Mark 16:9-20 Is Being Misrepresented. It Must Be Easter!

            Today is the first day after Easter 2020.   Happily, most journalistic outlets seem to have decided against publishing attacks on the passages of Scripture that affirm the bodily resurrection of Christ (or on the reliability of the Bible in general) – with one exception:  Bonnie Kristian’s article “Coronavirus and the mystery of St. Mark’s Easter story” was published in The Week, and on the Yahoo! News website.

            Kristian, a graduate of Bethel Seminary, targeted Mark 16:9-20 as part of her Easter celebration.  She attempted to draw a parallel between the fear that was felt by the women in Mark 16:8 and the fear that is felt by some people about the COVID-19 pandemic.  The same sort of parallel could be made using the fearfulness that is mentioned in Mark 16:5, or Luke 24:4-5, or John 20:19 – but Mark 16:8 was chosen instead, apparently so that Kristian could encourage readers to erase Mark 16:9-20 from the authoritative text, spreading some false claims along the way, such as the following:

● The KJV was translated from Latin rather than Hebrew and Greek.  That claim is false, and it has already been withdrawn from the article in The Week.  The Week regrets the error.

● In many ancient manuscripts of Mark, the Gospel ends at 16:8.   Today, the surviving text ends at the end of verse 8.  In real life, the number of Greek manuscripts of Mark that end the text there is three. The number of Latin manuscripts that end the text there:  one. The number of Syriac manuscripts that end the text there:  one.  The number of Greek manuscripts in which support for Mark 16:9-20 has survived is 1,640.  (This includes important ancient Greek manuscripts such as Codices A, C, D, W, etc.)   The number of Latin and Syriac manuscripts that include Mark 16:9-20 is in the thousands.  In addition to Gospel-manuscripts, Mark 16:9-20 is also prominently featured in hundreds of lectionaries, such as Sinai MS Gr, 212.

● Most modern translations, if they have verses 9-20, “add a preface stating it isn’t present in many of the best ancient manuscripts of Mark.”  This is false.  Most recent translations add a footnote, but when I consult the BibleGateway website, only the NIV and ESV appear to have a heading-note prefacing Mark 16:9, and it does not say what Kristien says.  There’s a reason for that:  two is not many.  

            The ESV’s heading-note stating that “Some of the earliest manuscripts” do not include verses 9-20 is not very accurate:  how many Greek manuscripts are in that “Some”?  The answer is, as already mentioned, is three.  One is GA 304, a medieval non-continuous commentary-manuscript.  Codex Sinaiticus (À, with replacement-pages at the end of Mark) is one of the two earlier ones, and Codex Vaticanus (B, with an entire blank column after the column in which Mark 16:8 appears) is the other.  

            Heading-notes and footnotes are brief by nature, and the point could be argued that a heading-note cannot be expected to mention Sinaiticus’ replacement-pages, or Vaticanus’ blank column.  But what keeps the note from being precise by referring to “Two” early Greek manuscripts instead of “Some”?  I hope it does not sound conspiratorial to mention one possibility:  the editors did not want readers to easily notice the narrowness of the thread from which their favored variant hangs.

● The KJV “includes uncritically a 12-verse ending.”  This is a technically ignorant statement – that is, Kristian has no special knowledge or insight about the critical research that went into the KJV; she simply does not know how much critical investigation into the question was made by the KJV’s translators.  Kristian says the KJV adopted Mark 16:9-20 “uncritically” but she did not mention any of the printed editions of the Greek New Testament that were issued in the 1500s – perhaps because she is unaware of their existence, thinking that the KJV was based on Latin instead.  I suspect that she is equally oblivious to the early patristic support of Mark 16:9-20 supplied by writers such as Irenaeus (in 180), Jerome (383), Augustine (400), Ambrose (385), Aphrahat (337), Ephrem Syrus (360) and Patrick (450) (to name just a few).  (For if she had known about them, it would have been deceptive to avoid mentioning them.  Surely, undoubtedly, The Week only misled its readers due to ignorance, not due to intent.) 

            There is still time for The Week to undo some of the damage its carelessly written article has done – although, alas, when misinformation is spread so irresponsibly, correcting it all is like trying to capture all of the coronavirus that a carrier has been sharing with family and friends over a weekend.

            There’s a lesson that may be learned from this:  if you read anything about the ending of the Gospel of Mark in a journal of any kind around Easter-time, and it does not mention that only three Greek manuscripts out of over 1,600 end the text at 16:8, and it does not mention that Irenaeus quoted Mark 16:19, and it does not mention Codex B’s blank space, know that you are reading propaganda, not a balanced report.

P.S.  N.T. Wright, this was partly your fault.  Fix your book!

P.P.S.  My research-book Authentic:  The Case for Mark 16:9-20 is available at Amazon as a Kindle e-book for 99 cents.   It can also be downloaded from Academia.edu for free.  Also, I will be glad to try to send a free digital copy to those who contact me and request it. 

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

Lectionary 60 - The One With Runes

Runes on the frontispiece of Lect 60.

            Lectionary 60 was made in the year 1022, and is thus almost one thousand years old.  It has a very unusual feature on its frontis-piece-page (which displays the remains of a picture of Christ, surrounded by symbols of the Evangelists):  runes.  The rune-inscription identifies the manuscript as the property of Saint Dionysius’ church – the famous basilica north of Paris where kings in France were entombed since Dagobert in 639. 

            Perhaps someone at St.-Denis, noticing that past generations of monks had been obligated to pay Vikings to spare the basilica, and to ransom their abbot, considered it wise to write this note in a language which Vikings could understand – just in case the Vikings might wonder where to send the ransom-note.  Or perhaps a Viking church-member wrote it.

            This existence of this lectionary ought to dissuade us from picturing the history of the Greek New Testament as an exclusively non-European thing – as if Greek manuscripts did not show up in western Europe until the 1400s.  Lectionary 60 shows that Greek manuscripts were not only read, but were produced, in France in the century before the First Crusade.  

            This arrangement of the text in Lectionary 60 tends to follow the pattern for the Synaxarion – movable days – given at Robert Waltz’s Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism.  Beginning at Easter-time, lections (i.e., selections for reading in church-services) from the Gospel of John are presented, along with lections from the book of Acts.  Lectionary 60 has lections for week-days as well as for Saturdays and Sundays.  After Pentecost, the lections are excerpted from the Gospel of Matthew and from Paul’s Epistles, beginning with Romans.  Twelve weeks’ worth of lections later, the lections are taken from the Gospel of Mark and from Paul’s other epistles.  Lectionary 60 has the lection-cycle for Easter-week, with the Twelve Gospel-readings for Good Friday, and the Readings for the Vigil at the first, third, sixth, and ninth hours, other Easter-time readings, and the Heothina-series.  On page 162, the Menologion section begins.

