Mark 16:9-20, Inerrancy, and Liberal Propaganda

            Have you ever been told that textual variants have no impact on Christian doctrine? Of course you have, if you have read text-critical handbooks by evangelical authors. However, some textual variants exist which are capable of having a strong doctrinal impact. For example, consider the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy. This doctrine is so cherished by some Christians that Dallas Theological Seminary lists it among seven “essentials” for students. 

            The adoption of some Alexandrian readings, however, would render the doctrine of inerrancy unsustainable. In Codex Sinaiticus (popularized as “The World’s Oldest Bible”), Matthew 13:35 attributes to Isaiah a passage from Psalm 78 – which was composed by Asaph, not Isaiah. And in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, the text of Matthew 27:49 includes a report that Jesus was pierced with a spear before He died – in direct contradiction to the account in John 19:30-35, which says clearly that Jesus was pierced with a spear after He died. If inerrancy is an important doctrine, then at least two textual variants found in manuscripts that some Bible-footnote writers consider “the most reliable manuscripts” are capable of having an impact on at least one important doctrine.

            Perhaps, in addition to Sinaiticus’ textual variant in Matthew 13:35, and in addition to the variant found in Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in Matthew 27:49, the abrupt ending of Mark (a reading unique to Vaticanus and Sinaiticus among all our early Greek manuscripts) should be added to the list of textual variants that can have a doctrinal impact, because some liberal theologians who prefer the abrupt ending – rejecting verses 9-20 as a scribal accretion – tend to use it as a platform for the notion that the accounts about Jesus’ bodily resurrection in the other three Gospels are embellishments that originated with later sources, rather than with eyewitnesses.

            For example, a recent article by Dr. Candida Moss, published at The Daily Beast, describes a book by Dallas Theological Seminary graduate Matthew Larsen, Gospels before the Book, in which the author proposes that the Gospel of Mark “might never have been intended for publication and was more like a rough draft or collection of notes than a book.” The textual contest about the ending of the Gospel of Mark comes into play in Larsen’s theory. Moss writes: “The conclusion to Mark bears the hallmarks of a draft. Historians will tell you that the oldest manuscripts (and, we thus say, the earliest “original” version) of Mark finish at Mark 16:8, with the women who had come to the tomb running away in fear. But there are at least four other endings to the Gospel in the ancient manuscripts, which serve as evidence of early Christian readers’ efforts to revise, polish, and improve the text.”
            This is used as a platform for the idea that accounts about Jesus’ bodily resurrection were later additions to the story of Jesus. Moss continues: “Later texts, including the Gospel of Matthew, added additional resurrection stories and prologues to the text and constantly repurposed this collection of notes.”
            Now, I have no intention of investing time today to review Larsen’s interesting book, or to address the proposal that the Gospel of Mark is a mere collection of notes. I just want to zoom in on what was not said by Moss: she did not mention any of the evidence that is earlier than Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Due to this omission, readers who believe Moss are likely to draw two conclusions:
            (A) The earliest evidence supports ending the Gospel of Mark at 16:8,
            (B) There are at least four other endings of Mark in the ancient manuscripts.

Both statements are false. Moss has put two manuscripts from the 300s in the spotlight, while keeping evidence from the 100s in the shadows. As I explain in my book Authentic: The Case for Mark 16:9-20, four patristic writers in the 100s (and more in the 200s, 300s, and 400s) utilized Mark 16:9-20 in one way or another:

● Epistula Apostolorum (written c. 150, and reissued c. 180) owes some of its narrative framework and verbiage to Mark 16:9-20. For example, nowhere in the Gospels except in Mark 16:10-11 is there a report of a woman seeing Jesus after His resurrection, and then telling the disciples that Jesus is alive, and not being believed by them. This sequence of events is related, however, in Epistula Apostolorum; the disciples are depicted stating, “We believed her not that the Savior was risen from the dead. Then she returned to the Lord and said to him, ‘None of them has believed me, that you live.’” (For more examples, see my book.)  Specialist Julian Hills (Th.D., Harvard) has stated, “I would vote for a high degree of probability that the author knew the Longer Ending.”

