Glitches in Christ's Genealogy

          The genealogy of Jesus Christ, which appears in Matthew 1:1-17 and the genealogy of Jesus Christ which appears in Luke 3:23-38, may both be skipped by casual Bible-readers, but they are both interesting passages to both the textual critic and the Christian apologist.  Today, let’s look at some of the ways in which copyists treated – and mistreated – parts of these two portions of Scripture.

          Perhaps the most famous variations within the genealogy in Matthew appear at the end of verse 7 and in verse 10.  These were the first two variant-units to be commented upon by the late Bruce Metzger in his Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament.  The Alexandrian text reads Ἀσάφ instead of the Byzantine Ἀσὰ in verse 7, and it reads Ἀμώς instead of Ἀμών in verse 10.    Neither Asaph the psalmist nor Amos the prophet was ever a king of Judah, so the presence of their names in the genealogy is surprising.  If the canon prefer the more difficult reading is applied, in both cases the Alexandrian reading will be adopted.  This was the course taken by Elijah Hixson in 2019, and it has been for over a century the usual decision.   (Hixson briefly described the main external evidence, so in the interest of brevity I will not review that here.)

          I argued in 2012, and again in 2016, however, in favor of Ἀσὰ and Ἀμών, proposing that lectio difficilior potior has been applied here too mechanically. As I showed in 2016, there was quite a bit of orthographic variety in the spelling of names by early Alexandrian copyists.  And I still propose that these erroneous readings originated as an attempt by an early copyist (one with “Western” proclivities) to “pad the resume” of Jesus, by including prophets in his genealogy. 

          Less famous, but no less interesting, is the treatment of Jesus’ genealogy in Luke in Codex Bezae (D, 05).  (Matthew 1 is not extant in D.)  The text in D omits Luke 3:24-31, and has instead the names of the ancestors listed in Matthew 1:6-16, in reverse order (Zadok’s name is not included), and there are other aberrations, including the names Ασαφ and Αμως) before resuming Luke’s list of Jesus’ ancestors in verse 31b.

          In Codex W (032), the genealogy in Luke is missing.  After Joseph’s name in Luke 3:23, the text of 032 simply jumps to chapter 4.  Perhaps this reflects a scribe’s awareness that the genealogies were absent in Tatian’s Diatessaron, or it could conceivably be a deletion by a recklessly bold scribe who did not want to transcribe anything that could be construed as a contradiction of the genealogy in Matthew 1.
         

          A small cluster of manuscripts (including M U Θ 1 1582 33, and over 150 minuscules) reflects a reading that was known to Epiphanius (in the late 300s):  somebody inserted, between Josiah and Jeconiah, a reference to Jehoiakim (Ἰωακείμ).  This is a harmonization to First Chronicles 3:15.  Some copyists, it appears, were not averse to attempting to correct their exemplars, even if it meant disrupting the total in one of Matthew’s groups of fourteen generations.  (Matthew probably intended foe this 14x structure to bring to his readers’ minds the memory of the numerical value of David’s name).

          Other glitch-readings occur in other manuscripts.  A notable error by the scribe of GA 109 was mentioned by Metzger (Text of the New Testament, p. 195):  the copyist mechanically copied the text of his exemplar, in which the individuals in the genealogy in Luke were formatted in two columns, as if they were one continuous piece, thus making a garbled mess of things.  A detailed analysis of how this occurred can be found near the entry of an entry at CSNTM’s “From the Library” blog from 2018.  

The beginning of the genealogy in Luke in GA 1273.

           The copyist of GA 1273 (the George Grey Gospels) also was discombobulated when formatting the genealogy in Luke.  Putting the names of Jesus’ ancestors in three columns, he mixed up the whole series of names, concluding with “of Adam, of Serug, of God.”  A little detective work (which Daniel Buck has done) can reveal the format of the genealogy in Luke in the exemplar used by the scribe of GA 1273.  It might be interesting to compare the format in 1273’s reconstructed exemplar with the three-names-per-line format in GA 2. 

The end of the genealogy in Luke in 1273.

          Other treatments of Luke’s genealogy have been identified by Daniel Buck; he has noticed that glitchy treatments in Luke’s genealogy seem to arise especially in verse 33, and that GA 1305, 1424, 2563, 2658, 2661, 2756, and 2882 all have glitches of one kind or another.  GA 28 also has some unusual readings, such as the insertion of τοῦ Ἀρὰμ in verse 33.

          Quite a few scribes, when listing the names in Luke’s genealogy, gave each name a single line.  These include the copyist of Sinaiticus (À) and Codex Vaticanus (B, 03) – mostly.  In B, near the end of the last column on a page, the copyist wrote Ιωσηφ του Ηλει (“Joseph, of Heli”) on one line, as long as his normal lines, with a space between “Ιωσηφ” and “του Ηλει”, but on the next line (the last line on the page), του Ματθατ gets a line all its own, and on the next page, each ancestor’s name, preceded by του, gets its own line.

          One glitch that has received special attention is the omission of τοῦ Καϊναν (or τοῦ Καϊναμ) at the beginning of Luke 3:36 in P75^vid and Codex Bezae (D, 05).  Kainan’s name is not in Genesis 10:24 in the Masoretic Text, or in the Samaritan Pentateuch.  It may be that due to its absence in Genesis in these witnesses, a scribe deliberately removed it from the Western text as it appears in D.  A question arises:  the texts of P75 (early Alexandrian) and D (Western) are so different from each other, how could they share this reading if it is not original?

