Trusting the Bible - A Response to John Piper

John Piper

          Earlier this week, the following question was addressed at the Desiring God website/podcast:  “How can I trust the Bible if there have been so many add-ins, such as Mark 16:9–20 and John 7:53–8:11 and First John 5:7–8?”

          John Piper, in his response, not only took for granted that all three of those passages are spurious, but he also linked the validity of his response to the validity of his view that all three passages should be rejected:  “If there is a science that can spot these three texts that he mentioned as not part of the original biblical manuscripts, then that same science, in the same way, can perform the same function for all the other passages. There is the answer.”

          It is not that simple.  When I look at the methods used by some textual critics to present their cases against Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11, I don’t see a lot of detached, disinterested balance in how the evidence is handled.  Instead, authors often mold and manipulate the evidence so as to produce one-sided propaganda, and important evidence for the opposite position never gets mentioned.  As an example, just look in the NET Bible’s notes about John 7:53-8:11 and try to find any mention of the testimony of Jerome and Augustine about that passage.  Look in the ESV Global Study Bible’s note about Mark 16:9-20 and try to find any mention of Irenaeus’ specific quotation of Mark 16:19.  (Irenaeus wrote in the 170’s/180’s, over a century before the production-date of the earliest existing manuscript of Mark 16, so his testimony is extremely important.)   

          But Piper’s answer would still be problematic even if commentators and Bible annotators were not seasoning their evidence-presentations with gallons of bias in favor of the Nestle-Aland compilation.  It is problematic, first, because although one of the basic axioms of textual criticism is that manuscripts should be weighed, rather than merely counted, the first thing that Piper did, in his reply, was to count manuscripts: 

          “Here is the reason we may have strong confidence that the science of textual criticism is successful in discerning the original wording of the manuscripts:  There are over 5,800 Greek manuscripts.”

          If it were merely a matter of favoring textual variants that are supported by over 80% of the manuscripts, then Mark 16:9-20 would be universally accepted (with support from over 99.8% of the Greek manuscripts), and so would John 7:53-8:11 (with support from 85% of the Greek manuscripts).  Clearly, the quantity of manuscript-support is not very important to the textual critics who reject those two passages.  In the Nestle-Aland compilation, two readings are in the text even though they have zero support among Greek manuscripts.

          When the textual critics who made the Nestle-Aland compilation sat down to do their work, they did indeed have access to the readings of thousands of manuscripts to consult and compare.  But they ignored most of them.  Most Greek manuscripts closely agree with one another, and this large collection of manuscripts, displaying the Byzantine Text, has been treated as a very large family that descended from a single ancestor-manuscript, and for that reason, their collective weight is regarded as the weight of that ancestor-manuscript.  This is why, in the apparatus of the UBS Greek New Testament (the text of which is the same as the text in the Nestle-Aland compilation), these hundreds of manuscripts are not listed individually; they are given a single emblem, “Byz.” 

          Meanwhile, the flagship-manuscripts of the Alexandrian Text – Vaticanus and Sinaiticus – are consistently listed individually, along with whatever allies for them can be found.  And with astounding consistency, when a textual contest occurs between a reading attested by a smattering of Alexandrian manuscripts, and a reading attested by over a thousand Byzantine manuscripts, the compilers of the Nestle-Aland text preferred the Alexandrian reading.    

          In other words, the text-critical method that is used by the editors of the compilation that John Piper uses (i.e., the NT base-text of the ESV) does not support his position:  the textual critics do indeed have thousands of manuscripts to consider, but their method routinely operates on the premise that thousands of manuscripts can contain a spurious reading where only a few contain the original text. 

          Daniel Wallace, as John Piper mentioned, has claimed that “New Testament scholars face an embarrassment of riches compared to the data of classical Greek and Latin scholars have to contend with.”  However, when one examines Wallace’s own approach to the text, it becomes obvious that he believes that in some passages – at the end of Mark, and at Mark 1:41, for example – almost every coin in the royal treasury is counterfeit. 

          When the medieval Byzantine manuscripts are treated as descendants of a single early edition of the text, numbers mean nothing, and thus the claim that the New Testament has “1,000 times the manuscript data” as the average Greco-Roman author, while true, is pointless.  The Nestle-Aland compilers favor earlier manuscripts, especially early Alexandrian manuscripts.  Maurice Robinson provides a sobering observation:  “Even if the text-critical evidence is extended through the eighth century, there would be only 424 documents, mostly fragmentary.  In contrast to this meager total, the oft-repeated apologetic appeal to the value and restorative significance of the 5000+ remaining Greek NT MSS becomes an idle boast when those manuscripts are not utilized to restore the original text.” 