● Justin Martyr’s First Apology (written in 160) features the following excerpt in its 45th chapter, as Justin interprets part of Psalm 110 as a prophetic description of Jesus’ ascension to heaven:
            His statement, “He shall send to Thee the rod of power out of Jerusalem,” [i.e., David’s statement in Psalm 110:2] is predictive of the mighty word, which His apostles, going forth from Jerusalem, preached everywhere.”
            (Only rarely in any of his writings did Justin make specific quotations; most of his utilizations of the Gospels are loose and imprecise; it is not unusual to see Justin combine phrases from more than one Gospel when relating episodes in Jesus’ ministry, and this phenomenon has led some researchers to deduce that Justin often relied not upon a copy of the Gospel of Matthew, and a copy of the Gospel of Mark, and a copy of the Gospel of Luke, but upon a Gospels-harmony in which the contents of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were blended together.)
In his statement about Psalm 110:2, Justin utilizes Mark 16:19, using three words which appear together nowhere else in Scripture except in Mark 16:19:
            Justin’s phrase in Greek: εξελθόντες πανταχου εκήρυξαν
            Justin’s phrase in English: went forth everywhere preaching
            Mark 16:20’s phrase in Greek: εξελθόντες εκήρυξαν πανταχου
            Mark 16:20’s phrase in English: went forth preaching everywhere.

Justin may also utilize the contents of Mark 16:9-20 in chapter 50 of his First Apology, where he states, after a lengthy quotation from Isaiah 53, that after Jesus’ crucifixion, “Even those who were acquainted with him all denied and forsook him. But afterward, when he had risen from the dead, and was seen by them, and they were taught to understand the prophecies in which all of this was foretold as about to happen, and when they had seen him depart into heaven, and had believed . . . they went forth to the whole race of mankind.”
            The phrase in bold print is reminiscent of the text of Mark 16:14 as preserved in the early Greek manuscript Codex Alexandrinus, which adds “from the dead” to the words “after He was risen.”

● Tatian, in his Diatessaron (produced in the 170s), blended together the contents of the four Gospels. (Tatian was, for a while, a student of Justin, and it is possible that Tatian got the idea to present the contents of all four Gospels into one continuous narrative from Justin’s Gospels-harmony that blended together Matthew, Mark, and Luke.)  The Diatessaron has only survived in versional and fragmentary evidence, but by comparing the different branches of evidence for its contents, the Diatessaron’s treatment of Mark 16:9-20 can be reconstructed: by comparing the arrangement of the contents of Mark 16:9-20 in the Arabic Diatessaron (a translation of an earlier Syriac copy) to the arrangement of the contents of Mark 16:9-20 in Codex Fuldensis (made in 546), we can see that the arrangement in both of these witnesses – one from the Western transmission-branch, and one from the Eastern transmission-branch – is almost exactly the same, implying that both echo the earlier arrangement by Tatian.
            Further evidence of Tatian’s use of Mark 16:9-20 comes from Ephrem Syrus’ commentary on the Diatessaron, upon which some fresh light has been provided by the discovery of Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709, from c. 500: In the eighth segment of his commentary, Ephrem Syrus wrote that Jesus had told His disciples, “Go into all the world and baptize in the name of the Father, and Son, and Spirit.” This is a combination of Mark 16:15a and Matthew 28:19. In the Armenian text of Ephrem’s commentary, Ephrem utilizes Mark 16:15 again later in his commentary, as he describes Jesus saying, “Go out into all the world and preach My gospel to all creation” (Mk. 16:15).

● Irenaeus, in Book 3, chapter 10 of Against Heresies (c. 180), specifically quoted Mark 16:19:  “Toward the conclusion of his Gospel, Mark says: ‘So then, after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sits on the right hand of God.’”
            Irenaeus’ testimony is not only clear and specific, but it also reflects the view of someonw who was familiar with the Gospels-text used in three locales:   Irenaeus grew up in Asia Minor; he visited Rome, and he served as bishop in what is now southern France.  Irenaeus was not hesitant to point out the existence of textual variants in his discussion of Revelation 13:18 (he refers to copies which read “616” instead of “666,” but rejects them, appealing to the oldest manuscripts, and to those with a known provenance); yet here he mentions no rival variants, as if the only form of the Gospel of Mark that he encountered anywhere was the text with 16:19 present.
            Irenaeus may also allude to Mark 16:15-19 in Book 2, chapter 32 of Against Heresies; although his comments there lack striking verbal parallels, he writes there like a person with that passage on his mind; after mentioning that the risen Lord “manifested himself to his disciples, and was in their sight received up into heaven,” he proceeds to point out that true disciples perform miracles in Jesus’ name, and drive out demons, and foresee future events, and that some “heal the sick by laying their hands upon them, and they are made whole” (see Mark 16:18).