          But do they?  In 2019, Henry B Smith Jr. and Kris J. Udd published a 46-page essay in the Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal, On the Authenticity of Kainan, Son of Arpachshad, in which this variant-unit was minutely examined.  A reconstruction of the relevant part of P75 (the MS is extremely fragmentary in this portion) was made by Smith and Udd in which “The inclusion of -Α TOΥ KAINAN at the beginning of line 5 would only increase its line length to 26 letters, fitting the context well.”  This reconstruction helps clear up some inaccurate records of P75’s text in Luke 3:36.  It also demonstrates that P75 never lacked Καϊναμ, though the question is open as to whether P75 read Καϊναμ or Καϊναν. 

          Thus the only manuscript that omits Kainan’s name in Luke 3:36 is Codex D.  Finding Kainan’s name absent in the early Alexandrian text and in a relatively early Western manuscript such as Codex D would have been remarkable.  But finding Kainan’s name omitted only in in the Western text of Luke attested by D is like finding a hamburger at McDonald’s; it is not remarkable at all, considering the other liberties that have been taken in Luke’s genealogy in D.

          While some readers might be taken aback by how some scribes messed up the genealogy of Jesus Christ, one should remember that the bulk of manuscripts in different transmission-streams maintain the original text of the genealogies very well.  A blizzard of scribal errors does not make the sun stop shining.
          

 

 

(Thanks to Kris Udd and Daniel Buck for their help obtaining some of the data in this post.)

 

Matthew 28:19 - Baptism In Whose Name?

Matthew 28:19-20a in Codex F,
beside part of the chapter-list for Mark.

            “This is perhaps a case of late interpolation.”  That was liberal scholar Rudolph Bultmann’s opinion of the words “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” in Matthew 28:19.  

            Earlier, in 1902, Frederick C. Conybeare – who might be considered the Bart Ehrman of his day – claimed in a detailed essay in The Hibbert Journal (and in 1901 in Zeitschrift fur Neutestamentlich Wissenschaft, pp. 275-288) that he had found patristic evidence against the genuineness of this phrase “so weighty that in [the] future the most conservative of divines will shrink from resting on it any dogmatic fabric at all.” 

            At this very moment, there are some in the Oneness Pentecostal denomination who similarly regard the threefold formula “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” as an early scribal corruption.  The theological impetus for this position is not hard to find:  throughout the book of Acts, Luke reports that the early Christians baptized “in the name of Jesus Christ” (2:38), or “in the name of the Lord Jesus” (8:16), or “in the name of the Lord” (10:48); the use of a threefold declaration at baptism is never mentioned by Luke. 

            Some Oneness Pentecostals have attempted to resolve this apparent discrepancy by taking a theological step that is not far from – and perhaps indistinguishable from – the early heresy of modalism:  they baptize without such a threefold formula, and insist that the name “Jesus” is the name of the Father, and the name of the Son, and the name of the Holy Spirit.  Others, while theologically greatly distanced from Bultmann and Conybeare, share with them a rejection of the authority of Matthew 28:19 on the grounds that the phrase “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” is not authentic.  Some Islamic groups similarly reject the genuineness of this phrase.

            Usually when a reading has the support of every Greek manuscript in existence in which a passage is extant – as is the case here at the end of Matthew – there is no text-critical issue and it is accepted as genuine, as a matter of course.  Even Bart Ehrman – who has proposed (like Gordon Fee before him) that First Corinthians 14:34-35, despite having enormous manuscript support, contains a lengthy interpolation – recently wrote, “It is usually thought that Matt. 28:19-20 is referring to the practice in Matthew’s own community, some 50 years after Jesus’ death, not to the words Jesus himself actually spoke.”  (Readers of such comments should understand that when Ehrman employs phrases such as “It is usually thought,” he means, “It is usually thought among my colleagues who deny supernatural events in general.”)  Regarding those who, instead, claim to reject the phrase on text-critical grounds:  what are their grounds? 

            Their go-to source is Eusebius of Caesarea, the influential and not-entirely-orthodox historian of the early 300s, best-known for his composition Ecclesiastical History.  As Conybeare documented, Eusebius utilized Matthew 28:19 seventeen times in ways that indicate that his text of the verse read πορευθέντες μαθητεύσατε πάντα τὰ ἔθνη ἐν τῷ ὀνόματί μου, that is, “As you go, make disciples of all nations in My name.”  Part of Conybeare’s argument that this reading should be given exceptional weight is that Eusebius was stationed in Caesarea, where in the previous generation Origen had enlarged the library with his own manuscripts; thus, it may be reasonably thought that among the manuscripts accessible to Eusebius in the early 300s were some copies from the early 200s, earlier than any existing copies of Matthew 28:19.

            Conybeare’s quotations from Eusebius may have initially appeared to justify his confident assertions, but he was quickly answered by J. R. Wilkinson in The Hibbert Journal in 1902, in the second part of an article titled, Mr. Conybeare’s Textual Theories (beginning on p. 96 of the journal issued in October of 1902, and on p. 571 of the digitally archived copy).  Wilkinson granted that Eusebius used a text in which “in My name” was in the first part of Matthew 28:19, referring to disciple-making, but he reasoned that this does not imply that “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” was absent from the second part of the verse, referring to baptism.     The textual critic Frederick Chase also wrote a response against Conybeare’s approach in 1905 in the Journal of Theological Studies (beginning on p. 481). 

            A comprehensive, and decisive, answer against Conybeare’s proposal appeared in 1923 in Bernard Henry Cuneo’s published dissertation, The Lord’s Command to Baptise:  An Historico-Critical Investigation With Special Reference to the Works of Eusebius of Caesarea.  Cuneo systematically scrutinized Conybeare’s quotations from Eusebius, one by one, along with other quotations, and showed that Eusebius, like some other patristic writers, tended to limit his quotations to the segments of Scripture that were relevant to the topic that he was discussing at a given point.  

