Proverbs 18:9
In the ninth lecture in my online introduction to New Testament textual criticism, I describe text-types. There has been a recent wave of resistance in academia to affirm the reality of text-types, on the grounds that only the Byzantine text has an archetype capable of confident reconstruction. This resistance is due to a failure to acknowledge the proper way to define a text-type. Instead of profiling entire collections of readings in separate genres of the New Testament (Gospels, Acts, General Epistles, Pauline Epistles, Revelation) , a constellation of 50 or less distinct readings is all that is needed to separate manuscripts into the traditionally recognized text-types (Alexandrian, Byzantine, Western, Caesarean).
Because of pervasive mixture and each manuscript's scribe's uniqueness, once each text-type's distinct variants - the stars in the constellation, so to speak - are identified, 45 out of 50 variants, rather than 50 out of 50, sufficiently shows the type of text a manuscript contains.
This approach is applicable to the full text across a genre; it does not apply to small fragmentary manuscripts, the classification of which should be made and which should also be considered provisional. Why provisional? Because block-mixture is real. It was once proposed that a small sample is sufficient to show the text-type of a manuscript: the text-type of the extant sample was extrapolated to apply hypothetically to the non-extant portion. The logic seemed sound: if you open a jar and stick a spoon inside and pull it out full of grape jelly, it's reasonable to conclude that the whole jar is full of grape jelly.
When we have the text of a full genre preserved in a manuscript, its text can be validly assigned to a type. Over a century ago, Edward Ardron Hutton, assisted by F. C. Burkitt, helpfully wrote An Atlas of Textual Criticism in which he presented (or re-presented) a valid basis for dividing groups of manuscripts' text into families. Hutton affirmed that "The test of antiquity is decidedly against the Syrian," i.e., against the Byzantine text. Built into his statement is the assumption that we can identify what the Byzantine text is.
The text of a non-fragmentary manuscript can easily be assigned to a text-type, or be recognized as mixed, on the basis of Hutton's Triple Readings. There is no need to add comets and fireflies to the constellation while the stars are blazing bright.
In the Evangelical Heritage Version, Matthew 17:21 says, "But
this kind does
not go out except by prayer and fasting.”
The KJV, NKJV, EOB-NT, MEV, WEB, and 1995 NASB read similarly. In the RV 1881, ASV, ESV, NIV, NLT, and NRSV,
however, there is no such verse; the versification jumps from 20 to 22. What has happened?
Bruce Metzger did not spend many words
explaining: “Since there is no good
reason why the passage, if originally present in Mathew, should have been
omitted, and since copyists frequently inserted material derived from another
Gospel, it appears that most manuscripts have been assimilated to the parallel
in Mk. 9.29.” (Textual Commentary on the GNT, p. 43) His concise treatment is unsatisfactory for
at least three reasons, first of which is the consideration that Matthew
himself when using Mark’s Gospel (or something closely resembling it) had no
discernible reason to skip over this statement of Jesus. Bruce Manning Metzger
In 2010 Jonathan C. Borland presented a paper titled “THE AUTHENTICITY AND INTERPRETATION OF MATTHEW 17:21”
at a gathering of the Evangelical
Theological Society in
● The author known as Pseudo-Clement,
in Letters on Virginity (1:12) did
not specify which Gospel he was quoting but the wording looks more like Matthew
17:21 than Mark 9:29 when he wrote
against individuals who “do not act with
true faith, according to the teaching of our Lord, who hath said: ‘This kind
goeth not out but by fasting and prayer,' offered unceasingly and with earnest
mind.’”
● Clement of Alexandria, c. 200, in Extracts from the Prophets, wrote, “The Savior plainly declared to the believing apostles that prayer was stronger than faith in the case of a certain demoniac, whom they could not cleanse, when he said, ‘Such things are accomplished successfully through prayer.’”
● Tertullian, in de Jejun 8:2-3, without specifying
whether he was citing Matthew or Mark, wrote the following: “After that, he prescribed that fasting
should be carried out without sadness. For
why should what is beneficial be sad? He taught also to fight against the more
fierce demons by means of fasting. For is it surprising that the Holy Spirit is
lead in through the same means by which the sinful spirit is lead out?”