            Yet these four pieces of evidence from the 100s, supportive of the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20 in the text of the Gospel of Mark, seem unworthy of mention in the world of liberal theologians who are intent on obscuring or simply ignoring whatever affirms the bodily resurrection of Christ. So let the reader beware: researchers who mention that Vaticanus and Sinaiticus end the text of Mark at 16:8, without mentioning that second-century patristic testimony supports the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20, are misleading their readers. And the same can be said for vague Bible-footnotes that mention “the oldest manuscripts” while leaving readers in the dark about patristic evidence that is much older than those two fourth-century manuscripts,

(In the interest of brevity, I skip over the testimony of other patristic witnesses as old or older than Codex Sinaiticus such as Hippolytus, Vincent of Thibaris, Hierocles, Acts of Pilate/Gospel of Nicodemus, the pagan writer Hierocles, and the Latin written Fortunatianus.)

            Now about the claim by Moss that “There are at least four other endings of Mark in the ancient manuscripts.”  One can truthfully say that there are two endings that follow Mark 16:8 in the ancient manuscripts, but only writers who want their readers to get a false impression would leave it at that.  More than 99.5% of the Greek manuscripts of Mark include 16:9-20. Besides Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, there is only one other Greek manuscript in which the text stops abruptly at the end of 16:8 – the medieval commentary-manuscript 304, which does not include a subscription to the Gospel of Mark, and which has undergone some damage, and which may be just the first volume of a two-volume set (the second volume of which, per this theory, began with the final comments on Mark before moving on to Luke and John).
            The “Shorter Ending” appears in six Greek manuscripts, all of which also include at least part of 16:9-20 – and various small but cumulatively decisive features in these manuscripts’ presentation of the Shorter Ending show that they all echo the text that circulated in a particular region in Egypt. In other words, while verses 9-20 are attested by early witnesses from Ireland, France, Rome, North Africa, Asia Minor, Constantinople, Cyprus, Israel, Syria, Egypt, Armenia, etc., the Shorter Ending’s early support is traceable to one locale. Nobody imagines that the Shorter Ending is original, and readers may reasonably suspect, as George Salmon did in 1890, that the primary reason why the Shorter Ending is given any prominence is to distract from the wide support given to the usual twelve verses. (For similar reasons, some commentators mention that Clement does not show an awareness of Mark 16:9-20, as if this is some suggestive thing – neglecting to tell their readers that Clement also does not show an awareness of twelve of Mark’s sixteen chapters.)          

More data is in my e-book,
available at Amazon.

          The way to justify claiming that there are “four other endings of Mark” is to call 16:9-20 an ending, and call the Shorter Ending an ending (and so far, all is well) – and to call the inclusion of both the Shorter Ending and 16:9-20 an ending, and to call 16:9-20 with the Freer Logion (an interpolation preserved in Codex W between verses 14 and 15) an ending. But that is a nonsensical way to describe the evidence; to illustrate:
            Suppose I have two dogs – let’s name them Magnus and Parvus – and I have 1,600 pictures of Magnus, and six pictures of Magnus and Parvus together, one blurry picture of Parvus, and a picture of Magnus wearing a hat. If I were to tell you that this means that I have four dogs, or a multitude of dogs, you might tell me that I am misrepresenting the evidence, and that I need to sober up. And when any writer claims that there are “at least four other endings of Mark,” (or, as Larsen says in his book, that there were “a multitude of options” regarding how to conclude the Gospel of Mark), that should be the gist of readers’ responses. Whenever such misleading language is used, you may confidently conclude that you are reading propaganda, and not honest research.


