Luke 2:14 - Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men

The Latin phrase on the angel's banner in this 
stained-glass window means, "Glory to God 
in the highest, and on earth peace."

          “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”  The  words of Luke 2:14 have encircled the world as an echo of the angelic chorus proclaimed to the shepherds on the night of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem.  Few passages of Scripture have had wider circulation in Western culture, traveling from the Bible to the majestic compositions of Handel and Vivaldi,  “Glory to God,” to Christmas cards, to stained-glass windows.   

          Even these clear, plain words, however, have been changed in modern Bible versions.  Most of the major new versions do more than change “on earth peace” into “peace on earth.”  There is a different meaning in their versions’ rendering of the final phrase.  Unlike the KJV, NKJV, and MEV, which all retain the phrase, “good will toward men,” the New Living Translation reads, “and peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased.”  The New International Version reads, “and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”  The Holman Christian Standard Bible reads, “and peace on earth to people He favors!”  Thus we have two sets of Bibles which mean two different things in Luke 2:14:  in one set, the angels proclaim goodwill toward people in general, without expressing any particular conditions or parameters or limitations.  In the other set, the angels proclaim God’s peace specifically, as the English StandardVersion says, “among those with whom he is pleased.”

          According to a note in the MacArthur Study Bible, the angelic declaration in Luke 2:14 “is not to be taken as a universal declaration of peace toward all humanity.”  This may seem difficult for some readers to swallow, especially since the angel declares in verse 10 that his promise of good news is for everybody.  But the translators of the ESV, NLT, NIV, and HCSB have not taken it upon themselves to rewrite the angelic song of goodwill toward men.  These versions render the last phrase of Luke 2:14 differently because in  Luke 2:14, the Byzantine Text (and the Textus Receptus, the compilation on which the KJV and NKJV are based) disagrees with the Alexandrian Text, which is the main base-text of the ESV, NLT, NIV, and HCSB.   

          The difference between the Byzantine Text (eudokia, eudokia) and the Alexandrian text (eudokiaV, eudokias) consists of only one letter, but the difference in meaning is drastic.  Consider the renderings of Luke 2:14b in The VoiceTM (based on the Alexandrian Text) and the World English Bible (based on the Byzantine Text):

               The VoiceTM:    “And on earth, peace among all people who bring pleasure to God!”

               WEB:    “On earth peace, good will toward men.”

          One letter in Greek has produced an extra phase in English.

          Now we arrive at the key question:  which reading is original:  eudokia or eudokiaV?  Researchers have offered different solutions to this question.

Codex Vaticanus once read EUDOKIAS but the
final sigma (at the end of the fifth line) was erased.

          In the late 1800s, John Burgon proposed that an early copyist inadvertently omitted the word en in the phrase kai epi ghV eirhnh en anqrwpoiV eudokia, resulting in kai epi ghV eirhnh anqrwpoiV eudokia.  (A similar error, he pointed out, occurred in Acts 4:12 in Codex Bezae, one of the few manuscripts that support eudokiaV.  In addition, according to James Brooks, in manuscripts of works of the fourth-century writer Gregory of Nyssa, Luke 2:14 is utilized with eudokiaV and without en.  According to Wieland Willker’s Textual Commentary on the Gospels, a few minuscules also omit en.)  From this shortened text, the early Latin version of the phrase is accounted for, which instead of meaning “And on earth peace, good will toward men,” means, “And on earth peace to men of good will” – which does not necessarily mean that divine favor has been dispensed to them, but can also mean that they are favorably disposed toward God:  in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.

Codex Sinaiticus once read EUDOKIAS but the final
sigma (at the end of line six) was erased in it, too.

          In an appendix of his 1871 book The Last Twelve Verses of Mark, Burgon used this variant-unit in Luke 2:14 to illustrate the importance of patristic testimony.  Confronted with the testimony of Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Bezae, and Codex Alexandrinus in favor of eudokiaV, Burgon cited 17 early patristic writers whose manuscripts of Luke 2:14 supported eudokia.  The supporters of the reading eudokia include:    

● Eusebius (c. 320, in Caesarea),

● Aphrahat (330’s, in Syria),

● Titus of Bostra (c. 350, in Syria),

● Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 360, in central Turkey and then Constantinople),

● Epiphanius of Salamis (375, on Cyprus),

● Philo of Carpasia (late 300s, on Cyprus),

● Didymus (380, in Egypt),

Codex Bezae reads EUDOKIAS (fourth line).

