Riplinger's New Age Bible Versions

            Gail Riplinger’s book, New Age Bible Versions: An Exhaustive Documentation Exposing the Message, Men and Manuscripts Moving Mankind to the Antichrist’s One World Religion, covers a very wide variety of subjects which are important but tangential to textual criticism in its first four sections.  Finally at page 464, something like a sustained focus upon New Testament textual criticism begins to materialize.  I intend via this post to test the accuracy of this book’s contents beginning at that point; I have no intention of adding anything here to the author’s critiques of some modern versions, or her warnings against the heresies of Helena P. Blavatsky, the New Age Movement, etc., which can be found in the earlier segment of the book.

            In section 34, “The Majority Text,” the author used quotations from Wilbur Pickering and John Burgon (both of whom, while opposing the 1881 Westcott-Hort compilation, reject some readings in the Textus Receptus, the New Testament base-text of the KJV).  She seems to believe that the Majority Text and the Textus Receptus are the same thing, and readers might be forgiven for drawing such a conclusion in light of sentences such as the one found on page 471:  referring to the Byzantine Text, Riplinger states, “This text type is available today in English in the Authorized Version, or as it is called in the United States, the King James Version.”  That is not 100% true:  when the Byzantine Text (as printed in the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform 2005 ed.), representing the contents of most Greek manuscripts, is compared to the Textus Receptus, there are some translatable differences.  With apologies for veering away from my main subject, here are some examples:
            ● Matthew 8:15:  most manuscripts end the verse by stating that Peter’s mother-in-law served “Him” (αὐτω) rather than “them” (αὐτοις), the TR reading.

            ● Matthew 18:19:  after πάλιν, most manuscripts have ἀμὴν, so as to read “Verily” or “Assuredly.”

            ● Mark 4:4:  most manuscripts do not have “of the air” (τοῦ οὐρανοῦ).

            ● Mark 4:9:  most manuscripts do not have “to them” (αὐτοῖς).

            ● Luke 6:10:  most manuscripts say αὐτῷ (“him”) rather than τῷ ἀνθρώπῷ (“the man”).

            ● Luke 7:31:  most manuscripts do not have the phrase “And the Lord said” (Ειπεν δε ὁ Κύριος) at the beginning of this verse.

            ● Luke 8:3:  most manuscripts say that the women ministered “to them” (αὐτοις) instead of “to Him” (αὐτω). 

            ● Luke 23:25:  most manuscripts do not say that Barabbas was released “to them” (αὐτοις).

            ● John 2:22:  most manuscripts do not say “to them” (αὐτοῖς).

            ● John 7:33:  most manuscripts do not say “to them” (αὐτοῖς).

            ● John 20:29:  most manuscripts do not have Thomas’ name (Θωμᾶ) in this verse.

            ● Acts 7:37:  most manuscripts do not have the words “him you shall hear” (αὐτοῦ ἀκούσεσθε).

            ● Acts 9:5-6:  in most manuscripts, there is no base-text for the words, “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.’   And he trembling and astonished said, ‘Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?’  And the Lord said unto him.”  (These words in the KJV appear to have been based on a harmonization to the similar passage in Acts 26:14-16.)

            ● Acts 10:6:  most manuscripts provide no base-text for the KJV’s phrase “He shall tell thee what thou oughtest to do.”

            ● Acts 15:11:  most manuscripts do not include the word Χριστου (“Christ”).

            ● Acts 15:34:  most manuscripts provide no base-text for this entire verse.

            ● Ephesians 3:9:  most manuscripts read οἰκονομία (“dispensation”) instead of κοινωνια (“fellowship”).

            ● Philippians 4:3:  most manuscripts read Ναι (“Yes”) instead of Και (“And”) at the beginning of this verse.

            ● Colossians 1:6:  most manuscripts include the words καὶ αὐξανόμενον (“and growing”), a phrase which would be vulnerable to accidental loss due to its occurrence between the words καρποφορούμενον and καθως.

            ● Second Timothy 1:18:  most manuscripts do not include μοι (unto me).

            ● Second Timothy 2:19:  most manuscripts read Κυρίου (“the Lord”) instead of Χριστου (“Christ”) at the end of this verse.

            ● Titus 2:8:  most manuscripts refer to things said about “us” (ἡμῶν) instead of “you” (ὑμῶν). 

            ● Hebrews 2:7:  most manuscripts have no base-text for the final phrase, “And did set him over the works of Your hands.”

            ● Revelation 1:11:  most manuscripts do not include the phrase ταις ἐν Ἀσία (“which are in Asia”).         

            ● Revelation 2:22:  most manuscripts read αυτης instead of αυτων, so as to refer to repentance from “her” works, rather than “their” works.

            ● Revelation 4:11:  in most manuscripts, the twenty-four refer to “our Lord and our God” (ὁ Κύριος καὶ ὁ Θεὸς ἡμῶν), instead of referring to Him as “O Lord” (Κύριε).

            ● Revelation 6:1:  most manuscripts include the word “seven” (ἑπτα) before “seals.”

            ● Revelation 6:12:  most manuscripts refer to the “whole moon” (σελήνη ὅλη), not just to “the moon.”

            ● Revelation 8:13:  most manuscripts refer to an eagle (ἀετου) rather than to an angel (ἀγγέλου) here.

            ● Revelation 15:3:  most manuscripts end the verse with a reference to the King “of the nations” (ἑθνῶν) instead of “of the saints” (ἀγιων).