Readers are invited to explore the embedded links for addition resources.

GA 1333 and the Story of the Adulteress

            It is difficult to exaggerate the extent of misinformation that is circulating in various commentaries regarding the pericope adulterae, or story about the adulteress (found in John 7:53-8:11 in most English Bibles, and in most Greek manuscripts).  Lately, one new bit of misinformation has been added to the pile:  the claim that in the medieval minuscule manuscript 1333, the passage about the adulteress is added to the end of the Gospel of Luke.  Dallas Theological Seminary professor Dr. Daniel Wallace, in a session on New Testament Textual Criticism in the Credo Course curriculum, was referring to minuscule 1333 when he said, as part of a lecture on the story of the adulteress, “In some manuscripts, it stands as an independent pericope between Luke and John.”
            To get some idea of how misleading such a description is, one must first be familiar with the evidence - which consists in this case of just one manuscript, not “some manuscripts.”  So let’s get a good look at the minuscule 1333, a manuscript which currently resides in Jerusalem, where it is cataloged as Hagios Sabas 243.  Black and white page-views of the manuscript are available at the website of the Library of Congress.  

            Minuscule 1333, assigned to the 1000s, is a Gospels-manuscript.  Most of the text is written in two columns per page, with 26 lines per column.  The main text is supplemented by Eusebian canon-numbers and section-numbers in the side-margins, although the Canon-tables themselves do not appear.  Chapter-numbers are also present in the side-margins, and chapter-titles appear in the upper margins.   There are a lot of short Arabic notes in the margin scattered throughout the manuscript.  (Perhaps it would be a worthwhile project for some Arabic-reader to study these notes.) 

            The manuscript has been prepared for liturgical use:  αρχη and τελος symbols appear frequently, and incipit-phrases are often supplied in the margins.  The Heothina-readings are marked.  Symbols (such as ※ and ⁘ and ⁒) of the sort which one might initially assume would link the text to marginal corrections lead instead to liturgical notes (most of which assign readings to specific days). 

            Here is a basic index; the links lead to page-views at the website of the Library of Congress:
Damaged lectionary-tables appear before the kephalaia-list for Matthew.   

Matthew begins below a headpiece similar to the kind often found at the beginning of lectionaries.

Matthew 6:13 includes the doxology to the Lord’s Prayer.

Matthew 16:2-3 is included in the text.

After the last page of Matthew, on which three lines (from Mt. 28:20) are written across the page, the chapter-list for Mark follows on the next page.  There is no subscription.

Mark begins without a headpiece.   

Mark 16:9-20 is included in the text and is identified in the margin as the third Heothinon-lection.

After Mark 16:20, a table of lections for Saturday and Sunday appears in the next two columns, beginning with a headpiece.

Before the chapter-titles for Luke, there is a filler-page.

Luke begins beneath a headpiece.

Luke 22:43-44 is included in the text.

The last six lines of Luke are written in a vortex format, that is, the lines are centered and become shorter as the end approaches.  There is no subscription.

John 8:3-11 is written on the page between the last page of Luke and the page which contains the chapter-titles of John.  The writing begins with a title that covers both columns:  The reading for the 8th of October, for Pelagia.  Then the first column begins with the words, εκ του κατα Ιω, that is, “From the [Gospel] according to John,” the usual sub-title used in lectionaries to introduce a lection from the Gospel of John.  This is followed by Τω καιρω εκεινω, that is, “At that time,” a routine incipit-phrase used to begin readings.  The rest of the text on the page consists of John 8:3-11.  

John 7:52 is followed by John 8:12 in the text.  A symbol resembling a patriarchal (two-barred) cross appears between the two verses.  Earlier in the text (on the facing page) the beginning of the lection for Pentecost is indicated in the text, and the lection is named in the upper margin. 

The closing lines of John 21 are formatted in a cruciform shape.  Arabic notes then appear.

A few Arabic notes and a brief Greek prayer appear near the end of the manuscript on leftover pages.

What should be deduced from this?  A few things:

● When 1333 was produced, it was copied from an exemplar that did not contain John 7:53-8:11.

● John 8:3-11 was added between the end of Luke and the chapter-list for John in order to provide the otherwise absent lection for Saint Pelagia’s feast-day (October 8).