            For example, Cuneo examples Eusebius’ statement in Ecclesiastical History 3:5 and considers the development of Eusebius’ argument in which the quotation occurs:  Eusebius quoted Matthew 28:19a, not to say something about baptism, but to confirm a parenthetical point; in the course of describing the Roman siege of Jerusalem, he writes:

            “. . . because the Jews continued to persecute His disciples, by stoning Stephen, beheading James the brother of John, and putting to death James the bishop of Jerusalem; and because they afflicted the other apostles so severely that they fled from Palestine and began to preach the Gospel to all the nations – imbued with the power of Christ who had said to them, “Going, make disciples of all the nations in my name” – and when all the Christians had left Jerusalem and fled to Pella, then the divine vengeance visited upon Jerusalem the crimes of which that city had been guilty against Christ and his disciples.”

            In Demonstration of the Gospel 1:6, Eusebius wrote, “Our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Son of God, said to His disciples after His resurrection, ‘Go and make disciples of all the nations,’ and added, ‘Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.’”  Here we do not see the middle of verse 19 because it is not pertinent to Eusebius’ present subject, whereas the beginning and end are pertinent. 

            Although this frugality may seem strange nowadays – that is, modern readers may understandably ask, “Why not just quote the whole verse?” – we ought to remember that nobody quoted from the New Testament in terms of chapter-and-verse divisions as we know them until the mid-1500s.  Quoting only what needed to be quoted in order to support a particular point was common in ancient times; Eusebius shows the same tendency toward brevity in his quotations of Matthew 11:27, 16:18, etc.

            Cuneo’s cumulative case is so effective that I recommend it to everyone who might encounter echoes of Conybeare’s argument; The Lord’s Command to Baptise is available online as a free download at Google Books.  Archive.org also has a copy.  Cuneo reminds readers about other patristic evidence in favor of the inclusion of the words “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  For example:

● Didache, chapter 7 (early 100s):  “Concerning baptism, baptize thus:  having first rehearsed all these things, baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, in running water.  But if you have no running water, baptize in other water, and if you cannot in cold, then in warm.  But if you have neither, pour water three times on the head ‘in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’”

● Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 3, part 17 (c. 180):  concluding a series of proof-texts supporting his contention that it was not a Christ-persona, but the Holy Spirit, who descended upon Jesus:  “He said to them, Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

● Tertullian, De Baptismo, ch. 13 (c. 200):  “The law of baptism was enjoined and its ritual prescribed.  ‘Go,’ He says, ‘teach the nations, baptizing them in the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit.’  The addition to this law of the regulation: ‘Except one be born again of water and spirit, he shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven,’ bound faith to the necessity of baptism.  Consequently from that time all believers were baptized.”

● Tertullian, De Praescriptione Haereticorum ch. 20 (c. 200):  “He commanded the eleven others, on His departure to the Father, to go and teach all nations, who were to be baptized into the Father, and into the Son, and into the Holy Ghost.”  

● Hippolytus, Contra Noetum, ch. 14 (early 200s):  “The Father’s Word, therefore, knowing the economy (i.e., disposition) and the will of the Father, that is, that the Father seeks to be worshipped in no other way than this, gave this charge to the disciples after He rose from the dead:  ‘Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’  And by this He showed that whosoever omitted any one of these, failed in glorifying God perfectly.”

● Acts of Thomas 9:4 (early 200s):  “And the apostle, having taken oil, and poured it over their head, and salved and anointed them, began to say, ‘Come, holy name of Christ, which is above every name; come, power of the Most High . . .  come, Holy Spirit, and purify their reins and heart, and seal them in the name of Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit.’” 

● Participants at the Seventh Council of Carthage (257), which was focused on the subject of baptism, included

            Lucius of Castra Galbae, who quoted Christ’s words from Matthew 28:18-19, including “Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”   

            Munnulus of Girba, who stated, “our Lord says, “Go ye and baptize the nations, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

            Euchratius of Thence, who said that Jesus Christ, teaching the apostles with His own mouth, “has entirely completed our faith, and the grace of baptism, and the rule of the ecclesiastical law, saying, “Go ye and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

            Vincentius of Thibaris, who, in addition to alluding to Mark 16:15-18, said that the Lord said, in another place, “Go ye and teach the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

            Cuneo also spent several pages showing that Eusebius of Caesarea was indeed the author of Against Marcellus (336/337) and A Letter to the Caesareans Concerning the Council of Nicea.  In the second composition, Eusebius introduces and repeats his own creed, which, he says, was read at the Council of Nicea in the presence of Emperor Constantine:

            “As we have received from the bishops who preceded us, and in our first catechisms, and when we received the holy laver [i.e., at baptism], and as we have learned from the divine Scriptures, and as we believed and taught in the presbytery, and in the episcopate itself, so believing also at the time present, we report to you our faith, and it is this:

            “We believe in One God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of all things visible and invisible.  And in One Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, God from God, Light from Light, Life from Life, Son Only-begotten, first-born of every creature, before all the ages, begotten from the Father, by Whom also all things were made; Who for our salvation was made flesh, and lived among men, and suffered, and rose again the third day, and ascended to the Father, and will come again in glory to judge the quick and dead. And we believe also in One Holy Ghost.”

            This is followed by an addition affirmation: 

            “Believing each of these to be and to exist, the Father truly Father, and the Son truly Son, and the Holy Ghost truly Holy Ghost, as also our Lord, sending forth His disciples for the preaching, said, ‘Go teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’  Concerning whom we confidently affirm that so we hold, and so we think, and so we have held previously, and we maintain this faith unto the death, condemning every  godless heresy.”    

