Maybe-Scripture-But-Maybe-Not???

            “So do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward.” – Hebrews 10:35 (EHV)

            When one version of the New Testament has a verse that is not in another version, that is something worth looking into.  When one version of the New Testament has 40 verses that another version doesn’t have, that’s definitely something worth looking into.  Textual criticism involves the investigation of those differences.  There are also hundreds of differences in manuscripts that do not involve entire verses, but involve important phrases and words.  (There are also hundreds of thousands of trivial differences which involve word-order and spelling, but non-synonymous differences in the wording of the text are the ones that tend to get the most attention.)    

            How can ordinary Christians maintain confidence that the New Testament they hold in their hands conveys the same authoritative message that was conveyed by the original documents of the New Testament books?  To an extent, that is something taken on faith:  even if there were zero variations in a reconstruction based on all external evidence, there would still be no way to scientifically prove that the earliest archetype does not vary from the contents of the autographs.  But that does not mean that one’s position about specific readings should be selected at random.  There is evidence – external evidence, and internal evidence – to carefully consider.    

            After the evidence has been carefully analysed, though, what should one do with one’s conclusions?  You might think that after scribal corruptions have been filtered out, the obvious thing for Christians to do would be to treat the reconstructed text as the Word of God, a text uniquely imbued with divine authority.  However, if one is to do something with one’s conclusions, one must first have conclusions.  

            And here we have a problem, because there is no sign that the Nestle-Aland compilation of the Greek New Testament will ever be more than provisional and tentative.  As the Introduction to its 27th edition states:  “It should naturally be understood that this text is a working text (in the sense of the century-long Nestle tradition):  it is not to be considered as definitive.”

            Anyone who wants a definitive text of the New Testament should abandon all hope of such a thing emerging from the team of scholars who produce the Nestle-Aland compilation. 

            The built-in instability of the Nestle-Aland text is understandable.  Nobody wants to say, “We are resolved to ignore any new evidence that may be discovered in the future.”  But it is also problematic:  it has caused some apologists, such as James White, to effectively nullify the authority of some parts of the New Testament.  Christians are being told that they should not have confidence about a particular verse, or a particular phrase, or a particular word, on the grounds that its presence in the Nestle-Aland compilation is tenuous.  The reading is in the text today, but the compilers might change their minds about it tomorrow, and therefore, it has been proposed, readers should not put much weight on such readings.

            For example, James White said this regarding the passage where Jesus says, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” – “In Luke 23:34, there is a major textual variant.  And, as a result, you should be very careful about making large theological points based upon what is truly a highly questionable text.”  In another video, White said this, referring to the same passage:

            “When you have a serious textual variant, you should not, in an apologetic context, place a tremendous amount of theological weight upon a text that could be properly and fairly questioned as to its specific reading.  And so, I don’t think that you should build a theology based upon this text.”

Notice the reasoning:  it’s not, “This verse is not original, so don’t use it.”  It’s “There is a textual variant here, so do not depend on it.”  There is a clear danger in such an approach:  the danger of effectively relegating parts of genuine Scripture to a non-authoritative status merely because they have been questioned by textual critics.

Is James White aware of how much of the New Testament has been questioned by textual critics?  I could easily list over a hundred passages in the Gospels where the interpretation of a passage changes, depending on which textual variant is in the text.  I will settle for listing twenty-five:

1.  In Mt. 12:47, did someone tell Jesus His mother and brothers were outside?

2.  In Mt. 13:35, did Matthew erroneously say that Isaiah wrote Psalm 72?

3.  In Mt. 17:21, did Jesus say that prayer and fasting were needed prior to casting out a particular kind of demon?)

4.  In Mt. 19:9, is remarriage permitted after divorce?

5.  In Mt. 27:16, was the criminal Barabbas also named Jesus?

6.  In Mt. 27:49, was Jesus pierced with a spear before He died, contradicting the account in the Gospel of John?

7.  In Mark 1:1, did Mark introduce Jesus as the Son of God?

8.  In Mk. 1:41, when Jesus was asked to heal the leper, was Jesus angry, or was He filled with compassion?

9.  In Mk. 6:22, was the dancer at Herod’s court the daughter of Herodias, or the daughter of Herod?

            10.  In Mk. 10:24, did Jesus say that it is hard to enter into the kingdom of God, or that it is hard for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God?