            (More (but far from all) differences between the Textus Receptus and the majority of manuscripts may be noticed via a consultation of the textual footnotes in the NKJV.)

            Riplinger states (p. 475) that “The variations among the Majority Text are minor.”  However, many such variations, such as the ones I just listed, are translatable, whether interpreters consider them “minor” or not.  The Nestle-Aland compilation disagrees with the Byzantine Text much more, and this tends to justify Riplinger’s description of the Nestle-Aland compilation as a text based on 1% of the extant manuscripts.  But the Textus Receptus still has some readings of its own that have only a small percentage of manuscripts in their favor.

            On page 478-479, Riplinger is almost simultaneously on and off target:  she notes that, as D. A. mentioned, “95% of the manuscripts belong to the Byzantine tradition,” but just one page later, she claims, “the KJV readings represent the earliest known manuscripts (i.e., P66 A.D. 175).”  This latter statement is true of a relatively small number of readings in P66, but it is not true in general; P66 agrees much more frequently with the Alexandrian Text than with the Byzantine Text.

            In section 35, “The Earliest Manuscripts,” Riplinger presents data drawn from the work of Wilbur Pickering, as well as quotations from as assortment of text-critical researchers (including Zuntz, Metzger, and Colwell) in which it is acknowledged that early papyri contain some distinct Byzantine readings – a fact which practically dismantles Hort’s foundational basis for rejecting the Byzantine Text.  There can be no serious denial of the veracity of the simple charts that Riplinger presents on pages 484-485, in which papyrus support is listed for 23 Byzantine readings.

            After critiquing the NASB due to its tendency to favor shorter readings in Luke 24 (an effect of Hort’s theory about “Western Non-interpolations”) – making several strong points in the process – Riplinger oversimplifies the testimony of a few important early versions when she says that the Sinaitic Syriac, the Gothic version, and the Peshitta “agree with the KJV.”  The Gothic version and the Peshitta tend to agree with the Byzantine Text, but this tendency is by no means total; meanwhile the Sinaitic Syriac is certainly not a consistent ally of the Byzantine Text, let alone of the Textus Receptus.  Similarly, Riplinger describes Codex A and Codex W as if they both support the KJV, but while this is true of portions of each manuscript, it is also untrue of other portions of each manuscript.

            Riplinger makes a serious error on page 489.  Small spelling errors – such as referring to Diognetus as “Diognelus” and referring to Macarius Magnes as “Macarius Magnus” – might be overlooked, but the claim, “P66 has predominantly KJV readings” is simply ridiculous; P66 has some readings that agree with the Textus Receptus but this is certainly not a “predominant” characteristic of the text of P66.   

           

            In section 36, Riplinger describes the Nestle-Aland compilation (Novum Testamentum Graece) and the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament as if they contain a consistently truncated, shortened form of the text.  Riplinger thus seems to assume that the Textus Receptus ought to be the standard of comparison, as if, when we come to a short reading in the Nestle-Aland compilation where there is a longer reading in the Textus Receptus, we ought to assume that something is missing in the Nestle-Aland compilation, rather than that something has been added to the Textus Receptus.  Hort, Nestle, and most textual critics of the 1900s tended to work from the opposite assumption, generally using “prefer the shorter reading” as a major guideline.  Recent research has shown that copyists tended to make more omissions than additions (thus nullifying what was for generations a common assumption among textual critics) – but it remains precarious to settle contests on the basis of generalizations; there are some cases (for instance, in James 4:12 and Jude v. 25) in which the Alexandrian Text has a reading longer than what is in the TR and the Byzantine Text.

            In her description of the UBS edition, Riplinger makes a strong case for the idea that the UBS Greek New Testament as it is currently printed is largely a Roman Catholic project carried out with an ecumenical agenda.  However, a tint of propaganda blots her point when she refers to the editors’ use of “their Gnostic Vatican manuscript.”  Vaticanus’ text perpetuates a few readings that may reflect the influence of early heretics such as the Gnostics, but their Gnostic-ness is contestable and they are quite rare.

            Next, Riplinger presents 23 passages – all from the Epistles of Paul – which, she proposes, show that in the base-text of the NIV and NASB the compilers have “used random minority text type readings when an opportunity arose to present New Age philosophy or demote God or Christ.”  Here on pages 499-502 we meet something to support the book’s title that is potentially more substantial than stories about a textual critic being bitten by Helena P. Blavatsky’s friend’s daughter’s dog; there is textual evidence to consider.  So let’s consider it.  My purpose here is not to settle every textual contest in the list, but to test Riplinger’s charge that the base-text of the NIV, NASB, etc., promote doctrines of the New Age movement in these verses.

            ● (1)  I Cor. 7:15:   NA reads ὑμᾶς where the TR, Byz, P46 and B read ἡμᾶς.  What difference has this made in English translations?  KJV:  “God hath called us to peace.”  NASB:  “God has called us to peace.”  NIV:  “God has called us to live in peace.”  CSB:  “God has called you to live in peace.” ESV:  “God has called you to peace.”  NASB:  “God has called us to peace,” with a note that means the reading “you.”  Obviously one reading is original and the other one is not, but where is the New Age philosophy in either one? 