          If John Piper used a text that he considered to be historically authenticated by virtue of the massive support of its contents in Greek manuscripts, then he could confidently assure his listeners that there is no likelihood of significant changes in its contents:  the readings that are supported by the overwhelming majority of Greek manuscripts today will be supported by the overwhelming majority of Greek manuscripts until Judgment Day.  However, as Bill Mounce has confirmed, John Piper uses a text that he considers to be critically authenticated through the analyses of the Nestle-Aland compilation-committee (which presently includes David Trobisch, a member of the secularist Center for Inquiry). 

          John Piper should not convey that the Nestle-Aland compilers will never change their minds about significant, translation-impacting textual variants.  Some of the thirty-two changes introduced in the 28th edition of the Nestle-Aland compilation have an impact on translation.  (Textual changes in the 28th edition were limited to the General Epistles – the rest of the text is the same as it was in the 27th edition.)  

          The introduction of a conjectural emendation into the text of Second Peter 3:10 reverses the meaning of the sentence.  And consider the contest between ὀλίγως and ὄντως in Second Peter 2:18.  In 1966, ὀλίγως was adopted and the UBS committee gave it a “C” ranking, meaning, according to the UBS Introduction, that “There is considerable degree of doubt whether the text or the apparatus contains the superior reading.”  Metzger’s Textual Commentary, however, stated, “ὄντως is far more likely to be secondary than ὀλίγως.”   By the time the fourth edition of the UBS Greek New Testament was printed, the editors were more confident; the reading ὀλίγως was ranked as an “A” reading – meaning, according to the Introduction of UBS4, “the text is certain.”  But in NA28, that was thrown out the window:  ὄντως appears in the text.   

          The Nestle-Aland compilation (and English translations that depend on it, such as the ESV) is not as stable as John Piper wants it to be.  He wants to assure his listener that the text of the New Testament is not going to drastically change.  Yet he says that 7% of the New Testament’s text is in question – subject to revision in the event of new discoveries or a change in the compilers’ views. 

          John Piper also wants the passages that constitute that unstable 7% to be inconsequential.  This seems about as realistic as saying that if a person has 100 dollars, and knows that 93 dollars are genuine, but he is not sure about the remaining seven dollars, he has nothing to worry about; he is free to claim that he has 100 dollars, and may use every dollar as if it is genuine without hesitation.  

          There are some important textual contests within that 7%.  (By the way, I do not accept the claim that this proportion accurately represents the amount of instability in the New Testament text – but I overlook this detail in the interest of brevity.)  Their outcomes are not likely to erase sentences from the Apostles’ Creed, but they definitely have an impact on how one interprets the passage in which they occur.  Consider:

          ● The first half of Luke 23:34 says, “And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”  John Piper used these words as Scripture in a sermon he preached on January 27, 2002.  (Perhaps he was convinced of their genuineness by “peculiar glory” emanating from them.  More about that in a moment.)  But in NA-27, these words are double-bracketed, just like Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11.  The UBS4 Introduction says that these double-bracketed passages “are known not to be a part of the original text.”  That is not trivial.    

         ●  It is difficult to see how the doctrine of inerrancy would survive if the compilers of the Nestle-Aland/UBS text decided to adopt (as Eberhard Nestle did) the reading of Codex Sinaiticus in Matthew 13:35, since it says that Isaiah is the author of Psalm 78.  It is also difficult to see how the doctrine of inerrancy would survive if the NA/UBS compilers decided to adopt the reading shared by Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (and some other witnesses) in Matthew 27:49. 

         ● What would happen to the doctrine of the Virgin Birth if compilers decided (as Von Soden did) to adopt the reading in Matthew 1:16 in the Sinaitic Syriac:  “Joseph, to whom was betrothed Mary the virgin, begot Jesus who is called the Christ”?  

         ● In Matthew 17:21 and Mark 9:29, does it have no impact whether or not Jesus said that a particular kind of demon will not be exorcised except by prayer and fasting? 

          ● In Mark 7:19, does Jesus refer to a bodily function, or does Mark comment that Jesus thus declared all meats kosher? 

          ● Does it make no difference to interpreters whether Mark 1:1 does (as in the ESV, and in almost all manuscripts) or does not (as in the TNIV, and a smattering of manuscripts) include the words, “the Son of God”? 

          ● Does it have no theological impact whether Acts 20:28 refers to “The church of God, which he bought with his own blood,” or to “The church of the Lord, which he bought with his own blood,” or to “The church of the Lord and God, which he bought with his own blood”? 