● Origen, in his Commentary on Matthew (13:6-7) wrote, “That
those, then, who suffer from what is called lunacy sometimes fall into the
water is evident, and that they also fall into the fire, less frequently
indeed, yet it does happen; and it is evident that this disorder is very
difficult to cure, so that those who have the power to cure demoniacs sometimes
fail in respect of this, and sometimes with
fastings and supplications and more toils, succeed.” And, “But let us also attend to this, ‘This kind goeth not out save by prayer and
fasting,’ in order that if at any time it is necessary that we should be
engaged in the healing of one suffering from such a disorder, we may not
adjure, nor put questions, nor speak to the impure spirit as if it heard, but
devoting ourselves to prayer and fasting,
may be successful as we pray for the sufferer, and by our own fasting may
thrust out the unclean spirit from him.”
● The Latin writer Juvencus wrote in Book 3
of Libri evangeliorum quattuor, “For by means of limitless prayers it is faith and much fasting
of determined soul that drive off this kind of illness.”
Although
defenders
of modern versions have claimed that “The verse is not included in the newer Bibles
because the older and better manuscripts of Matthew do not include it,” antiquity
in this case favors inclusion: the oldest
witness for inclusion is older than the oldest witness for non-inclusion.
The scope of attestation also favors inclusion at least as
much as it favors non-inclusion: Western
witnesses for inclusion far outnumber the Western witnesses for non-inclusion,
and they are geographically widespread.
We are left with the appeal to the “best” manuscripts as
the basis for rejecting the verse. But
this is circular reasoning; the real question is “What are the best witnesses at this specific point?”, and
generalizations simply do not answer that question. It is like deciding which football team wins the ballgame when the score is tied by asking which kicker has made the most field goals, instead of by actually scoring more points than the other team.
Third, this supposed harmonization doesn’t yield a tight harmony. Let’s compare the text of Matthew 17:21 to Mark 9:29. Mark wrote, τοῦτο τό γένος ἐν οὐδενὶ δύναται ἐξελθειν εἰ μὴ ἐν προσευχῇ καὶ νηστείᾳ. (Regarding the Alexandrian text’s non-inclusion of καὶ νηστείᾳ, see my earlier analysis.) Metzger’s plea that Mark 9:29 was transplanted into Matthew 17 is complicated by the distinct lack of verbal similarity:
Matthew: τοῦτο δὲ τό γένος ούκ
ἐκπορεύεται εἰ μὴ ἐν προσευχῇ καὶ νηστείᾳ.
Mark: τοῦτο τό γένος ἐν οὐδενὶ δύναται ἐξελθειν εἰ μὴ ἐν προσευχῇ καὶ νηστείᾳ.
This
is not a verbatim harmonization – out
of 12 words (in Matthew 17:21), nine are identical – and Metzger’s comment that
“copyists frequently inserted material derived from another Gospel” fails to explain
why a scribe with Mark 9:29 in front of him would change 25% of its wording
when inserting it into the text of the Gospel of Matthew. It should also be noted that the kind of
harmonization Metzger referred to usually involved harmonization to
the text of Matthew in Mark and Luke, not the other way around (the harmonization
of Matthew 9:13 and Mark 2:17 to Luke 5:32
being a notable exception).
I
propose that an early Western scribe intentionally omitted the material we know
as Matthew 17:21 out of concern that readers might think that the ability of
the Son of God was limited depending on whether he fasted or not. (The same concern motivated the omission of καὶ νηστείᾳ in Mark 9:29.) This exclusion was
subsequently adopted by scribes in the Alexandrian transmission-line, which led
to the reading (or non-reading) in À B Q et
al.
Matthew 17:21 should be regarded as an authentic part of the Gospel of Matthew. The oldest evidence, the most geographically diverse evidence, and the vast majority of evidence all point in favor of its inclusion. The NIV, ESV, etc. should be corrected accordingly.
Thanks to Jonathan Borland for sharing his insightful research.
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| Ethiopic MS 11, Image 7 (Gospel of John) |
In the fourth edition of The Text of the New Testament, on p. 322 (repeating what was on p. 226 of the first edition, written in 1964), Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman state, “A number of manuscripts of the Ethiopic version” do not contain Mark 16:9-20. (Full title: The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration). The late esteemed apologist Norman Geisler wrote that not only are verses 9-20 “are lacking in many of the oldest and most reliable manuscripts,” (see pp. 377-378 of The Big Book of Bible Difficulties, © 1992, a.k.a. When Critics Ask), but he also repeated the statement about Ethiopic MSS, writing, “These verses are lacking in many of the oldest and most reliable Greek manuscripts, as well as in important Old Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Ethiopic manuscripts.” (Neither statement is altogether true , as we shall see shortly. Only two unmutilated Greek MSS do not support Mark 16:9-20, and only one undamaged Old Latin manuscript, and only one unmutilated Syriac MS. See here for information on GA 304 and GA 239.)