            ● (2)  I Cor. 8:3:  NA and the TR both include τὸν θεόν, which is not included in P46.  What difference has this made in English translations?  KJV:  “But if any man love God.”  NASB:  “But if anyone loves God.”  NIV:  “But whoever loves God.”  ESV:  “But if anyone loves God.”  NASB:  “But if anyone loves God.”  Where is the New Age philosophy supposed to be?     

            ● (3)  I Cor. 10:9:  NA reads Χριστόν with the TR, Byz, and P46 where the previous edition of NA read Κυριον, with ℵ B C.  This interchange of sacred names causes a difference in meaning in English:  KJV:  “Neither let us tempt Christ.”  NASB:  “Nor let us try the Lord.”  NIV:  “We should not test Christ.”  ESV:  “We must not put Christ to the test.”  As in the first example, there is an obvious difference, but where is the exchange of a true statement for one which promotes a doctrine of the New Age movement?  It is not as if some papyrus says, “Let us not tempt Zarathustra.”   

            ● (4)  I Cor. 11:24:  NA does not have the words λάβετε φάγετε (“Take, eat”) and the word κλώμενον (“broken”), which are read in TR and Byz.  The NASB, NIV, CSB, ESV follow the NA and thus do not include “Tale, eat” and “broken” in this verse.  This may echo a difference in local liturgical practice, or (some would argue) incomplete harmonization to Matthew 26:25.  But what New Age doctrine is thus promoted?        

            ● (5)  I Cor. 13:3:  NA reads κἂν where TR and Byz read καὶ ἐὰν, but that makes no translatable difference; Riplinger must be referring to the textual contest further along in the verse:  TR and Byz read καυθήσωμαι (“to be burned”) where NA, with P46 ℵ B,  reads καυχήσωμαι (“that I may boast”).  Again, there is a difference – CSB:  “in order to boast.” NIV:  “that I may boast” – ESV:  “to be burned” – NASB:  “to be burned” – but does this look like anything other than the effect of an early scribal mistake involving a single letter?     
            ● (6)  I Cor. 14:38:   Where the TR and Byz read ἀγνοέιτω (“let him be ignorant”), NA reads ἀγνοέιται, and as a result of this one-syllable difference, the NIV reads “they will themselves be ignored,” the NASB reads, “he is not recognized.” The CSB reads “he will be ignored,” and the ESV reads “he is not recognized.”  Again, there is no question that there is a difference in the meaning – but where is the evidence of a devious doctrinal agenda, rather than scribal sloppiness?

            ● (7) I Cor. 15:49:  TR (Stephanus 1550) reads φορέσομεν, Byz reads φορέσωμεν, Pickering’s f³⁵ text reads φορέσωμεν, and NA reads φορέσομεν.  Here the NA and TR agree with each other while disagreeing with the majority of manuscripts!  The resultant difference in translations:  KJV:  “We shall also bear.”  CSB:  “we will also bear.”     NIV:  “so shall we bear.” ESV:  “we shall also bear.”  NASB:  “we will also bear,” with a footnote that mentions the alternative, “let us also bear.”  That alleged New Age conspiracy is starting to look extremely subtle.           

            ● (8) I Cor. 15:54:  TR, Byz, and NA all read the same; they all read νικος at the end of the verse, rejecting the reading in P46 and Vaticanus, νεικος.  (This reading νεικος was mentioned in the Preface to the 1582 Rheims version, as if it was a reading which Beza was inclined to adopt.)   The KJV, ESV, NIV, CSB, and NASB thus refer to “victory.”

            ● (9) 2 Cor. 1:10:   The TR and Byz read ῥύεται (“does deliver”) where NA reads ῥύσεται (“will deliver”).  This is why the KJV says “doth deliver” where the CSB, NIV, ESV, and NASB say “will deliver.”   

            ● (10) 2 Cor. 1:11:  The TR, Byz, and NA all read ἡμῶν at the end of the verse; thus the KJV and other versions refer to “on our behalf.”  Had the reading in P46 (ὑμῶν) been adopted instead, the phrase would say “on your behalf.”  

            ● (11) 2 Cor. 1:12:  The TR, Byz, and NA all read ἁπλότητι, which means “simplicity” or (in the NIV) “integrity.”  The NASB reflects the alternative reading supported by P46 ℵ* B, ἁγιότητι (adopted in NA previously), which means “holiness.”  Again I find myself asking, “Where is the insidious introduction of New Age philosophy??”       

            ● (12) 2 Cor. 2:1:  Where TR and Byz read δε, NA reads γαρ; the resultant difference in translations is the difference between “But” and “For” at the beginning of the verse. 

            ● (13) 2 Cor. 2:17:  TR and Byz and NA read πολλοὶ (“many”), and P46 reads λοιποί (“the rest”).  The CSB, ESV, KJV, NIV, NASB, and NIV read “many.”

            ● (14) 2 Cor. 3:2:  ℵ reads ὑμῶν where P46, TR, Byz, and NA read ἡμῶν.  This is the same sort of variant seen in 2 Cor. 1:11.   A few English versions had adopted ὑμῶν; this is why the RSV and the Living Bible refer to “your” hearts rather than “our” hearts.     

            ● (15) 2 Cor. 3:9:  Where the TR, Byz and B read ἡ διακονία, NA, with P46, reads τῇ διακονίᾳ.  This difference seems to have had no effect on English translations.