            11.  At the end of the Gospel of Mark, do the verses which mention Jesus’ bodily post-resurrection appearances, and His command to go into all the world and preach the gospel, and His ascension into heaven, belong in the Bible, or not?

            12.  In Lk. 2:14, did the angels say “Peace on earth, goodwill to men,” or “Peace on earth to men who are favored by God”?

            13.  In Lk. 14:5, did Jesus refer to a donkey, or to a son, or to a sheep?

            14.  In Lk. 11:13, did Jesus refer to the gift of the Holy Spirit, or to gifts in general?

            15.  In Lk. 22:43-44, did Jesus’ body exude drops of sweat like blood?  And did an angel appear to Him in Gethsemane, strengthening Him?

            16.  In Lk. 23:34a, did Jesus ask the Father to forgive those who were responsible for crucifying Him?

            17.  In Lk. 24:6, did Luke state that the men said to the women at the tomb, “He is not here, but is risen”?

            18.  In Lk. 24:40, did the risen Jesus show His disciples His hands and His feet?)

            19.  In Lk. 24:51, did Luke say specifically that Jesus “was carried up into heaven”?

            20.  In Jn. 1:18, did John call Jesus “only begotten God” or “the only begotten Son”?

            21.  In Jn. 1:34, did John the Baptist call Jesus the Son of God, or the chosen one of God?

            22.  Did Jn. 3:13 originally end with the phrase, “the Son of Man who is in heaven”?)

            23.  Does the story about the woman caught in adultery, in Jn. 7:53-8:11, belong in the New New Testament, or not?

            24.  In John 9:38-39, did Jesus receive worship from the formerly blind man, or not?   

            25.  In John 14:14, did John depict Jesus referring to prayers offered to Him, or not?

            In these 25 passages (and many more), the decisions made on a text-critical level will decide how the text is approached at an interpretive level.   And this sort of thing is not confined to the Gospels:  it also occurs elsewhere, for example, in Acts 20:28, and First Corinthians 14:34-35, and First Timothy 3:16. 

            Does anyone think that the Holy Spirit wants Christians to answer these questions with, “Only God knows”?  All Scripture is profitable for doctrine – but it can’t be profitable for doctrine if its authority is not recognized.  And its authority cannot be recognized as long as its content is not recognized. 

            An objection might be raised:   “It is not as if those readings have been arbitrarily declared dubious; the passages you listed have been properly and fairly questioned.”

            Who says?  A horde of seminary professors who know only what they vaguely recall reading 30 years ago in Metzger’s Textual Commentary?  Didn’t Metzger routinely house his arguments in the now-demolished prefer-the-shorter-reading principle?  Didn’t most of the editors of the Nestle-Aland compilation adhere to Hort’s defunct and untenable Lucianic recension theory?  If you have read Aland & Aland’s Text of the New Testament, then you know:  that is almost exactly what they did, and they almost invariably rejected Byzantine readings accordingly. 

            But James White, instead of stepping back from their obsolete theories and biased methodology – a methodology which starkly defies the “multi-focality” that he seems to imagine that it favors – still supports their results. 
           Instability is built into their results in hundreds of passages.  Over and over and over, the advocates of the Nestle-Aland text are obligated to say, “Maybe the original reading is this, and maybe it is that, and so we cannot confidently use either one as authoritative Scripture.”  Furthermore, the direction that the Nestle-Aland compilers (and, by extension, James White) are taking the text is not toward stability; it is toward perpetual instability, and more of it.

           

            In the approach that James White currently endorses, whether he realizes it or not, the authority of a passage can be nullified if a particular group of researchers declares that they are not confident about what the original reading was.  More and more of the text will inevitably be declared unstable – and thus, unsafe to use for theological purposes – as long as this approach is used.       

           Of course it seems reasonable to say, “Don’t build theology on disputed passages.”  But it is an invitation to chaos when no one establishes parameters to answer the question, “What is the proper basis on which to dispute a passage?”.  Is a suspicion of corruption all it takes?  Is the testimony of a single manuscript, or two manuscripts, a sufficient basis to throw a reading onto James White’s Disputed-And-Thus-Not-To-Be-Used pile?  Shouldn’t researchers resolve textual contests instead of merely observe them?  

