Elijah Hixson and the Purple Uncials

 

Elijah Hixson

          Today at The Text of the Gospels we welcome a special guest, Elijah Hixson.  He currently is a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh; before that, he studied at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, completing a thesis on the text of John in Codex Alexandrinus.  He recently received the 2016 Edwin M. Yamauchi Award for Excellence in Textual Studies.  His dissertation is Scribal Habits in the Sixth-century Purple Gospel Manuscripts, which we will look into shortly.  He has graciously accepted an invitation to discuss his work.   

Hixson:  Thank you very much for inviting me here.  It is an honor that somebody would take interest in my dissertation.  I will proceed with the caveat that I have submitted my dissertation, but I have not yet defended it.

Q:  Before we get to that, let’s briefly look into your thesis-paper.  You concluded that the scribe of Codex Alexandrinus “was far more likely to omit than to commit any other type of error, including substitution,” and that “In general, there was not a tendency to add to the text.”  When we consider this alongside similar observations made by James Royse, Dirk Jongkind, and Juan Hernández, is it safe to say that the evidence presently indicates that scribes tended to omit rather than to insert all the way into the 400s?  

Hixson:  I am thankful for my time at SBTS and their allowing me to write a text-critical master’s thesis.  However, I know that I made plenty of mistakes in that thesis, and hopefully I learned from them.  I would do things differently if I had to do it again knowing what I do now.  That being said, I think generally that is probably true, but not without qualifications.  

Q:  What does this say about the canon, “Prefer the shorter reading,” and about compilations that were produced by compilers who regularly applied that canon as a decisive factor when making text-critical decisions?  Should all such decisions now be revisited without that assumption in play?  

A page of Codex N

at the National Library of Russia.

(Text begins in Matthew 10:14)

Hixson:  The “prefer the shorter reading” rule sadly suffers much from oversimplification.  Griesbach himself gave several exceptions in which the longer reading is preferred.  Jongkind noted that a lot of the omissions that Royse pointed out fall under Griesbach’s exceptions to the “shorter reading rule”.

At the same time, Royse also gave a list of exceptions when he said to prefer the longer reading, so I worry that his “prefer the longer reading” rule is also a victim of oversimplification.  The weird thing is that when you factor in the exceptions given by Griesbach and Royse, the two end up being a lot closer than people might think.  Both agree that the longer reading is preferred if there’s some kind of accidental or minor (likely unnoticed) omission involved.  Both agree that the shorter reading is preferred if the longer reading comes from a parallel passage or could be explained as the scribe “improving” the text.

            I’m certainly in no place to pontificate about it, but I do wonder – given how often Royse and Griesbach are oversimplified – if it might be better to say “You know what?  Let’s not worry too much about longer and shorter readings.  Instead, let’s remember that scribes could omit short things accidentally, they harmonized the text, they attempted to improve the text, etc.”  Let’s first be on the lookout for those kinds of changes when evaluating variants rather than simply counting how many words or letters there are and picking the shorter (or longer) reading.

Q:  Thanks for those thoughts.  Moving on to your new work:  could you briefly describe the Purple Uncials for our readers, and what is special about the three manuscripts you have been studying? 

Hixson:  The purple uncials (or majuscules) of the New Testament are five luxurious copies of the Gospels:  N (022, Codex Petropolitanus Purpureus), O (023, Codex Sinopensis), Σ (042, Codex Purpureus Rossanensis), Φ (043, Codex Beratinus) and 080, dating to the 500s.  They are so-named because they are made of parchment that has been dyed purple and written in silver and gold ink.  They are absolutely beautiful. Textually, they have a form of the Byzantine text.  The Alands placed them in Category V (except 080, which is too fragmentary to classify). 

Three of them (Ν, O and Σ) were all copied from the same exemplar, presumably around the same time in the same scriptorium.  To my knowledge, these three are currently the earliest extant examples of sibling-manuscripts made from a common exemplar, though the exemplar itself is lost.  There are other purple biblical manuscripts as well. Do a Wikipedia search for “purple parchment” and you should see a list of a few of them.