            ● (16) 2 Cor. 8:7:  Where the TR and Byz read ὑμῶν ἐν ἡμῖν, NA, with P46 and B, reads ἡμῶν ἐν ὑμῖν.  Thus while the KJV refers to “your love for us,” the ESV refers to “our love for you,” and so does the NRSV.  The CSB’s base-text agrees with Byz, reading “your love for us.” (I suspect that the CBGM, plus common sense, may elicit the adoption of ὑμῶν ἐν ἡμῖν in the future.)  As in other examples of this kind of exchange of pronouns, the difference in the readings looks much more like an effect of scribal sloppiness than an effect of a doctrinal agenda to smuggle New Age doctrines into the text.

            ● (17) Gal. 1:3:  Where the KJV’s base-text, along with the text in most manuscripts, means “God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ,” translations of NA say, instead, “God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”  In other words, the substance of this textual difference is a matter of where the word “our” (ἡμῶν) belongs.  Where is the New Age doctrine in either reading?

            ● (18) Gal. 1:8:   TR and Byz include the word ὑμῖν, and thus the KJV reads “to you” in the first reference to preaching, as well as the second reference.  The NA only has this word within brackets.  The NIV lacks the first reference to preaching “to you,” whereas the ESV, NASB, and CSB has it.          

            ● (19) Gal. 1:15:  the TR and Byz include ὁ θεὀς (“God”), which NA included within brackets; ὁ θεὀς is not there in P46 B Pesh, and an earlier edition of NA did not adopt it.  (Bruce Metzger added a special note in his Textual Commentary emphasizing his view that ὁ θεὀς is secondary here.)  The difference, when the verse is translated into English, is a difference between Paul referring to God directly (as in, “But when it pleased God, who separated me,” in the KJV) or implicitly (as in, “But when he who had set me apart . . .  was pleased” in the ESV).      

            ● (20) Gal. 4:25:  Where TR and Byz read τὸ γὰρ before Ἅγαρ Σινᾶ, NA reads τὸ δε.  The translation effect of this difference consists of whether or not the sentence begins with “For.”  What New Age teaching is supposed to be supported by this?    

            ● (21) Gal. 4:28:  Where TR and Byz (and ℵ A C) read ἡμεῖς at the beginning of the verse and ἐσμέν at the end, NA (with P46 and B) read ὑμεῖς and ἐστέ.  Thus while the KJV says “Now you,” most modern translations say, “Now we.”      

            ● (22) Gal. 6:2:  The one-letter difference between ἀναπληρώσατε in the TR and Byz (and ℵ A C), and ἀναπληρώσετε results in a slightly different meaning; this is why the KJV reads, “fulfil” while the NIV reads, “you will fulfill.” (Interestingly, the ESV and NASB agree with Byz here.)

            ● (23) Gal. 6:13:   Where Byz reads περιτετμημένοι αὐτοὶ (“those who are submitting to be circumcised,”) TR and NA read περιτεμνόμενοι αὐτοὶ (“Those who are themselves circumcised”).  Either way, the reference is to the same group of people. 

            Not a single one of these textual contests involves a reading which presents New Age philosophy. Not a single one of these textual contests involves a reading which demotes God or Christ.  The tone of Riplinger’s argument in sections 34-36 of her book, to the effect that the NIV and NASB are “New Age Bible versions,” hits a wall when the actual evidence is considered:  the presentation of New Age philosophy is simply absent from the 23 passages she has presented.  This is not to say that the Alexandrian readings in these 23 passages are all correct and original; it is to say that they are doctrinally benign.

            My general impression of New Age Bible Versions – from cover to cover – is that it was written by an author who has taken a valid concern – namely, concern about the many doctrinal errors that were promoted in the late 1800s by Blavatsky and various spiritualists – and transferred it to the text-critical work of B. F. Westcott (an Anglican bishop, and a different person from William Wynn Westcott) and F. J. A. Hort, as if their revision of the Greek New Testament, coming from the same place, and at around the same time, as Theosophy and Spiritualism, must be linked to those heresies in some way.    

            It is easy to claim an association between the New-Age-ism of the era in which Westcott and Hort worked, and their text-critical work itself.  And Hort did himself no favor by attending a séance on one occasion, by insisting on the inclusion of a Unitarian on the committee in charge of producing the Revised Version, or by joining a group of scholars who wished to put spiritualism under the microscope of scientific investigation.  But the strengths and weaknesses of Hort’s text-critical evidence and arguments are strong or weak on their own, and do not depend at all upon the theological integrity of Hort or of their other advocates.  In addition, many renderings which Riplinger finds objectionable are translation-related, and emanate from translators, not from the base-text being translated.   

            Riplinger would have done well to consider Hanlon’s Razor:  do not rush to attribute to malicious motives what can be explained by simple incompetence.  When we set aside Riplinger’s transferred alarm about Blavatsky & Co., and take the time to examine the textual centerpiece of her case – the 23 textual contests she has listed in which Alexandrian readings are supposed to present New Age philosophy – it becomes spectacularly clear that they do nothing of the sort. 

Readers are invited to double-check the data in this post.

           

Do Byzantine MSS Have Less Disagreements? (Part 3)

            In part 1 and 2 of this investigation, we compared the differences between Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in Luke 19 to the differences between Codex Alexandrinus and minuscule 2474 in the same passage, and found that although B and À disagree 35 times, and these 35 disagreements involve 115 letters’ worth of difference, there are 28 disagreements between A and 2474, involving 127 letters’ worth of disagreement, indicating that the amount of disagreement between À and B is not remarkably higher than the amount of disagreement between A and 2474 (both considered Byzantine manuscripts).