● The titles that precede John 8:3-11 in 1333 show that this passage was not floating or fluttering around as an independent tradition; the passage is clearly identified as a lection from John.  It is misleading to describe it as an “independent pericope,” inasmuch as the person who wrote it had to have depended on a source in which it was identified as a part of the Gospel of John.  John 8:3-11 in 133 is not formatted in a way that can be reasonably construed as if it were seen as part of the text of Luke, nor is it formatted in a way that can be reasonably construed as if the scribe obtained his text of the passage from some independent non-Biblical source. 

● When and where John 8:3-11 was added to 1333, John 8:3-11 was part of the annual cycle of readings in the Menologion.    

● 1333 was initially formatted to include filler-pages; the presence of John 8:3-11 before the chapter-list of John and the presence of a lection-list before the chapter-list of Luke are probably both the work of a later scribe who used the filler-pages as a convenient place to add materials that would render the manuscript more useful for liturgical reading.

My Favorite Passage About an Adulteress in the Bible

            Dan Wallace’s research on John 7:53-8:11 is unreliable.  Let’s take a few minutes today to see where this professor at Dallas Theological Seminary has gotten things wrong about John 7:53-8:11 in his Credo Course on New Testament textual criticism, and at the wrong conclusion that his mistreatment of the evidence has led him.

Actually, we have a lot more than that:
half the majuscules of John 7-8,
and about 1,500 minuscules.

(1)  Wallace:  “We have three majuscule manuscripts, out of the 322 that we have, that actually have this passage.  That’s it.”

This statement is wrong in two ways.  First, the metric is unfair, since most of the 322 uncial manuscripts that he cited (a number which has risen slightly since then) do not have any text from the Gospel of John whatsoever.  It would be unfair to say, “The Dallas Cowboys have failed to win 308 out of 316 football games this season” if the team only played 16 football games, won seven times, and had one tie.  To include 300 games that the team could not participate in serves only one purpose:  to convey a false impression. 

            Second, more than three majuscule manuscripts have the story of the adulteress!  The uncials E, G, H, K, M, U, S, G, Ω, 047, and 0233 support the passage, and Codex F included it when the manuscript was in pristine condition.  Wallace’s statement of the number of uncials (i.e., majuscules) that contain the pericope adulterae is off by a factor of four.

            In addition, it is no secret that Codices Δ and L, while they do not contain John 7:53-8:11, contain blank space between John 7:52 and John 8:12, which is obvious testimony to their copyist’s awareness of the absent passage, and there is no good reason to neglect to mention this feature of these two manuscripts when presenting them as evidence for the non-inclusion of the passage.

The Latin chapter-titles (capitula)
and chapter-summaries (breves)
tell a different story.

(2)  Wallace:  “When the Syriac, and the Coptic, and the Latin versions, along those lines, don’t have it, when they were begun in the second and third century, their manuscripts that they used didn’t have it.”

Wallace’s statement is unobjectionable regarding the Syriac and Coptic copies – setting aside the Syriac Didascalia’s statement about Jesus’ statement, “Neither do I condemn you” in the interest of brevity, since it is not a manuscript – but the Latin evidence is quite a different story.  In an early form of the Latin chapter-divisions of John, considered to have originated in the mid-200’s or slightly thereafter (and for this reason called “Type Cy,” the “Cy” representing Cyprian and his era), the thirtieth chapter-title, or summary, begins with the phrase, “Ubi adulteram dimisit et se dixit lumen saeculi,” that is, “Wherein he dismissed the adulteress, and said that he was the light of the world.” 

            Another form of the Latin chapter-divisions in John, Type I, from the 300’s, divides the text differently; its sixteenth chapter-title, or summary, says, “Adducunt ad eum mulierem ‘in adulterio deprehensam,’” and in one form of this chapter-summary, the text continues, “in moechatione ut eam iudicaret,” and this phrase – with the loanword moechatione – is also found in another form of the Latin chapter-divisions, Type D.  All in all, twelve different forms of Latin chapter-divisions include the story of the adulteress, all in the usual location after John 7:52. 