Q:  Do you think you have successfully reconstructed the text of the shared exemplar of N, O, and Σ?

Hixson:   I only reconstructed the exemplar in Matthew, but I think I succeeded.  Codex O is only extant there.  I used a spiral process, in which I started with the places where all three are extant, looked for instances in which one disagreed with the other two, took that as the scribe who made an alteration, and then compared those results.  I also took corrections into consideration, to shed light on what kinds of mistakes each scribe made.

From that it became clear that the scribe of O was the scribe who changed the text the least, and that the scribe of Σ had a noticeable tendency to harmonize Matthew to Markan parallels.  So for instance, when only Ο and Σ are extant, and they differ, it is more likely that O preserves the reading of the archetype, especially if the difference could be explained as a harmonization to Mark by the scribe of Σ.

I also rated my confidence in the reconstruction of the archetype at those points of variation with A B C and D.  The ratings are entirely subjective, but at least I was honest and gave reasons for why I adopted the readings I did, and how sure I am of my decisions.

Q:  Is it true that the copyists of the Purple Uncials wrote in silver ink, and used gold ink for contractions of the sacred names, such as “God” and “Lord”?  Which sacred names received this treatment?

Hixson:  It is partially true.  The scribe of N did it, and I believe the scribe of Φ did it for a few chapters but abandoned the effort later in the codex.  O and 080 are entirely in gold, and Σ only used gold for the titles and first three lines of each Gospel.  The scribe of N used gold for “Jesus,” “God,” “Lord,” “Christ,” and sometimes for “Father,” “Son” and “Spirit.”  The scribe of N also wrote the marginal chapter headings in gold.

Q:  Does it look like the copyists used two pens, switching inks as they went, or did they write the main text in silver first and then add the sacred names’ abbreviations in gold afterwards? 

Hixson:  There are a few mistakes here and there that suggest that the exemplar did not use a different ink for any nomina sacra, and that the scribe of N would leave a blank space for them and come back to write them in later in gold.  Whether that was after he finished a page, or a quire, or at the end of the work-day, is anybody’s guess.  I don’t get the impression that the scribe used a different pen for gold.

Q:  Did they ever write the wrong name?  What happened in Codex N at Matthew 13:51? 

Hixson:  In Matthew 13:51, the scribe wrote κ in silver but left a space and went back to write ε and the supralinear line in gold.  And yes, the scribe did write the wrong name a time or two.  Matthew 11:27 is a great example of that.  The reading in N is clearly a blunder on the part of the scribe and not from the archetype (so maybe N shouldn’t be cited there in the UBS/NA apparatuses!).

Q:  Parts of Codex Sinaiticus are scattered among four institutions.  But Codex N is even more scattered.  Can you tell us about that, and how it got that way?  Could some of its missing pages still be out there somewhere?

Hixson:  We don’t know exactly how it happened, but portions of Codex N are presently in eight or nine locations that we know of.  It is usually assumed that the Crusaders had something to do with its dispersal, and I would guess that’s probably right.  We know that most of what’s missing in N went missing centuries ago because of the palaeography of some cursive Greek notes in the margins that indicate that the manuscript was grouped into bundles of 50 folios.  I say eight or nine locations because one leaf of John was formerly in an Italian private collection – it was published and microfilmed – but it appears to have been sold around 15 years ago. We don’t know where it is currently.

However, we do know that at least four folios were taken from N in the 1800’s, because of two modern systems of page numbers.  There are four places where one system continues unbroken but the other one has a gap.  This means that one folio in each of those four places was there when the first system was added, but was removed by the time the second system was added.  Now, three of those four folios have since resurfaced, and sure enough, they each have the pagination from the first system but nothing from the second; these are the folios in Thessaloniki, Athens and New York.  I suspect that if a single folio of Codex N ever surfaces (other than the one that was sold recently), it will be that fourth leaf.  It will contain the text of Luke 4:26–36.