● Apostolic Constitutions (380),

● Chrysostom (c. 400, in Antioch and then Constantinople),

● Cyril of Alexandria (c. 420, in northern Egypt),

● Theodotus of Ancyra (c. 430, in central Turkey), and

● Marcus Eremita (435, in Israel).

Codex Alexandrinus reads EUDOKIAS (fourth line)
in its text of Luke.  But in a hymn at the end of the
book of Psalms (Ode 14 - Morning Hymn),
the text of Luke 2:14 is used with EUDOKIA.

          These witnesses, and others, demonstrate that ευδοκία was such a widespread reading – not just in the Middle Ages, but already in the 300s and early 400s – that even with some patristic writers on the other side of the equation (including Gregory of Nyssa, who is not listed in the UBS apparatus), it is not easy to explain how, if it is not original, it managed to come from behind, overtake the original text, and leave it far behind.   The evidence from the Armenian version, the Bohairic version, the Syriac Peshitta version and the Harklean Syriac version add their weight to this consideration; they support eudokia.  

          F. H. A. Scrivener, another text-critical scholar of the 1800s, concurred with Burgon’s conclusion, but argued that eudokiaV originated by a simple “transcriptional blunder,” which was subsequently meticulously perpetuated.  Scrivener also emphasized that the internal evidence is against eudokiaV on the grounds that the same thought could be expressed in much clearer terms. 

          Bruce Metzger, in his widely circulated and influential Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, favored the reading in Vaticanus (what a surprise!), and offered the explanation that a copyist might have considered eudokiaV too difficult, or may have misread his exemplar – which would be particularly easy to do if, in the exemplar, the word eudokiaV was written at the end of a line, with the final letter superscripted instead of at its normal size.  However, Metzger’s imaginative proposal can easily be reversed if one imagines, instead, an exemplar in which a punctuation-mark was mistaken for a sigma.

James Hardy Ropes

          James Hardy Ropes, a minister and Harvard professor in the early 1900s, favored the reading eudokia.  Ropes usually advocated Alexandrian readings in his textual research – as he spectacularly demonstrated in his commentary on the epistle of James – but he concluded, in an article which appeared in Harvard Theological Review in 1917, that eudokiaV originated when an early copyist read the angelic hymn as a distich, that is, as two poetic lines, the first of which was, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth.”  The copyist, having gotten that far, would come to eudokia and sense a disruption in the poetic balance of the two-line proclamation; thinking that this was due to an error in his exemplar, he changed eudokia to eudokiaV.              

          Thirty-six years earlier, Hort had approved eudokiaV, the reading which was in Vaticanus and Sinaiticus when they were made – even though in both of those fourth-century manuscripts, the final sigma was erased so as to bring their text into conformity to the usual reading.  (It is difficult to tell at what point these erasures were carried out.  For all we know, it might have been when the manuscripts were proof-read in the scriptorium, before their pages were bound together.)  Hort argued in his 1881 Introduction that the angelic hymn was indeed meant to consist of two parallel statements:  (1) Glory to God in heaven and on earth, and (2)  Peace to men of His favor.  Hort accounted for the grammatical harshness of this rendering as an effect of its nature as a Hebraism.  

          This line of reasoning, however, did not satisfy Ropes, who countered that Hort’s proposal turns the angelic proclamation into an irregular distich, but “With eudokia, the verse is a tristich, and is easily translatable into three lines of formal poetry in either Hebrew or Aramaic.”  Matthew Black confirmed, regarding the text of Lk. 2:14 with eudokia, “When rendered into Aramaic it falls naturally into rhythmic structure, and, with the earlier words for poimhn, poimnh, gh, preceding ευδοκία, there is an example of paronomasia.”  [p. 125, An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts.]

          Ropes and I disagree with Hort’s conclusion, but Hort did get one thing right:  he stated that if eudokiaV is not original, “it must be Western.”  The reason is that eudokiaV is read by Codex Bezae, and seems to be the basis of the Old Latin rendering:  hominibus bonae voluntatis is accounted for by en anqrwpois eudokiaV more naturally than by en anqrwpois eudokia (unless, as Burgon thought, en was omitted).  (The author of the NET’s note at Luke 2:14 seems to take for granted that Burgon’s guess is correct, stating that the Old Latin witnesses “reflect a Greek text which has the genitive eudokiaV but drops the preposition en.”)   

