in
the other manuscripts I had.”
Erasmus also stated that Edward Lee did not have a valid
reason to accuse Erasmus of negligence in this regard;
de Jonge provides
Erasmus’ retort: “What sort of indolence
is that, if I did not consult the manuscripts which I could not manage to
have? At least, I collected as many as I
could. Let Lee produce a Greek
manuscript in which are written the words lacking in my edition, and let him
prove that I had access to this manuscript, and then let him accuse me of
indolence.”
Shortly after this exchange between Edward Lee and
Desiderius Erasmus, the existence of Codex Montfortianus, and the inclusion of the
Comma Johanneum in its text of First John, were pointed out to Erasmus. Erasmus never made a promise to include the
Comma Johanneum in a future edition of
the Greek New Testament if a Greek manuscript containing it could be found; he
merely insisted that he could not validly be accused of omitting it in his
first two editions due to negligence, because he had not found it in the
manuscripts accessible to him. However,
it is also clear that because of Erasmus’ statement that he would have included
the
Comma Johanneum if he had found
it in a single manuscript, Erasmus could easily anticipate in 1522 that if he
were to omit the
Comma Johanneum in
his third edition, after being informed of the existence of a Greek manuscript
that contained the passage, he would certainly be accused of inconsistency,
having already stated that if he had possessed a single Greek manuscript with
the passage, he would have included it.
Erasmus consequently included the
Comma Johanneum in
subsequent editions (with some adjustments to its text). It was also included in the editions of Stephanus and Beza
later in the 1500’s – and thus it was in the base-text used by the translators
of the
Geneva Bible and the
King James Version. So although
minuscule 61 is relatively unimportant as far as most other passages of the New
Testament are concerned, in First John 5:7-8 its impact has been enormous.
J. Rendel Harris, in 1887, proposed that Codex Montfortianus
was produced – with the
Comma Johanneum
– by a Franciscan monk named William Roy (sometimes called Froy, because, in theory, an abbreviation for
“Fratris” (“brother”) was misinterpreted as part of his name), who
was working at the time under the auspices of Henry Standish, a British bishop
who opposed both Erasmus’ Greek New Testament and the Protestant Reformation in
general. (Froy went on to leave the
Franciscan order in the early 1520’s; he became an assistant of
William Tyndale
for a while, and was eventually martyred, in
Portugal,
in 1531.)
Roy
was in the right place, at the right time, and possessed the necessary training
and resources to produce the manuscript (in which the text of Revelation
appears to have been copied from minuscule 69).
Richard Brynckley (or Brinkley) is another suspect. This erudite scholar was Provincial Minister
from 1518 to 1526, and he had taught at
Cambridge
from 1492 to 1518, when
minuscule 69 was kept there. (Brynckley was at
Cambridge
when Erasmus lived there in 1511-1513, and Erasmus later sent greetings to
Brinkley in a letter to Henry Bullock.)
Grantley McDonald, in a recent book, has recently questioned the
possibility that Brinkley made MS 61, on the grounds that the script that Brinkley used to write his name and title in another manuscript does not match the script in MS
61. However, Brinkley may have been,
like many people, capable of using one kind of script when writing his signature, and another handwriting-style for other purposes.
Yet another suspect is Francis Frowyk.
Grantley McDonald proposes that Harris’
identification of “Froy” as Fratris Roy does not fit the evidence as well as
the identification of Froy with Francis Frowyk, a Franciscan colleague of both
Erasmus and John Clement (one of the owners of MS 69). Frowyk, according to McDonald, visited
Erasmus in August of 1517. Frowyk had
the requisite skill in Greek, and access to minuscule 69, and interest in
Erasmus’ work. It may be that Codex
Monfortianus was produced not by an enemy intent on embarrassing Erasmus, but
by a friend who discerned that an opportunity existed to quietly provide a
resource which would give Erasmus the means to deflect some accusations of
heresy which several critics were making against him.
In any event, without Codex Montfortianus, the Reformation
might have been significantly different.