There is some slight hope that bits of Codex O might also still be out there.  Forty-three of its leaves are in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), but O also bears an older foliation system that suggests it had at least 50-some-odd leaves at some point in its modern history before the BnF acquired it in 1899.  Only one of those missing leaves ever resurfaced, though, and to my knowledge, nobody has seen it since before 1962.  It was in Ukraine when anyone last saw it.  Thankfully, the BnF has an old black/white photo that was taken over 100 years ago, which they posted online when they digitized their 43 leaves of O last year.

Q:  There’s the deluxe Tyrian purple, and there’s the cheaper purple-ish purple.  Similarly, there’s real gold, and there’s gold-like pigment.  Are the purple and gold of the Purple Uncials the real deal?

A page of Codex N

at the British Library.

(Text begins in John 14:2)

Hixson:  There have been some scientific tests on a couple of them. The purple is not Tyrian purple, but the gold and silver are the real deal. Oxidation is a great way to see the quality of the gold and silver—gold is extremely resistant to oxidation, but silver tarnishes fairly easily.  In the London leaves of N, the dye has faded away almost completely and the silver has tarnished to black, but you can still see the gold of the nomina sacra looking just as fine as ever.  At first glance, it doesn’t look like one of the purple codices.

Q:  The Purple Uncials are sometimes dated to the late 400s or 500s.  Is that correct?  And, what date would you assign to their archetype?

Hixson:  I think the 500s is a good date for them. The palaeography seems to support it, and that’s true of two different types of handwriting in Σ (biblical majuscule for the main text, and upright pointed majuscule for other things).  Other considerations lead me to suspect that they are probably mid-500s.  I don’t think the archetype was much older than its copies.

            We do have references to earlier purple codices.  Jerome mentions purple manuscripts in a letter he wrote in 384 [Epistle 22, To Eustochium, in paragraph 32].

Q:  Which one of the Purple Uncials do you think is the oldest, and does it matter?

Hixson:  I don’t think it matters all that much.  The scribe of O was the most ideal scribe of the three. N and Σ were probably produced at the same time, and I think they are the products of a master (Σ) and his or her apprentice (N).  Codex O has a lot of features that suggest that it was made – for lack of a better word – ‘differently’ than N and Σ.  It’s single-column; they are double-column. It has 6-sheet quires; they have 5-sheet quires.  It has illuminations accompanying the text; they do not.  Whether it was made earlier, later, or while the scribes of N and Σ worked – that’s anybody’s guess.

Q:  Tell us about the unusual patches in Codex N.  Did later owners of the manuscript use parchment from severely damaged pages to repair not-so-badly-damaged pages?

  

Hixson:  Different institutions have used different methods to repair the manuscript, but at some point, somebody used a bit of the folio containing the kephalaia [chapters] list to Luke, and bits of another folio (which originally contained part of Matthew 6) to patch other places in the manuscript.  Maybe those folios were already damaged.  We can hope so at least; that’s better than the thought of someone tearing up good pages intentionally!

Q:  Cronin [a researcher in the late 1800s/early 1900s] thought that Codex N might have omitted Matthew 12:47, based on space considerations.  What do you think?

Hixson:  Cronin was incredibly insightful and helpful overall, but I think he was wrong there.  N had Matthew 12:47.  There are only two folios missing in the gap, and Σ is extant there.  Σ has it (and adding it in a large section like that isn’t the sort of thing the scribe of Σ would do, nor is the scribe of N likely to omit something large like that), and furthermore, N and Σ have nearly identical line-lengths.  If you count lines in Σ where N breaks off until it comes back in to folios later, you arrive at nearly the exact number of lines you would expect in N. That tells us that whatever N had on those lost pages, it occupied the same space as what Σ has in that text.  I would be comfortable citing N^vid for the longer reading there.

Q:   Is there a possibility that any of the Purple Uncials contained the pericope adulterae after John 21, like in the family-1 manuscript-cluster?