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| Another example of Ge'ez script (from my collection) |
Dr. Geisler’s claim that Mark 16:9-20 is “lacking in many of the oldest and most reliable Greek manuscripts” is wrong – it’s lacking in only two ancient Greek manuscripts (Vaticanus and Sinaiticus). And the entire claim about Ethiopic manuscripts ending the Gospel of Mark at 16:8 is also wrong. In 1980, Bruce Metzger himself acknowledged that his earlier claim (in The Text of the New Testament, p. 226, 1964) was incorrect. (Not to detour from the subject of Ethiopic manuscripts, but on the same page, Metzger also wrote, erroneously, that Eusebius shows no knowledge of the existence of Mark 16:9-20. This was quietly altered in subsequent editions by replacing the name “Eusebius” with Ammonius – which is also incorrect as I explained in a recent post).
In 1980, in the scholarly journal New
Testament Tools and Studies, Metzger published an essay called “The
Gospel of St. Mark in Ethiopic Manuscripts.” In this essay he
demonstrated that in 1889 William Sanday had perpetuated errors made by two
other researchers (D. S. Margoliouth and A. C. Headlam) in a collation of
twelve Ethiopic manuscripts made by D. S. Margoliouth and edited by A. C. Headlam. As a result, a claim was spread to the effect
that “three Ethiopic manuscripts in the
But when Metzger personally checked the listed MSS, he discovered that “The three manuscripts which are said to omit verses 9 to 20 in reality contain the passage. Furthermore, an examination of the seven manuscripts disclosed that, instead of replacing the longer ending with the shorter ending, these witnesses actually contain both the shorter ending and the longer ending.” He also affirmed, after combining his own results with the research of William F. Macomber, S. J., that “Of the total of 194 (65 + 129) manuscripts, all but two (which are lectionaries) have Mark 16:9-20, while 131 manuscripts contain both the Shorter Ending and the Longer Ending.”
In other words, all of the commentators who have been saying that some Ethiopic MSS end Mark at 16:8 are wrong.
Some other points that Metzger mentioned in 1980 are worth noticing, to appreciate the weight of the Ethiopic version in general:
● The oldest dated Ethiopic MS that contains the Shorter Ending was made in 1343.
● The oldest undated Ethiopic MS that that contains the Shorter Ending between 16:8 and 16:9 was made in the 1200s.
● One Ethiopic MS at the Chester
Beatty Library (Ethiopic Manuscript 912), made in the 1700s, ends the Gospel of
Mark near the end of 16:8, but Metzger explains that “it is certain that the
manuscript in its present state is fragmentary and that originally it continued
with additional textual material.”
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| We all make mistakes. Perhaps this sort of carelessness makes a good case against making the mistake entrusting the revision of your book on the text of the New Testament to an apprentice who is busy becoming an atheist. |
The value of the Ethiopic version
has increased since the Ethiopic
Garima Gospels were dated (via radiometric analysis) to no later than the
mid-600s (and I think the Garima Gospels was probably made a bit earlier, in the mid-500s). (And the Ethiopic version continues to be
given attention at the Hill
Museum and Manuscript Library, and new discoveries continue to be made.) Unfortunately this does not seem to have
elicited a desire to withdraw the erroneous claim that important Ethiopic
manuscript omit Mark 16:9-20 – a claim that was disseminated in academia since Tischendorf
and Warfield – and which was still disseminated in the third and fourth
editions of Metzger’s The Text of the New
Testament (see p. 275 of Bruce Metzger’s The
Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, 1992, and page 322 of the fourth edition. Yes; the fourth edition, co-edited with Bart
Ehrman, says two different things, depending on which page you’re reading.) and
which
can be read online right now at the Defending Inerrancy website, along with
other obsolete erroneous claims taken from the 1964 edition of Metzger’s book.
The evidence described by Metzger shows that all unmutilated Ethiopic MSS of Mark known to exist contain Mark 16:9-20. It also suggests that some time after the Gospel of Mark was translated into Ethiopic (with Mark 16:9-20 immediately following 16:8), the Shorter Ending intruded into the Ethiopic text-stream (probably from the Secondary Alexandrian transmission-stream represented in Mark 16 by 019 044 099 etc.) and was adapted as a liturgical flourish to conclude a lection-unit which would have otherwise concluded at the end of 16:8. (I suspect that at first the Shorter Ending – in its later form, with the variant “appeared to them” – was in the margin, like in Bohairic MS Huntington 17.)