Codex Regius (L, 019), an Alexandrian manuscript
from the 700s, reads EUDOKIA in Lk. 2:14.

          But are there any other reasons why – other than by sheer accident (as Burgon thought), or due to a misunderstanding of the phrase-division of the sentence (as Ropes thought) – an early copyist whose exemplar read eudokia might change it to eudokiaV?  
          To answer this question it maybe helpful to take a closer look at something written by Origen (a prolific writer in the first half of the 200s).  Origen quoted Luke 2:14 with eudokia in Against Celsus 1:60, and in Book One of his Commentary on John (according to the 1989 edition by Ronald E. Heine, page 49) but he is thought to have used a different form of the text when he wrote Homily #13 on Luke in the 230’s.     

          Origen’s Homily #13 on Luke, written in the 230’s, is extant only in a Latin translation prepared by Jerome, and so it is not perfectly clear what text Origen cited.  Commenting on the angels’ statement from Luke 2:14, Origen said that a careful reader of Scripture might wonder how, inasmuch as Jesus said (in Matthew 10:34) that He did not come to bring peace on earth, the angels could chant “Peace on earth.”  Origen’s solution to this problem runs as follows (based on the English translation made by Joseph Lienhard, pages 53-54):           

MS 892 reads EUDOKIA in Lk. 2:14.

          “If Scripture said, ‘Peace on earth,’ and the sentence ended there, then the objection would be valid.  But something is added.  After ‘peace,” Scripture says, ‘among men of good will.’ [Latin:  in hominibus bonae voluntatis]  This answers the objection.  The peace on earth that the Lord does not give is not the peace ‘of good will.’ [Without the double-negative, that’s “The peace on earth that the Lord gives is the peace of good will.”]  For he did not say simply [in Mt. 10:34], “I have not come to spread peace.”  He added [still in Mt. 10:34], ‘Upon earth.’” 

Minuscule 700, known for its unusual and ancient
variants, reads EUDOKIA in Luke 2:14.

          Hort argued that Origen “manifestly reads ευδοκίας, combining it in construction with eirhnh, not with anqrwpoiV.”  It seems to me that Origen’s resolution still works with eudokia, but in the interest of brevity I won’t argue that point here.  The thing to see is that Origen was concerned that readers might sense an inconsistency between Mt. 10:34 and Luke 2:14.  And here we may have an explanation for both the creation of eudokiaV in the Western text-stream and for its preference by a copyist or copyists in the ancestry of Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus:  by specifying that peace is extended to a particular group of people, an objection about the appearance of inconsistency between Matthew 10:34 and Luke 2:14 is nullified.  

The Covel Lectionary (L-150), produced in 995,
reads EUDOKIA in Lk. 2:14.

           For more than 100 years, textual critics have allowed an apologetically motivated Western reading which contaminated part of the Alexandrian Text’s transmission-stream to stand in the text of Luke 2:14.  This should have changed a long time ago.  Not only was Ropes’ appeal to internal evidence sufficiently strong, but we have external evidence of which Hort knew nothing.  The minuscule 892 (a manuscript of the Gospels from the 800s, with strong Alexandrian affinities – more than any other minuscule) supports eudokia; had Hort known this, he might have given further consideration to the idea that eudokiaV is a Western attempt to prevent the perception of an inconsistency. 
          In addition, Ephraem Syrus’ commentary on the Diatessaron is much better-known than it was in 1881.  In Ephraem’s Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron, Ephraem cites Luke 2:14 as follows:  “Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth” – not to the animals or beasts, but, “Good hope for human beings.”   [p. 67, Carmel McCarthy, Saint Ephrem’s Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron: An English Translation of Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709 with Introduction and Notes, Copyright Oxford Univ. Press 1993]  On the premise that Ephraem was quoting from the same text upon which he was commenting – and this seems a very reasonable premise – we have here an echo of Tatian’s Diatessaron, that is, a composition made around 172.

Agnes Smith Lewis

          Besides the testimony of Tatian and minuscule 892, the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript – discovered at St. Catherine’s monastery in 1892 – also provides early support for en anqrwpoiV eudokia.   After Agnes Smith Lewis and her sister Margaret Gibson obtained access to this manuscript (which was produced around 400), she translated it into English in 1894, and in that translation she rendered the angelic hymn as, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace upon earth, and good-will to men.”  According to Matthew Black, the Sinaitic Syriac has the Syriac word ‘ar‘utha, which is different from the Peshitta’s term, sabhra tabha; both are paraphrastic but clearly support eudokia.    