            There are, however, variations from the Byzantine pattern – especially when it comes to the lection that was to be read in honor of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite.  This lection was particularly esteemed at the church that was named in Saint Dionysius’ honor.  Why Dionysius had received that honor might take some explaining: 

            There are three Dionysiuses in the picture.  First there was Dionysius the Areopagite, who was converted to Christianity by the preaching of Paul in Athens, as reported in chapter 17 of the book of Acts.  Second, there was the patron saint of France, Saint Denis (Denis is short for “Dionysius”), a bishop who was beheaded in Paris in a wave of persecution initiated by Emperor Decius in the mid-200s.  (This martyr was commemorated by the famous Oriflamme banner.)  Third, there was the anonymous author of several influential philosophical compositions that were circulated in the late 400s and early 500s; this author is known as Pseudo-Dionysius.

            Among medieval clerics who thought that Pseudo-Dionysius was actually Dionysius the Areopagite (an impression which Pseudo-Dionysius’ writings encouraged), there was also confusion between Dionysius the Areopagite and Dionysius the third-century martyr.  This may account for the emphasis (a natural emphasis at the basilica of Saint Denis) on the lection for Dionysius the Areopagite (Acts 17:22-34) in Lectionary 60:  it appears in the lectionary three times.  First, it is written in Greek (but in Latin-like handwriting) on page 55, after an acrostic (ΔΟΞΑ ΤΩ ΘΕΩ ΑΜΗΝ) which interrupts the lectionary-material.  It is also found on fol. 153, in a Latin-like script completely unlike the main copyist’s handwriting; the person who wrote this lection seems to have had a gift for finding unusual ways to spell words in Greek.  (Apparently, there had been blank pages in the manuscript, leftover between sections, and someone used them as the material upon which to write this particular lection.)  And it is written near the very end of the lectionary, in much better (recent?) handwriting, with a Latin heading. 
            Two lections in two different kinds of handwriting occupy fol. 154a:  Luke 6:17-23 is written, in something like sense-lines, before Matthew 4:25-5:3a.   Near the bottom of the page, there is an inartistic Greek alphabet and, in Latin, a curse upon anyone who steals this holy book from the library of the St-Denis church.  (Another Greek alphabet appears in the lower margin of fol. 82.)

             

            Once one gets used to the handwriting and untrained initial-drawing of the main copyist in Lectionary 60, its text is not bad at all (although the spelling is phenomenally bad).  Here, as a sort of spot-check, are comparisons of four passages in Lectionary 60 to the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform; I have disregarded incipit-phrases, and most itacisms (which are everywhere):

            John 9:1-10 (p. 39):  in v. 7, Lect 60 does not have ουν (“therefore”), and in v. 10, Lect 60 has ηνεόχθησάν instead of ανεώχθησάν [NA:  ηνεώχθησάν]

            John 14:1-4 (p. 44):  in v. 1, Lect 60 has μηδε διλιτω [≈14:27], in v. 2, Lect 60 has δια τα εργα αυτα before ειπον [≈14:11],

            First Corinthians 4:1-5 (p. 68):  in v. 2, λοιπόν is absent, in v. 4, Lect has γαρ instead of δε before ανακρίνων [-νον in Lect 60],

            Mark 1:1-5 (p. 178):  in v. 5, Lect 60 does not have ἡ after πασα, in v. 5, and Lect 60 has ϊερουσαλημ instead of οι ιεροσολυμιται.  In v. 4, John’s name is written as ιω.  

                       

            Here are some interesting textual features, and other features, of Lectionary 60:

            ● Mark 16:9-20 is included (on p. 156); it is one of the readings in the Heothina-series

            ● John 5:3-4 is included (on p. 7), and the angel is described as the angel of the Lord (αγγελος γαρ κυ)

            ● Acts 8:37 is not included (on p. 25)

            ● Luke 22:43-45a is included in the text of Matthew, following Mt. 26:39 (on p. 125b, page-view 262 at CSNTM)  (This is normal in Byzantine Gospels-lectionaries – but still interesting.)

            ● In Matthew 10:8 (on fol. 152b, p. 316 at CSNTM), νεκρους εγειρεται (“raise the dead”) is included, but not immediately following “heal the sick.”  Instead, it appears at a later point in the verse, between εκβάλλεται and the first δωρεὰν. P and W and Δ share this reading with Lectionary 60.  (On the same page, there is something strange about the text of Matthew 11:27.)

            ● On page 9, the number Β (2) appears in the upper outer corner of the page; on page 97, the number ΙΓ (13) appears; on page 145, ΙΘ, that is, 19, appears.  Perhaps these are quire-numbers, and perhaps there were once more numbers on other pages, written a little further to the right, but the others have been trimmed away.  (Some notes in the upper margin have been trimmed away; some have been half-trimmed away.)

            ● The margins of Lectionary 60 have quite a few notes, mostly in Latin.  (They are not all from the same hand.)  For example, on page 154b, where Matthew 1:1 begins the text, the opening Latin phrase of Matthew 1:1 is written in the margin.  130b contains a good example of Latin notes alongside Greek notes.

            ● On page 55, the lectionary-material is interrupted by an acrostic poem. (The initials say ΔΟΞΑ ΤΩ ΘΕΩ ΑΜΗΝ)  (This is followed by the St. Dionysius lection, already described.)

            ● The parchment that was used for Lectionary 60 was not of high quality; the copyist(s) frequently had to adapt to uneven pages and pages with holes.

            ● Lectionary 60 includes lections from Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, First Corinthians, Second Corinthians, Hebrews, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, First Thessalonians, First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Philippians.

            ● On fol. 108 there is a little prayer-note in the lower margin.

            ● Although I did not investigate the question thoroughly, I suspect that at least two copyists, besides later supplement-providers, worked on this lectionary. 

            ● A colophon on fol. 193 supplies the name of a copyist, his location, and the production-date of the manuscript:  ἐτελ[ε]ιοθ[η]  τω παρον εκλογαδ[ιον] δια χειρος Ηλιοῦ πρεσβυτερου κ[αι] μοναχου σπιλεό [?] του μη[νος] Νοεμβριω κς ημερα κυ[ριακῇ], ωρ[α] θ.  τε. ϛφλ ινδ. Ε εν χόρα φραγκι καστρο δε κολόνιας.  –  Something like, “The gift of this Eclogadion was completed through the hand of Elias, presbyter and monk, stained [?] in the month of November, on the 25^th day, Sunday, at the 9^th hour, year 6,530 in the fifth indiction.  In the country of France, in the castle of Kolonia.”  Someone did the calculations and wrote the implied production-date, 1022, in the margin.

            Lectionary 60 is presently housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (the national Library of France), where it is cataloged as Grec 375.  A digital file of the entire manuscript can be downloaded from the Gallica website.