            In another composition, the rarely cited Syriac Theophania, Eusebius of Caesarea made a full quotation of Matthew 28:17-20 in Book IV, chapter 8:     “After His resurrection from the dead, all of them [i.e., the eleven apostles], being together as they had been commanded, went to Galilee, as He had said to them. But, when they saw Him, some worshipped Him, but others doubted.  But He drew near to them, spoke with them, and said, ‘All power in heaven and earth, is given to me of my Father.  Go ye and make disciples of all nations, and baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. And teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.  And, behold!  I am with you always even to the end of the world.’  Observe now, in these things, the consideration and caution evinced by the disciples . . . .”     

            (In the same composition, which its translator, Samuel Lee, translated from a Syriac manuscript which had been obtained by Henry Tattam at the Monastery of the Blessed Virgin in the Nitrian Desert – a manuscript which Lee assigned to a period no later than the 400s – Eusebius explicitly quotes Matthew 28:19a with “in My name” as part of the text, saying in Book 5 chapter 46, “It was not that He commanded them, simply and indiscriminately, to go and make disciples of all nations, but with this excellent addition which He delivered, specifically, ‘in My name.’”)

            In addition to demolishing Conybeare’s case against the phrase “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” Cuneo offered an explanation for the presence of the words “in My name” in Eusebius’ text of Matthew 28:19a:  it is a simple harmonization drawn from Luke 24:47.
            This introduces a fresh subject:  the abundance of alterations, harmonistic or otherwise, that are clustered in the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances.  These passages were among the most-used parts of the Gospels in early church-services, and were thus especially vulnerable to early liturgical influence.  Here are a few examples:
            ● In the Peshitta version of Matthew, Matthew 28:18 features an insertion drawn from John 20:21; after the usual words of the verse, the Peshitta adds, “As the Father sent Me, so also I send you.”  (Codex Θ also has this feature.)

            ● In the Alexandrian text of Luke 24:42, there is no mention of honeycomb.  The words και απο μελσσίου κηριου could have been accidentally skipped due to early scribal inattentiveness; και follows κηριου in the next sentence.  But another possibility is that these words – supported by Tertullian, the vast majority of Greek manuscripts, the Vulgate, the Armenian version, etc.  – were removed intentionally to avoid incorporating honey into annual Easter-time worship-services. 

 

Extra words appear in the text of
Luke 24:43 in Codex K.

           ● In Luke 24:43, after the usual statement that Jesus “took and ate in their presence,” several significant manuscripts – including K, Θ, Π*, and members of f¹³, as well as the Vulgate and, according to Tregelles, the Curetonian Syriac and the Armenian and Ethiopic versions, also say, “and gave the rest to them.”  (Θ does not include “and.”)  This phrase may have been added when and where the passage had been interpreted somewhat mystically – the fish in the narrative being seen as congruent to the presence of Christ, ΙΧΘΥΣ – and when this point was reached in the Scripture-reading in the worship-service, the celebration of the Lord’s Supper commenced.    

            ● In Luke 24:36, after Jesus’ appearance in the midst of the disciples, He says to them, “Peace to you!”  In a small number of Greek manuscripts (including uncials G and P), and in the Vulgate, Jesus says a bit more; He goes on to say, “It is I; do not be afraid.”  These extra words – drawn from John 6:20 – are supported, according to the UBS apparatus, by the Vulgate, the Peshitta, the Harklean Syriac, the Armenian version, and by Ambrose and Augustine (in Contra Felicem Manichaeum).   In addition, in Codex W, “It is I; do not be afraid” appears before “Peace to you.”   

            All these witnesses may echo early Easter-time liturgical arrangements of the blended-together Gospel-accounts.  An early attempt to remove the intruding words appears to have gone too far; in several Old Latin manuscripts and in Codex Bezae, the entire phrase – “and said to them, “Peace to you” – is missing.  (This is one of the “Western Non-interpolations” which appear in Luke 24.)  Another possibility is that the phrase was skipped by accident.

            The worship-services of the early churches had a detectable impact upon the text of the New Testament.  But the impact of the text of the New Testament upon the early churches was far greater.  As far as the use of the words, “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” are concerned, there was one reason for the early Christians to use these words:  they were attributed to Christ in every copy of the Gospel of Matthew.

Readers are invited to double-check the data in this post.

The Myth of Tenacity

            On page 78 of The King James Only Controversy, author James White states:   “Once a variant reading appears in a manuscript, it doesn’t simply go away.  It gets copied and ends up in other manuscripts.”  To support this statement, White appealed to Kurt & Barbara Aland’s similar statement:  “Once a variant or a new reading enters the tradition it refuses to disappear, persisting (if only in a few manuscripts) and perpetuating itself through the centuries.  One of the most striking traits of the New Testament textual tradition is its tenacity.” – Aland & Aland, The Text of the New Testament, p. 56.

            Aland & Aland, however, only provided three examples of this “tenacity” – and two of the three are very poorly attested among later Greek manuscripts.  Their first example is the abrupt ending of the Gospel of Mark (i.e., the ending at 16:8); among extant Greek manuscripts, it is supported by exactly one later copy (304).  In addition, 304’s text of Mark is 90% Byzantine; there is a very real possibility that 304’s exemplar contained Mark 16:9-20; like 2386 and 1420 (both of which used to be cited – erroneously – as support for the abrupt ending), 304’s support for the abrupt ending of Mark may turn out to be merely a quirk. 