          ● Is it likely that the same message will be preached from the opening verses of the Epistle of Jude regardless of whether the fifth verse refers to “The Lord” (Κυριος) or “Jesus” (Ιησους) or “God Christ” (Θεος Χριστός)?   

          ● In the angelic proclamation in Luke 2:14, did the angels say, “And on earth peace; goodwill toward men,” as the vast majority of manuscripts (and the KJV, NKJV, and MEV) say, or “And on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased” (as the ESV says, allied with the Alexandrian text)?  On December 24, 2011, John Piper preached from this passage and stated that the KJV’s rendering “was not an accurate translation.”  However, this difference between the KJV and the ESV is not a matter of translation; it is a textual difference – the difference between εὐδοκία and εὐδοκίας.  The theological nuance of the sentence pivots upon this small difference.

          It is not my intention here to tour all the textual contests that affect interpretation.  I merely mention these few as evidence that any promise that the scientific evidence demands confidence that the text of the New Testament will not ever materially change is poorly grounded as long as the text under discussion allows a few manuscripts to outweigh all the rest.  The product of the text-critical methodology that has yielded 28 editions of Novum Testamentum Graece is, and will always be, inherently non-definitive.  

          That approach does not preclude that in the event of the discovery of several very early manuscripts, the text of the New Testament could change, as we saw the text of Novum Testamentum Graece change significantly in Luke 24 after Papyrus 75 was discovered.  The same methodology that presently assigns overwhelming weight to Codex Vaticanus and its Alexandrian allies is likely to assign overwhelming weight to newly discovered early manuscripts.  Thus there is no scientific reason to absolutely preclude significant textual shifts.

          How, then, can one confidently maintain that the compilation that one can hold in one’s hands contains nothing but the original text?  Piper’s solution:  ask if you see “the peculiar glory of God shining through those words and confirming to your own mind and heart that these are the very words of God.”  That is a spectacularly bad idea.  

          Such a misapplication of Second Corinthians 4:6 renders textual criticism superfluous and replaces it with subjective contemplation.  Many Bible-readers see the glory of God shining through the words, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to all creation.”  Many Bible-readers see the glory of God shining through the words, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.”  Advocates of the KJV claim to see the glory of God shining through the Comma Johanneum.  Mormons claim to see the glory of God in their Book of Mormon, and Roman Catholics claim to see the glory of God in the book of Tobit, and so forth.  I don’t think we really want to make subjectivism the crucial factor in textual contests.

          But how else can one answer the listener’s question, as long as one agrees with the methodology of the compilers of the NA/UBS text?  How can one believe that the NA/UBS text, in its present condition, is the Word of God, considering that in the future, its compilers might reject many of its present readings?  It’s a question which I leave to advocates of the NA/UBS compilation to answer. 

          In the meantime, I close with an observation and a suggestion.  First:  scientifically speaking, the Byzantine Text does not have the instability problem that the Nestle-Aland text has.  Even at points where the Byzantine Text is unstable – where there is no clear-cut majority reading – the options are limited to known variants with significant manuscript support.  Meanwhile the Nestle-Aland compilation is susceptible to the introduction of readings which are presently unknown in Greek manuscripts.  (Of course one could argue that this aspect of the Nestle-Aland text is not a bad thing – if a large second-century papyrus manuscript of the Gospels were discovered tomorrow, wouldn’t you want the compilers to pay attention to it?)      

The Byzantine Text

          Second:  theologically speaking, I suggest that most Christians, instead of insisting on confidently possessing the exact form of the text of the autographs, should be content to possess the message that was conveyed by the original text.  (This is how almost everyone, except Greek-readers, encounters the New Testament’s message.  It was even the attitude of copyists of New Testament manuscripts; they routinely used abbreviations and contractions, thus altering the text’s form but not its message.) 

          And while the Byzantine Text does not constitute the exact form of the original text, the advocates of the Nestle-Aland compilation relentlessly insist that the textual differences between the Byzantine Text and the Nestle-Aland text do not affect the general message.  Everyone thus seems to agree that the message conveyed by the Byzantine Text is the definitive message of the original text, even if the form of the words conveying that message is not always the original form.  So, in response to the listener’s initial question, I would say that it does not require very much faith to confidently believe that no future discoveries, and no valid methodology, will ever introduce material into compilations of the New Testament text that conveys a significantly different message than what is conveyed by the Byzantine Text. 

A Fresh Analysis of John 7:53-8:11

$4.99
in the United States
(as of June 23, 2016).

My e-book about the pericope adulterae is now available at Amazon.