            Among Old Latin manuscripts of John, while the early Latin support for John 7:53-8:11 is not unanimous, Jonathan Clark Borland has shown that the story of the adulteress circulated in not just one, but three localized forms within the Old Latin tradition.  Clearly, there is Dr. Wallace’s claim, and then on the other hand there is the real world.

Except 20 or so.  Obscure writers
such as Ambrose and Augustine.

(3) Wallace:  “We have a lack of patristic comments on this passage until the twelfth century.   Not until the 1100’s do you get somebody who takes any time to really comment on this text.” 

           For those who are familiar with the comments on this passage made by Pacian of Barcelona (mid-300’s – same era as Codex Sinaiticus’ copyists), Ambrose of Milan, Ambrosiaster, Jerome (whose testimony is strangely absent from the NET’s note on the passage), Augustine, Prosper of Aquitaine, and others, the gracious reaction will be to assume that the speaker was rephrasing Bruce Metzger’s outdated Textual Commentary, and forgot to include the word “Greek” to describe the patristic comments to which he referred.  But this cannot be the entire explanation, because Wallace proceeded to assert that “You don’t see it in any fathers of the first millennium.” [bold print added]

(4) Wallace:  “There are several [manuscripts] that have an asterisk in the margin.” 

            The number of manuscripts with an asterisk or asterisks (or similar marks, such as a column of squiggly lines) is something more like 270, not just “several.”  But in 130 of these manuscripts, the asterisks do not accompany all of John 7:53-8:11; they only accompany John 8:3-11.  Maurice Robinson has helpfully demonstrated that in these cases, the asterisks constitute part of the lectionary-apparatus, conveying to the lector where to find the lection for Saint Pelagia’s Day (October 8) embedded within the lection for Pentecost.  Wallace, however, instead of accepting what should be obvious – for why would copyists put asterisks only by 8:3-11, and not 7:53-8:2 as well, if their intent was to mark the passage as spurious? – has insisted that these asterisks were inserted to convey scribal doubt.  

            Part of the reason why he has insisted that these asterisks convey scribal doubt, he claimed, has something to do with the presence of an asterisk in Codex Claromontanus.  If anyone can make sense of the line of reasoning Dr. Wallace has employed about this, please let me know, for it seems to me that showing that one copyist used an asterisk for one purpose does not mean that other copyists cannot use it for an entirely different purpose.

(5) Wallace:  “Codex D’s text is not at all like the Byzantine MSS’ version of the story.  Lots of corruption in this passage.  Some manuscripts tell us what He wrote.  This indicates that this was “may well be a floating oral story that got spread about in different forms for quite some time.”

            Another explanation is that, as Eusebius of Caesarea reported, there was another form of the story in the once-popular writings of Papias, and details from one form of the story were occasionally blended into the other.  Of course for students to perceive this alternative explanation, they would first have to be informed about the existence of Eusebius’ report of Papias’ form of the incident.

Diagnosis:  Metzgerius Regurgitatis.
Study the lectionary cycle, professor.

(6) Wallace:  “It is a floating text as far as the New Testament is concerned.  Let me show you some of the places this passage has shown up, and let’s wrestle with what the implications of that are.  It appears in three different places in John 7 – not just John 7:53 but a couple of places earlier.”

            Ah, the Fable of the Floating Anecdote.  Since I have already refuted, in an earlier series of posts beginning at http://www.thetextofthegospels.com/2017/01/john-753-811-why-it-was-moved-part-1.html , the theory that the dislocations of the story of the adulteress indicate that it was a freestanding narrative that floated around like a restless butterfly, I will not replow plowed ground here, except to expose how selective Dr. Wallace’s descriptions of the evidence are.

(7) Wallace:  “In some manuscripts, it appears as a separate pericope at the end of all four Gospels, just tacked on at the very end.”

Tell us, please, about the note that
accompanies it in minuscule 1582. 
The note that says it was taken from
the location after John 7:52.