Anyway: I am sure that Metzger and Nida etc. would
not want to go on spreading false information.
Of course authors cannot undo the damage after they die. So if you happen to find a book claiming that
“A number of manuscripts of the Ethiopic version do
not contain Mark 16:9-20,” the authors would no doubt thank you for writing in
the margin, in ink, “This is false. See
Metzger’s retraction in Tools & Studies X, 1980.” Because that number is ZERO.
Aphrahat the Persian Sage, also known
as Aphraates (280-345), was a church leader in Syria who wrote a lengthy series
of sermons in acrostic form, called Demonstrations – one composition for each of the 22 letters
of the Syriac alphabet. This was completed by A.D. 337, and was supplemented by a 23rd homily in 345.
Aphrahat was a contemporary of Eusebius of Caesarea, and from
a distance he heard of the spiritual transition of those in charge of the government of
the 
Aphrahat (The Persian Sage)
Among the implications of this is
that neither the Sinaitic
Syriac MS, nor the Curetonian
Syriac MS, nor the Syriac Peshitta
(if its Gospels-text is correctly assigned to the late 300s), constitutes the
earliest extant Syriac evidence regarding how the Gospel of Mark concluded, for
Aphraates lived before any of those witnesses were produced. It may be worthwhile to draw attention here to
Aphrahat’s testimony regarding the final portion of Mark (which has been
utterly ignored by many commentators).
In the 17th paragraph of Demonstration One: Of Faith, Aphrahat wrote, “And when our Lord gave the sacrament of baptism to His apostles, He said to them, ‘ Whosoever believes and is baptized shall live, and whosoever believes not shall be condemned.’”
Thus
Aphraates used what we know as Mark 16:16 in Syriac in 337. He expressed no doubts about it whatsoever.
(Non-Syriac-reading English readers
may consult, to see the context, John Gwynn’s English translation of Demonstration
One, (in Volume 13
of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series), which I rely
upon for these quotations.)
At the end of the same
paragraph, Aphrahat writes, “He also said thus, ‘This shall be the sign for
those who believe; they shall speak with new tongues and shall cast out demons,
and they shall place their hands on the sick and they shall be made whole.’” Although
the passage is quoted very imprecisely (notice the absence of any reference to
the signs being done “in my name,” and the absence of any reference to
serpent-handling and poison-drinking), what Aphrahat quotes here
is clearly based on Christ’s words in Mark 16:16-18.
Aphrahat is regarded as a frequent
user of Tatian’s Diatessaron, but his quotation is significantly
different from the passage found in the Arabic Diatessaron. The differences may be very probably attributed to the later conformation of the Arabic
Diatessaron to the text of the Syriac Peshitta. (The Arabic Diatessaron is
itself an echo of a Syriac source.)
Let us accept, for the moment, that
Aphrahat was utilizing the Diatessaron when he wrote the 17th paragraph of Demonstration
One: Of Faith. In which case, we have here, embedded in Aphrahat’s writings, a
quotation from a source no later than 175 (namely, Tatian’s Diatessaron). (To put this another way: Aphrahat quoted from Tatian's Diatessaron, which - if the completion of the Gospel of Mark is correctly assigned to the year 68 - was made by Tatian less than 110 years after the autograph of the Gospel of Mark was written, using copies of the Gospels earlier than any complete copies that have survived to the present day.]
(Not to detour, but, another
neglected author, the Armenian known as Eznik of Golb (also known as Yesnik Koghbats‘i), also
used Mark 16:17-18 in the first half of the 400s, writing in his composition De Deo (a.k.a. “Against
the Sects”) 1:25,
“And again, ‘Here are signs of believers: they will dislodge demons, and they will take
serpents into their hand, and they will drink a deadly poison and it will not
cause harm.’” This appears to be a
citation that Eznik made from memory. Notice, by the way, Eznik's inclusion of the words "into their hand" in v. 18.)
Some additional evidence that
Aphrahat, writing in Syriac, was using Tatian’s Diatessaron is found in Demonstration 2, paragraph 20, where
he states that Jesus “showed the power of his greatness when he was cast down
from a high place into a valley, yet was not harmed.” This
statement is not based on anything in the canonical Gospels as we know them; it
is based on a quirky rendering of Luke 4:29-30 which recurs when the episode is
described by other writers who used the Diatessaron. (It is not in the
Arabic Diatessaron; at this point the Arabic Diatessaron’s exemplar has been,
again, conformed to the text of the Peshitta).