Various commentators, preachers and seminary professors have called for the removal of John 7:53-8:11 – the story about Jesus and the adulteress – to be removed from the Bible, because it is not in some important early manuscripts, and because, in some other manuscripts, it is in different locations.  In this book I offer the following:  

● A case for the genuineness of John 7:53-8:11,

● Corrections and clarifications of some well-circulated falsehoods and misinformation (answering especially some claims spread by Bruce Metzger, Dan Wallace, Bart Ehrman, David Parker, John Piper, and James White),

● An explanation of the simple scribal mechanism that elicited the loss of the passage in an early transmission-stream,

● An explanation of the influence of lection-cycles that led to the transference of the passage to other locations – including a consideration of the rarely cited evidence from Palestinian Aramaic texts.

● A refutation of the theory that the passage was a “floating” anecdote,

● A consideration of Augustine’s theory about why the passage was removed from the text, 

● A thorough review of the relevant external evidence, including not only Greek manuscripts but also versional and patristic evidence, 

● An examination of the internal evidence, and the disruption in the narrative that results when the pericope adulterae is removed, and

● Some brief notes about miscellaneous concerns which have a bearing on the question about John 7:53-8:11 (or upon which the question about John 7:53-8:11 has a bearing) in one way or another. 

I have tried to make this digital volume affordable for the typical Bible student.  (The price varies from country to country.)  Those for whom the price is prohibitively high are welcome to request a copy directly from me.  

The Pericope Adulterae and Some Early Manuscripts

          The Greek manuscripts which are often cited as the primary external evidence against the pericope adulterae (John 7:53-8:11 – a passage which some evangelical seminary professors and influential preachers, including John Piper, do not regard as Scripture) are Papyrus 66, Papyrus 75, À (01, Sinaiticus), B (03, Vaticanus), A (02, Alexandrinus), C (04, Ephraemi Rescriptus), L (019, Regius), N (022, Petropolitanus Purpureus), W (032, Washingtoniensis), and Δ (038, Sangallensis).  None of these manuscripts has John 7:53-8:11 between 7:52 and 8:12.  However, the testimony of some of these witnesses is significantly nuanced by additional details.

Codex Delta's blank space.
Color page-views are online.

          For example, in Codex Δ (from the 800’s), the copyist provided a clear indication of his recollection of the passage, even though it was absent from his exemplar.  After John 7:52, the copyist wrote the first seven words of 8:12, but then left the rest of the page blank, and resumed writing after leaving three additional blank lines on the following page.  Then he restarted the text of 8:12, and proceeded on from there.  Thus, while Codex Δ attests to the absence of the pericope adulterae in its exemplar, it also attests to the copyist’s memory of the presence of the passage in some other manuscript.

          Similarly, in Codex L (from the 700’s), the copyist left a long blank space between the end of John 7:52, on one page, and the beginning of 8:12, on the following page.  This blank space in Codex L includes more than an entire blank column.  In codices Δ and L, the blank space is not sufficient to include John 7:53-8:11, but the copyists’ intention to leave “memorial space,” acknowledging their awareness of the absent passage, remains obvious.  It therefore seems somewhat selective when commentators such as Metzger, Wallace, and White (among others) mention the absence of John 7:53-8:11, but fail to mention these blank spaces, of equal age, which attest to the presence of the passage in the memories of these manuscripts’ scribes.

Codex Regius' blank space.

          Before we turn to some other interesting features in these manuscripts, it should be pointed out that of the 1,476 manuscripts that contain the pericope adulterae, about 60 manuscripts have it in a location other than between John 7:52 and 8:12.  One particular group of manuscripts, which includes the important minuscules 1 and 1582, has the passage after the end of the Gospel of John, preceded by a note stating that because most manuscripts did not contain the passage, and because it was not commented upon by venerable patristic writers (such as John Chrysostom), it was moved to the end of the book, having been previously found after John 7:52 (the end of which the annotator quotes). 

          Although the minuscules that contain John 7:53-8:11 after John are not particularly early, their agreements are considered to echo an ancestor-manuscript which was produced in the 400’s.  In addition, their distinct readings tend to have an affinity with readings used by Origen, a patristic author who died in 254. 

          The transfer of John 7:53-8:11 from the usual place in chapters 7 and 8 to the end of the Gospel of John thus did not begin when these manuscripts were produced, but centuries earlier, when their shared ancestor was made.  This raises a question:  could some of the manuscripts which have been cited against the pericope adulterae, and which do not have it in chapters 7 and 8, have had it at the end of the Gospel of John? 
          In the case of Codex N (from the 500’s), there is no way to verify if it contained the pericope adulterae after the end of John or not, because the manuscript is damaged; the last extant bit of John 21 is in verse 20, and so there is no way to know if 21:25 was followed by the pericope adulterae when Codex N was in pristine condition or not.