As if someone took a separate composition and added it on to the Gospels.  Except when one learns – as Dr. Wallace’s students, sadly, do not learn in his classroom – that these manuscripts belong to a tightly-related group, family-1, and that the core members of this group (minuscules 1 and 1582) preface the story of the adulteress with a note which specifically says “The chapter about the adulteress:  in the Gospel according to John, this does not appear in the majority of copies; nor is it commented upon by the divine fathers whose interpretations have been preserved – specifically, by John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria; nor is it taken up by Theodore of Mopsuestia and the others.  For this reason, it was not kept in the place where it is found in a few copies, at the beginning of the 86^th chapter [that is, the 86^th Eusebian section], following, ‘Search and see that a prophet does not arise out of Galilee.’”

            If Dr. Wallace’s students were told about the contents of this prefatory note, they would not leave him classroom ready to confidently tell their future flocks that the story about the adulteress was “tacked on at the very end” from someplace other than from within the Gospel of John.  They would know about the note which specifically says that the story of the adulteress was transplanted to the end of John from its usual location after John 7:52.

Some?  I think you mean one.
And it's not independent. 
It's the lection for Saint Pelagia's
Day, with a heading, "From John."

(8) Wallace:  “In some manuscripts, it stands as an independent pericope between Luke and John.”

This is not the case.  The manuscript that comes the closest to fitting Dr. Wallace’s description is minuscule 1333, in which the lection for Saint Pelagia’s day (John 8:3-11) is added between the end of Luke and the beginning of John, on what had been a filler-page.  But John 8:3-11 is accompanied on this page in 1333 by headings which identify it as the lection for Saint Pelagia’s day, and as a lection from the Gospel of John.  Once again when the details of the evidence are not locked away, the same thing that was treated as evidence that the story of the adulteress was a floating text is seen to be just the opposite. 

(9) Wallace:  “What does all this tell us?  Is it stable in its place?  No; it’s not stable.  That suggests that here’s a passage that’s trying to get into the Bible, and it’s tried several different places to get in, if you can personify this.  And finally it landed on John 7:52, right after that seemed to be the most logical, the most coherent place, it seems; fits into the text pretty well, and yet there are still some real serious issues there.”

            That is the conclusion that Dr. Wallace wants his students to reach.  Throughout his lectures on this subject – not only in the Credo Course but also in other online presentations – he demonstrates an utter lack of consideration of the impact of the lection-cycle upon the text.  One is tempted to even call it a lack of awareness of the lection-cycle altogether, for as far as I can tell, he never brings up the point that the lection for Saint Pelagia was embedded within the lection for Pentecost.  Nor, as far as I can tell, does he ever indicate that he understands that copyists sometimes simplified the lector’s task on Pentecost (where the lection jumped from the end of John 7:52, leapfrogged John 7:53-8:11, and landed on 8:12) by removing the elided verses to another location.

            Rather, here is how he described the format of the passage in minuscule 115; I give an extensive quote in order to show the extent of his misunderstanding: 

(10) Wallace:  “And it also occurs, in one manuscript, after John 8:12; this is fascinating:  it’s codex 115, and it’s one that Griesbach actually was one of the very first guys to collate; I collated it several years ago, and what I noticed was – here’s a manuscript, it shears off at John 11, right in the middle of John 11 – but, the scribe copying out this manuscript gets to this pericope, and – he’s copying from another manuscript – he writes out John 7:52; then he continues copying from this other manuscript, and writes out John 8:12. 

            “The manuscript that he’s copying from . . . all of a sudden, it skips the story of the woman caught in adultery.  This scribe doesn’t catch it until he writes the verse after this pericope.  And so, he catches it:  he goes, “Oh!  Wait a minute; that’s not right.  This story is supposed to go here.”  So he goes and puts that manuscript down, picks up another one that has the story of the woman caught in adultery, and writes it out.  This is the only manuscript I know of where you have the story of the woman caught in adultery after John 8:12, and then John 8:12 is again repeated after it.  And you can see how it came about.”