A few decades after Aphrahat wrote, Ephrem Syrus wrote (I rely on others
for the English translation), “When they cast him down from the hill, he flew
in the air.” (More has been written
about this interesting detail (by the late William
Petersen for instance), but I focus here upon Aphrahat’s testimony.)
If it is granted that Aphrahat wrote
Demonstration 23 in 345 (shortly
before he died), then he must have had more than Tatian’s Diatessaron to work
with, because (a) it is generally
granted that the Diatessaron, as produced by Tatian, did not include Jesus’
genealogies, and (b) in Demonstration 23, paragraph
20, Jesus’ genealogy is quoted as it appears in Matthew 1:13 to 16.
Whether or not Aphrahat is regarded
as the author of Demonstration 23, Aphrahat was definitely the author of Demonstration
One: Of Faith and thus, his testimony from 337 (prior to the production of
Codex Sinaiticus) provides us with a window on a Syriac text that existed in
his lifetime.
(A good transcript of Aphrahat’s Demonstrations 1-10, produced in 474, exists today as British Museum Add. MS. 17182. The same MS includes Demonstrations 11-23, written down in 510.)
Aphrahat has been confused with another Syriac author, Jacob of Nisibis, partly because Aphrahat took the name “Jacob” at his baptism. (Jacob of Nisibis was among those who attended the Council of Nicea in 325.) Although John Burgon, in 1871, pointed out that Aphahat’s Demonstrations were wrongly attributed to Jacob of Nisibis (Burgon pointed this out on p. 26 of The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel of Mark, calling Aphrahat “Aphraates”). Nevertheless Jacob of Nisibis was named in the textual apparatus of the first edition of the UBS Greek New Testament (1966). This may be an indication of how little attention was paid to John Burgon by the compilers of the Nestle-Aland NTG and the UBS GNT in its first and second editions.
Rather than replace Jacob of Nisibis’ name with Aphrahat’s name, the textual apparatus for Mark 16:17-18 in the fourth and fifth editions of the UBS GNT features neither. For those who rely on the textual apparatus of the UBS GNT4 and UBS GNT5, it is as if Aphrahat’s support of Mark 16:16-18 in Demonstration One, instead of being changed from an incorrect identification (as Jacob of Nisibis) to a correct identification (as Aphrahat), has blinked out of existence.
No doubt this
was merely an editorial oversight; certainly Carlo Martini and Kurt Aland and Bruce Metzger would
never have thought of attempting to evade or silence an important voice such as
Aphrahat’s. (I would like to
imagine that Aphrahat’s name did not
appear in the textual apparatus of NA27 simply because there was not enough room on the page to include it – but, alas, I cannot, because half of the page of
NA27 that features Mark 16:17b-20 is entirely blank. The editors of NA27 found room to include GA 2427
(which has turned out to be a forgery made in the 1800s) in the apparatus for Mark 16:18, and GA 579 (from the 1200s), but somehow they did not find room to include Aphrahat’s name.) (A novice reader, unfamiliar with the complex nuances of evidence-citation and apparatus-making, could get the impression that the selection of witnesses in the apparatuses of the Nestle-Aland NTG and UBS GNT has been somewhat biased.)
The GNT’s current editors are
welcome to express their penitence (or serve as proxy-voices for previous
editors) by including Aphrahat’s name in the textual apparatus of the yet-to-be-released
6th edition. Perhaps someone by then
will still dare to rely on such an unreliable source for patristic evidence as
the UBS GNT’s textual apparatus has been.
(A final note about Aphrahat: he believed strongly that baptism is central
in conversion – that is, he did not treat it as an optional afterthought. In his Demonstration
6, Concerning Monks – in which Aphrahat’s
writing seeps with Scripture-references like a dead skunk smells like skunk – he
writes, in the 14th paragraph, the following (translated into English from
Syriac): “Remember the warning that the
apostle [St. Paul in Ephesians 4:30] gives us:
‘Grieve not the Holy Spirit whereby ye have been sealed unto the day of
redemption.’ For from baptism do we
receive the Spirit of Christ. For in
that hour in which the priests invoke the Spirit, the heavens open and it
descends and moves upon the waters [cf. Gen. 1:2]. And those that are baptized are clothed in it. For the Spirit stays aloof from all that are
born of the flesh, until they come to the new birth by water, and then they
receive the Holy Spirit. For in the
first birth they are born with an animal soul which is created within man and
is not thereafter subject to death, as he said, ‘Adam became a living
soul.’ [Cf. Gen. 2:7] But in the second
birth, that through baptism, they received the Holy Spirit from a particle of
the Godhead, and it is not again subject to death.”)