Update! (Sept. 2021)  Denis Salgado has provided more information about Lectionary 60 at the CSNTM blog.

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

The Date of Easter and Early Lection-Cycles

         

Constantine

  In the year 325, Roman Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicea.  This council, attended by 318 bishops from all over the empire, focused on the subject of the nature of Christ. (The number 318, drawn from Genesis 14:14, was considered to have a special meaning, since in Greek gematria the letters ΤΙΗ (tau, iota, eta) have a total value of 318, and are also, visually, the shape of a cross plus the first two letters in Jesus’ name.) 

The result of this council was the Nicene Creed, which declared, among other things, that Jesus was “very God of very God, begotten, not made.”  This meant that Arius – the Egyptian cleric whose controversial teachings had elicited the council – was wrong in his insistence that there was a time when the Logos did not exist.

            Something else was also addressed at the Council of Nicea.  It was not the New Testament canon, contrary to the fictitious gobbledegook that has been spread by The Da Vinci Code and similar books.  It was the date of Easter.

            When the early church first celebrated the resurrection of Christ, their celebration coincided with the Jewish Passover.  A vestige of this arrangement can still be found in the King James Version in Acts12:4:  the Passover-festival is referred to as Easter.  In this passage the KJV’s translators did not intend to convey that the Jewish ruler Herod was celebrating the Christian holy day of Easter or that he was celebrating some pagan holiday.  They simply retained the rendering that had been made almost 90 years earlier by William Tyndale, who also coined the term “Passover,” a term which eventually caught on and facilitated the recognition of the two holidays as separate events.  (Tyndale’s English version repeatedly refers to the Passover as “Easter,” even in episodes in the Gospels that precede the death and resurrection of Christ.)  

            Some Christians had a special annual celebration of the Lord’s resurrection on the same day as the Jewish Passover.  Others, though, celebrated Holy Week annually with the Lord’s resurrection always observed on a Sunday.  This difference had persisted for a long time – ever since the days of the students of the apostles.  In Ignatius’ closing comments in his Letter to the Philippians, he stated that whoever observes the Passover with the Jews or receives the emblems of their feast is a partaker with those who killed the Lord and His apostles - quite a heavy denunciation, though it is unclear if Ignatius was referring to merely celebrating the Lord’s resurrection at the same time the Jews celebrated Passover, or to participating in the Judaic Passover observance itself. 
            Hippolytus, in Book 8 of his lengthy composition Refutation of All Heresies, firmly opposed those who celebrated Easter on the 14th of the month; yet even though he called them heretics, he acknowledged that in other regards they kept the apostolic faith and traditions. 

Hippolytus

            Eusebius of Caesarea (a participant in the Council of Nicea who tended to sympathize with Arius, but not too vocally) described the controversy that arose in the 100’s, in his Ecclesiastical History, Book 5, chapters 24-25.

            Congregations in Asia (i.e., western Turkey), Eusebius reported, customarily observed a tradition that the resurrection of Christ corresponded annually with the Jewish Passover (the 14th day of the month Nisan), whether it was a Sunday or not.   But in other places, including Jerusalem and Rome, it was customary to always celebrate the resurrection of Christ on a Sunday – and the leaders of those places wrote to the churches in Asia, appealing to them to alter their custom.

               Polycrates, a leader in the Asian churches, responded with a letter – Eusebius cited it specifically and presented its contents – in which he stated that Philip the evangelist, John the apostle, Polycarp the martyr, Melito of Sardis, and others (including relatives of Polycrates) had all observed the resurrection of Christ on the 14th of the month – and he had no intention of deviating from that tradition. 

             In 193, Victor, bishop of Rome, initially resolved to excommunicate Polycrates and everyone who agreed with him.  This course of action was averted, though, by advice given by several other bishops – one of whom was none other than the renowned Irenaeus of Lyons. 

            Eusebius presented a snippet of Irenaeus’ letter, which has a remarkably conciliatory tone.  Irenaeus advised Victor of Rome that the disagreement involved not only the annual date, but also details about the length of the fast that preceded it.  To excommunicate people over such details would not look good.  In addition, Irenaeus pointed out, earlier generations of Christians had not condemned one another over this issue; their inactivity implied that they did not consider it something worth separating about:

            “This variety in its observance,” Irenaeus wrote, “has not originated in our time, but long before in that of our ancestors.  It is likely that they did not hold to strict accuracy, and thus formed a custom for their posterity according to their own simplicity and peculiar mode.  Yet all of these lived nonetheless in peace, and we also live in peace with one another.”

            And there is more.  In the composition by Irenaeus presented by Eusebius, Irenaeus mentions that Polycarp, when he was at Rome, disagreed with Anicetus (apparently about when to celebrate Easter), and neither could persuade the other – so they agreed to disagree.

              The agreement to disagree effectively ended, though, at Nicea.  The Quartodecimanians – those who observed Easter on the 14th of the month – were summarily denounced.  The exact wording of the decree at Nicea about this is unknown, but in 341 at the the Council of Antioch, a decree was issued which, in the course of affirming the Council of Nicea, stated that bishops who observed the Lord’s resurrection at the same time as the Jews (that is, on the 14th of Nisan) were to be relieved of duty. 

            With the Quartodeciman tradition thus rejected, a consensus emerged that Easter was to be observed annually on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox.  The details of this approach were probably based on the Paschal Canon of Anatolius of Alexandria (from A.D. 270).  Alas, even this objective calculation has not resulted in uniformity among all churches, due to the effects of the different calendars that have been retained as the basis for the calculation.  This year (2018), Passover-week is March 31- April 6, and Easter Sunday is April 1 (although for the Orthodox Churches it is April 8).  (Panos Antsalkis of the University of Notre Dame explains it all in a detailed essay.)

            “Fascinating,” you may be thinking, “but what does all that have to do with the text of the New Testament?”

            The thing to see is that an annual cycle of Easter-observance emerged very early, and became entrenched very quickly, in the first half of the 100s.  It seems very likely that other annual observances spread at the same time and that this elicited the early emergence of lection-cycles.  In the case of the annual feast of Pentecost, Christian observance of Pentecost is mentioned not only in the New Testament book of Acts, but also in the anonymous second-century composition Epistula Apostolorum (which also mentions the Easter celebration). 

Tertullian, writing in Latin in North Africa in the late 100’s or early 200’s, mentioned Christians’ observance of Pentecost in chapter 23 of his composition On Prayer:  “We, however – just as we have received – only on the day of the Lord’s resurrection ought to guard not only against kneeling, but every posture and office of solicitude; deferring even our businesses lest we give any place to the devil.  Similarly, to, in the period of Pentecost, which period we distinguish by the same solemnity of exultation.”