            We may think that indecision is merited when Bible-footnotes tell us that “Some” manuscripts say one thing, and “Others” say something else.  But what would we think if the evidence were brought into focus, and we saw that behind the “Some” are a few witnesses, all representing the same transmission-line, and that behind the “Others” are thousands of witnesses, including the most ancient testimony, representing a wide variety of locales and transmission-lines?  

            We might conclude that it is preposterous, or even immoral, to continue to regard readings with excellent and abundant attestation as unstable.  But as long as the Nestle-Aland editors are the ones who get to answer the question, “Should this reading be disputed?” and as long as individuals such as James White say the equivalent of, “If it’s disputed, do not treat it like Scripture,” the door will inevitably open wider and wider for more and more passages to be disputed.  And that will result in having less and less Scripture on which to build theology – that is, less and less Scripture to treat at Scripture.  

            As far as the tasks of interpreting and applying the Scriptures are concerned, the situation will be no different than if those disputed passages were not there at all.  So I feel justified when saying, in conclusion that James White’s approach to these passages, while less shocking than erasing them, will have the same effect in the long run.  If you don’t want more and more of the Bible to be thrown onto the Do-Not-Use-for-Theology pile in the future, maybe you should stop using the new Nestle-Aland compilation, and stop supporting James White’s Alpha and Omega “Ministry.”

James White and the Ending of Mark

            In The King James Only Controversy (second edition 2006), James White discussed some external evidence about Mark 16:9-20, on pages 316-318.  He concluded that “Given the external evidence, we believe every translation should provide the passage.  However, we also believe that every translation should note that there is good reason to doubt the passage’s authenticity.”  This effectively erases the passage’s doctrinal force, as if to tell the reader, “Maybe it’s inspired and authoritative, but maybe not.” 

            Some aspects of White’s description of the external evidence need adjustment – not least of which is what White doesn’t say:  he does not mention the testimony of the second century writers Justin, Tatian, and Irenaeus.  Irenaeus specifically quoted Mark 16:19 in Against Heresies Book III, Chapter 10, paragraph 5, in about 180, over a century before the production of the two fourth-century manuscripts in which the text of Mark ends at 16:8.  White only mentions one patristic writer, Jerome – and instead of mentioning that Jerome included Mark 16:9-20 in the Vulgate, White only says, “Jerome was aware of manuscripts lacking the passage.”   Other patristic writers – Aphrahat, Ambrose, Apostolic Constitutions, and Augustine, for example – are not called to the witness stand, and the jury – White’s readers – never hears their testimony.         

            White stated that 16:9-20 is not in “some manuscripts of the Sahadic Coptic version,” by which the Sahidic version is meant.  Perhaps someone somewhere has confirmed that more than one manuscript of the Sahidic version lacks Mark 16:9-20, but as far as I know, the Sahidic codex P. Palau-Ribes Inv. Nr. 182 is the only Sahidic manuscript that fits such a description.  It is one of the three non-Greek manuscripts of Mark 16 made before the 700s in which there is no text from verses 9-20.  (The other two are the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript and the Old Latin Codex Bobbiensis – both of which White mentions by name, with no mention of the Curetonian Syriac, the Syriac Peshitta, the Gothic version, and the Old Latin manuscripts that include Mark 16:9-20.) 

            There is a detectable correlation here:  statements from patristic writers, and individual versional manuscripts, that do not support Mark 16:9-20 are mentioned; statements from patristic writers, and individual versional manuscripts, that support Mark 16:9-20 are not mentioned.  For someone who says, “The reader should be given all the information available,” White has done a remarkably poor job of presenting the evidence that supports Mark 16:9-20. 

My defense of Mark 16:9-20
is available as an e-book
at Amazon.

            White also perpetuated a common error about asterisks or obeli, stating, “f¹, 205 and others” include Mark 16:9-20 “along with critical marks (such as asterisks or obeli) indicating that the scribe knew of its questionable nature.”   Regarding this claim (which was spread by Bruce Metzger), see Points #3 and #4 in my 2016 post Mark 16:9-20 – Sorting Out Some Common Mistakes, and for additional details see my book, Authentic:  The Case for Mark 16:9-20.  