            What about Aland & Aland’s other two demonstrations of tenacity?  They are found in Matthew 13:57 and Mark 1:16:

            Regarding Matthew 13:57:  Aland and Aland point out that whereas some manuscripts (B D Θ 33 700) simply present Jesus saying that a prophet is without honor in [his] homeland (πατριδι), and some manuscripts (À f¹³) present Jesus saying that a prophet is without honor in his own homeland (ἰδία πατριδι), and some manuscripts (L Byz K N W) present Jesus saying that a prophet is without honor in his homeland (πατριδι αὐτοῦ), the scribe of Codex C conflated two readings, so as to write ἰδία πατριδι αὐτοῦ.  “This is typical,” Aland and Aland say – “a scribe familiar with both readings will combine them, reasoning that by preserving both texts the right text will be preserved.”

            The obvious problem with the Alands’ proposal is that Codex C’s reading in this passage is anything but “typical;” C’s reading is singular – that is, it is the only Greek manuscript that has this reading!  Far from being “tenacious,” this reading burst into existence with the scribe of C, and then went extinct.  We may have here a tenacious page of parchment, but not a tenacious reading.

            The example in Mark 1:16 is better, where it can be argued that the majority reading is a combination, or conflation, of the reading in Codex A (του Σίμωνος) and the reading in Codex D G W Θ and the Textus Receptus (αὐτου), producing the longer reading αὐτου του Σίμωνος.  Although a counter-argument can be made, let’s step back at this point and survey the evidence that has been collected to illustrate the proposal that once a reading (whether part of the original text, or the creation of a scribe) appears in a manuscript, it does not go away:

            ● The presence of the abrupt ending of Mark in minuscule 304.

            ● The reading ἰδία πατριδι αὐτοῦ in Codex C (a singular reading), and

            ● The reading αὐτου του Σίμωνος in the Byzantine Text of Mark 1:16.  

            Now consider the mass of evidence against the concept of tenacity:  the hundreds of singular readings that appears in ancient manuscripts, but of which there is no trace in later manuscripts.  How many such readings are there?  Greg Paulson wrote his 2013 thesis on singular readings in the codices Vaticanus (B), Sinaiticus (À), Bezae (D), Ephraemi Rescriptus (C), and Washingtonianus (W) in the Gospel of Matthew, and he mentioned how many singular readings – i.e., readings that do not recur in any other Greek manuscript – each one of these codices has in its text of Matthew.  Paulson’s data:
            Vaticanus:  97.

            Sinaiticus:  Scribe A:  163. 

            Bezae:  259.

            Ephraemi Rescriptus:  75

            Washingtonianus:  112.

            I emphasize that these numbers – showing that five important early manuscripts combine to produce a total of 706 singular readings – only take the text of Matthew into consideration.  If one were to extrapolate, so as to maintain a proportion of 25 singular readings per chapter of the Gospels, then we could reasonably expect that a study of all the singular readings in these five manuscripts throughout the four Gospels would total about 2,225.  Well, there we would have 1,500 non-tenacious readings – never seen before or after the one time they appear – versus the three submitted by Aland & Aland.  Suppose that two-thirds of these were nonsense-readings which scribes could reasonably be expected to regard as mistakes.  That would leave 500 non-tenacious, non-nonsense readings, just in the Gospels, just in these five manuscripts.

            And what if we consider some earlier manuscripts?   A single quotation from James Royse (from p. 246 of Scribal Tendencies in the Transmission of the Text of the New Testament, chapter 15 of The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, © 1995 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Ehrman and Holmes, editors) may serve to tell us:  Royse provides a chart which conveys that Papyrus 45 has 222 significant singular readings; Papyrus 46 has 471 significant singular readings; Papyrus 47 has 51 significant singular readings; Papyrus 66 has 107 significant singular readings; Papyrus 72 has 98 significant singular readings; Papyrus 75 has 119 significant singular readings.  (In a footnote, Royse helpfully defines “significant singular readings” as “those singular readings that remain after exclusion of nonsense-readings and orthographic variants.”)  

            Hundreds of readings refute the Alands’ claim about tenacity.  (Over a thousand in just six papyri.)  There is no evidence that these readings were ever perpetuated after they entered the transmission-stream precisely once.  Here the case might rest, Q.E.D. 

  

            But let’s also consider a few peripheral pieces of evidence.             

            ● Origen and Luke 1:46.  Bruce Metzger pointed out (in his essay References in Origen to Variant Readings) that Origen, in his commentary on Matthew, mentioned that in some copies, the Magnificat is said to be sung by Mary, while according to other copies, Elizabeth is the singer.  Presently, no Greek manuscripts say that Elizabeth was the singer. 

            ● Tertullian and John 1:13.  All Greek manuscripts of John 1 support the use of a plural in this verse, so as to understand it as a generalization about all genuine believers.  Tertullian, however, seems to have been convinced that the original reading here was singular, and that Valentinian heretics were responsible for changing it to a plural form.  (Denis S. Kulandaisamy has written a 300-page book on this little subject.)   

            ● Epiphanius and Matthew 2:11.  The apologist Epiphanius of Salamis, in the late 300s, mentioned that the wise men opened their “wallets” (πήρας), and noted that some manuscripts – like all Greek manuscripts extant today – referred instead to their “treasures” (θησαυροὺς).  No known manuscript today has the reading πήρας.  

            ● Jerome, Isidore, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Ephesians 5:14.  Several significant patristic writers drew attention to a textual variant in Ephesians 5:14, where instead of “And Christ will shine on you,” some manuscripts in their day read “And Christ will touch you.”  John Chrysostom seems to have alluded to this variant, too, although he did not go into detail about it.  If it is extant in any Greek manuscripts, there is no mention of them in the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. 

            ● Origen and Matthew 4:17.  Origen says plainly that some manuscripts do not have the word “Repent” in this verse.  All of our Greek manuscripts, however, presently support the inclusion of “Repent” in this verse; only in the Old Syriac copies and in the Old Latin Codex Bobbiensis is it missing.     