Hixson:  I doubt it.  In N, the very last page of John is missing, but from John 16:15 until that last page, every folio survives.  The manuscript has original quire markers, and at the end of each Gospel, the scribe reduced the number of sheets he/she used per quire so as to finish at the end of a quire and start a new book on the first sheet of a new one.  Kephalaia lists would have been at the end of these ‘short’ quires so that the next Gospel would still begin on the first page of a new quire – that is to say, the extra material between the Gospels was gathered with the Gospel that was ending, not with the one that was beginning.  We know that the final quire of John had three sheets, and the last folio of the outer sheet is the only one missing.  The text cuts off in John 21:20.  I didn’t reconstruct it, but at a glance, what’s left in John 21:20-25 looks like about how much the scribe normally got on a single folio.

All of that is to say that if the PA was added after John 21, it would have to have been added as a new quire on its own, after the scribe deliberately planned to end John at 21:25 and reduced the number of sheets per quire in order to do so. The codex certainly seems planned to end at John 21:25.

Q:  Were these manuscripts made for the Byzantine emperor and his family?

Justinian I, Byzantine
Emperor (r. 527-565)

Hixson:  The best way I know how to put it is that they certainly smell like Justinian I. I’ve not found any contemporary historians mentioning purple codices, but they do describe Justinian’s church-building programs, and the purple codices are definitely consistent with the type of things he did.  There is no proof that Justinian had anything to do with them, but I’ll go back to what I said before:  they certainly do smell like him.

Q:  Did the exemplar of N, O, and Σ have illustrations?  Also, could you take a minute to explain the “testimonials” in the illustrations, where Old Testament characters comment on events in the Gospels? 

Hixson:  I doubt the illustrations were in the archetype.  There are too many differences between the illustrations in O and Σ, and none from N survive.

            The testimonials are interesting.  I wrote an article on that for The Journal of Theological Studies.  I came to the conclusion that they were more likely copied from continuous-text manuscripts than from existing testimonia collections, and in a number of places, they seem to be showing how passages from the Old Testament are fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

Q:  Now that you’ve completed this project, what’s next?

Hixson:  I’m teaching Romans and John’s Gospel at Edinburgh Bible College this spring, so I’ll be busy preparing lectures for that.  Writing-wise, I’m co-editing a book on textual criticism and apologetics with Peter Gurry, which will be published by IVP – hopefully in a year or two. I’ve got a few articles in the works that have spun out of my dissertation as well.  I do have a couple of monograph-length ideas, but my ability to pursue those depends on whether or not I have gainful employment a year from now, and if so, where and for how long.  At the end of the day, I am an evangelical Christian, so I want to work out my faith in Jesus Christ by careful and responsible scholarship, and I want to use whatever knowledge I gain there in some way for the Church.

            Thank you again for taking interest in my research!

Snapp:  Thank you for taking the time to discuss it!  We look forward to more of your work.

[Readers are invited to scroll-over the text to find embedded links that lead to additional resources.]

Matthew 12:47 and Homoioteleuton

Matthew 12:45b-50 in the
ESV Reader's Gospels.
Where's verse 47?

           In the English Standard Version, in the passage about the visit of Jesus’ mother and brothers in Matthew 12:46-50, there is a strange feature:  there is no verse 47; it is in the footnotes rather than in the text.  The ESV’s footnote says, “Some manuscripts insert verse 47:  Someone told him, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, asking to speak to you” – except in the ESV Reader’s Gospels, which has neither verse-numbers nor footnotes; its text goes directly from the end of verse 46 to the beginning of verse 47.
            In the Christian Standard Bible, meanwhile, Matthew 12:47 is included in the text, and a footnote says, “Other mss omit this verse.”  Before examining the text-critical reasons for the disagreement among these English versions, let’s first consider how inconsistently the CSB describes the manuscripts in its footnotes and headings.  For where its text retains Matthew 12:47, the CSB describes the manuscripts that disagree as merely “Other,” but following Mark 16:8, its editors have added a line (as if to tell the readers where to aim their scissors), and interrupted the text with a heading, “[Some of the earliest mss conclude with 16:8]” – but both notes refer to essentially the same small cluster of manuscripts.