Not only was the Day of Pentecost a special occasion from the sub-apostolic era onward, but the whole fifty-day period from Eastertime to Pentecost was considered a special period of celebration.  Evidence of this is provided in Tertullian’s allusion to Pentecost in the third chapter of his composition On the Soldier’s Crown, in the course of referring to activities which in his time were already regarded as traditional practices:  “We consider fasting or kneeling in worship on the Lord’s Day to be unlawful.  We rejoice in the same privilege also from Easter to Pentecost.” 

Slightly later, Origen mentioned Christians’ annual observance of Pentecost too, in Against Celsus, Book 8, chapter 22:

“If it be objected to us on this subject that we ourselves are accustomed to observe certain days, as for example the Lord’s Day, the Preparation, the Passover, or Pentecost, I have to answer that to the perfect Christian, who is constantly in his thoughts, words, and deeds serving his natural Lord, God the Word, all his days are the Lord’s, and he is always keeping the Lord’s Day.”

He continued in chapter 23:  “But the majority of those who are accounted believers are not of this advanced class; but because they are either unable or unwilling to keep every day in this manner, they require some sensible memorials to prevent spiritual things from passing altogether away from their minds.”

The early establishment of annual Christian festivals provided a setting in which it was almost inevitable that specific passages were assigned to be read on specific days.  This established the basic building-blocks of what eventually became annual cycles of lectionary-readings – reading-cycles that were initially independent and localized (like the manner in which Easter was observed), but which gradually became more uniform.

John Burgon, in his 1871 book The Last Twelve Verses of Mark Vindicated, pointed out some readings in early manuscripts which, he proposed, are early adaptations of the text made at the beginning or ends of lections to either introduce, or to round off, the episode.  Not all of his examples seem persuasive, but the following are interesting and suggestive:    

● Matthew 8:13.  A small assortment of manuscripts has an extra sentence attached to this verse:  “And the centurion returned to his house, and in that hour the servant was made whole.”  If these manuscripts were all medieval, this reading would likely be dismissed as a harmonization to the parallel in Luke 7:10, intended to round off a lection.  And, indeed, this verse concludes the lection for the fifth Sunday after Pentecost in the Byzantine lectionary-cycle.  But that small assortment of manuscripts includes Codex Sinaiticus (from the mid-300s) and several other uncials. 

● Mark 14:3.  Codex D (05, Codex Bezae) inserts Jesus’ name.  Codex Bezae’s text includes so many little expansions that one might argue that it is a mere coincidence that this one occurs at the beginning of the lection for the seventeenth Friday after Easter.  

● Luke 7:1.  Codex D basically rewrites the verse, which happens to begin the lection for the fifth Saturday after Pentecost.

● Luke 4:16.  Codex D (and F and G and 579) insert Jesus’ name in the first part the verse; this happens to be the beginning of the lection for first Thursday after Pentecost. 

● Luke 5:17.  Codex D rewrites the verse, which happens to begin the lection for the second Saturday after Pentecost.

● Luke 16:19.  Codex D reads “And He spoke another parable,” which could be an arbitrarily made harmonization, but which interlocks snugly with Burgon’s idea that the purpose for the harmonization at this particular point was to serve as a lection-incipit, that is, one of the brief phrases with which lectors introduced the daily reading.

● John 14:1.  Codex D begins the verse with “And He said to His disciples,” which looks very much like an lection-incipit, that is, one of the brief phrases with which lectors introduced the daily reading.  As it turns out, a lection does indeed begin at this exact point; in the Byzantine lectionary John 14:1-10 is the lection for the sixth Friday after Easter.      

Lectionary 152,
       from the 900s.

Burgon also proposed, in the same book, an interesting theory about Codex Bezae’s unusual reading in Mark 14:41, το τέλος και (between ἀπέχει and ηωρα):  “Nothing else has happened here,” Burgon proposed, “but that a marginal note, designed originally to indicate the end (το τέλος) of the lesson for the third day of the second week of the Carnival, has lost its way from the end of verse 42, and got thrust into the text of verse 41.”  Burgon noted that this reading is supported by the Peshitta, by the Old Latin, and by the Philoxenian version – which would mean that this quarter of witnesses echoes a yet-earlier ancestor; Burgon proposed that such an ancestral text came from the 100s.

Willker’s Textual Commentary on the Greek Gospels confirms that το τέλος Or its non-Greek counterparts) is in the text of Mark 14:41 not only in Codex D but also in Codex W (ἀπέχει το τέλος ἰδου ηλθεν) and Codex Θ (ἀπέχητο· το τέλος ηλθεν), as well as 0233, family 13 (a small cluster of MSS that share an earlier ancestor-copy), 565, 713, 1071, lectionary 844, and the Armenian version and one Georgian copy, and that it is not only supported by the Peshitta but also by the Siniatic Syriac and the Harklean Syriac – plus several Old Latin manuscripts including Codex Vercellensis (which probably was produced in the 370s). 

Willker also observes that in the margin of Codex Vaticanus at this point there is a distigme (that is, a symbo resembling an umlaut which conveys that the person who added it was aware of a textual variant in the line of text that it accompanies – though there is some debate about the date at which this person worked) and that not only Burgon, but also Scrivener advocated the theory that το τέλος had first entered the margin to signal the end of a lection before being blended into the text of Mark 14:41, and that later copyists and translators tackled it in their own ways. 
A consultation of a footnote on page 76 of the first volume of the 1894 edition of Scrivener’s Plain Introduction confirms that Scrivener regarded Codex D’s readings in Luke 16:19 and John 14:1 as lection-incipits, and he also says that the το τέλος in Mark 14:41 “probably has the same origin.”  Yet Burgon, in chapter 12 of Causes of Corruption (written some time after his defense of Mark 16:9-20), explained the presence of το τέλος as a slight expansion, rather than as an insertion of stray marginalia, stating in a footnote that he retracted unreservedly what he had proposed in The Last Twelve Verses of Mark regarding this variant.      

Hort, in his 1881 Notes on Select Readings, proposed that το τέλος was added not as a lost lection-ending note, but as an attempted harmonization drawn from Luke 22:37, where Jesus – still in the upper room – states that the prophecies about Him are being fulfilled, that is, reaching their end (καὶ γαρ το περι εμου τελος εχει).  This seems unlikely, inasmuch as a harmonizer would have no motive to be so frugal.

Metzger resorted to the guess that a copyist was puzzled by the somewhat rare ἀπέχει (or thought that the readers of their manuscripts would be puzzled) and added το τέλος to add clarity – but it seems to me that this would be far down any clarity-prioritizing copyist’s list of options. 