            ● Jerome and Matthew 13:35.  Jerome firmly asserts that all of the ancient copies state that these things were done to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Asaph.  No manuscripts of Matthew today have this reading, and Jerome mentions that by his own time, the text had been altered; one alteration had yielded the erroneous reading “Isaiah the prophet.” 

            If you take in hand Amy Donaldson’s two-part dissertation Explicit References to New Testament Variant Readings Among Greek and Latin Church Fathers, you will find details about these readings, and others, which were cited by early patristic writers but which now are never or only rarely found.

            Finally, the myth of tenacity is not only refuted by empirical evidence; it is rendered superfluous by logic.  For if a reading were to enter the transmission-stream, and then fall into oblivion, and the manuscript containing it did not survive, and no one referred to it in patristic writings, how would we know?  Even if we did not have the empirical evidence that thoroughly refutes the theory of tenacity, the theory could only ever be an assumption, not a verifiable thing.

                         

(Readers are invited to double-check the data in this post.)

Mark 2:16 - Eating and Drinking with Sinners

            In Mark 2:16, there are several interesting textual contests.  Today I will focus on three of them.  First, did Mark refer to “the scribes of the Pharisees,” or to “the scribes and the Pharisees”?  Second, is the original word-order, in Mark’s description of those with Jesus, “tax collectors and sinners” or “sinners and tax collectors”?  Third, at the end of the verse, do the religious leaders object that Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners, or that Jesus is eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners?   

            The differences are conveyed by the bold print in the quotations shown here from the English Standard Version and the New King James Version:

ESV:   And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

NKJV:  And when the scribes and Pharisees saw Him eating with the tax collectors and sinners, they said to his disciples, “Why is it that he eats and drinks with tax collectors and sinners?”

Let’s address each variant-unit separately.

● The scribes and the Pharisees, or the scribes of the Pharisees? 

            Almost all English translations that are based on the Nestle-Aland compilation agree with the meaning of the ESV. (The NET is a surprising exception; it refers to “the experts in the law and the Pharisees.”)  Meanwhile, the KJV, NKJV, and MEV agree with the Byzantine base-text, found in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts of Mark.

            The attestation for οἱ γραμματεῖς τῶν Φαρισαίων is sparse:  Among uncial manuscripts, only Codex W has exactly this reading, although Codex B differs by only one letter (reading οἱ γραμματεῖς τῶν Φαρεισαίων).  In the damaged fragment 0130, from the 800s, the words τῶν Φαρισαίων have survived, according to Tischendorf’s transcription.  In addition, although À and L lack the οἱ before γραμματεῖς, they support τῶν instead of καὶ οἱ.  The Nestle-Aland apparatus also lists Papyrus 88^vid (assigned to the 300s) as a witness in favor of τῶν.          

            Internal evidence strongly favors the reading τῶν (yielding “the scribes of the Pharisees”)rather than καὶ οἱ (“the scribes and the Pharisees”).  The reading οἱ γραμματεῖς καὶ οἱ Φαρισαίων (“the scribes and the Pharisees”) was more familiar to copyists, due in part to the repeated mention of scribes and Pharisees together in Jesus’ denunciation of both groups in Matthew 23.  (The phrase also appears in Luke 5:21, 6:7, and 11:53, and in John 8:3 (in the most widely-circulated form of the verse).)

            A conformation to οἱ γραμματεῖς καὶ οἱ Φαρισαίων would be natural, and is the sort of scribal alteration that could occur even unconsciously; the reading οἱ γραμματεῖς τῶν Φαρισαίων, on the other hand, is unusual, and there does not seem to be anything intrinsic in οἱ γραμματεῖς καὶ οἱ Φαρισαίων that would provoke a change to οἱ γραμματεῖς τῶν Φαρισαίων. 

            Another consideration is that in the parallel in Luke 5:30, the Byzantine Text reads οἱ γραμματεῖς αὐτῶν καὶ οἱ Φαρισαίων (“their scribes and the Pharisees”), where the Alexandrian Text reads οἱ Φαρισαῖοι καὶ οἱ γραμματεῖς αὐτῶν (“the Pharisees and their scribes”).  Here, again, nothing in the Byzantine Text seems puzzling or likely to provoke copyists to change anything, whereas the Alexandrian reading appears to refer to the religious group that is mentioned in Acts 23:9, where Luke refers to “the scribes of the Pharisees’ party.”  Codex Sinaiticus, in Luke 5:30, deviates from most other Alexandrian witnesses by referring to “the Pharisees and the scribes” (without “their”), exemplifying a scribal tendency to keep the two groups (the scribes, and the Pharisees) distinct. 

            All things considered, despite the huge numerical advantage of “the scribes and the Pharisees,” the internal evidence compels the adoption of “the scribes of the Pharisees.”    

      

● “Sinners and tax collectors” or “Tax collectors and sinners”?

In Codex W, the text of Mark 2:16 was shortened
to relieve a perceived redundancy.

            Practically all major manuscripts (except Codex D) agree in the second half of Mark 2:16 that Mark wrote “tax collectors” and then “and sinners.”  Earlier in the verse, though, Codices B, D, L, Θ, and minuscules 33 and 565 refer to “the sinners and tax collectors” where À, A, C, and most manuscripts refer to “the tax collectors and sinners.”  The evidence is a bit more uniform in English than it is in Greek:  Papyrus 88, the corrected text of Codex B, the text of Codex D, the text of Θ, and minuscule 33 read (after μετὰ) τῶν ἁμαρτωλῶν καὶ τῶν τελωνῶν.  (But Codex B as initially written did not have τῶν before τελωνῶν, and Codex D adds another καὶ after τελωνῶν.)        

