Revelation 20:5 - A New Attempt to Change A Doctrinally Significant Text

The first half of Revelation 20:5 has been part of the English text of the book as long as the English text of Revelation has existed – until now.  It appears the same in the Byzantine Text and Textus Receptus:  οἱ λοιποὶ τῶν νεκρῶν οὐκ ἔζησαν ἄχρι τελεσθῇ τὰ χίλια ἔτη.   The meaning is plain:  “But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished.”

A quick review of Bible Gateway shows that English versions including the KJV, ESV, NKJV, NIV, NET, WEB, NASB, NRSV, NLT, CSB, CEV, and EHV include the entire verse. 

The first half of 20:5 is missing, though, in Codex Sinaiticus and in an interesting array of minuscules:   61 82 93 141 177 201 218 325 452 456 498 522 808 1424 1719 1734 1780 1795 1849 1852 1872 2030 2048 2053 2062 2138 2256 2350 2377 2494 2495 2582 2672 2681 2845 2847 2886 2917 and 2921.

Victorinus of Pettau (Ptuj in Slovenia) quoted the full text of 20:5 in a commentary composed around 260.  At the New Advent website his comments can be read in English:

“[20:4] And I saw thrones, and them that sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them; and I saw the souls of them that were slain on account of the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast nor his image, nor have received his writing on their forehead or in their hand; and they reigned with Christ for a thousand years.

[20:5] The rest of them lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. There are two resurrections. But the first resurrection is now of the souls that are by the faith, which does not permit men to pass over to the second death. Of this resurrection the apostle says: If you have risen with Christ, seek those things which are above.

[20:6] Blessed and holy is he who has part in this resurrection: on them the second death shall have no power, but they shall be priests of God and Christ, and they shall reign with him a thousand years. I do not think the reign of a thousand years is eternal; or if it is thus to be thought of, they cease to reign when the thousand years are finished. But I will put forward what my capacity enables me to judge. The tenfold number signifies the decalogue, and the hundredfold sets forth the crown of virginity.  For he who shall have kept the undertaking of virginity completely, and shall have faithfully fulfilled the precepts of the decalogue, and shall have destroyed the untrained nature or impure thoughts within the retirement of the heart, that they may not rule over him, this is the true priest of Christ, and accomplishing the millenary number thoroughly, is thought to reign with Christ; and truly in his case the devil is bound.”

The loss of οἱ λοιποὶ τῶν νεκρῶν οὐκ ἔζησαν ἄχρι τελεσθῇ τὰ χίλια ἔτη is explained by one of the most common scribal accidents:  a scribe’s accidental omission of material when his line of sight shifted from letters in his master-copy to the same (or similar) letter recurring further along in the text.  Anyone can see how such an accident, technically called parablepsis, occurred when a scribe’s line of sight jumped from the χιλια ετη at the end of 20:4 to the identical letters in this middle of verse 5:

⁴και ειδον θρονους και εκαθισαν επ αυτους και κριμα εδοθη

αυτοις και τας ψυχας των πεπελεκισμενων δια την μαρτυριαν

ιυ και δια τον λογον του θυ και οιτινες ου προσεκυνησαν

τω θηριω ουτε την εικονα αυτου και ουκ ελαβον το χαραγμα

επι το μετωπον αυτων και επι την χειρα αυτων

και εζησαν και εβασιλευσαν μετα του χυ [τα] χιλια ετη

⁵και οι λοιποι των νεκρων ουκ εζησαν αχρι τελεσθη τα χιλια ετη

αυτη η αναστασις η πρωτη . . . .

 

I note that in the UBS GNT 1966, there was no apparatus entry for Revelation 20:5, and in the UBS GNT 4^th edition, likewise, there was no apparatus entry for Revelation 20:5.   It is exasperating to see such a shift in the new compilation, particularly when no new pertinent external evidence has appeared.  I recommend that from now on translators of Revelation should use Wayne Mitchell's The Greek New Testament, 4th edition, or the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform, and set aside the unstable UBS compilation.   

 

 

 

 

 

Matthew 26:28 - "This is my blood of the new covenant" . . . right?

In Matthew 26:28, as Jesus instituted the sacrament of communion, he told his disciples, “This is my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many for the remission of sins.”   Or did he?  Byzantine-based versions such as the KJV, NKJV, EOB, and MEV uniformly report that he did, but in the CSB, NIV, NLT, NASB, ESV, NRSV the word “new” is not included.  The Evangelical Heritage Version, the Easy-to-Read Version, J. B. Phillips (1960), the New Life Version, and The Voice and the hyper-paraphrase known as The Message both include “new” despite echoing plenty of non-Byzantine readings elsewhere.

