The ongoing series of lectures "Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism" continues with
Lecture 24, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHYcBlwAqzc , about conjectural emendations. I had a stroke on June 14, and you may notice in this video that I am speaking more slowly than before. Also for some reason I repeatedly didn't say
"chi" correctly. Oh well; hopefully improvement will continue. I covered some of the passages mentioned in this lecture back in 2017 (in the "Cracks in the Text posts,
part 1 and
part 2). Here is a transcript of the video!
Welcome to the twenty-fourth
lecture in the series, Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism. Let’s begin with prayer.
Heavenly Father,
Thank You for giving Your people the
fruit of Your Spirit. Influence us to
long to be more loving, modeling your love.
Make us more joyful as we remember Your promises to us. Make us peaceful, in light of the peace you
have provided. Make us patient, kind,
and good, seeking to conform to the image of your Son. Make us gentle, seeking to represent Your
kingdom in every circumstance. And give
us self-control, that all our actions may be guided by our awareness of Your
presence. Through Your Son Christ our Lord, Amen.
Today we are investigating one of the
most controversial areas in the field of New Testament textual criticism: the creation and adoption of conjectural emendations.
A conjectural emendation is a reading that is not directly supported by
any witnesses. Conjectural emendations are
driven by the premise that on some rare occasions, the reading that accounts
for all other readings is a reading that is not extant.
Even
in the earliest days of the printed text of the Greek New Testament, some
conjectural emendations were proposed:
in James 4:2, Erasmus did not think that it was plausible that the
readers of James’ letter would kill,
so he introduced the idea that James originally wrote that his letters’
recipients were envious. Erasmus’
conjecture influenced some future translations, including Martin Luther’s
translation, and the 1557 Geneva Translation.
By the late 1700s, so many conjectural
emendations had been proposed that a printer named William Bowyer collected
them in a book in 1772 that was over 600 pages long, titled Critical Conjectures and Observations on the New Testament. Many of the
conjectures were apologetically driven and resolved historical questions rather
than textual ones, and many others implied a magical stupidity on the part of
copyists.
But in 1881, when Westcott and Hort
printed their Greek New Testament, they were willing to grant the possibility that
60 passages in the New Testament contain a primitive corruption, where only by
conjecture could the original reading be recovered. Other scholars have seriously argued for the
adoption of non-extant readings in a few other places.
We’re not going to look into each and
every one of those 60 passages today, but we will look into some of them,
especially the ones that have affected some English translations.
Mark 15:25 – One of the
earliest conjectural emendations is from Ammonius of Alexandria, from the 200s,
whose proposal was passed along by Eusebius of Caesarea and others. Ammonius suggested a conjectural emendation
that could harmonize Mark’s statement (in Mark 15:25) that Jesus was crucified
at the third hour, and John’s statement (in John 19:14) that Jesus was
being sentenced by Pilate at the sixth hour. Rather than imagine
that different methods of hour-reckoning are involved, Ammonius proposed that the
text of John 19:14 contains an ancient error, and that the Greek numeral Γ, which stands for “3,” was misread as if it was
the obsolete letter digamma, which stands for “6”). Some copyists apparently thought that this
idea must be correct, and wrote the Greek equivalent of “sixth” in Mark
15:25; a few others (including the copyists of Codex L and Codex Δ)
wrote the equivalent of “third” in John 19:14.
John 1:13 – Another early
church writer, Tertullian, proposed that the extant reading of John 1:13 is not
the original reading. In chapter 19 of
his composition On the Flesh of Christ, he insisted that the reading
that is found in our New Testaments is the result of heretical tampering, and
that the verse initially referred specifically to Christ. Not only Tertullian but also Irenaeus and
the author of the little-known Epistula
Apostolorum appear to cite John 1:13
with a singular subject rather than a plural one.
John 7:52 – No reading that is
supported exclusively by papyri has been adopted in place of readings that were
already extant. But a reading of Papyrus
66 comes very close to doing so. William
Bowyer’s 1772 book included a theory that had been expressed by
Dr. Henry Owen about John 7:52:
Owen had written, “The Greek text, I apprehend, is not perfectly
right: and our English Version has carried it still farther from the true
meaning. Is it possible the Jews could say, “that out of Galilee hath arisen no prophet;”
when several (no less perhaps than six) of their own prophets were natives
of that country? . . . I conclude, that what they really
said, and what the reading ought to be, was … That the prophet is not to arise out
of Galilee: from whence they supposed Jesus to have sprung.”
The key component of Owen’s proposal was vindicated by the discovery of Papyrus
66, which has the Greek equivalent of “the” before the
word “prophet” – just what Owen thought was the original
reading.