            What happened here?  Either copyists made the word-order in the first part of the verse resemble the word-order in the second part, or else copyists made the word-order different – or both.  The text of Codex D reflects the former – but its word-order is in a category all its own: both parts have the word-order “the sinners and the tax collectors.”  Meanwhile, some Alexandrian copyists considered the repetition of the same word-order to be redundant.  (The scribe responsible for the text of W must have considered it very redundant, for he removed the first phrase entirely.)  For that reason, they transposed the first reference – and in the process they not only transferred τελωνῶν to follow τῶν ἁμαρτωλῶν but also transferred (and repeated) τῶν.  This double-occurrence of τῶν is a vestige of scribal editing.  Codex B’s corrector even went a little further, adding τῶν before ἁμαρτωλῶν in the second occurrence as well.)  The original word-order is thus μετὰ τῶν τελωνῶν καὶ ἁμαρτωλῶν (“with the tax collectors and sinners”) in both parts of the verse.           

● “He eats” or “He eats and drinks”?

If rival variants could be compared to racehorses, there is a race at the end of Mark 2:16 in which a dozen horses are competing.  Scribes copying the text of Mark here recollected the parallel-passages in Matthew 9:11 and Luke 5:30.  In Matthew, there is no mention of Jesus drinking; Luke mentions both eating and drinking – but both parallel-passages have their own unique aspects as well.  As a result, this passage has been corrupted in different ways; here are a few examples:

Codex À harmonizes Mark 2:16 to Matthew 9:11, forming the question, “Why with tax collectors and sinners does your teacher eat?”. 

Codex C and 579 also harmonize Mark 2:16 to Matthew 9:11, but in a different way, and with a reference to drinking:  “How is it that with tax collectors and sinners your teacher eats and drinks?”.

Codices L and Δ also harmonize, like the harmonization in À, but with a reference to drinking:  “Why with tax collectors and sinners eats and drinks your teacher?”.  (Neither conforms to Luke’s ἐσθίετε καὶ πίνετε.) 

Most manuscripts end Mark 2:16 with ἐσθίει καὶ πίνει, so that the question is, “How is it that with tax collectors and sinners He eats and drinks?”.  However, in Codices B, D, and W, the verse ends with  just ἐσθίει.  Similarly Codex Θ and 1424 read ἐσθίετε, a slight adjustment which matches up with the ἐσθίετε (but not πίνετε) in Luke 5:30.  (It is notable that in Luke 5:30 in Codex K, there is similarly only a reference to eating, and not to drinking.)

Two factors contributed to the loss of the reference to drinking at the end of the verse:  first, a tendency to harmonize to the parallel-passage in Matthew.  Second, simple scribal carelessness:  verse 17 begins with καὶ, so both homoioteleuton and homoioarcton occur together here.  It is not surprising that when an early copyist’s line of sight went from the first occurrence of ει καὶ to the second occurrence of the same letters in the line ἐσθίει καὶ πίνει καὶ, he did not detect the resultant accidental omission, inasmuch as the sentence still made sense. 

The text at the end of Mark 2:16 as it existed in Egypt before this omission occurred, however, is attested by Papyrus 88:  it supports ἐσθίει καὶ πίνει.  The minuscule 892, known for its Alexandrian character, also supports “eating and drinking” at the end of Mark 2:16, as do (as already mentioned) C and 579 which despite being harmonized to Matthew still refer to drinking, not just eating.  (Like L and Δ, they read ἐσθίει καὶ πίνει, not the Lukan wording ἐσθίετε καὶ πίνετε.)  (L has an itacism, reading πίνι.)

These are not the only variant-units within Mark 2:16, and it is probably no exaggeration to conclude, when surveying them all, that not a single extant manuscript has transmitted the original text of this entire verse in its pristine form:  different attempts to harmonize the text, and to amplify its meaning, have affected different witnesses in different ways.  (Readers are encouraged to consult Wieland Willker’s Textual Commentary on the Greek Gospels:  Mark for more data about the complex series of variants in this verse.)  The sense of the passage, however, is consistently maintained:  the religious leaders asked Jesus’ disciples why He was taking His meals with the people they considered the dregs of society.  When Jesus answered, He gave an important insight about the nature of the gospel.  There is a textual variant in His answer in Mark 2:17, too – but that’s a subject for another post.

Mark 16:9-20 and the Strange Scholarship of BAR

This is a sequel to my post Mark 16:9-20 and Early Patristic Evidence.  A fellow researcher, upon encountering my post, referred me to an article at the website of the Biblical Archaeology Review magazine:  James Tabor’s The Strange Ending of the Gospel of Mark and Why It Makes All the Difference.  I saw this material when it was first published, and I had hoped that the editors of BAR might let Tabor’s embarrassing inaccuracies (and lack of quotation-marks when borrowing from Metzger’s Textual Commentary) quietly slip into the shadows.  Alas, the article is still being circulated and still needs to be addressed.

In the interest of brevity I will not address the parts of the article in which Tabor promotes his books and his view on peripheral subjects, and via this step alone I have spared myself from delving into most of the article. 