          In Codex W (from about the year 400), the Gospels are arranged in the order Matthew-John-Luke-Mark.  Commentator Wieland Willker has noticed that between the end of John and the beginning of Luke, there is a blank page – blank on both sides.  No such similar feature exists in Codex W between Matthew and John, or between Luke and Mark.  This might be an attempt, by a copyist aware of the existence of the pericope adulterae, to provide space where it could be added.    

          In Codex A (from the early 400’s), the pages containing the text from John 6:50 to 8:52a have been lost.  Thus, we cannot see directly that in Codex A, John 7:52 was followed by 8:12; we have to rely on space-calculations.  Here, again, Willker’s commentary is very helpful:  he notes that the copyist accidentally omitted John 8:52, when his line of sight wandered too far down the page.  When this is accounted for, a reconstruction of the missing text, without John 7:53-8:11, fits the space that would have been on the absent pages, whereas if the pericope adulterae had been present, the space would not be remotely sufficient. 

Codex Alexandrinus -
The end of John,
and a blank column.

          At the end of the Gospel of John, the copyist of Codex A put the closing-title of the book at the end of the first column on the page.  The second column is completely blank.  One might argue that this is to be expected at the end of the Gospels – yet, at the end of Acts, there is no similar blank column; the column in which the book of Acts ends is followed immediately by a column in which the Epistle of James begins.  On the other hand, between the end of Philemon and the beginning of Revelation, there are two blank columns, that is, one side of the page is blank.  There is little way to discern, from this evidence alone, if the blank column at the end of John in Codex A is filler-space, or memorial-space.

          In Codex Sinaiticus (from the mid-300’s), after the Gospel of John concludes in the fourth column of a page, the next four columns are completely blank.  Once again, while it is probable that this is simply filler-space, it is not impossible that this feature represents copyists’ recollection of the presence of the pericope adulterae at the end of the Gospel of John. 

          In Codex Vaticanus (from the early 300’s), John 7:53-8:11 does not appear after 7:52, and there is no unusual blank space after the end of John (on page 1382 of the codex) – just the usual leftover space below the end of the book.  However, in the outer margin alongside that blank space after John 21:25, there is an interesting feature:  an umlaut, also known as a distigme.    Very many of these symbols appear in the margins of the New Testament books in Codex Vaticanus; researcher Philip Payne brought them to the attention of his fellow-researchers in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, and established that they were added to denote the locations of textual variants. 

          It has not been determined beyond reasonable doubt that these symbols were added in ancient times.  Payne has contended that most of the distigmai are contemporary with the production of the manuscript; Peter Head, however, has challenged this position.  My own suspicion is that these marks are all late.  However, because some scholars, including Daniel Wallace, have treated them as if they are ancient, let’s consider their possible significance in the case at hand:  the only known textual variant that would elicit the addition of a distigme in the blank space after the end of the Gospel of John is the presence of the pericope adulterae.   

          If the distigmai are as ancient as the manuscript itself, Codex Vaticanus testifies to a fourth-century copyist’s awareness of the pericope adulterae’s presence at that location in at least one manuscript older than Codex Vaticanus itself.  This would imply that the transfer of the passage to the end of John 21 was not initially due to its lack of use by Chrysostom and other patristic writers, but was caused by some other factor.

          Papyrus 75 (usually assigned a production-date in the early 200’s) is only extant in John up to 15:10, so there is no way to tell whether or not the pericope adulterae was present after the end of chapter 21.          

Papyrus 66 -
not much remains
of John 21:17ff. except
the page-number.

          Similarly, Papyrus 66 (which Robert Waltz describes as “a notably inaccurate copy”), also from the 200’s, is very fragmentary in John 21, and no text can be confidently reconstructed beyond 21:17.  Thus we cannot tell with certainty that Papyrus 66 did not contain the pericope adulterae after John 21. 

          A few things should be clear from this review of the major early witnesses for the non-inclusion of the pericope adulterae.

● First:  the evidence strongly supports the view that the text of John used in Egypt in the 200’s did not contain the passage after John 7:52.  

● Second:  codices L and Δ should be considered witnesses for non-inclusion and for inclusion.  

● Third:  the testimony of most of the major Greek manuscripts that support the non-inclusion of the pericope adulterae in chapters 7 and 8 is not nearly as clear or one-sided when they are asked to testify about the passage’s presence or absence following John 21; on this question, most of the early Greek manuscript-evidence is open to interpretation.