The manuscripts for non-inclusion include P37, P45^vid, 01 03 019 Q Z [Z = the palimpsest Dublinensis, 035, from the 500s] 0298^vid 33.  Swanson erroneously presented Codex Y as if it also supports non-inclusion.  This is a variant-unit where the papyrus evidence has had a real impact:   in the 1800s Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf and Wordsworth favored inclusion; Alford had καινῆς bracketed. 

Bruce Metzger wrote that the UBS committee favored non-inclusion on the grounds that if καινῆς “had been present initially, there is no good reason why anyone would have deleted it.”  This is a bit amusing because even a novice can realize that καινῆς could easily be lost via parablepsis after τῆς.  Wayne A. Mitchell noticed this possibility in Scribal Skips.

The editors of the UBS and Nestle-Aland compilations assumed that Matthew’s text was harmonized to conform to the wording of Luke 22:20 (and First Corinthians 11:25).  However, an accidental parableptic loss explains the shorter reading without positing thorough scribal creativity that went in the opposite direction of their usual tendency.   

The question of whether Jesus explicitly said the equivalent of “new,” as Paul plainly wrote in his recollection of the institution of the eucharist, is a separate issue, perhaps one which boils down to  more of a preference for the inspired record of Jesus’ ipsissima vox, or the inspired verba understanding him.

 

Archaic Mark (GA 2427) and the Problem of Academic Slothfulness

I am greatly enjoying Charles L. Quarles' New Testament Textual Criticism for the 21st Century.  This is without a doubt one of the most erudite guides written on the subject -- better in terms of both style and accuracy than Metzger-Ehrman's The Text of the New Testament.  (Metzger, as far as I can tell, embraced the now-untenable Lucianic Recension explanation of the origin of the Byzantine Text throughout his entire academic career.)  Its opening chapters are brimming with thoughtful analysis, and its inaccuracies are minor (like referring to GA 305 in a footnote on p. 31 when GA 304 was meant). 

One thing I did not enjoy however was the reference on p. 65 to GA 2427 without any mention that it is a forgery.  This should serve as a reminder that it takes vigilance to stay up-to-date against those who wish to smuggle counterfeit currency into circulation.  Stephen Carlson showed in 2006 that GA 2427 is a forgery and is better suited to an art gallery than to a place in the textual apparatus of a Greek New Testament.  Nineteen years later 2427 is still mentioned as if it is authentic in what is surely going to be a standard textbook.   

The pigment found in some of the illustrations in GA 2427 was not invented at the time when the manuscript was initially thought to have been produced.  Some of the instances of parablepsis in 2427's text are explained via a scenario in which its scribe was using as his exemplar the 1860 printed edition of Buttmann's Greek New Testament.     As Margaret Mitchell reported in 2010, GA 2427 is not authentic.  It is "a modern production."  It must not be included in the textual apparatus in the future.

The problem of Christian academia's reluctance to abandon the consensus of the previous generation and to ignore compelling evidence is real.  For example John Burgon pointed out in 1871 that Aphraates, not Jacob of Nisibis, was the author who should be credited with a citation of Mark 16:17, but in the first and second edition of the UBS Greek New Testament, over seven decades later, Jacob of Nisibis was listed in the apparatus nevertheless (on page 197).  To this day, as far as I can tell, Daniel Wallace has not acknowledged that the claim about "asterisks and obeli" accompanying Mark 16:9-20 is bogus.   Likewise Ben Witherington III, as far as I know, has not retracted his false claim that “Eusebius and Jerome both tell us these verses were absent from all Greek copies known to them.”  (See pp. 412-413 of The Gospel of Mark – A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary © 2001 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.)  Grace To You continues to circulate the falsehood-filled sermon of the late John MacArthur in which Mark 16:9-20 was called a "bad ending."  The authors of the fourth edition of The Text of the New Testament retract on one page the claim that Mark 16:9-20 is absent from some Ethiopic copies, and repeat the claim on another page!   

Sometimes it seems like the only way to get tenured scholars to admit a mistake is public humiliation, similar to what led to Wallace's apology for confidently exaggerating P137's early date.  But it doesn't have to be that way.  Unlike pseudo-scholars such as James White ("Whitebeard" on X) of Apologia Church (who still, as far as I know, has  yet to retract any of his nonsense claims in The KJV-Only Controversy), Christians in the academy should welcome the refinement of their materials and be willing to engage their critics in a spirit of open co-operation.  Otherwise they may discover too late that while they have not updated their materials to accurately fit the facts, that when reciting the proverb, "The dogs bark, but the caravan passes," they turn out to be the dogs getting less and less attention and more and more derision due to their inattentiveness.

May GA 2427 never again be listed in any textual apparatus.

