Video Lecture: Luke 23:34a - Father, Forgive Them

 The 19th video lecture in the series Introduction to NT Textual Criticism is accessible at YouTube and at Bitchute.  This lecture is almost 34 minutes long.  Here's an extract:

            Hilary of Poitiers, known as the “Athanasius of the West,” around the year 360, wrote his Twelve Books on the Trinity, and in that work he quoted Luke 24:34a three times.  It might be worthwhile to show some of the context of his statements:

            In Book 1, As Hilary takes his theological opponents to task for perverting the meaning of the words of Christ, he emphasizes the importance of interpreting each passage in light of its context.  In Part 32, he says that his opponents commit blasphemy when they misinterpret the words of Christ, “Father, into Your hands I commend My spirit,” and, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”   Hilary writes, “Their narrow minds plunge into blasphemy in the attempt at explanation.”

            In Book 10, Part 48, as Hilar illustrates the fearlessness and power of Christ shown in the Gospels, he mentions that “He prayed for His persecutors while the nails were driven through Him.”

  

            And near the end of Book 10, in Part 71, Hilary writes, “Christ prayed for His persecutors, because they knew not what they did.” 

             ● Ambrose of Milan, in the 380s, in his Commentary on Job, Part Two, Section 6, in the course of offering a rather unlikely interpretation of Job 9:5, quotes Luke 23:34a.  He cites the passage again in Part 5, Section 12, stating that he is quoting what the Lord Jesus says in the Gospel.

            Ambrose also explicitly quotes Luke 23:34a in The Prayer of Job and David. 

             ● Gregory of Nyssa, working in the late 300s in what is now east-central Turkey, wrote a book On Christian Perfection, and in it, he presented Christ as a model of longsuffering:  Gregory of Nyssa pointed out that the longsuffering of Christ was displayed when He endured chains and whips and various physical injuries, and nails, and His response was “Father, bear with them, for they know not what they do.”

             ● In the fourth-century story called the Acts of Philip, at one point in the story, persecutors hang Philip by his ankles, and it looks like he is about to die. Philip escapes by cursing his persecutors, causing them to all be swallowed up by the earth.  But before he pronounces the curse, his companions John and Barthlomew and Mariamne try to persuade him no to do it:  they say, “Our Master was beaten, and scourged, and was stretched out on the cross, and was made to drink gall and vinegar, and said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

 

            ● A composition known as the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, from the mid-300s, uses Luke 23:34a near the beginning of the fifth part of its sixth book, preserved in Latin by Jerome’s contemporary Rufinus: 

            “The Master Himself, when He was being led to the cross by those who knew Him not, petitioned the Father for His murderers, and said, ‘Father, forgive their sin, for they know not what they do.’”  The author’s memory does not seem to have been having its best day, considering that this statement was given while Jesus was on the cross, not while He was being led to the cross.

            ● In the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, which is basically a different form of the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, Luke 23:34a is utilized, specifically in Homily XI, Part 20, where the author wrote:  “The Teacher Himself, being nailed to the cross, prayed to the Father that the sin of those who slew Him might be forgiven, saying, ‘Father, forgive them their sins, for they know not what they do.’”

             ● Amphilochius of Iconium, who lived from about 340 to about 400, is traditionally identified as the author of a brief sermon called Oration #5, On the Holy Sabbath.  In this text, which has been translated by J. H. Barkhuizen, after briefly contrasting the divine nature of Christ with His sufferings during His trials and crucifixion, Amphilochius says, “While suffering these things for the sake of those who were crucifying Him, He prayed as follows: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’  He conquers the evil through goodness.  He speaks in defense of the Christ-murderers while drawing them in His net toward salvation.  He brings to naught the accusation by blaming their ignorance.”

            ● The heresy-hunter Epiphanius of Salamis, in the late 300s, also quoted Luke 23:34a, in Panarion, also called The Medicine-Chest; in Part 77, which is about the errors of the Antidicomanians.  Epiphanius slightly tweaked the text, replacing the reference to “forgive” with a different word that means “bear with.”   The same word was used by Gregory of Nyssa.

            Epiphanius also reports that James, the Lord’s brother, was martyred in Jerusalem when he was thrown down from the pinnacle of the temple, but survived, and knelt and prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and he was then struck on the head with a fuller’s rod, and he died. 

            Epiphanius’ main source for this material was probably Eusebius’ work Ecclesiastical History, Book Two, Part 23.  Eusebius acknowledged his own sources for the story:  first, Eusebius says that Clement was his source for the report that James was thrown from the pinnacle of the temple and then beaten to death with a club.  Then he mentions the fifth book of the Ánecdotes of “Hegesippus, whom lived immediately after the apostles,” as his source for a more detailed account. 