The presence of such phenomena in Codex Bezae and in the Old Latin copies is especially interesting because these particular witnesses tend to echo the Western text that circulated widely in the latter half of the 100s.  The case that the variants in the list just given show the influence of early lection-cycles might not be irresistible, but it is strong, and the inference from this is that the influence of basic lection-cycles involving the main annual Christian feasts should not be casually dismissed as a possible cause of textual variants that emerged as early as the 100s, when the bishop of Rome, until cooler heads prevailed, was willing to excommunicate fellow Christians because they would not celebrate Easter at the same time he did. 
            C. R. Gregory – the scholar whose name is recalled whenever textual critics refer to manuscripts by their Gregory-Aland numbers – theorized that specific passages were assigned for Sundays “at an extremely early date.”  Although it was a matter of centuries before lections were collected into  separate volumes, nothing precludes the idea that on the major Christian feasts, and particularly for the period from the beginning of Easter-week to Pentecost, specific passages were assigned to specific days.  (This may have even been the custom in the time of Justin Martyr, who mentioned in the 67th chapter of his First Apology that Christians gathered on the day called Sunday and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets were read, as long as time permitted, before a sermon and the observance of the Lord’s Supper.)    
This factor – the influence of lection-cycles – should be considered not only when evaluating the variant-units mentioned earlier, but also some other variant-units, including Luke 22:43-44 and John 7:53-8:11.


[Readers are encouraged to explore the embedded links in this essay which lead to additional resources.]

Michael Brown and the Elephant in the Room

[Note for newcomers:  I am most definitely NOT a KJV-Onlyist.]

  

            Recently, Dr. Michael Brown, on The Line of Fire radio show, made an episode which, at first, targeted King-James-Onlyism, but which quickly shifted so as to target the King James Version itself.  His primary objection against the KJV was that its language is unfamiliar to people nowadays.  He stated, “What may have been an accurate translation then will not convey the same thing today.”  Of course that is true, where archaic terms and obsolete grammar is concerned – but that is an effect of the natural development of the English language in the past 400 years; it does not reflect upon the quality of the translation itself. 

            To illustrate:  if someone were to read about dissolving political bands in the Declaration of Independence and conclude that U2 was breaking up, the Declaration of Independence would not be to blame.  When readers approach a 400-year old text, it is their responsibility to take its age into consideration when interpreting it.  The chronological distance between 1611 and 2017 makes the King James Version more difficult to understand, but it does not necessarily make it erroneous.

            The accuracy of the KJV can only be measured fairly when it is measured in light of the meaning of words in 1611, and in light of the text upon which it was based.  Dr. Brown seemed to grant this when he provided two examples of terms in the KJV that meant one thing in 1611, but which mean something else in 2017:  the term “meat” – which could refer to food in general, including grains and fruits – and the term “study,” which was intended, just as Dr. Brown said, to mean, “Do your best,” or to exercise diligence when pursuing a particular goal. 

            So, when someone interprets the term “meat offerings” as if the cooked flesh of an animal must be involved, and when someone interprets “study” as if the word necessarily involves peering into a book, the error does not emanate from the KJV.  The error emanates from the reader’s failure to perceive what those particular words meant in 1611.  A simple glossary of the KJV’s archaic terms can greatly lower the risk of this sort of misimpression. 

            When Dr. Brown turned to the King James Version’s use of the word “Easter” in Acts 12:4, he called it an error.  However, a careful investigation shows that the term “Easter,” in the early 1600’s, was synonymous with “Passover.”  Dr. Brown said, “The Greek does not say ‘Easter.’  The Greek says ‘The Passover.’” 

            The term “Passover” was an invention of William Tyndale.  If you were to take in hand Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, you would see that he freely interchanged the term “Easter” and his own new word “Passover.”  One example should suffice:  in Matthew 26:18-19, in Tyndale’s translation, Jesus tells His disciples to go into the city and deliver the message “I will kepe Myne ester at thy housse with my disciples,” – “and the disciples did as Iesus had apoynted them, and made redy the ester-lambe.” [Bold print added to make the reference super effective.] 

       
            So it should be plain as day that the KJV’s “Easter” in Acts 12:4 is not an error; it means the same thing that the versions which refer to the end of the Passover-feast mean:  that Herod intended to wait until after the last day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread before having Peter executed.  Dr. Brown said, “To say ‘Easter’ is 100% inaccurate and misleading.  It’s a mistake.”  However, what he has perceived as an error is really just another case of obsolete language.

            Likewise, Dr. Brown charged the KJV with error because the term didaskalos” is translated in the KJV as “Master,” rather than as “Teacher,” apparently unaware that in 1611, the term “master” was entirely capable of referring to a teacher.  (An echo of this usage is still retained in the term “schoolmaster.”)

            What were the other prime examples of errors in the KJV?  Dr. Brown said that instead of referring to “devils,” the KJV should refer to “demons.”  But does anyone imagine that the KJV’s use of the word “devils” is really confusing?  As confusing as using four English Bibles translated from four base-texts using four different translation-techniques?    

            A few of Dr. Brown’s other examples are more convincing:

            ● Readers could be spared some confusion if the King James Version’s translators had not used the term “unicorn.”  However, the KJV’s preface (The Translators to the Reader) specifically cautions readers against putting too much weight on their renderings of rare terms for animals, plants, and minerals.  Plus, the precise meaning of the Hebrew term re’em that is often translated as “wild ox” is still a matter of debate – it might be a wild ox, or the extinct buffalo-like animal known as the aurochs, or the rhinoceros.  From before the time of Christ, this term has been translated as if it refers to a one-horned animal (a real one, not a mythical bearded goat-horse thing), and the KJV’s translators deferred to the traditional understanding of the term, cautioning their readers not to treat this rendering dogmatically.

            ● Dr. Brown’s objection against the KJV’s artificially plural term “cherubims” seems entirely valid. 

            ● The text of First Kings 18:37 in the KJV could be made more literal by reading “Answer me” rather than “Hear me.” 

            ● Another inaccuracy in the KJV, Dr. Brown said, is found in Psalm 84:  “Psalm 84:  one of the verses that I grew up loving was, ‘Blessed be the Lord our God, who daily loadeth us with benefits’ in the King James.”  Dr. Brown was recollecting Psalm 68:19, not anything in Psalm 84.  His point (minus the mistaken reference) seems valid; more recent versions render the Hebrew phrase as “who bears our burdens,” or “who bears us up.”

            Dr. Brown put a microscope to the text, symbolically speaking, and found an error in how the KJV treats the Greek word exousian in Luke 10:19.  He also objected against translating the word ekklesia as “church.”  Another “major example” of errors he has found in the KJV is its use of two different words (“weakness” and “infirmities”) to represent the same Greek word in Second Corinthians 12:9.  

            In these cases, he may have a technical point, but it’s like watching an archer hit the bullseye, and having a referee say that the arrow didn’t hit the very center of the bullseye, so it’s not close enough and the archer might as well have missed the whole target.   If one were to put such a yardstick alongside the NASB, NIV, ESV, etc., then one could identify hundreds of such “errors,” every time there is no distinction between the singular and plural pronouns, and every time the word και (and) is not represented, and every time a proper name is put in place of a pronoun, and so forth.
            Dr. Brown also proposed that if a team of the King James version’s scholars had been able to sit down to improve the translation 20 years after its initial publication, they would have changed passages such as Acts 12:4 and Luke 10:19.  History stands in the way of Dr. Brown’s theory:  in 1638, some scholars who had served on the KJV’s translation-committees (John Bois and Samuel Ward) did tidy up the text of the KJV – and they did not change those passages. 