            White referred to “l, 1602,” among the witnesses for the double-ending (i.e., witnesses that attest to both the Shorter Ending and 16:9-20).  This is an editorial or typographical mistake.  The italicized letter “l” when standing by itself should be used to refer to the Old Latin manuscript Codex Rehdigeranus.  However, the intended reference here is not to Codex Rehdigeranus:  it should be an abbreviation for the word “lectionary,” and “1602” should be combined with it, so as to refer to just one witness:  the Greek-Sahidic fragment l1602.  For details about the unusual annotations which l1602 shares with 099, L, and 083 (indicating that their combined testimony echoes a rather narrow line of transmission), see my book.  (White’s reference to “l, 153” in his discussion of Mark 1:2 should likewise be corrected to refer to lectionary 153.)

            White also states that “Some Old Church Slavonic manuscripts (from as far along as the tenth century) include only verses 9-11 of the longer ending.”  The fourth edition of the UBS Greek New Testament only lists one Old Slavonic manuscript that fits such a description.  But, whether one Old Slavonic manuscript or a dozen, how can this be construed as evidence against Mark 16:9-20?  Suppose someone falls into a pit full of hungry lions, and afterwards, only an arm is taken out of the pit.  Should we conclude that only an arm fell into the pit?  No, and likewise this Old Slavonic evidence is evidence of a damaged exemplar which, when made, contained the entire passage.

            White also attempted to use the inclusion of the Freer Logion in Codex W as evidence against the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20, but surely this is backwards:  Codex W supports the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20, and if Metzger’s estimate of the date of the Freer Logion’s creation is accepted, then it shows that 16:9-20 was in the copy used by the creator of the Freer Logion in the 100s or 200s (i.e., prior to the production of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus) – as well as in the Greek codices to which Jerome referred when (in 417, in Against the Pelagians) he mentioned the Freer Logion and said that he found it “In certain exemplars, and especially in Greek codices, near the end of the Gospel of Mark.”

            White employs a somewhat problematic approach when he states, “It is the multiplicity of readings that causes so many experts to reject the longer ending’s originality.”  Textual critics routinely encounter variant-units that involve a multiplicity of readings, without concluding that they must all be scribal corruptions.  White says, “There simply would be no need for all these different endings if verses 9 through 20 were a part of the originally written gospel.”  This is both an exaggeration and an oversimplification.

            In over 1,600 Greek manuscripts of Mark, the text flows straight from 16:8 to 16:9.  In three manuscripts (Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and the medieval minuscule 304), the text stops at the end of 16:8.  The Shorter Ending is in a total of six Greek manuscripts (albeit just in the margin in the case of the medieval minuscule 274).  And that is all the distinct endings of Mark that exist in Greek manuscripts.  Codex W does not give us a different ending; it presents 16:9-20 with an interpolation between v. 14 and v. 15.  White’s phrase “all these different endings” is just tricky rhetoric. 

            When phrased realistically, the question “Why these three endings?” is not difficult:  though present in the autograph in Rome, Mark 16:9-20 was absent from an exemplar used in Egypt; this accounts for the form of the text in B and À.  The Shorter Ending was then composed there to compensate for the otherwise abrupt conclusion to Mark’s narrative; this accounts for the form of the Latin text in Codex Bobbiensis (k); then the usual ending began to circulate in Egypt again, and it eclipsed the Shorter Ending, sometimes being grafted to 16:8 and sometimes to the Shorter Ending; this accounts for the double-ending in Egyptian and Ethiopic sources.             

            A focused and thorough study of the evidence in this case is conducive to a conclusion in favor of Mark 16:9-20.  However, when evidence is misrepresented, and when it is hidden and silenced, it is easy to convince readers that Mark 16:9-20 should only be given a “maybe, maybe not” status.  In White’s world, to take away the authority of a reading found in 99% of the Greek manuscripts, one does not have to prove that it is spurious.  Simply (1) point out that it has a rival, and (2) inflate the importance of that rival, and voila:  the task of eroding the authority of the passage is complete; it is doomed to a bracketed existence in the land of  “Maybe, Maybe Not.”