Rather than convey his position in anything like a restrained and measured tone, Tabor describes Mark 16:9-20 in boisterous terms:  he calls this passage “concocted” and “patently false” and “forged” and “bogus” and a “forgery” and he then attempts to make a case for his own belief that Mark believed in something other than the bodily resurrection of Jesus.  But where and how does he present the evidence?  His presentation of external evidence begins and ends with this excerpt: 

            “The evidence is clear. This ending is not found in our earliest and most reliable Greek copies of Mark.  In A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Bruce Metzger writes: “Clement of Alexandria and Origen [early third century] show no knowledge of the existence of these verses; furthermore Eusebius and Jerome attest that the passage was absent from almost all Greek copies of Mark known to them.” ”

Tabor’s concise description misleads his readers at every step:  he fails to mention that he is referring to only two manuscripts as “our earliest and most reliable Greek copies,” namely Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus – and he fails to mention that both of these manuscripts contain unusual features at or near the end of Mark that indicate that their copyists were aware of the existence of the missing verses.  In Codex Vaticanus, for example, the copyist left a distinct blank space (including an entire blank column) just the right size for a skilled scribe to fit verses 9-20.  In Codex Sinaiticus, the four pages containing Mark 14:54-Luke 1:76 written by the main copyist are not extant; the four pages which now exist in the manuscript are a single sheet of parchment (written on the front and back and folded down the center, so as to form four pages) which replaced the work of the main copyist; for details see the post Codex Sinaiticus and the Ending of Mark).  He fails to mention that over 1,500 Greek manuscript of Mark include 16:9-20.       

Tabor also repeats Bruce Metzger’s claim that Clement of Alexandria and Origen show no knowledge of the existence of these verses, letting readers imagine on their own that the writings of Clement and Origen are jam-packed with quotations from the rest of the Gospel of Mark, while in real life Clement of Alexandria hardly ever made specific quotations from the Gospel of Mark except for one long extract from chapter 10.  To put it another way:  according to the data in Carl Cosaert’s research, Clement of Alexandria does not makes specific citations from Mark chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 15, and 16.  Even if tomorrow someone were to discover a dozen citations from Mark made by Clement, the implication would not change:  Clement cited the Gospel of Mark only very rarely and his lack of usage of Mark 16:9-20 is merely a symptom of his general neglect of the entire book.  What Tabor (and Metzger) says about Mark 16:9-20 as a passage not used by Clement can be said about almost every 12-verse segment of the book, outside chapter 10.    

As for Origen, while he cited Mark more often than Clement did, he did not cite it anywhere near the frequency with which he cited the other Gospels.  As far as I can tell via a study of Origen’s major works, Origen cited nothing in Mark 3:19-4:11 (28 consecutive verses), or in 5:2-5:43 (41 consecutive verses) or in 8:7-8:29 (22 consecutive verses), or in 10:3-10:42 (39 consecutive verses), or in 1:36-3:16 (54 consecutive verses).  If we should conclude that a non-use of Mark 16:9-20 means that the verses were absent in Origen’s copies (as Tabor seems to expect his readers to conclude that it does), then by the same measure, they would conclude that Origen had a much shorter text of Mark.  Whereas the proper conclusion is simply that Origen’s non-use of Mark 16:9-20 – if a reference in Philocalia 5 does not allude to Mark 16:17-20 – is a side-effect of his general preference for the other three Gospel-accounts.

Tabor also misrepresents (because Metzger did) the testimony of Eusebius and Jerome; those who seek a more realistic and informed perspective on their testimony may want to bypass the misleading snippets used by various commentators and read Eusebius’ comments for themselves in Eusebius of Caesarea – Gospel Problems and Solutions, and to compare it to Jerome’s Epistle 120 – To Hedibia, and notice (as D. C. Parker noticed) that Jerome’s comment is not a personal observation by  Jerome about Jerome’s manuscripts; it is part of Jerome’s Latin abridgment of part of Eusebius’ Ad Marinum, cobbled together in response to Hedibia’s general question about how to harmonize the Gospels regarding events that followed Christ’s resurrection.  Those who take the time to do so will see that Eusebius, rather than forcefully reject Mark 16:9-20, advised Marinus about how to punctuate and pronounce (and thus retain) Mark 16:9; they will also see that Eusebius used Mark 16:9 himself on two other occasions in the same composition.  

Tabor then mentions “two other endings,” and here too he misleads his readers.  For he fails to mention that when every Greek manuscript that includes the Shorter Ending – all six of them – was made, the usual 12 verses were included too.  And he says that these endings show up in “various manuscripts” but there is only one manuscript that has what he describes as an ending:  the Freer Logion, found in Codex W.  Furthermore, it is plainly false to call the Freer Logion another ending, because it is not an ending; it is an interpolation, as you can see (page-views below).  This material does not appear after Mark 16:8.  It appears between Mark 16:14 and 16:15, right where Jerome mentioned in one of his writings that he had seen it, “especially in Greek codices.”    

            And that is where Tabor’s presentation of the external evidence ends; the remainder of the article is not much more than restatements of the author’s unorthodox beliefs regarding the nature of the resurrection of Christ.  Where does he mention that Irenaeus specifically quoted Mark 16:19 around the year 180, over a century before Codex Vaticanus was made?  Nowhere.  Where does he mention that manuscripts representing the Byzantine, Western, Caesarea, and Alexandrian text-types include Mark 16:9-20?  Nowhere.  How is it that in a footnote Tabor mentions (via a quotation from Metzger’s Textual Commentary) two Georgian manuscripts from the 800s and 900s, but none of the patristic utilizations of Mark 16:9-20 from the 300s and 400s?  Is evidence from the Vulgate, from Codex Alexandrinus, from Codex Bezae, from Apostolic Constitutions (380), from Ambrose, from Augustine, and from Jerome suddenly so trivial as to be ignored?  No?  Then why – I ask the editors of BAR – was none of this mentioned in their article?     

            No matter what the answer is – whether such glaring omissions and evidence-molding were intentional or accidental – it seems obvious that BAR should be considered a dry well – or worse, a poisoned well – by readers thirsty for accurate descriptions of the external evidence pertinent to important text-critical questions about the text of the New Testament.