For decades, commentators on the Gospel of Mark have mentioned that there is an alternative ending to the Gospel of Mark (that is, an alternate after verse 8 that does not involve verses 9-20). The ESV presents this alternative ending, which is known as the “Shorter Ending,” in a footnote, attributing it to “some manuscripts” – “But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him all that they had been told. And after this, Jesus himself sent out by means of them, from east to west, the sacred and inperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.”
The ESV’s “Some manuscripts” was, until recently, a total of six continuous-text Greek manuscripts, plus one bilingual Greek-Sahidic lectionary (lectionary 1602): 019, 044, 083 (a.k.a. 0112), 099, 279, and 274mg.
The Double Ending is also attested in quite a few versional
copies:
Sahidic
copies (for example, Pierpont Morgan Manuscript 11 (c. 700), Pierpont Morgan
Manuscript 4 (c. 800),
The Armenian MS Etchmiadzin 303 (1200s).
The Bohairic MS known as
Many Ethiopic copies (at least 131 – as described by Bruce Metzger in 1980 in “The Gospel of St. Mark in Ethiopic Manuscripts,” in New Testament Tools and Studies, Vol. 10; in the course of this study Metzger withdrew the well-circulated claim that a number of Ethiopic copies conclude Mark’s text at 16:8 – although the false claim can still be found in some sources, including p. 322 of the fourth edition (2005) of Metzger’s The Text of the New Testament, of which Bart Ehrman is named as a co-author). (The corrected description of the Ethiopic evidence is on p. 120 of the same book.)
The Double Ending has also been found in a few representatives of the Harklean Syriac version (such as DFM 00829, a witness from the 1200s-1300s discovered by Mina Monier), and even in a copy of the Peshitta (British Library MS Add. 14456, as David Taylor has shown).
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| The third-to-last and last page of Mark in Old Latin Codex Bobbiensis (VL 1, k) |
There are slight variations in the text of these witnesses – mainly the presence or absence of the explicit reference to Jesus’ appearance (ο Ις εφανη in 044 and 274mg and Greek-Sahidic lectionary 1602, and Ις εφανη αυτοις in 099) and the presence or absence of a final Amen. But today I shall overlook the interesting implications of these variants to focus on a recent discovery made by Mina Monier: there are now eight Greek manuscripts (plus Greek-Sahidic lectionary 1602) that support the Double Ending (i.e., the Shorter Ending followed by verses 9-20): the newly confirmed manuscripts are GA 1422 and GA 2937 . GA 1422 is assigned to the 900s-1000s; GA 2937 is assigned to the 900s.
These two new witnesses for the Double Ending, via their
agreements in shared format and shared annotations with several of the other
known Greek witnesses for the Double Ending, convey more clearly than ever
before that as a Greek reading, the Shorter Ending’s early circulation had a
very limited geographic range, in one specific area in
On folio
178v of GA 1422, alongside the text of the Gospel of Mark 16:7 (beginning
with ὄτι προάγει) to 16:13 (up to and including λοιποῖς), the catena-commentary
that frames the text on three sides refers to, and includes, the Shorter
Ending. Variants within the Shorter
Ending in 1422’s commentary are: (1) the non-inclusion of ὁ before Ἰς), (2)
the non-inclusion of ἐφάνη or ἐφάνη αὐτοῖς after Ἰς, and (3) ἀπ,
rather than ἀπό, before ἀνατολῆς.
(One might suspect that the Shorter Ending that appears in
the lower margin of GA 274 (below the text of Mark 16:6b-15, up to and including ἃπαντα κη-) was extracted from a
commentary-manuscript such as 1422 or 2937, rather than from a commentary-free
continuous-text manuscript.)
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| Mina Monier |
Mark 16:8 in GA 2937, meanwhile, is followed by – according to Mina Monier’s transcription – “ειχεν δε αυτας τρομος and several lines of commentary, concluding with Αυτη η υποθεσις οπιθεν εστι εις το “εφοβουντο γαρ:” This is followed by the Shorter Ending, in a form which is nigh-identical to what is in 274mg. And this is followed by – again following Monier’s transcription – “Eστι δε και ταυτα φερομενα μετα το εφοβουντο γαρ” (the same note that is in 019, 044, 083, 1422, and Greek-Sahidic lectionary 1602) – followed by “αναστας δε πρωϊ πρωτῃ σαββατον και τα εξης.” More commentary-material (from Gregory of Nyssa, according to a rubric in the margin), which makes use of Mark 16:9-20, follows.