 

            According to Eusebius, Hegesippus specified that it was the scribes and Pharisees who opposed James the Just, and that after he survived the fall from the temple, they began to stone him, at which point he said, “I entreat You, Lord God our Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

 

            ● John Chrysostom, who became archbishop of Constantinople in 397 after serving at Antioch for about 20 years, quoted Luke 23:34a several times.  In Against Marcionists and Manichaeans, Chrysostom wrote, “He commanded men to pray for their enemies; and He teaches this through His actions, for when He had ascended the cross, He said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

            In Homily 7 on the Epistle to the Ephesians, as Chrysostom describes the grace given to Israel, he says, “And after He was crucified, what were His words? ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’  He was cruelly treated before this, and even cruelly treated after this, even to the very last breath.  For them He did everything; He prayed in their behalf.”
            Chrysostom also says in Homily 14 on the Epistle to the Ephesians that the Son of God prayed for those who crucified Him, and shed His blood for those who hated Him.

            In Homily 79 on Matthew, Chrysostom mention that among the ways in which displayed His meekness, “on the very cross, He was crying aloud, “Father, forgive them their sin.”

 

            In the sixth chapter of The Cross and the Thief, Chrysostom states that during the time when Christ was being nailed to the cross, and His garments were being divided, He did not get angry or have guile in His heart against them; instead, “Hear Him declaring, ‘My Father, forgive them because they do not know what they are doing.’”

            Or does he?  The author of The Thief on the Cross is probably not Chrysostom, but Theophilus, who served as the patriarch of Alexandria from 384 to 412.  Or it might be an anonymous author who attributed his own work to Theophilus. 

            In favor of the idea that the author was in a locale where a Coptic form of the text was in use is the observation that in its ninth chapter, the text says that the lost will be swallowed up in the abyss, and go down to the place of their brother Nineveh.  A mangled form of the name “Nineveh,” without its first syllable, is the name given to the rich man, in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, in Luke 16:19 in Papyrus 75, and the interpolation “named ‘Nineveh’” also appears in this verse in some later Arabic manuscripts.   

             ● Another author, like Chrysostom, whose name was transferred to material written by someone else, was the second-century writer Justin Martyr.  The composition known as Questions and Answers for the Orthodox was attributed to Justin, but it probably comes from Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who died in 457.

             The 108^th Question in this composition begins something like this:  If the Jews were forgiven, then why did the ancient Jews, who crucified Christ out of ignorance, suffer many unbelievable afflictions, as Josephus testifies in his account of the fall of Jerusalem?  And why have those who refuse to obey Christ now been expelled from their homeland?” And it goes on to say, “Wasn’t the Lord aware of their condition, when He said, "Father, I say, forgive them, for they do not know what they do"?  And doesn’t the Apostle say, "If they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory?”

            The odds that the author is Theodoret of Cyrrhus are increased when we compare this to Theodoret’s Commentary on the Letters of Paul, and see that when he comments on First Corinthians 2:8, he interprets it through the filter of Luke 23:34a, stating that Pilate, Herod, Annas, Caiaphas, and the other rulers of the Jews were unaware of the divine mystery, and that is why they crucified the Lord.  Theodoret writes, “Surely, this is why the Lord, on the cross, also said, “Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing.”  Theodoret goes on to say that after the resurrection, and the ascension, and the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the apostles’ miracles, they persisted in unbelief, and so He delivered them to be besieged.

           ● Jerome is another patristic writer whose use of Luke 24:34a should not be overlooked, even though we have already seen that he included this text in the Vulgate.  In his composition Ad Hedibiam, produced around the year 400, Jerome goes off on a little tangent, and writes, “We should not be surprised that after the death of the Savior, Jerusalem is called ‘the holy city.’ 

            “For before it was completely ruined, the apostles did not have a problem entering the temple, and observing the ceremonies of the law, in order not to offend those among the Jews who had embraced the faith of Jesus Christ.

            “We even see that the Savior loved this city so much that the disasters with which it was threatened drew tears from His eyes, and when He was on the cross, He said to His Father, ‘Forgive them, My Father, for they do not know what they are doing.’”              Jerome continues:  “So his prayer was answered, since shortly after His death, the Jews believed in Him by the thousands, and God gave this unhappy city forty-two years to repent.  But in the end, when its citizens  had not taken advantage of the opportunity, and still persisted in their malice, Vespasian and Titus, like the two bears of which the Scriptures speak, ‘came out of the middle of the woods, and killed and mauled those children who blasphemed and insulted the true Elisha, when he went up to the house of God.’”