            Now let’s briefly take a broader look at how James White misrepresents the evidence in other passages.  He has avoided sharing important evidence in the course of rejecting readings in the following passages:  Matthew 1:25, Matthew 17:21, Matthew 21:12, Matthew 23:14, Mark 1:2, Mark 10:24, Mark 11:26, Mark 15:28, Mark 16:9-20, Luke 2:14, Luke 23:17, Luke 23:34, John 1:18, John 3:13, John 5:4, and John 7:53-8:11. 

            One example may suffice.  In his list of evidence against Luke 23:34a, White lists “sy” instead of “sy^s).  This little difference is the difference between saying (a) the Peshitta, the Curetonian Syriac, the Harklean Syriac, the margin of the Harklean Syriac, the Sinaitic Syriac, and the Palestinian Aramaic  version omit this passage, or (b) the Sinaitic Syriac omits this passage.  The latter is the actual case.  Of course White does not bother to mention the Syriac evidence that supports the passage anywhere in his discussion of this textual contest.  He also avoids letting his readers know that Justin Martyr refers to this passage in the middle of the 100s. 

            Such evidence-molding is widespread in White’s descriptions of textual contests:  Irenaeus is not mentioned in his discussion of Mark 16:9-20.   The early Old Latin chapter-summaries, and Jerome’s testimony that he found the pericope adulterae in many manuscripts, both Greek and Latin, go unmentioned in White’s discussion of John 7:53-8:11.  Minuscule 1424 is listed as a witness for the non-inclusion of the pericope adulterae but White does not mention its margin-note which affirms the legitimacy of the passage.  The forgery 2427 is still listed by White (in a discussion of Mark 1:2) as if it is a legitimate witness.  And so forth.              

            Also, White argues repeatedly that modern translations present a stronger case for the deity of Christ than the KJV does.  This proposal, however, collides with White’s other proposal:  the idea that passages which are considered dubious should not be relied upon (i.e., treated as Scripture) as the basis for a doctrine.  All arguments that a version such as the NIV presents a strong case for the deity of Christ in Mark 1:1, John 1:18, John 14:14, Acts 16:7, Acts 20:28, Romans 9:5, First Timothy 3:16 (regarding which White states on page 261 that he prefers the usual reading, “God was manifest in the flesh”), First Peter 3:14-15, Jude v. 5, et al, are undermined by White’s maxim to the effect that when you have a serious textual variant, you should not built theology upon it.                          

            In conclusion, while I have no objection to The King James Only Controversy’s protests against Ruckmanism and similar varieties of KJV-Onlyism, White has consistently molded the evidence in such a lop-sided way in his discussions about textual variants that this book really should not be considered a text-critical resource even as a last resort.  White’s approach has not only misled many readers about the evidence relevant to many textual variant-units, but it has also encouraged them to exile many passages of genuine Scripture to the land of Maybe, Maybe Not – and will continue to do so as long as it is sold.  The publisher is Bethany House, a division of the Baker Publishing Group.               

           

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.

Business Insider and the Bible

          Earlier this month, a website called Business Insider spread several false claims about the Bible in a short video produced by Joe Avella.  The video also promoted some statements which are technically true but which were framed in a way which is likely to mislead viewers.  Let’s test the reliability of the claims made in the recent Business Insider video about the Bible.

          The Business Insider video’s narration stated, “This sacred text has changed a great deal.”

          There’s no doubt that this is true, because whenever an ancient text is translated, it changes.  However, such changes tend to be benign, like when water is poured from one bottle into another.  The form changes, but not the content of its message, provided that the translation is accurate.  And, among Greek manuscripts, spelling changed; lettering-styles changed, individual copyists made mistakes (which can be filtered out by comparing multiple copies), and so forth.  Then came a claim that the earliest copies we have were made hundreds of years after the events they describe.

For the Gospels, that would be after A.D. 230.

          Granting that we do not have any of the actual documents written by the authors of the books of the New Testament, the Business Insider’s claim that the earliest copies that we have were made “hundreds of years” after the events they describe is FALSE.  