            And then . . . 

THE ELEPHANT ENTERS THE ROOM

            About 21 minutes into his presentation, Dr. Brown brought up manuscript-related issues, even though initially he had said that he would set that sort of thing aside.  

            In the fourth segment of the presentation, the manuscript-base of the KJV’s New Testament text came up again when Charles from Tennessee called the show and pointed out that “The bigger issue is actually the textual issue,” and that modern translations treat Mark 16:9-20 in ways that call it into question.  Charles also alluded to the enormous amount of manuscript-evidence in favor of Mark 16:9-20, and to the features in Vaticanus and Sinaiticus which indicate that their copyists were aware of Mark 16:9-20 “and willingly omitted it.”  Finally, Charles asked Dr. Brown, “Would you recommend any version that brackets or negates the ending of a Gospel, that basically removes the resurrection-account of Christ?”

            In reply, Dr. Brown first said that if one feels a certain way about the manuscripts, one should use the NKJV or MEV – but then he said (referring to Mark 16:9-20), “We know that that was not the original ending of Mark.  The vocabulary is totally different.”

            Charles responded that he had read Burgon’s book on the last 12 verses of Mark.

            Dr. Brown responded that Burgon’s book “has been refuted many times over.”  Yet he failed to name any specific refutation of Burgon’s book; instead, he recommended reading D. A. Carson’s book (The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism) and James White’s book (The King James Only Controversy), too – “They’ll help you there.”  Those who have read Carson’s book may wonder what Brown was talking about, since Carson specifically says in A Plea for Realism, on page 65, “I am not here arguing for or against the authenticity of Mark 16:9-20.”  White’s book is also remarkably unhelpful for people looking for accurate information about the external evidence pertinent to the ending of Mark – and concludes its discussion of Mark 16:9-20 with the affirmation that “Every translation should provide the passage” as well as mention “that there is good reason to doubt the authenticity of the passage as well.”  Well, that clears things up, eh.  (I contend in my book Authentic:  The Case for Mark 16:9-20 that with patristic support for Mark 16:9-20 from the 100’s, and with over 99.9% of the Greek manuscript-evidence supporting the inclusion of the passage, across all text-types and across many locales, such a definite maybe is not the best we can do.)  

           

            Dr. Brown then reaffirmed, “We don’t have the original ending to Mark’s Gospel.”  But he added that Mark 16:9-20 was “received by the church, and I personally am happy to use it.”

            Wait, WHAT?!  Dr. Brown just said that Mark 16:9-20 is not part of the original text, but he is happy to use it.  Happy to use it as what?  As if it is Scripture, or as if it is the work of some non-inspired person in the second century? 

            Dr. Brown recommended reading good commentaries on Mark to get the details about the ending; unfortunately he did not name any specific commentaries.  Then, after mentioning First John 5:7 again, he reminded himself that he had said that he wouldn’t be debating about the manuscripts – and again told his listeners that if they are at home with the Textus Receptus, “then by all means use the New King James, or the Modern English Version.”  (This seems a little inconsistent, since the NKJV has some of the same features – in Psalm 68:19 and Second Corinthians 12:9, for example – that Dr. Brown called errors.)

            Thirty-four minutes into the show’s video, Dr. Brown tried to reframe the narrative after Charles’ lively contribution to the discussion – but manuscripts were clearly still on his mind:  at one point he started a sentence with “Putting the manuscript debate aside” but continued, “don’t we want a translation . . . that has better manuscript evidence?”. 

           

            I don’t think that there is much of a chance that Dr. Brown will persuade any King-James-Onlyists that they are on the wrong track, as long as he pretends that the textual matters do not matter.  Most people who are willing to learn the archaic language of the KJV are not the sort of people who are going to be satisfied knowing that they have acquired the basic doctrinal message of the Bible; they want the full counsel of God, with no adulteration.  Few and far between are those individuals who would abandon the status of the KJV, the textual stability of the KJV, and the familiarity of the KJV, in order to be rid of the trivial inaccuracies listed by Dr. Brown.  One might as well invite people to kill their Cocker Spaniel in order to get rid of a few fleas.

            There are still some KJV-Onlyists who insist that the KJV’s translators themselves were as inspired as the apostles and prophets, but that is not where the momentum of the KJV-Only movement is going.  Increasingly, KJV-Onlyists (such as Samuel Gipp and David Sorenson) are making textual issues the centerpiece of their case.  To insist that all the essential doctrine is still there in the Alexandrian base-text of the NIV, ESV, NLT, etc., and that that makes it okay to select either the Textus Receptus or the Nestle-Aland compilation with as much consideration as one uses to select ice cream flavors, while it is spectacularly obvious that the differences between the two yield dozens of interpretive differences, is to insult the intelligence of one’s listeners.

            

Luke 23:34a - Answering the Apologists (Part 2)

          In the previous post, we looked at the external evidence regarding Jesus’ saying from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” found in Luke 22:34.  We saw that although this sentence is included in 99% of existing Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke, the copyists of six early manuscripts – Papyrus 75, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Bezae, Codex W, Codex Koridethi,  and 070 – did not include it in the text, and because these particular manuscripts constitute early representatives of diverse branches of the text’s transmission, this is seem by some researchers – including James White of Alpha & Omega Ministries – as evidence that the passage was not in the original text.  On the other hand, we also saw that this passage was used by over a dozen patristic writers in the 100’s, 200’s, and 300’s.

            Either these words were put into the text of Luke, or else someone took them out.  A few theories have been proposed as attempts to explain why and how someone would put these words into the text: 

            (1)  After someone in the early church noticed that Jesus made six pronouncements from the cross, he decided that it would be an improvement if Jesus had made seven statements from the cross, so he created one, or borrowed an oral tradition, and put it into the text. 

            (2)  These words circulated in the early church as an agraphon, or unwritten tradition about the sayings of Jesus, and someone, somewhere, decided to put them at this location in the text.

            (3)  A copyist did not want Jesus to appear less forgiving than Stephen, who prayed to Jesus as he was being stoned to death, “Lord, do not hold this sin to their account” (in Acts 7:59-60). 

            Let’s briefly look at each of these theories. 

DID SOMEONE ADD THESE WORDS DUE TO A DESIRE FOR THERE TO BE SEVEN SAYINGS FROM THE CROSS?