Some commentators have considered it
implausible that John would report, in John
19:29, that the soldiers at the crucifixion would offer to Jesus a sponge
filled with sour wine upon a stick of hyssop. In 1572, Joachim
Camerarius the Elder proposed that originally John had written about a javelin, or spear, and that after this had
been expressed by the words ὑσσῷ προπεριθέντες, scribes mangled the text so as to produce
the reference to hyssop. This conjecture, which was modified by Beza, was adopted by the scholars who made the New English Bible New Testament in
1961.
In Acts 7:46, textual critics have to choose
between the reading of most manuscripts, which is the statement that David
asked to be allowed to find a dwelling-place for the God of
Jacob, and the statement that David asked to be allowed to find a
dwelling-place for the house of
Jacob (which is the reading in the Nestle-Aland compilation).
The second reading is more difficult, because it seems to say that David asked
to build a house for a house. Even when the second “house” is understood
to refer to the nation descended from Jacob, the problem does not go away,
since the temple was for God, not for the people, who were not looking for a
new place to reside in the days of David. In
1881, Hort proposed that “οἴκω can hardly be genuine,” but instead of accepting
the Byzantine reading, he conjectured that neither
reading is original, and that the original text was τω Κυριω (“the Lord”),
which was contracted, and then inattentive copyists misread it as ΤΩ ΟΙΚΩ.
In Acts 16:12, Bruce Metzger was overruled by the other
editors of the United Bible Societies’ Committee, and an imaginary
reading was adopted into the UBS compilation:
πρώτης was adopted, instead of πρώτης της μερίδος, so as to mean that Philippi was a “first city” of the district
of Macedonia. Metzger insisted that the extant text was
capable of being translated as “a leading city of the district of Macedonia.”
● Acts 20:28 – Bruce
Metzger dedicated two full pages of his Textual Commentary to
consider the variants in Acts 20:28. Did
the original text refer to “the church of God,” or to “the church of the Lord,” or
to “the church of the Lord and God”? The contest between “God” and “Lord”
amounts to the difference of a single letter:
if we set aside the Byzantine reading, once the sacred names are
contracted, it’s a contest between ΘΥ, and ΚΥ. If the contest is decided in favor of ΘΥ, then a second question
arises: did Luke report that Paul stated that God purchased the church
with His own blood?
Many
apologists have used this verse to demonstrate Paul’s advocacy of the divinity
of Christ. Hort, however, expressed echoed
the suspicion of an earlier scholar, Georg Christian Knapp, that at the end of
the verse, after the words “through His own blood”, there was originally the
word υἱοῦ (“Son”).
The Contemporary English Version, advertised as “an accurate and faithful
translation of the original manuscripts,” seems to adopt this conjecture. It has the word “Son” in its text of Acts
20:28b: “Be like shepherds to God’s church. It is the flock
that he bought with the blood of his own Son.”
The Greek evidence is in agreement about
how First Corinthians 6:5 ends.
But the Peshitta disagrees. The reading in the Peshitta implies
that its Greek base-text included the phrase καὶ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ (“and a
brother”).
The
first part of Paul’s statement in this verse is something to the effect of, “Is
there not even one person among you – just one! – who shall be able to judge
between” – and that’s where the difficulty appears. The Greek text just mentions one brother,
whereas the idea of judgment between two parties seems to demand that more than
one brother should be mentioned.
Although the Textus Receptus has the equivalent of between his
brother” – which is clearly singular – the KJV’s translators concluded the
verse with “between his brethren” (which is clearly plural). The CSB,
the NIV, and the NASB likewise render the text as if the verse
ends with a plural word rather than a singular one. All such treatments
of the text make the problem all the obvious: the first part of the
sentence, in Greek, anticipates two brothers, while the second
part of the sentence mentions only one.
In light of such strong internal evidence, Michael Holmes, the compiler of
the SBLGNT, recommended the adoption of a conjectural emendation at this point,
so that καὶ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ (“and the
brother”) appears at the very end of the verse.
A fairly recent development in textual
criticism is the tendency to regard First
Corinthians 14:34-35 as non-original even though the words are in every
manuscript of First Corinthians. In a
few copies they appear after verse 40.
The usual form of this conjecture is that the words began as a marginal
note and were gradually adopted into the text.
Gordon Fee
advocated this view in his commentary on First Corinthians and it has grown in
popularity since then, especially among interpreters who favor an egalitarian
view on the question of gender roles in the church. One of the interesting aspects of this issue is the impact of the double-dots, or distigme, that appear in the margin of
Codex Vaticanus to signify a variation between the text of that
manuscript and the text in another document.
● A much older scholarly debate has orbited the
phrase “Now this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia”
in Galatians 4:25. This sentence is included the Nestle-Aland
compilation; however, it has been proposed that the entire phrase originated as
a marginal note. This conjecture goes
back at least to the early 1700s, with Richard Bentley. More recently, Stephen Carlson has argued in
favor of the same idea.