          At the beginning of the New Testament, the Gospels describe the ministry of Jesus, around A.D. 30, and at the end, John mentions his exile to the island of Patmos, around A.D. 90.  Thus “hundreds of years” after that would be between 230 and 290.   

Some manuscripts that were made before A.D. 230.

        But we have several manuscripts of New Testament books that were made before 230.  And it is not as if this is difficult to discover.  Ten minutes of casual research should be enough to prevent any responsible writer from making such a ridiculous claim, and to prevent any responsible website from spreading it.

          Next, the Business Insider video stated, “For the first 100-200 years, copies of the Bible were made by hand – and not by professionals.”  Bibles were made by hand for a lot longer than that; they were made by hand until after Gutenberg invented movable type in the mid-1400’s.  That is why we call them “manuscripts.”  But the claim that no early manuscripts were written by professionals is not true.  In the early manuscript known as Papyrus 46, one can observe notes about the number of sense-lines after some of the books, showing that the copyist was a professional who expected to be paid by the sense-line.  

Meanwhile in the real world.

      Now let’s turn to what Joe Avella described as the three biggest changes in the Bible.  First, he mentioned the story of the woman caught in adultery.  I’ve looked into this subject, and I consider this passage part of the original text of the Gospel of John, and I believe that it was lost in the following way:  an early exemplar contained symbols in the margin which were intended to instruct the lector to skip the passage about the adulteress when reading the adjacent lection for the Feast of Pentecost; a copyist, thinking that those symbols meant that the passage was to be skipped by copyists, dutifully obeyed, and thus these verses were lost in an early transmission-stream that affected practically all early copies from Egypt.  On the other hand, the passage is present in over 1,450 Greek manuscripts of John, and in 383 Jerome included it in the Vulgate, and in the early 400’s he stated that it was found in very many manuscripts, both Greek and Latin.

Not familiar with the
evidence about the story
of the adulteress?
This book can help.

          And let’s consider that quote from Bill Warren:  if one holds the view that the story about the adulteress was not written by John as part of his Gospel, then what we have in John 7:53-8:11 is an authentic story.  In which case, what has happened is that instead of making an entire New Testament book out of this episode, it was grafted into the Gospel of John instead.  So in this scenario, with the longer text, readers get one more true, authentic report about Jesus.

          The Business Insider video then considered Mark 16:9-20 and stated, “In original manuscripts of Mark, this part of the story is nowhere to be found.”  But the same video just finished telling us that we don’t have the original manuscripts!  The original manuscript of Mark was made in the first century, probably in the mid-60’s.  The manuscripts to which the Business Insider’s video refers are not the original manuscripts; the two early Greek manuscripts which end the text of Mark 16 at the end of verse 8 were made in the 300’s – at least one hundred and thirty years after Saint Irenaeus quoted from this passage as it appeared in his manuscript of Mark, around the year 184.  This passage is supported by over 1,600 Greek manuscripts, and is used by over 40 writers from the era of the Roman Empire.  The Business Insider doesn’t seem to sense a need to share these details with its viewers. 

          Next, the video turns to Jesus’ words in Luke 23:34:  “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  (Here we learn that Joe Avella consulted a book by an atheist to learn about the background of the Bible.  What could go wrong?)  Although some early interpreters tried to remove this passage from the text because it seemed to pose a theological difficulty, it was not removed in the Byzantine text, the text that was used in medieval Greek churches and which is attested by the vast majority of Greek manuscripts.  Nor was it removed in the Vulgate, the text that was used in the Latin-speaking churches.  So:  what the video presents as the third-biggest change in the Bible turns out to be an attempt at alteration which the church reacted against.   

          The Business Insider’s video says that this passage was “changed to reference the Romans.”  That is false.  Interpretations of the phrase “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” varied, but the words themselves were not changed to refer to the Romans.  If the Business Insider has been hiding a manuscript in which Luke 23:34 says that Jesus said, “Father, forgive these Romans,” let’s have it.  Otherwise this false claim – and the other false claims crammed into this video – should be withdrawn.

          Let’s hope that Business Insider’s writers and video-makers are better at dispensing financial advice than they are at investigating the history of the text of the Bible.