            Now, in Part 3, I wish to look at the text of Luke 19 in two members of a particular Byzantine sub-group:  family 35, which the famous compiler Hermann von Soden named the “K^r” text.  The “K” in this appellation stands for “Koine,” that is, the common text, essentially synonymous with the Byzantine Text, and the “^r” stands for “revision,” because von Soden thought that this form of the text was a standardization made in the 1100s. 

            Researcher Wilbur Pickering has argued that the term “K^r” is somewhat loaded, like Hort’s term “Neutral text,” and he believes that this text goes back to the 200s at least, and constitutes the best available representative of the original text.  Pickering has argued that because representative manuscripts of family 35 are found in diverse monasteries at Mount Athos, this implies that their ancestor-manuscripts were taken to Mount Athos before the Islamic conquest, ant thus family 35’s form of text cannot be the result of a medieval revision.  Without addressing Pickering’s claims, I will use the title “family 35” as an alternative to “K^r.”

           Family 35 could be described as a manuscript-cluster, having essentially the Byzantine Text but with enough shared readings to set its members apart from other Byzantine manuscript-groups.  (For a brief description of Byzantine sub-groups see Robert Waltz’s description of the Claremont Profile Method.)   Do its members agree with each other more closely than B and À?  More closely than A and 2474?

            To find out, I compared the text of Luke 19:1-27 in GA 155 and GA 691 (two members of family 35 – GA 155 is at the Vatican Library, catalogued as Reg. Gr. 79, and GA 691 is at the British Library, catalogued as Additional MS 22739).  I compared their online page-views to the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform, using the same ground-rules I used for À, B, A, and 2474 (that is, setting aside trivial orthographic variations, not counting contractions as errors, and ignoring most itacisms).   

            Due to the remarkable uniformity of the text in these two manuscripts, instead of providing a verse-by-verse list of their disagreements with each other, it seems better to just state the differences:

           

Differences between GA 155 and 691 in Luke 19:1-27:

1-15 – no differences

16 – 691 reads επραγματεύσατο instead of διεπραγματεύσατο (-2)

17 – no differences

18 – 692 reads μνας instead of μνα before σου (+1)

19-22 – no differences

23 – 691 reads την before τράπεζαν (+3)

Verses 24-27 – no differences

            (Both 155 and 691 disagree with RP2005 in verse 15 by not including και, and both MSS read συκομοραίαν instead of RP2005’s συκομωραίαν in verse 4.)
            The total amount of disagreement between 155 and 691 in Luke 19:1-27 thus consists of three disagreements, involving six letters.

            I am confident that 155 and 691 display a similarly remarkable level of agreement in Luke 19:28-48.

            In Luke 19:1-27, there is obviously a stark difference between the degree of disagreement between two representatives of the Alexandrian Text (20 differences, involving 49 letters), and two relatively early members of the Byzantine Text (14 differences, involving 69 letters), and two members of family 35 (three disagreements, involving six letters).   

            Unless 155 and 691 are somehow exceptional, it appears that the copyists of the manuscripts in family 35 transcribed with a level of precision and uniformity which was on a whole other level compared to the scribes in the other manuscript-groups.  It may be the case that “No two manuscripts agree exactly,” due to trivial differences, but the agreement-rate for members of family 35 appears to be phenomenally higher than the agreement-rate among members of any other major manuscript-group.  Whether the copyists of the over 220 manuscripts that represent were physically isolated from exemplars representing other forms of the text, or were intentionally selective about which exemplars to use, they perpetuated the text with remarkably uniformity.  So we can say, when asking if Byzantine manuscripts have less disagreements that other forms of the text:  not necessarily in early settings where the use of diverse exemplars elicited mixture, but in the Byzantine sub-group known as family 35, yes; those Byzantine MSS have far fewer disagreements.  

If In Doubt, Sort It Out

 

Curious incidents
in the Byzantine Text.

          “If in doubt, don’t throw it out.”  That is the way in which Dan Wallace has asserted that Byzantine copyists handled the text of the New Testament when they had two exemplars that said two different things.  That is essentially a restatement of the claim made by J. J. Griesbach over 200 years ago:  “Scribes were much more prone to add than to omit.  They hardly ever leave out anything on purpose, but they added much.” 

            That idea – one of the fundamental principles used by textual critics throughout the 1800’s and 1900’s – was effectively erased by the data and analysis which was published by James Royse in 2010 in Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri.  Royse observed that the rate at which the copyists of some early papyri made omissions is higher than the rate at which those copyists made additions; the ratio works out to about 3:2.  This means that scribes were more prone to omit than to add.  Griesbach had it backwards, and everyone who has relied on the validity of the axiom, “Prefer the shorter reading” has had it backwards – including Bruce Metzger.

            It shouldn’t have taken until 2010 for researchers to acknowledge that Griesbach’s claim was standing on thin ice.  (And some already did; in each generation at least a few scholars maintained that the New Testament text’s transmission-history resembled the clothes in a traveling salesman’s suitcase, losing a sock at every hotel.)  To researchers equipped with (mostly) accurate transcripts of Codices Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, Bezae, and Sinaiticus, it should have been clear that if the Byzantine Text originated as an amalgamation of Alexandrian and Western readings, its creators must have frequently rejected the readings in their exemplars.  That is, one can believe Hort’s theory of the Lucianic recension, or one can believe that scribes using more than one exemplar typically expanded the text, but not both. 