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| A page from Sahidic-Greek lectionary 1602. |
More information about GA 2937 can be found in the article Greek Manuscripts in Alexandria, by H.A.G. Houghton and Mina Monier, which appeared in Journal of Theological Studies, Vol. 71, Issue 1, April 2020, pp. 119-133.
[Readers are encouraged to explore the embedded links in this post.]
Sometimes when first-time observers read about the production-dates of New Testament manuscripts, one of the first things they notice is that most of the dates are not very precise. Several factors contribute to establishing the approximate production-date of a manuscript. Let’s look at some of them today: colophons, script, content, material, special factors, and radiocarbon dating.
COLOPHONS. Notes written by a scribe, or scribes,
involved in the production of the manuscript – sometimes state when the
manuscript was made. Such notes, or
colophons, immediately simplify the task of assigning a production-date. Medieval scribes who wrote colophons with
dates typically used calendars in which the first year of the earth was
5509. Sometimes the production-date was
given in terms of the reign of a particular Byzantine Emperor. Robert
Waltz has provided a detailed explanation of how production-dates mentioned in
colophons should be interpreted.
Rarely, dates are given in terms of the number of years A.D. (Anno
Domini, “the year of the Lord”).
SCRIPT. Usually, there is no colophon, so analysts
attempting to determine a manuscript’s production-date must resort to a study
of the handwriting displayed in the manuscript.
This involves the field of paleography (or “palæography”), the study of
ancient writing. The method of Greek
handwriting changed over time – from the majuscule, or uncial, lettering of the
early copies (and formal and informal variations), to the minuscule lettering
of later copies (with variations such as Perlschrift, Bouletée, and “Ace of
Spades” minuscule).
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| Bernard de Montfaucon (1655-1741) |
CONTENT. A manuscript cannot, of course, be written
before the events that are recorded in the manuscript. Some New Testament manuscripts – more than
you might expect – mention historical
events (especially in lectionary-calendars accompanying the Biblical text) that
provide a solid basis for discerning the limits of when a manuscript was
made. For example, if a lectionary
calendar mentions the feast-day for Cosmas the Hymnographer, bishop of Maiuma,
and Andrew of Crete, it must have been produced after the mid-700s. If a lectionary-calendar mentions Lazarus the
Wonder-worker, its production-date must be later than the period when Lazarus
the Wonder-worker was active in the 900s.
(The Latin term for the earliest
possible production-date is the terminus
a quo. The Latin term for the latest possible
production-date is the terminus ad quem.)
MATERIAL. All New Testament manuscripts are made of
papyrus or parchment or paper. (There is
a small class of witnesses, which used to be represented by the letter “T” in a
Fraktur-style font, which can include other material such as very small manuscripts, amulets, and inscriptions.) Characteristics of these
materials can influence the dating of a manuscript – especially when the paper
features a watermark, which can narrow down not only the production-date of a
manuscript but also its provenance (where it comes from).
SPECIAL
FACTORS. Sometimes the provenance of
a manuscript helps define the limits of its production-date. For example, the manuscript known as GA 0212 (which
technically should not be in the list of continuous-text New Testament
manuscripts, because it is not a continuous-text New Testament manuscript) was
found in the ruins of Dura-Europos, a place which was beseiged and destroyed by
a Roman army in 257. Thus 0212’s terminus ad quem cannot be later than
257.
Even after taking all of the above into consideration, specialists sometimes get production-dates wrong. One example is found in the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, where the editors assigned GA 2427 a production-date of “XIV?” (p. 711), and ranked it as a “consistently cited witness of the first order” in Mark (See the Nestle-Aland Introduction, p. 47* and p. 58*). GA 2427 is indeed cited very frequently throughout Mark in NA27’s textual apparatus.