           

Codex Seidelianus (G, 011), from the 800s,
reads EUDOKIA in Lk. 2:14 at the end of 
the seventh line.  Codex G is one of hundreds 
of Byzantine manuscripts with this reading.

          To sum up:  ever since 1881, most new English translations of Luke 2:14 have been based on eudokiaV, even though the external evidence in favor of its rival eudokia has grown stronger and stronger, and the rationale for ευδοκίας based on internal considerations has been effectively countered.  If the textual critics who are currently preparing base-texts for translators of the New Testament do not feel compelled to adopt eudokia – the reading with more widespread patristic support, the reading with overwhelming more abundant attestation, the reading that is more stylistically appropriate to the author, the reading that fits the context better (considering 2:10b), and the reading that is more difficult (from an apologetic perspective) – then this confirms what many readers have long suspected:  despite the text-critically significant discoveries that have been made in the past 135 years, the pro-Alexandrian compilers of the Nestle-Aland and United Bible Societies’ texts have not progressed very much beyond Westcott and Hort, and have no intention of doing so.     

The "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" Is a Forgery

Photos of FHF can be viewed online.

            On February 27, 2015, Salon magazine published a remarkably inaccurate article about Jesus.  The author, Valerie Tarico, (a non-theist), stated at the outset that Jesus was probably married.  The first thing she mentioned as the basis for this claim was “an ancient papyrus scrap” that referred to the wife of Jesus.  She was referring to the fragment which Harvard professor Karen King – the publisher of that papyrus scrap – has labeled “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” 
            Tarico’s Salon article is a collection of falsehoods glued together with inaccuracies and wrapped in half-truths, but her claim about this papyrus is particularly misleading.  The so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” has been demonstrated to be a forgery.  Yet even after the proof of the forgery has been placed online where any journalist can access it, Salon published Tarico’s claim anyway.  If Salon were a doctor, it would be guilty of malpractice.

            The proof of the counterfeit nature of the Forged Harvard Fragment – abbreviated, for the sake of convenience, as FHF – does not consist in the date of the materials out of which it was fabricated.  Forgers have plenty of access to ancient papyrus.  Forgers can not only use ancient papyri – say, relatively cheap receipts – to write upon, but they can also burn ancient materials to create soot as a component of carbon-based ink to write with. 

            FHF was subjected to two Carbon-14 tests, and the results, part of the detailed analysis published in Harvard Theological Review, were wildly divergent:  one test indicated that the materials were from A.D. 650-870, and the other one indicated that the materials were from 410-200 B.C.  Neither one is consistent with a production-date in the 300’s or 400’s, which is what the Harvard professor had been proposing.     

            FHF’s carbon-14 date in 650-870 is consistent with the date of another fragment which was in the same collection of old fragments in which the FHF was brought to Karen King’s attention:  a fragment of the Sahidic (Egyptian) text of the Gospel of John.  The production-date of the papyrus used for the fragment of Sahidic John was carbon-dated consistently to somewhere between 640 and 880.  This supports the idea that the fragment of the Sahidic text of John, and the FHF, both come from the same batch of papyrus, and that the papyrus-material was produced in 640-880.  Strengthening the likeliness of this is Dr. Christian Askeland’s observation that when one looks at the fragment of the Sahidic text of John, and also at the writing in FHF, “the writing tool, ink and hand” are “exactly the same.” 

            This presents a rather large obstacle to the notion that the FHF was written in the 300’s or 400’s:  a writer in the 300’s or 400’s obviously would not have access to papyrus writing-material produced in the 600’s-800’s.  So is the solution to move the production-date of the texts into the 600’s-800’s?  That isn’t feasible either, because by that time, the dialect in which this particular fragment is written was no longer being used.  The dialect – Lycopolitan Coptic – is attested rather sparsely; it is known from a manuscript called the Qau Codex (a manuscript of the Gospel of John produced in 350-400) which was published in 1924 by Herbert Thompson. 

 

Photos of the Sahidic fragment of John are included in the report in 
Harvard Theological Review and can be viewed at several news-blogs. 
(Photo credit unknown -- Timothy Swager (?))