  

  

    

Pen, Print, & Pixels 2022 - Report on Day One

The Plano Marriott at Legacy Town Center

           This past week, on May 19-20, specialists in New Testament from around the world – Britain, Germany, Australia, Amsterdam, Arizona – gathered at the Dallas/Plano Marriott at Legacy Town Center for the Pen, Print, & Pixels Text and Manuscript conference, hosted by the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

          Daniel Buck was there, and was able to attend about half of the sessions.  He had these takeaways from the first day of the conference:

          The speakers were generally in agreement that there is still much new ground to be turned in the field of New Testament textual criticism.

          l Hugh Houghton foresees much more to discover in palimpsests through Multi-Spectral Imaging, and much to be gained from the study of family relationships in catena manuscripts.

          l Timothy Mitchell envisions learning more about how published work made it into circulation, and especially how they were guarded against tampering once they passed out of the authors’ direct control, by studying numerous references to that process in Greco-Roman classical works.

          l Peter Montoro has only just started us off in tracking down more examples of back-eddies in the transmission stream where continuous text manuscripts textually feed off of patristic homilies, such as a singular reading in GA 104 at Romans 2:26 from Chrysostom's homilies (Jan Krans, a bit later in the day, cited John 1:28 in Origen as such a case).

          l Dirk Jongkind thinks that it’s time to turn a corner in our approach to singular readings (proposing that they should be weighed both before and after counting them), and may even be ready to remove the old but not-quite-yet-ancient landmark of the Gregory-Aland numbering scheme.

          l Ryan Griffin wants us to further change the modern critical text to align more closely with the “Western” readings of p46 at three places in Philippians.

          l Edgar Ebojo sees a lot of work to be done in using distinctive line endings, especially in reconstructing inextant text and in distinguishing the scribes by their idiosyncratic ways of writing them.

          l Jan Krans is not at all ready to declare the “folly and duty” of proposing new textual emendations to be complete.

          And that was all just from some of the first day’s sessions.

Zooming in on some specific details:

          Hugh Houghton explained how looking beyond the continuous text in the dozens of catena manuscripts allows us to classify them into families, and even to identify family readings which are a direct result of chopping the text into lemmas.  Frequently the beginning or ending content of a lemma is completely excised in the process, and for no other reason than ease in production; only that content worthy of commentary was thought essential for inclusion.

          Now we can directly identify the source of omission for which, in such cases, could be accounted for by no previously identified scribal habit. Houghton urges the special identification of catena manuscripts, suggesting that prefixes or superscripts to GA numbers could be used for this process. He foresees that a lot more about family relationships between manuscripts will emerge as we do this.

Dirk Jongkind

          Dirk Jongkind asked the question, “Is the use of singular readings on the way out?” He certainly hopes so, at least when it comes to studying scribal habits—because more recent research (such as the research conducted by himself and Elijah Hixson) shows that focusing on just singular readings overlooks a lot of the data – especially in MSS like 01 and 0319.  However, he’s not about to throw out the whole idea.  He finds singular readings to still be useful for studying individual MSS and scribes:  all scribes make similar errors, but they don’t make them all in the same way.  But when it comes to focusing on singular readings to cast light on the canons of criticism, he points out that the same data, once in the hands of different scholars, has led to opposite conclusions.  

          Jongkind pointed out that there are two categories of evidence:  singular readings, and changes made by a particular scribe as he copied his exemplar.  In an ideal world the first would be a subcategory of the second, maybe even completely overlapping, but this is far from the case in the five manuscripts for which it can reasonably assumed that we have both the exemplar and the copy.  Instead we have three possible categories:  

          (1) singular readings that are not scribal errors because they were actually copied from a lost exemplar,

          (2) singular readings that are scribal errors because they were committed first-hand, and

          (3) “undetected” scribal errors that are not singular readings, because they were easy mistakes to make and thus several unrelated manuscripts share them (thus causing the most common scribal errors to be excluded from being counted under such a scheme).

          He mentioned five manuscripts for which the figures for both of the latter categories have been tabulated (three of these actually being the purple codices for which Elijah Hixson argued that he had been able to reasonably reconstruct their common exemplar, wherever two of the three agreed).  These five vary considerably as to which proportion of their scribal errors are also singular readings, showing that the approach that only looks at singular readings is flawed, in that it excludes much of the available data from consideration.

          Jan Krans gave a thorough history of conjectural emendations going back to 1453  showing that emendation of the New Testament text did not become a major practice until Erasmus and Beza, before tapering off quite a bit since the end of the 19th century (perhaps due in part to the lack of a classical education by today’s scholars).  He even did some textual criticism of the emendations, showing how confusing ellipsis marks for ditto signs in one listing of known emendations had a similar effect on subsequent lists.