            What manuscripts omit Matthew 12:47?  Primarily Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Regius (L, 019), Codex Tischendorfianus IV (036, from the 900s), and minuscule 579, allied with the Sahidic version, the Sinaitic Syriac and the Old Latin Codex Bobbiensis.  A few other copies lack Matthew 12:47, but if those four had contained it, their testimony would be considered trivia.

            And of the over 1,600 Greek manuscripts of Mark, two uncials omit Mark 16:9-20:  Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus (and both show signs of their copyists’ awareness of the absent verses, as I have shown already, here and here).  Codex L echoes a later stage of a text used in Egypt; it has the “Shorter Ending” after Mark 16:8, and then verses 9-20), and minuscule 579 also has the “Shorter Ending” between Mark 16:8 and 9 (though, unlike Codex L, without short notes to introduce each ending).  And in the versions, the text of the Sinaitic Syriac stops at 16:8, and the copyist of Old Latin Codex Bobbiensis, after mauling verse 8, included the Shorter Ending, poorly transcribed. 

            The same cluster of witnesses is in view in both cases – but the unsuspecting reader of the Christian Standard Version meets them masked as “Other mss” where their testimony is rejected, and as “Some of the earliest mss” where the passage is bracketed. 

            Now let’s turn back to Matthew 12:47, and see why it is missing not only in the ESV but also in that cluster of manuscripts in which the best Greek uncials and worst Syriac and Latin copies appear to keep close company.  What we have here is a simple case of homoioteleuton (also spelled homoeoteleuton).  Verse 46 ends with the Greek words ζητοῦντες αὐτῷ λαλῆσαι (“seeking to him to speak”), and verse 47 ends with the words ζητοῦντες σοι λαλῆσαι (“seeking to you to speak”).  An early copyist – working at a point in the transmission-stream early enough to be echoed by the Alexandrian branch represented by ﬡ, B, and L, on the one hand, and by the Western branch represented by the Old Syriac and Codex Bobbiensis, on the other – accidentally skipped verse 47 when his line of sight drifted down from the λαλῆσαι at the end of verse 46 to the λαλῆσαι at the end of verse 47.

            It is not hard to see how this happened.  Meanwhile, consider what the ESV’s editors must believe about the transmission of this passage.  If the ESV’s non-inclusion is correct, then the copyists of virtually all other Greek manuscripts – C D W Z Δ Θ 28 33 157 892 (which adds προς αὐτον; see Willker’s comments for details), 1424, the family-1 group, the family-13 group, and well over 1,500 minuscules, and hundreds of lectionaries – and over 10 Old Latin copies (including Codex Vercellensis, from the 370’s), the Vulgate, the Peshitta, the Armenian, Georgian, and Ethiopic versions, and copies cited by patristic writers including Jerome and Augustine (and Augustine cited the verse in two different forms, echoing two different Old Latin transmission-lines), were all using the wrong exemplars at this point.

Another plain case of
homoioteleuton in Codex B.

            I hope my readers will understand by this last paragraph that I am not arguing for the majority reading merely because it is the majority.  Today we know of one early Middle Egyptian manuscript – Mae-2, that is, Codex Schøyen 2650, from the early 300s – which agrees with ﬡ and B in non-inclusion of Matthew 12:47.  But if we had 50 copies in the same transmission-line, the argument would not vary, just as the discovery of 50 more copies of the Vulgate would not make much of an impact.  It is not a matter of number, but of the relative plausibility of the competing models of the text’s transmission-history. 
            The evidence demands that the scribal error that caused the loss of this verse happened very early – early enough to echo in a limited part of the Alexandrian transmission-line, and in a limited part of the Old Latin and Syriac transmission-lines.  But early parablepsis is parablepsis nonetheless.  Matthew 12:47 should be included in the text, and if there is a footnote, let it tell the reader why the verse was lost in the transmission-line of ﬡ and B, instead of just giving enough information to perpetuate confusion.

_______________

The English Standard Version is © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.  Used by permission.  All rights reserved.

The Christian Standard Bible® is Copyright © 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers.  Used by permission.  Christian Standard Bible® and CSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers. 

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® is Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.  ESV Text edition:  2011.  Used by permission.  All rights reserved.  