When we look at the Qau Codex and compare its text of the Gospel of John to the contents of the fragment of John that was made by the same person who made the FHF, we find something highly incriminating:  the line-endings in the fragment of John correspond to the line-endings in the Qau Codex.

            Even without knowledge of Coptic dialects, this can be seen via a simple comparison, as shown here.  Thus we can practically reconstruct what the forger who made FHF did as he produced FHF’s sister-forgery:  he wrote the text of the Qau Codex, and simply combined every two lines as a single line.

            On May 24, 2014, Bart Ehrman wrote about this at his blog:  “On the reverse side of the Gospel of John fragment there is writing (not from John but from another text).”  He also wrote:  “The words and letters on the left hand margin for all of 17 lines in a row of the “new discovery” match exactly those in the text that was discovered in the 20th century,” i.e., in the Qau Codex.  Both of Ehrman’s statements are problematic.  First, the fragment in question has text from the Gospel of John on both sides.  Second, the left margin of the fragment is only extant on one side.  Third, the correspondence to the Qau Codex occurs on alternating lines in the fragment, not on every line.  (One wonders if he ever even saw pictures of the fragment he was describing to his readers.)  Hopefully Dr. Ehrman will post again on this subject in a less confused state.  In the meantine, the fragment can be viewed in the online report submitted to Harvard Theological Review.

           Francis Watson has shown that the FHF’s text is similarly derivative:  the forger basically pieced together snippets from the Coptic text of the Gospel of Thomas (a Gnostic text composed in the 100’s), altering their contents to make the contents more sensational, but leaving clear traces of his source.      

            Stephen Emmel has pointed out a different path to the same conclusion:  when one reconstructs the format of the text of the Gospel of John that would be necessary in a codex in which a page has the particular passages on the front and back that this fragment contains, the codex’s pages would need to be either exceptionally tall (if the text were written in a single column) or exceptionally wide (if the text were written in two columns).  This augments the point that the person who made the Sahidic fragment of John – the same person who made FHF – did not carefully think through everything that would be required to make a convincing forgery.

           Mark Goodacre and other perceptive readers noticed that in one phrase, the FHF reads the same as the text of the Gospel of Thomas usually does, except for one unusual reading which happens to be identical to a typographical error that appeared in an online edition of the Gospel of Thomas – specifically, an edition by Mike Grondin which was first available in November of 2002.  This may indicate when and where the forger obtained his text of the Gospel of Thomas before using its component-parts in the process of putting together the text of the forgery.  Not long thereafter, Dan Brown’s deceptively marketed and fictitious work The Da Vinci Code was published – which, as Dr. Francis Watson has noted, may have given the forger the idea of using snippets of the Gospel of Thomas to create a forgery which conveyed that Jesus had a wife.

What's next, National Geographic?

                The history of the Forged Harvard Fragment was interesting and illuminating.  It showed the value – I mean, the worthlessness – of some “expert opinions,” and the worthlessness of the sort of “peer review” that can occur when the ultra-liberal “peers” thirstily want something to be true.  (James McGrath at Butler, Candida Moss at Notre Dame, James Tabor at UNC-Charlotte, and April DeConick, I’m thinking of you.  Candida Moss has finally acknowledged the obvious about FHF, in a CNN report on February 20, 2015.  Why does it seem so hard for the others?  Roger Bagnall, any comment?  And AnneMarie Luijendijk: “impossible to forge”?  Please explain.)  

            It also showed how a group of scholars (Leo Depuydt (whose has consistently maintained his early assessment that FHF is a poorly executed forgery), Francis Watson, Andrew Bernhard, Mark Goodacre, Michael Grondlin, Alin Suciu, and Christian Askeland, among others), connected by the internet, can undo the damage which the recklessness and negligence of other scholars would probably have otherwise done.  

            And, inasmuch as Salon magazine is still spreading essays that treat the Forged Harvard Fragment as something other than a proven forgery, months after the proof was provided, it also shows that there is a real need, on the part of people who engineer a sensationalistic mess, to clean up after themselves with the same level of energy that was expended in the promotion of a falsehood.  Why has there been so little, if any, acknowledgement of the proof the FHF is a forgery from the Smithsonian Channel and other media-outlets responsible for spreading false claims about this forgery?  When will the headline appear in National Geographic informing its readers that the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” is fake?)  This responsibility seems to be very much lacking in some circles of New Testament academia – which is rather ironic considering what the New Testament says about honesty.