But in NA28, GA 2427 is gone. In 2006, Wieland Willker already
described 2427 as a fake, and, as Willker reported, Stephen Carlson
demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that 2427 is a forgery, based primarily
on Philip Buttmann’s 1860 Greek New Testament (as he explains in an article at
the SBL Forum Archive). Tommy
Wasserman gives additional details about the exposure of 2427 in a
2009 post at the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog. Margaret Mitchell of the
So, experts can be fooled, at least
temporarily, by well-made forgeries – even with careful consideration of
colophons, script, material, and special factors. Which brings us to the last resort:
RADIOCARBON ANALYSIS. A small amount of parchment that undergoes
carbon-14 tests can yield an approximate production-date for the material. (The date when the material was used may be
later.) This is usually not done (because
the carbon-14 tests involve the destruction of the things they test). But sometimes it is. For instance the Ethiopian Garima Gospels,
initially assigned a production-date in the 1000s, was suspected by Jacques
Mercier of being much earlier. Mercier submitted
small sample fragments of the manuscript to radiocarbon tests, which gave one
fragment a date of 330-540, and another
fragment a date of 430-650 (as
reported in 2011 in the journal of Kenyon College). And just like that, the Garima Gospels went
from being a minor witness to the Ethiopic Version to being confirmed as a
contender (with the Rabbula
Gospels of 586) to be the oldest illustrated manuscript of the Gospels. Perhaps what is presently a last resort should in the future be the first resort, where parchment is involved, and when the requisite amount of material can be spared, and the cost of radiocarbon analysis is not prohibitive. Rare is the parchment New Testament manuscript that does not have a blank border that could be removed without appreciable loss.
Leaving the Gospels momentarily, today we explore a textual variant in the Pauline Epistles: in First Corinthians 10:9, did the text originally say “Nor let us tempt Christ” (Χριστόν) or “Nor let us tempt the Lord” (Κύριον) or “Nor let us tempt God” (Θεόν)? All three readings are nomina sacra (sacred names, usually written in contracted form), and thus, with the nomina sacra in play, amount to the difference between ΧΝ, ΚΝ, and ΘΝ.
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| Erasmus' text of I Cor. 10:9 (1522) |
English Bibles in use today with “Christ” in First Corinthians 10:9 include the KJV, NKJV, EOB (Eastern Orthodox Bible), WEB, EHV, and also the CSB, ESV, NET, NIV 2011, NLT, NCV (New Century Version), and NRSV.
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| I Cor. 10:9 (Nicolaus Gerbel, 1521) |
 |
| I Cor. 10:9 (Fell, 1675) |
Now let’s look at some text-critical data:
 |
| Fell's footnote (1675) |
 |
| I Cor. 10:9 in Codex Sinaiticus |
Osburn’s thorough list extends to two other readings:
Codex A, 2 81 1127 1595 and 14 other minuscules (and 2815 which Osburn did not list, but Swanson does) read Θεόν.
Nothing appears between ἐκπειράζωμεν and καθως in 97 1729* 1985 and 2659.
The
earliest support for Χριστόν is Marcion (the arch-heretic from
Also in support of Χριστόν are Ambrosiaster, Ephraem Syrus, Pelagius, Augustine, Pseudo-Oecumenius, and Theophylact. Chrysostom also cites I Cor. 10:9 with Χριστόν three times.
Κύριον is supported by Epiphanius, Theodoret of Cyrrhus (in a substantial quotation in his commentary on the Pauline Epistles), Cassiodorus, John of Damascus, and Sedulius Scotus. Chrysostom is cited as using κύριον once.
Now let’s analyze this evidence and reach a conclusion.
 |
| I Cor. 10:9 in Tregelles' text. |
Χριστόν has in its favor the support of very early and geographically diverse patristic witnesses. The discovery of P46 with Χριστόν (written as ΧΡΝ - see BP II f.49 in the online Chester Beatty Papyrus Collection on the fourth line from the bottom) probably should have instantly elicited a change in the critical text here, inasmuch as with its discovery, Χριστόν scores high on multiple metrics: it is the reading of the oldest manuscript; it is the reading of the most manuscripts (by far); it is the reading of the most diverse array of manuscripts; it is the reading favored by a strong combination of early patristic writers. About the only counter-argument that favors Κύριον is the internal consideration that Paul would be unlikely to have written that the Hebrews in the wilderness tempted Christ – but as indicated in a note in the NET, Osburn built an effective cumulative argument that the case against Χριστόν driven by this internal evidence is weak. I cannot think of any reason but haste, and perhaps over-reliance on the work of Tregelles (who had no access to P46) to elicit the Tyndale House GNT’s adoption of κύριον. It was due to over-reliance upon À and B that κύριον was ever adopted in printed Greek New Testaments; hopefully the days of such over-reliance, repeatedly shown to be merely a disguised bias, are behind us.
Χριστόν merits confident inclusion in the text.