            It is intrinsically unlikely that anyone would deliberately invent a saying and insert it into the text just to make the total number of sayings from the cross total seven.  The notion that Jesus only spoke six words from the cross could only exist after all four Gospels were considered a distinct narrative unit – that is, after all four had been composed, collected together, and recognized as specially authoritative – by which time, the individual Gospels would have already circulated for decades, making it difficult for any such novel insertion to suddenly appear and gain acceptance from church leaders such as Irenaeus. 

            Recent supporters of the idea that the sentence was added in order to bring the number of Jesus’ sayings from the cross to a total of seven have pointed to the order in which the sayings appear in Tatian’s Diatessaron (to the extent that it can be reconstructed); however, changes in order in the Diatessaron occur often, and in this case the re-ordering of the sayings from the cross appear to be a side-effect of Tatian’s attempt at chronological harmonization of the four Gospels’ accounts; they are not indicative of any instability in the text, as if the sentence was floating around somewhere further along in Luke 23.       Furthermore, I cannot find any comment by any patristic writer about the significance of there being seven sayings of Christ from the cross.  Without question, people mildly appreciated groups of seven when they found them in the text, but I know of no case whatsoever in which any early Christian writer altered the text to create a total of seven of anything.  (And would this not be intrinsically unsatisfying to the person making the alteration?) 

DID SOMEONE CREATE AN AGRAPHON, WHICH SOMEONE ELSE INSERTED INTO THE TEXT?

            Did someone in the early church value an agraphon (an unwritten tradition consisting of, or centered around, a saying of Jesus) so highly that he thought it should be inserted into the text of the Gospel of Luke?  That is the theory proposed by Bruce Metzger in his Textual Commentary on the United Bible Society’s compilation:  “The logion,” he wrote, “though probably not a part of the original Gospel of Luke, bears self-evident tokens of its dominical origin.” However, there is no physical evidence that this statement ever circulated in any form other than as part of the text of Luke 23:34.  The statement, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” demands a narrative context:  who is being forgiven for what?  It seems unlikely that this sentence would ever circulate without a framework. 

            Several agrapha were mentioned in patristic writings – but the intrusion of an agraphon into the Greek text of the Gospels is exceptionally rare.  Interpolations in Codex Bezae, and Codex W’s “Freer Logion” between Mark 16:14 and 16:15, are almost unique in this respect.  Codex D has interpolated sayings of Jesus after Matthew 20:28, after Luke 6:4, and after John 6:56.  These features – and a few others which resemble parallel-passages – display the influence of a loosely translated and interpolated Old Latin text, which is in the same codex on alternating pages.  But though attested in Codex D, these readings are not in the Byzantine Text, indicating that either copyists possessed considerable resistance against novelties in their exemplars, or that only a very few copyists were reckless enough to insert them in the first place, or both.   

            Consider the curious incident of the saying about money-changers: Γίνεσθε δόκιμοι τραπεζιται (“Be ye approved money-changers”).  Brook Foss Westcott (of Westcott & Hort fame) liked this saying so much that he put it on a preface-page in his Introduction to the Study of the Gospels.  Several patristic writers used it too, including Clement of Alexandria (who referred to it as a saying of Jesus in Stromata 1:28), Origen, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of Alexandria, and even John of Damascus in Orthodox Faith, Book 4, chapter 17 – a composition from the early 700’s). 

            But even though this saying circulated in the churches for over 500 years (and here we are, still discussing it!), how many copyists inserted it into the Greek text of Scripture?  Inasmuch as it appears in no Greek manuscript of any part of the New Testament, the answer seems to be zero.  This does not bode well for the plausibility of the theory that typical copyists were open to the idea of putting additions of any kind into the Greek text of the Gospels.             

DID SOMEONE THINK THAT JESUS SEEMED TO BE LESS FORGIVING THAN STEPHEN, AND CREATED THESE WORDS TO EVEN THE SCORE?   

The idea that someone in the early church created Luke 23:34a so that Stephen would not appear more altruistic than Jesus has several problems.  First, nothing in the account of Stephen’s martyrdom in Acts 7 matches the phrase, “for they know not what they do.”  Second, while the statement of Stephen and the statement in Luke 23:34a are conceptually similar, they are diverse where vocabulary is concerned.  Third, inasmuch as Stephen made his statement a gasp away from death, a person desiring to create a parallel in Luke’s narrative of Jesus’ crucifixion would be more likely to insert it at the point of Jesus’ death, not more than three hours earlier.  Fourth, the actions of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke are repeatedly emulated by Jesus’ followers in the book of Acts; to whatever extent Stephen’s statement in Acts 7:70 resembles Luke 23:34a, it is just the sort of resemblance that points to Luke as the author.

            These proposals do not plausibly explain the ancient and widespread presence of “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” in the text of Luke.  In addition, an internal feature of the passage constitutes subtle but forceful evidence that it was written by Luke:  it exemplifies Luke’s distinct emphasis on ignorance (the term “ignorance” is used here in its technical sense, not in a derogatory sense) as an extenuating circumstance capable of eliminating or reducing a perpetrator’s guilt. 

            Some examples of this emphasis may be listed:  among the Evangelists, Luke, and Luke alone, records the saying of Jesus in which He establishes different measures of judgment for those who know their master’s will, and for those who do not know it.  In Acts 3:14-7, Luke records Peter’s statement that although members of his audience had “killed the Prince of life,” they had acted in ignorance, and so had their rulers.  He proceeds to invite them to repent.  In Acts 13:27, Luke records Paul’s statement that the inhabitants of Jerusalem and their rulers handed Jesus over to be executed “because they did not know Him.”  And Acts 17:30 – part of Paul’s address to the Athenian philosophers – states, “God overlooked these times of ignorance, but now commands all men everywhere to repent.”

            The probability that someone in the 100’s perceived and mimicked what Eldon Epp has called Luke’s “Ignorance Motif,” and expressed it in a 12-word insertion (with syntax consistent with Luke 11:4), seems very far lower than that alternative explanation that Luke wrote these words.

         

OR:  DID SOMEONE REMOVE THE PASSAGE BECAUSE HE THOUGHT THAT THE JEWS HAD NOT BEEN FORGIVEN?
   

            A strong motivation existed for early copyists to omit these words:  a desire to avoid the impression that Jesus’ prayer had been rejected.  About 40 years after Jesus’ crucifixion, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, and it was devastated again in the Bar Kokhba Revolt.  Hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed; many others were enslaved, and they were deprived of their homeland.  The pagan jibe can easily be written:  “Is this what happens when Jesus asks for people to be forgiven?  Their city is laid waste, and they and their families are slain or enslaved?  His intercession does not seem very effective.”  Even without a pagan around to express the objection, an ordinary reader could perceive a difficulty when comparing Christ’s prayer to the history of the Jews in the century that followed.