"Some Manuscripts Say . . ." - The Problem with Footnotes

          Why are the footnotes in most English translations of the New Testament so unhelpfully vague?  “Some manuscripts say this.”  “Other manuscripts say that.”  While some readers may appreciate being notified about the presence of textual variants, the immediate effect of such vague footnotes is to render the passage doctrinally useless, unless both variants mean the same thing.  Furthermore, the use of “some” and “other” to describe manuscript evidence can be highly misleading. 

          Let me show you what I mean by sharing some details about textual variants in four passages from the Gospel of Matthew, and how they are treated in the ESV (English Standard Version) and in the HCSB (Holman Christian Standard Bible).  (Bear in mind that the HCSB is about to be re-issued in a revised form as the Christian Standard Bible, and there is no guarantee that their footnotes will be identical.  The ESV can also change from one edition to another.)  I will first present each passage as it is translated in the New King James Version, just to provide a frame of reference.    

● MATTHEW 12:47

NKJV:  Then one said to Him, “Look, Your mother and Your brothers are standing outside, seeking to speak with You.” 

ESV:  Matthew 12:47 is not included in the ESV.  A footnote states, “Some manuscripts insert verse 47:  “Someone told him, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, asking to speak to you.””

HCSB:  And someone told Him, “Look, Your mother and Your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to You.”  A footnote says, “12:47 Other mss omit this verse.”

            What has happened is that in an ancestor-manuscript of the three primary Alexandrian manuscripts of this passage – Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Codex L (019) – a copyist accidentally skipped from the word λαλησαι at the end of verse 46 to the same word at the end of verse 47, thus losing all the words in between.  The mistake was a relatively early one – impacting not only the Alexandrian Text’s leading witnesses but also an early form of the Syriac text.  However, not only does the longer reading account for the shorter reading in this case, but the external support for the inclusion of the verse is massive and ancient.  It includes almost all Greek manuscripts (not some bare majority, but over 99%, including Codices D and W) and a strong array of Old Latin copies, the Vulgate, and the Peshitta.  In addition, a comparison of two Middle Egyptian evidence may confirm the passage’s vulnerability to accidental loss:  Mae-2 (Schoyen Codex 2650) does not have the verse, but Mae-1 (the Scheide Codex, from c. 400 or slight later) has the verse.  

            Some additional details are worth noting.  In Codex D and some other manuscripts (including L and Θ), the order of the last two words in verse 46 is reversed; this may echo an early copyist’s practical attempt to decrease the perceived risk of losing verse 47 via parablepsis.  In Codex Sinaiticus, the copyist did not only skip all of verse 47 but also the last portion of verse 46, losing the words ζητουντες αυτω λαλησαι (“seeking to speak with Him”).   This level of sloppiness should be a concern.

            Footnotes which do not convey the limited range of the non-inclusion of Matthew 12:47, and which fail to convey the mechanism which accounts for the accidental loss of the verse, are worse than no footnote at all.  It would be better for the compilers of the ESV’s base-text of to acknowledge that their favored manuscripts are defective at this point (as Michael Holmes has done in the SBL-GNT).    

● MATTHEW 13:35a

NKJV:  “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet,”  

ESV:  “This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet:” –

A footnote states:  “Some manuscripts Isaiah the prophet”

HCSB:  “so that what was spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled:”  (no footnote).  

            In New Testament passages that quote from the Old Testament without naming the specific reference, some copyists were tempted to embellish the text.  We can observe this, for example, in Codex Bezae (D) in Matthew 1:22; the name “Isaiah” is inserted into the text.  We see the same tendency in modern paraphrases; in Eugene Peterson’s The Message, for example, when a New Testament author quotes from the Old Testament, The Message often inserts the name of the Old Testament book, whether it is specified in the Greek text or not. 

            Occasionally, reckless copyists who made such embellishments assigned quotations to the wrong source.  In Codex Sinaiticus, for example, in the margin alongside Matthew 2:5-6, the name “Isaiah” appears in a vertically-written note to identify the prophet whose work is quoted in the text.  The prophet being quoted, however, is Micah, not Isaiah.  A little further along in Codex Sinaiticus, the name “Numbers” appears in a vertically-written note alongside Matthew 2:15, even though the text cited in Matthew 2:15 is Hosea 11:1.       