With all this in the background, we approach the battleground for today's contest: First John 3:1-14 – not far from the passage
for which Codex Montfortianus has become infamous. We shall use, as the basis of comparison, the
text of the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland compilation. Words in brackets will be treated as part of
the text. Transpositions will be
mentioned but not included in the final corruption-count. Abbreviations of sacred names, and other
abbreviations, will not be treated as variants.
In addition, στ (sigma and tau) and ϛ (stau) will be treated as identical, that is, the use of stau in 61 to represent what is
expressed as στ in Codex A will not be considered a variant.
Here are the differences between Codex A and the text of
NA27 in First John 3:1-14.
1 – A has εδωκεν instead of δεδωκεν. (-1)
2 – no differences.
3 – no differences.
4 – no differences.
5 – no differences.
6 – no differences.
7 – A has Παιδια instead of Τεκνια (+4, -4)
7 – A has μη τις instead of μηδεις (+1, -2)
8 – A has δε after ο at the beginning of the verse (+2)
9 – no differences
10 – A has την after ποιων (+3)
11 – A has αγγελεια
instead of αγγελια (+1)
12 – no differences
13 – A does not have Και at the beginning of the verse (-3)
Codex A thus has 11 non-original letters, and is missing 10 original
letters, for a total of 21 letters’ worth of corruption.
Here are the differences between the text of 61 and the text
of NA27 in First John 3:1-14.
(Agreements with the
RP2005 Byzantine Text are marked with a triangle.)
1 – 61 has ιδε instead of ιδετε (-2)
1 – 61 transposes, yielding ο πατηρ ημιν
1 – 61 does not have και
εσμεν (-8) ▲
2 – 61 has ουκ
instead of ουπω (+1, -2)
2 – 61 has δε
after οιδαμεν (+2) ▲
2 – 61 has εστι instead of εστιν (-1)
3 – 61 has αυτος
instead of εκεινος (+3, -5)
3 – 61 has εστι instead of εστιν (-1)
4 – 61 does not have ποιει
(-5)
4 – no differences
5 – 61 has ημων
after αμαρτιας (+4) ▲
5 – 61 has εστι instead of εστιν (-1)
6 – no differences
7 – 61 has εστι instead of εστιν (-1)
8 – 61 has εφανευρωθη
instead of εφανερωθη (+1) [This might be an accent but I was not sure.]
9 – 61 has το before σπερμα (+2)
10 – 61 has εστι instead of εστιν (-1)
10 – 61 has εργα before the first τεκνα (+4)
11 – no differences
12 – 61 has εσφαξε instead of εσφαξεν (-1)
13 – 61 does not have Και at the beginning of the verse (-3) ▲
13 – 61 has μου after αδελφοι (+3) ▲
14 – 61 has τον αδελφον after αγαπων (+10) ▲
Minuscule 61 thus contains, in First John 3:1-14, 30 non-original letters, and is missing 31 original letters, for a total of 61 letters’ worth of
corruption. (If movable-nu variants are removed from
consideration, then 61 has 30 non-original letters, and is missing 25 original
letters, for a total of 55 letters’ worth of corruption.)
RESULTS:
Compared to NA27, Codex A has only 21 letters’ worth of
corruption in First John 3:1-14 – most of which consists of the reading Παιδια (instead
of Τεκνια) in verse 7, την after ποιων in verse 10, and the inclusion of Και at
the beginning of verse 13.
Compared to NA27, 61 has 61 letters’ worth of corruption in
First John 3:1-14 – the biggest differences being the absence of και εσμεν in verse 1, αυτος instead of εκεινος
in verse 3, the absence of ποιει in verse 4, the presence of ημων in verse 5,
and the inclusion of τον αδελφον in verse 14.
This was an easy victory for
Codex Alexandrinus – and the
quality of Codex A’s text increases when NA
28 is the standard of comparison: in NA28, Παιδια was adopted at the beginning
of verse 7. Codex A thus has only
13 letters’ worth of corruption in
First John 3:1-14. (Side-note: I cannot tell why the compilers of
NA-28 kept Και at the beginning of verse 13. If Και is rejected – as it seems to be in the
text of practically all modern English versions – then Codex A’s
corruption-level in these 14 verses decreases to just
10 letters’ worth of
corruption.)