            The same line of reasoning that is used by Jerome, specifically mentioning Vespasian and Titus, is used in the composition In Principium Actorum, which is often attributed to Chrysostom.

             ● Augustine, in North Africa in the early 400s, wrote the following in his Sermon 382:  “Did He not say, as He hung on the cross, ‘Father, forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing?’”  And he continues:  “When He was praying as He hung on the cross, He could see and foresee.  He could see all His enemies.  He could foresee that many of them would become His friends.  That is why He was interceding for them all.  They were raging, but He was praying.  They were saying to Pilate, ‘Crucify,’ but He was crying out, ‘Father, forgive.’”

And from near the end:

The reason why Luke 23:34a is supported by such a vast array of evidence is that it is original.  It was removed in an early transmission-line that influenced not only the text of Codex Bezae and the Sinaitic Syriac, but also Papyrus 75, and Codex Vaticanus, and the Sahidic version.

         There was a strong motivation to make this excision:  a desire to avoid the impression that Jesus had prayed for the Jewish nation, and His 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.  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 Jesus’ prayer to the history of the Jews in the century that followed.

            When we look at how the passage is approached by patristic writers, we see that addressing this misconception is a high priority.  Almost all of the patristic writers who comment on the passage regarded it as a petition regarding the Jewish people. 

            The author of the Diascalía Apostolorum slightly modified the prayer, framing it with the words “if it be possible.”  Epiphanius and Gregory of Nyssa added a slight interpretive nuance, replacing the term “forgive” with the term “bear with.”     

            Later writers approached the problem thoughtfully, perceiving that the Jews as a nation had been forgiven for what had been done at Calvary, but this did not mean that they were forgiven for later offenses of unbelief.

            But to a reckless early Western copyist, the statement that Jesus asked the Father to forgive those who engineered His death appeared to contradict what they saw God do to the Jewish nation historically.  And to such a copyist, the easiest way to resolve the tension was to excise the sentence.

            Hort’s objection to this is not a good example of his acuity; he basically argues that such a thing can’t have happened because such a thing never happened.  Similarly, Metzger’s claim, that the shorter reading here “can scarcely be explained as a deliberate excision,” is more of a decree than an argument.

            The effects of anti-Judaic tendencies on the part of some copyists show up occasionally in the form of the text that is seen in the Old Latin version, the Sinaitic Syriac, and Codex Bezae. 

            Despite its name, the Western Text was known and used in the east, in Egypt.  Contrary to the claim that the text in all of the New Testament papyri discovered in Egypt is Alexandrian, Papyri 37, 38, and 48 support the Western text-form.

            The Glazier Codex, also known as G-67, written in Coptic in the 400s, strongly supports the Western Text.  The anti-Judaic sympathies of its text’s

producers occasionally manifest themselves; this does not mean that the copyist of this particular manuscript had such views, but they were held somewhere further back in the text’s ancestry.

            For instance, in Acts 10:39, it is not enough for the Western Text to say simply that “they” killed Jesus.  In the Glazier Codex, the text in this verse is changed, so as to specify that the Jews rejected Him and killed Him.  According to Eldon Epp, this reading is supported by the Old Latin Codex Legionensis, Old Latin MS 67. 

            It appears that very early in the history of the text of the Gospels in Egypt, a witness that was corrupted with readings that expressed an anti-Judaic prejudice, existed along with some much better copies.  But although those better copies generally were preferred, here and there a reading supported by this witness was preferred. 

             As a result, one of those corruptions – the removal of Luke 23:34a – was adopted into the transmission-stream from which came Papyrus 75, Codex Vaticanus, the Sahidic version, and a few other witnesses.   

            This may also be the case at other points of textual variation where we see major Alexandrian witnesses agree with the text represented in the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript, and disagree with both the vast majority of early patristic testimony and the vast majority of manuscripts and versions representing a variety of locales.  But this is a more general point that invites separate investigation.

            Although Papyrus 75 and Codex Vaticanus are widely regarded as representatives of a generally reliable transmission-line, this does not make them immune from occasional corruptions, and we should vigilantly avoid giving them an oracular status that they do not deserve. 

            Inasmuch as Luke’s reference to Jesus’ saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” is inspired Scripture, we should not cause Bible-readers to perpetually question its authority by introducing  vague footnotes that raise more questions than they solve, pretending that concise footnotes do justice to the evidence. 

            We should acknowledge that Luke 23:34a is original.  And as part of the original text of the New Testament, it was not given so that we could doubt it.  It was given to be profitable to us, to teach us, to rebuke us, to correct us, and to instruct us.

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.