          The same thing has happened in Codex Sinaiticus in Matthew 13:35, except the embellishment has been inserted directly into the text; Codex Sinaiticus is one of the few manuscripts that reads “Isaiah the prophet” in Matthew 13:35.  This reading was known in the late 300’s by Jerome, who expressed a belief that the passage had previously referred to “Asaph the prophet” and that copyists who did not recognize Asaph’s name changed it to “Isaiah.” 

            The external evidence for the non-inclusion of Isaiah’s name in Matthew 13:35 is enormous and wide-ranging:  it is supported by B, D, W, and by every branch of the Byzantine Text, and by all known Syriac, Latin, Sahidic, and Armenian copies.             

            The attribution of the quotation to Isaiah is an error, and to some textual critics, this makes it likely to be original, on the grounds that it is thus the more difficult reading.  Hort, in 1881, demonstrated his non-belief in inerrancy in his Notes on Select Readings, stating, “It is difficult not to think Ἠσαίου [Isaiah] genuine.”  Eberhard Nestle (the originator of the Nestle-Aland compilation) embraced the erroneous reading in his 1901 Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the Greek New Testament.  On page 251, after acknowledging that this reading was only attested by a smattering of extant manuscripts, but was also mentioned by Eusebius and Jerome (both of whose explicitly rejected it), Nestle wrote, “It was used still earlier by Porphyrius as a proof of Matthew’s ignorance.  It is certainly, therefore, genuine.” 

            Nestle seems to have put a high degree of confidence in the ability of Porphyry to resist the temptation to use scribal mistakes as ammunition for his jibes, and a low degree of confidence in the ability of Christian copyists to simply reproduce the contents of their exemplars.  He does not explain why the same scribes who allowed Jeremiah’s name to stand in Matthew 27:9 (where some initial puzzlement is natural, considering Matthew 27:9-10 is mostly based on Zechariah 11:12-13) found it intolerable to read Isaiah’s name in Matthew 13:35.  The explanation of the evidence is not complex:  the name “Isaiah” crept into the transmission-stream as an early copyist’s erroneous attempt to specify which prophet was being cited – and, when this embellishment was recognized as what it was, it was duly resisted and jettisoned.        

            Footnotes which merely say that “Some manuscripts” have Isaiah’s name in Matthew 13:35 mislead the typical reader twice.  First, the term “some” does not convey that the number of manuscripts which have Isaiah’s name in this verse is very small.  Second, such a footnote fails to inform the reader about the scribal tendency to embellish non-specific references, and to provide names for prophets and other individuals whose names are not supplied in their exemplars.  (Even Papyrus 75, for example, has an embellishment in Luke 16:19, where a name is given to the rich man).  With these two factors in view, the reader is equipped to evaluate the evidence; without them, the sketchy footnotes only succeed in puzzling the reader.

● MATTHEW 14:30a

NKJV:  “But when he saw that the wind was boisterous”

ESV:  “But when he saw the wind” with a footnote:  “Some manuscripts strong wind.”

HCSB:  “But when he saw the strength of the wind” with a footnote: “Other mss read the wind”

            Here the editors of the ESV and the editors of the HCSB disagreed about which reading belongs in the text.  The phrase that is found in almost all Greek manuscripts is βλέπων δε τον ανεμον ισχυρον, but the ESV is based on the text of Codices B, À, and 33, which do not have the word ισχυρον.  The Middle Egyptian Schøyen Codex also supports non-inclusion of this word.  The shorter reading is efficiently explained by the longer reading:  a copyist whose work influenced the exemplars of the Alexandrian Text’s flagship manuscripts carelessly skipped from the letters -ον at the end of ανεμον to the same letters at the end of ισχυρον, accidentally losing the letters in between and thus losing the word ισχυρον. 