            Except that’s not how it came about.  The copyist of 115 was merely trying to make the lector’s job a little easier by putting 8:12 alongside the rest of the lection for Pentecost.  Minuscule 115 is not the only manuscript like this; the same thing is found in minuscules 1050, 1349, and 2620, and in minuscule 476, John 8:12 is written in the margin alongside 7:52 for the same purpose.  Dr. Wallace guides his students to conclude that the passage is a floating text, but what the evidence that he is presenting really shows – if its details would be allowed to speak in Dr. Wallace’s classrooms – is that the copyists of these manuscripts expected John 7:37-52+8:12 to be read at Pentecost, and they also expected John 8:3-11 to be read on October 8 in honor of Saint Pelagia (or in some cases, Mary of Egypt).  In no way does these transplantations of the passage support the idea that it was moved from anywhere except from its usual location after John 7:52. 

            Regarding the other case of transplantation that Wallace mentioned (to the end of Luke 21), and others that he did not mention, I have elsewhere already explained how they originated because of adjustments to the lection-cycle, and do not support the idea of a “floating text,” unless one means that some copyists, in attempts to simplify the task of the lector, floated the passage from its usual location after John 7:52 to other locations that they considered more convenient.

(11) Wallace:  “I told you that some of these manuscripts have an asterisk there, and the asterisk is indicating that the text is not authentic.  Here in Codex 1424 we see asterisks in the margin down here, of this text.  So you’ve got the text actually written out, but then you’ve got the asterisks saying it’s not actually authentic, or that they have doubts about it.  This is a manuscript at the Lutheran School of Theology that we photographed a few years ago, a very important manuscript.  But, significantly, those asterisks say, the scribe is telling us he has doubts about the authenticity.”

What about the note in 1424 that
says that the entire passage is in
the ancient manuscripts and that
the church should use it?

            Let’s take a closer look at minuscule 1424’s treatment of the story of the adulteress.  Its main text does not include the passage; the account is crammed into the outer and lower margin of the page.  The readings within the passage as written in the margin of 1424 are similar to the text of the passage in Codex Λ.  In addition to the asterisks, it is accompanied by a note.  Nearly identical notes also appear in Codex Λ (as a scholium), and in minuscule 262, and in minuscule 20 (in which the passage is transplanted to the end of the Gospel of John).  Here is the note:  “This is not in certain copies, and it was not in those used by Apollinaris.  In the old ones, it is all there.  And this pericope is referenced by the apostles, affirming that it is for the edification of the church.”  (The last sentence is referring to the use of the story about the adulteress in the composition known as Apostolic Constitutions, Book 2, chapter 24, which is modeled upon an older work, the Didascalia, at this point.)

The format of the text in 1349:
Red line with green arrow (twice) = 8:12
Yellow line = 7:53-8:11
Blue rectangle = heading, "The Adulteress"
Green square:  movable date for the next lection

            Thus, when closer scrutiny is applied to the margin of 1424, we do not have to resort to guesswork to see the purpose of the asterisks:  they draw attention to the passage that the note is about – a note which affirms that the passage, though not in some copies, was found in ancient manuscripts, and which appeals to Apostolic Constitutions as confirmation that it is for the edification of the church.  Not quite the same impression now, is it?

(12) Wallace:  “I really think the passage needs to be relegated to the footnotes.”

            So would I, if my grasp of the evidence were as poor as his, or if I were a student at Dallas Theological Seminary (or at the Credo Course) without the means to test the accuracy of what I was being taught on this subject.  But having taken an unfiltered look into the evidence (and there is much more I could critique, but have not, in the interest of brevity), my view is that the story about the adulteress was originally in the text of the Gospel of John, and that it was lost in an early and influential transmission-line when a copyist misunderstood marginal instructions intended for a lector as if they were meant for the copyist.  It should be revered by everyone as inspired Scripture.  

            Some might claim that my position is the effect of an attachment to tradition, or “emotional baggage.”  What could I do against such suspicions except insist that this is not the case, and that it is those who reject the pericope adulterae who are promoting an obsolete tradition – namely, the “floating anecdote” myth that is no longer sustainable.  Against all attempts at dismissal, I bask in my confidence that even those who have traveled down that dead-end road will soon learn the facts of the case, and stop spreading their inaccurate claims about the story of the adulteress.

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            I take this opportunity to remind readers that my Kindle e-book A Fresh Analysis of John 7:53-8:11 is available to purchase at Amazon for 99 cents – and readers (especially seminary professors and Bible teachers) are welcome to contact me at james.snapp@gmail.com and request a free copy.