● In Hebrews 11:37, as the sufferings endured by spiritual
heroes are listed, one of those things is not like the others: they are
all somewhat unusual experiences, except for “they were tempted.” Some
textual critics have suspected that the word ἐπειράσθησαν originated when a copyist committed dittography
– writing twice what should be written once; in this case, the preceding word the
means “they were sawn in two” – and that subsequent copyists changed it into
something meaningful. Others have thought that this relatively common
term replaced one that was less common – perhaps another word that meant “they
were pierced,” or “they were sold”.
Presently the Nestle-Aland compilation, deviating from the 25th edition, simply
does not include ἐπειράσθησαν in the text, following Papyrus 46. But Papyrus
13 appears to support the inclusion of
ἐπειράσθησαν and
it has a very impressive array of allies. I would advise readers to not
get used to the current form of this verse in the critical text, for it
seems to be merely a place-holder that might be blown away by the appearance of
new evidence or slightly different analysis.
● First Peter 3:19 – The most popular
conjectural emendation of all time was favored by the textual expert J. Rendel
Harris, who encountered a very brief form of it in William
Bowyer’s book. The extant text of First Peter 3:19 says, “in which
he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison.” Verse 18 refers to
Christ, and nobody else is introduced into the text, so verse 19 has been understood
to mean that during the time between Jesus’ death and resurrection, He visited
the realm of the dead, and visited the spirits of those who had been
disobedient in the days of Noah, prior to the great flood – and delivered a
message to them.
However, Harris, proposed that the original text was different. He
thought that Peter had in mind a scene that is related in the pseudepigraphical
Book of Enoch. In this text, Enoch is depicted delivering a message of
condemnation to the fallen spirits who corrupted human beings so thoroughly that the
great flood was introduced as the means of amputating the moral infection they
had induced.
Harris proposed that the opening words of the original text
of 3:19 were ἐν ᾧ καὶ Ἐνώχ (“in which also Enoch”), assigning the
subsequent action not to Christ, but to Enoch. There are two ways in which the name “Enoch” could have fallen out of the
sentence.
1.
If the original text were simply Ἐνώχ (without ἐν ᾧ καὶ), then, in majuscule script,
the chi was susceptible to being
misread as an abbreviation for the word και (“and”) [a kai-compendium]. A copyist could
easily decide to write the whole word instead of the abbreviation, and thus
Enoch’s name would become ἐν ᾧ καὶ.
2.
Or, if the original text were ἐν ᾧ καὶ Ἐνώχ, a copyist could read the chi as an abbreviation for και [again, a kai-compendium], and assume
that the scribe who made his exemplar had inadvertently repeated three words. Attempting
a correction, he would remove “Ἐνώχ.”
Against the charge that the
introduction of Enoch’s name “disturbs the otherwise smooth context,” the
answer is that a reference to Enoch is not
out of place, inasmuch as Enoch’s story sets the stage for the story of Noah
and his family, whose deliverance through water Peter frames as a pattern of salvation.
If this conjectural emendation were adopted, it would have at least a little doctrinal
impact, by diminishing the Biblical basis for the phrase “He descended into
hell” found in the Apostles’ Creed.
Finally,
in First Peter 3:10, we encounter an
imaginary Greek reading that has been adopted into the text of the 28th
edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament. Rejecting the assortment of contending
variant offered by the Greek manuscripts, the editors have preferred the
reading that is implied by a reading for which the external support is only
extant in Coptic and Syriac. However,
the judgment of the scholars who gave up on the extant Greek readings may have been
premature.
The text is sufficiently clear with the reading, “will be found,”
while it is also puzzling enough to provoke attempts at simplification.
Only
two of these conjectural emendations are mentioned in the 28th
edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament; the 27th edition was
the last one to list include conjectural emendations in its textual apparatus.
Some readers may be taken
aback by the idea that some of the inspired words in the Word of God can only
be reconstructed in the imaginations of scholars. A realistic pushback against the idea of adopting any conjectural emendation is the question,
“Does it really seem feasible that every
scribe in every transmission-stream got it wrong?” If scholars reject singular readings simply because they are singular, then non-existent readings should be even more
disqualified, as a point of consistency.
It also seems very inconsistent to criticize advocates of poorly
attested readings only to turn around and advocate readings with zero
external support.
It has been said by some very influential textual critics that New
Testament textual criticism is both an art and a science. But it should
be all science, and not art, because it is an enterprise of reconstruction, not
construction. Its methods may validly be creative and
inventive, and even intuitive, but not its product.
Conjectural emendation is the only aspect of textual criticism that potentially
involves the researcher’s artistic or creative skill.
In my view, no conjectural emendation should ever be placed in a compilation of
the text of the Greek New Testament. At the same time, the task of
proposing conjectural emendations as possible readings which
account for their rivals serves a valuable purpose: to demonstrate the heavy
weight of the internal evidence in favor of such readings in the event that
they are discovered in an actual Greek manuscript.
Thank you.