            Footnotes which give readers no clue about how the omission originated are not just unhelpful; they raise doubts about the stability of the text even in cases where a little information about word-endings has a strong clarifying effect.  Of course if a translation (in this case, the ESV) has adopted the incomplete text, those who want to maintain its credibility might want to avoid mentioning such inconvenient details. 

● MATTHEW 17:21

NKJV:  “However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.”

ESV:  Matthew 17:21 is not included in the ESV.  A footnote states:  “Some manuscripts insert verse 21:  But this kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting.”

HCSB:  Matthew 17:21 is included in the text, within brackets:  “[²¹However, this kind does not come out except by prayer and fasting.]”

            Out of about 1,700 Greek manuscripts of Matthew 17, almost all of them include verse 21, including the uncial codices D, L, Σ, and W, which represent different transmission-branches or locales.  The verse is also included in most Old Latin copies, and in the Vulgate.  The ESV, however, is based on the Nestle-Aland compilation, which does not include this verse because this verse is not included in Vaticanus and Sinaiticus and a few other witnesses representative of the Alexandrian Text; nor is this verse supported by two representatives of an early Syriac version of the Gospels. 

            Earlier than any of those witnesses, however, were the manuscripts used by Origen in the early 200’s – and Origen quoted this verse in his Commentary on Matthew, in Book 13, chapter 7.  In the mid-300’s, Basil of Caesarea also quoted this verse.  Ambrose of Milan used it, slightly later, in his Epistle 65, part 15.  So did John Chrysostom, in his Homily 57 on Matthew, and Hilary of Poitiers.  It is also included in the Peshitta (with fasting mentioned before prayer).

            Bruce Metzger – one of the compilers of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament – wrote in his influential Textual Commentary that “There is no good reason why the passage, if originally present in Matthew, should have been omitted.”  I must suspect that the UBS committee’s search for a reason for excision was awfully brief, because it is not difficult to perceive that a Christian copyist could easily be alarmed by the thought that readers might conclude that the eternal Son of God needed to fast in order to control fallen angels.  (The same consideration motivated the excision of the words “and fasting” from Mark 9:29 in the Alexandrian Text; the presence of the words in Mark are confirmed, however, not only by almost all manuscripts, but also by Papyrus 45.) 

            In this case, referring to “Some manuscripts” and “Other manuscripts” obscures rather than illuminates the real state of the evidence, in which over 99% of the manuscripts favor the inclusion of the verse, and in which it is cited by patristic sources going back to the early 200’s.  Such vague footnotes do more harm than good.  They provide only an illusion of informing the reader, while failing to share information about meaningful aspects of the relevant evidence, such as the scope and antiquity of the evidence.

            The misleading vagueness in the footnotes for these four passages is typical of the textual footnotes that occur throughout the ESV.  The term “some” is used to describe about a dozen manuscripts, and it is also used to refer to over 1,600 manuscripts.  There is no way to tell from the footnotes what kind of evidence is meant by “some” manuscripts.  No attempt is made to explain to the reader how the reading in the footnote originated.  That is remarkably unhelpful.            

            If the editors of modern English translations wish to turn the margins of our Bibles into a collection of trivia about the mistakes made by ancient copyists, we should at least insist that they present the evidence fairly, instead of inviting readers to look at the manuscript-evidence through lenses that are foggy, distorted, and broken.         

            Textual footnotes should be helpful, concise, and focused.  When early patristic evidence is relevant, it should be mentioned.  (For instance, it is certainly deceptive to tell readers that “The earliest manuscripts” do not include Mark 16:9-20 without mentioning that Irenaeus quoted Mark 16:19 around 180, over a century before the two Greek uncials that omit verses 9-20 were made.)  When a textual variant is supported by fewer than ten Greek manuscripts, or when a variant’s support is almost exclusively from one transmission-branch, the scope of the evidence should be pointed out.  Exactly how to do this, while maintaining conciseness, is a challenge, but it will be far better to undertake that challenge than to continue to distract and puzzle Bible-readers with misleading footnotes.

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The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV) is Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. 

The Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) is © Copyright 2000 Holman Bible Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee.

The New King James Version (NKJV) is Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.