            The following readings, all taken from the first five chapters of the Gospel of John, demonstrate this with particular force.  In each case, the Byzantine reading is shorter than a reading found in leading Alexandrian and/or Western witnesses. 

            ● 1:6 – Byz does not read ἦν

            ● 1:19 – Byz does not read πρὸς αὐτον after ἀπέστειλαν

            ● 1:21 – Byz does not read πάλιν after αὐτὸν (cf. Codex Wsupp)

            ● 1:28 – Byz does not read ὁ before Ἰωἀννης

            ● 1:38 – Byz does not prefix μεθ- to ἐρμηνευόμενον

            ● 1:39 – Byz does not read οὖν after ἦλθον

            ● 1:46 – Byz does not read ὁ before Φίλιππος

            ● 1:50 – Byz does not read ὄτι

            ● 2:4 – Byz does not read Καὶ before λέγει

            ● 2:17 – Byz does not read ὄτι after ἐστίν

            ● 3:5 – Byz does not read ὁ before Ἰησοῦς

            ● 3:28 – Byz does not read ὄτι after εἶπον
            ● 4:3 – Byz does not read γῆν before καὶ

            ● 4:3 – Byz does not read πάλιν before εἰς (B^c, À, P66, P75, D, and L all read πάλιν)

            ● 4:5 – Byz does not read τῷ after Ἰακὼβ

            ● 4:14 – Byz does not read ἐγὼ before δώσω (cf. Codex Wsupp) 

            ● 4:15 – Byz does not prefix δι- to έρχομαι

            ● 4:27 – Byz does not read αὐτῷ after εἶπεν

            ● 5:5 – Byz does not read αὐτοῦ after ἀσθενείᾳ

            ● 5:9 – Byz does not read ἐγερθεὶς

            ● 5:10 – Byz does not read καὶ after ἐστιν

            ● 5:10 – Byz does not read σου after κράβαττόν

            ● 5:15 – Byz does not read οὖν after ἀπῆλθεν

            ● 5:19 – Byz does not read τοῦ ἀνθρώπου after υἱὸς

            ● 5:26 – Byz does not read ὁ ζῶν before ἒχει

            ● 5:40 – Byz does not read αἰώνιον after ζωὴν

           

            That’s 26 non-expansions in five chapters, an average of five non-expansions per chapter.  Extrapolating, we might find over 100 such non-expansions in the entire text of John, and over 400 such non-expansions in all four Gospels.  

            (In addition, one might profit from considering all the Byzantine readings that are not significantly longer than their Alexandrian and Western rivals, but are simply different – variants such as the reading ὡσεὶ (instead of ὡς) in John 4:7, and the transposition at the end of John 4:20, and the reading Βηθεσδὰ in John 5:2 (where Vaticanus reads Βηθσαιδὰ, Sinaiticus reads Βηθζαθὰ, and D reads Βελζεθὰ).  

            How can one say that the Alexandrian and Western readings in the listed passages have not been thrown out?  And how can the Byzantine Text, at these points, be considered derivative of text-forms whose readings are rejected?

            Hort’s eight conflations have been used as proof that Byzantine scribes applied the principle, “If in doubt, don’t throw it out.”  Meanwhile, a tour through just the first five chapters of John reveals three times as many instances where, if Byzantine copyists accessed Alexandrian and Western exemplars (as advocates of the Lucianic recension believe that they did) – they must have thrown out Alexandrian or Western readings. 

            This does not mean that as more and more non-Byzantine manuscripts (with non-Byzantine readings) were encountered in the areas now known as Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, and Greece in the 300’s, they had no effect whatsoever on the local text.  This data does not refute the idea that in some passages of the Byzantine Text (I am thinking specifically of some of Hort’s alleged conflations), an early local reading, which once agreed exclusively with either the Alexandrian or Western reading, has been completely supplanted by an expansion that was elicited by the arrival, from another locale, of an attractive rival reading.  (Something similar happened occasionally in the Alexandrian transmission-stream, as Wilbur Pickering has demonstrated; see, for examples, Mark 1:28, John 7:39, Ephesians 2:5, and Colossians 1:12.)  But it does imply that to describe Byzantine scribes as if they never met an expansion they didn’t like is to spread an essentially false characterization.

            The evidence supports instead the position that the typical attitude of Byzantine scribes, when and where they encountered unfamiliar readings from non-local exemplars, was one of caution:  “If in doubt, sort it out.”  Otherwise these 26 short Byzantine readings in John chapters 1-5 would be longer.          

             

Equitable Eclecticism - Part 1

            In 2010, I wrote an essay called Equitable Eclecticism:  The Future of New Testament Textual Criticism, and included it in the Kindle e-book Assorted Essays on New Testament Textual Criticism.  Since then, I have frequently been asked about how my text-critical approach differs from the Byzantine Priority approach and “Reasoned Eclecticism.”  So, as a convenient reference, here is the essay on Equitable Eclecticism, presented in two parts (with some improvements).