            Many early Christian writers considered the Jewish nation corporately responsible for Christ’s death; they interpreted Matthew 27:25 as if it referred to all Jews.  Compositions such as Melito of Sardis’ Easter Homily, a.k.a. Peri Pascha (c. 170) display this interpretation very clearly. Melito, in the course of addressing the Jews in a diatribe, says, “You did not recognize the Lord; you did not know, O Israel, that this one was the firstborn of God” – but he also insists that the Jews should have known, in light of the prophecies about the Messiah.

            Origen, writing Against Celsus (Book 4, chapter 22), similarly regarded the destruction of Jerusalem as divine retribution.   And about 150 years after Origen wrote, John Chrysostom, in Homilies Against the Jews (better titled, Sermons Against Those Who Partake in Jewish Customs), preached that the Jews, collectively, were in a situation similar to that of Cain – guilty but unwilling to admit that they had done wrong – and he advised that Christians should not even pray for them, alluding to Jeremiah 7:16 and 15:1 as justification. 

            So when Chrysostom (or someone whose works have been mixed up with the sermons of Chrysostom) commented on Luke 23:34 in Homily on the Cross and the Robber, he began with the obvious question:  “Did He forgive them the sin?” – and Chrysostom’s answer was that forgiveness was given to those who repented – to Paul, and to the multitudes of Jews who became Christians in the book of Acts – but then, judgment fell.      

            Hippolytus found a simpler solution in the incomplete composition Demonstratio Contra Judaeos; he concluded that Jesus’ prayer was on behalf of the Gentile soldiers who did the actual work of crucifying Him.   

            The unknown author of the Didascalia Apostolorum (c. 250) resorted to a more reckless course:  he altered Jesus’ prayer to make it conditional, like Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, adding the phrase “if it be possible” – the implication being that just as it turned out to not be possible to let the cup of suffering pass, it was likewise not possible to forgive those responsible for Christ’s crucifixion, in light of their non-repentance.

            This use of the destruction of Jerusalem as an interpretive lens was not limited to commentators of the early church, but also was employed by copyists.  Eldon Epp, in his book, The Theological Tendency of Codex Bezae Cantebrigiensis in Acts, devoted a chapter to the subject of anti-Judaic tendencies in the text of Codex D – i.e., in the Western Text that is displayed in Codex D.  Epp showed that a scribal tendency to alter features in the text that could be understood to excuse or reduce the guilt of the Jews for Jesus’ death is discernible in the Western Text.  (C. K. Barrett wrote a response to Epp’s claim, challenging it, but Barrett’s answers, for the most part, are far from effective; it is like watching someone turn “they killed him” into “those evildoers deliberately rebelled and killed him” and then be told that the person making the changes was just trying to make the sentence more clear.)

            Westcott and Hort, in 1881, had little reason to suspect that the text found in their favorite manuscript could be contaminated with Western readings.  However, the discovery of the Glazier Codex (G67) of Acts shows that the Western Text was used at an early period in Egypt.  (Although James White has spread the claim that “Every one of the papyrus manuscripts we have discovered” represents the Alexandrian text (see KJV-Only Controversy, page 152, 1995 edition), that is simply false; papyri that have a text that is not Alexandrian include P29, P38, P45 (which is quite a substantial manuscript), P48, P54, P59, P69, and P88.) 

            Codex Glazier’s Egyptian text confirms the antiquity of the anti-Judaic tendency that is displayed in the text of Codex Bezae’s Greek and Latin text:  in Acts 10:39, it is not enough to say simply that “they” killed Jesus; there is, in the Glazier Codex, an alteration, specifying that the Jews rejected Him and killed Him.  (According to Epp, this reading is supported by the Old Latin Codex Legionensis, MS VL 67.  Unfortunately this variant was not selected to be mentioned in the apparatus of the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.)

            Without further ado, let’s consider what all this implies:

            ● The scribes who made the Western form of the text of the Gospels and Acts in the 100’s and 200’s had a bias against the Jews, regarding them as corporately responsible for Christ’s death and understanding the destruction of Jerusalem as evidence that God had not forgiven them.  This affected their treatment of some passages.   

            ● Various patristic writers in the 100’s and 200’s (and later) express the opinion that the Jewish nation as a whole could not have been forgiven for Christ’s crucifixion; those who accept Luke 23:34a tend to feel obligated to explain that it does not mean that the Jews were forgiven then and there.

            ● Some writers altered the text of Luke 23:34a to make it interlock with their understanding that the destruction of Jerusalem signaled that God had not forgiven the Jews.  (The Didascalia added, “if it is possible;” Gregory of Nyssa and others changed “forgive” to “bear with.”)          

            ● In Codex D – the flagship Greek manuscript of the Western Text – Luke 23:34a is absent.  The copyist of D did not create this reading; it is also shared by the Old Latin Codex Vercellensis and the Sinaitic Syriac; these three witnesses echo an older form of the text.   

            ● The Western text, and its creators’ anti-Judaic sentiment, circulated in Egypt, as shown by the Glazier Codex and other evidence. 

            Thus considerable force drives the hypothesis in which Egyptian copyists around the end of the second century were aware of two forms of the text of Luke 23:34 – one (echoed by Sinaiticus, C, L, 33, 892, et al) that contained “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and one (echoed by P75 and Vaticanus), that did not.  But a review of the allies of P75 and B in this case – D, a, d, the Sinaitic Syriac – informs us that this originated as a Western reading. 

            Once this reading (or, rather, this omission) was known in Egypt, it was very difficult for scribes to resist adopting it, because it was consistent with their understanding that the destruction of Jerusalem implied that the Jews, collectively, were unforgiven.  Rather than face the foreseeable jibes and questions that the inclusion of these words would invite, they concluded that such a statement could not be original, and so they adopted the omission (which first emerged in part of the Western Text) into part of the Alexandrian transmission-stream.

          This conclusion – that a scribal prejudice elicited the omission of Luke 22:34a, and the adoption of the omission – is further confirmed by the observation that the sentence is omitted in a smattering of Byzantine manuscripts.  Rather than suggest that these particular copies are somehow genealogically connected to manuscripts such as P75 and B, this shows that a non-textual factor – scribes’ anti-Judaic prejudice – could independently elicit the omission of this sentence in unrelated witnesses.

            Inasmuch as “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” is in Luke 23:34 in a massive majority of Greek manuscripts representing multiple transmission-branches, as well as in massive versional evidence, and is supported by very ancient and very widespread patristic evidence, and inasmuch as there is compelling evidence that its rival-reading originated as the result of scribes’ prejudice against Jews, I conclude that this sentence is original to Luke. 

            And since it is inspired Scripture, let us not perpetually cause Bible-readers to question its authority by introducing oversimplified footnotes, as if we suffer from the delusion that such vague notes do justice to the evidence.  Let us acknowledge that it is original – and may we therefore be inclined to forgive, and to yearn for the forgiveness of those who do not know their Master’s will.