Equitable Eclecticism: 

The Future of New Testament Textual Criticism

Textual Criticism:  Its Goals and Risks 

The textual criticism of the Gospels is a scientific task which has two goals.  The primary goal is the reconstruction of the text of each Gospel in its original form, that is, the form in which it was initially received by the church.  The secondary goal is the reconstruction of the transmission-history of the text.  This involves both the evaluation of rival readings in specific variant-units, and the evaluation of the documents in which the readings are found.  Hort, in his 1881 Introduction, argued that if superior readings are consistently found in a particular document or set of documents, in cases that seem easy to decide, then the character of the documents should be a factor when considering harder cases. 
            Hort expressed this principle as an axiom:  “Knowledge of documents should precede final judgment upon readings.”  The consideration of individual variant-units should never be completely detached from the question of the relative quality of the witnesses, or from the question of how groups of variants became characteristic readings of text-types.  Accurate text-critical judgments will assist in the estimation of the relative values of witnesses, and in the reconstruction of the text’s transmission-history; simultaneously, accurate assignments of relative value to the witnesses, combined with accurate reconstructions of the text’s transmission-history, will assist specific text-critical decisions.     

The textual critic who engages this method should vigilantly avoid circularity; the adoption of a reading because “the best manuscripts” support it ought to be a last resort.  After observing, on analytical grounds, that certain witnesses seem to consistently contain the best readings, a textual critic might then be tempted to abandon the initial approach which led to that premise, and proceed to use the premise itself to justify a tendency to adopt the readings of those witnesses.  Similarly, a textual critic who notices that a group of witnesses tends to contain the worst readings might be tempted to reject the remainder of the testimony of that group of witnesses.  If a textual critic proceeds to build on both such premises, the premises will virtually determine the results of the rest of the analysis. The “best manuscripts” will seemingly get better and better.  

Competing Models of Transmission-History

The model of transmission-history adopted by a textual critic has a strong effect upon the values which a textual critic assigns to the testimony of groups of witnesses, and therefore also upon the final evaluation of variants.  In this respect, the approach which I advocate – Equitable Eclecticism – resembles the approach used by Hort.  However, Equitable Eclecticism yields an archetype which is significantly different from the Revised Text produced by Westcott & Hort, and from the modern descendants of the Revised Text (such as the 28th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece).  This is because research and discoveries subsequent to Westcott & Hort have required the adoption of a transmission-model significantly different from the one used by Hort. 

Hort, building on premises developed by previous investigators, reasoned that the Byzantine Text was essentially the result of a recension that consisted of readings drawn from manuscripts with Alexandrian or Western readings; Byzantine variants were derived from the Alexandrian Text, or the Western Text, or both, or, in some cases, came into being during the recension.  Hort therefore rejected all distinctive Byzantine variants.  After dismissing the Western Text as the result of scribal creativity, embellishment, and a general lack of discipline (with the exception of a smattering of readings), Hort declared the Alexandrian Text (which he called the “Neutral” text) the only text-type which could possibly be regarded as the depository of the original text of the Gospels. 

Hort’s endorsement of the Alexandrian Text was not absolute, but it was so strong that he openly stated that variants shared by the Alexandrian Text’s two flagship codices (B and À) “should be accepted as the true readings until strong internal evidence is found to the contrary,” and “No readings of ÀB can safely be rejected absolutely,” while “All distinctively Syrian” – that is, Byzantine – “readings must be at once rejected.”

Thus, in the approach used by Hort, the degree of favor that was given to the Alexandrian Text was matched only by the degree of disregard that was given to the Byzantine Text.  The categorical rejection of Byzantine readings was a natural implications of Hort’s model of transmission-history in which the Western Text was derived from the Alexandrian Text, and the Byzantine Text was derived from both the Alexandrian Text and the Western Text. 

However, Hort acknowledged that such a clear-cut genealogical model would be out of place if a transmission-model persistently involved readings which all had some clearly ancient attestation.  [See Hort’s Introduction, page 286, § 373.]

This very thing, or something very close to it, was subsequently proposed by textual critics in the 1900s.  Eminent scholars such as E. C. Colwell, G. D. Kilpatrick, and Kurt and Barbara Aland maintained, respectively, that “The overwhelming majority of readings,” “almost all variants,” and “practically all the substantive variants in the text of the New Testament” existed before the year 200.  Nevertheless the Hortian text has not been overthrown.  Only slightly changed, it has become entrenched in NA-28 and UBS-5 as the primary, and nearly exclusive, Greek New Testament used in seminaries. 

With the discovery and publication of Egyptian New Testament papyri in the 1900s – beginning with Grenfell and Hunt’s work at Oxyrhynchus – Hort’s  claim that the Alexandrian readings have a demonstrably greater antiquity than their rivals has eroded.  Harry A. Sturz collected and categorized dozens of distinctive Byzantine variants which were supported by at least one early papyrus.  Sturz’s data does not vindicate the entire Byzantine Text (and we should not expect it to do so).  What it does do is demonstrate that Hort’s main reason for rejecting distinctive Byzantine readings was unsound.  According to Hort’s transmission-model, none of the early distinctive Byzantine readings listed by Sturz should exist.  The fact that they obviously did exist, even in papyri found in Egypt, demonstrates that the Byzantine Text may, at any given point, attest to an ancient distinctive reading.  Hort’s theory of the origin of distinct Byzantine readings was wrong.

In addition, discoveries about the texts in the papyri, in early versions, and in early parchment codices have contributed to the erosion of one of the building-blocks of Hort’s approach:  the proposal that conflations in the Byzantine Text demonstrate that it is later than the Alexandrian Text and the Western Text.  As Edward Miller objected in 1897, eight conflations cannot justify the rejection of the entire Byzantine Text.  They may be comparable to recently minted coins dropped in an ancient well. 

Dr. Wilbur Pickering, in Appendix D of his book The Identity of the New Testament Text, showed that an apparent conflation exists in Codex Sinaiticus at John 13:24 (where the Alexandrian Text has και λεγει αυτω ειπε τις εστιν, the Byzantine Text has πυθεσθαι τις αν ειη, and Sinaiticus reads πυθεσθαι τις αν ειη περι ου ελεγεν, και λεγει αυτω ειπε τις εστιν).  A conflation appears to occur in B at Ephesians 2:5 and at Colossians 1:12 (where the Western Text has καλεσαντι, the Byzantine Text has ικανωσαντι, and B has καλεσαντι και ικανωσαντι).  In D, a conflation appears to occur at Acts 10:48 and John 5:37 (where the Alexandrian Text – supported by P75 – has εκεινος μεμαρτυρηκεν, the Byzantine Text – supported by P66 - has αυτος μεμαρτυρηκεν, and D has εκεινος αυτος μεμαρτυρηκεν).                

In the world according to Hort,
this should not happen.

The papyri have supplied direct evidence against Hort’s belief that apparent conflations imply that the text in which they are found must be late.  In P53, the text of Matthew 26:36 seems to read ου αν, where the Byzantine text has ου and the Alexandrian Text and Western Text have αν.  Papyrus 66 reads σχισμα ουν παλιν at John 10:19 (agreeing with the Byzantine Text), where the Alexandrian Text has σχισμα παλιν and the Western Text has σχισμα ουν.  Similarly, P66 reads εβαστασαν ουν παλιν at John 10:31 (again agreeing with the Byzantine Text), where the Alexandrian Text has εβαστασαν παλιν and the Western Text has εβαστασαν ουν.  

The appearance of such readings in very early manuscripts forces the concession that they do not imply that the text in which they appear is late.  Instead, they prove that an early text can appear to include conflations.  Nevertheless some modern-day textual critics still appeal to Hort’s list of eight Byzantine conflations as if it demonstrated that the entire Byzantine Text was secondary. [See for example Dan Wallace’s treatment of the data in his online essay The Conspiracy Behind the New Bible Translations.]    

Ironically, as the papyri-discoveries took away the pedestal upon which Hort’s transmission-model had stood, they also tended to exonerate Hort’s favored text of the Gospels, the Alexandrian Text, by demonstrating the high antiquity of the Alexandrian text of Luke and John.  Papyrus 75, in particular, possesses a remarkably high rate of agreement with B.  This shows that the Alexandrian Text of Luke and John was carefully preserved in the 200s, and this has tended to alleviate the suspicions of some earlier scholars that the Alexandrian Text was the result of editorial activity in the 200s.

The correspondence between Papyrus 75 and Codex B was interpreted by some textual critics as a demonstration of the antiquity and superiority of the entire Alexandrian Text.  Kurt Aland compared the situation to sampling a jar of jelly or jam:  a mere spoonful is enough to show what is in the rest of the jar.  However, although the agreement between P75 and B proves that the Alexandrian Text of Luke and John is not the result of scribal editing conducted in the 200s, it did not prove that Alexandrian readings are not results of earlier scribal editing.  

Theoretically, if the Western Text could develop in the period prior to the production of P75, so could the Alexandrian Text.  Papyrus 75 proved that the Alexandrian Text of Luke and John is very early; it did not prove that Alexandrian readings are not the result of very early editorial activity.  (As late as 1992, Bruce Metzger maintained that most scholars “are still inclined to regard the Alexandrian text as on the whole the best ancient recension,” on page 216 of The Text of the New Testament, third edition (1992), emphasis added.)

  

Nor did Papyrus 75 prove that the Byzantine Text is less ancient than the Alexandrian Text.  It shows what kind of Gospels-text (or at least, major parts of the Gospels-text) was in use in Upper Egypt in the early 200s.  It does not constitute evidence about what form of text was used, or was not used, in other places.  

The most significant evidence for the absence of the Byzantine Text prior to the 300s is the lack of patristic testimony for its use, but this is largely an argument from silence.  The natural destructive effects of humidity upon papyrus-material, allied with Roman persecutors who sought to destroy Christian literature, silenced a large proportion of the Christian communities of the first three centuries of Christendom.  According to Hort’s theories, when these communities adopted the Byzantine Text in the 300s and 400s, they embraced a new, imported text of the Gospels, setting aside whatever they had used previously.  A more plausible alternative is that they simply continued to use their own local texts which consisted primarily of Byzantine readings.  (For additional thoughts on this subject see my post Byzantine Manuscripts:  Where Were They Before the 300s?.)         

The discovery of the papyri led some textual critics to advocate an undue emphasis upon the ages of witnesses, resulting in a lack of equity toward variants with no support in Egypt.  Because the Egyptian climate allowed the preservation of papyrus, the oldest copies will almost always be copies from Egypt.  To favor the variant with the oldest attestation is to tilt the playing-field, so to speak, in favor of whatever readings are found in whatever manuscripts were stored in the gentlest climate.  But this is no more reasonable than favoring the variants of a manuscript because it was found closer to the equator than other manuscripts.  Certainly when two rival variants are evaluated, and the first is uniformly attested in early witnesses, while the second is found exclusively in very late witnesses, the case for the first one is enhanced.  But to assign values to witnesses according to their ages without considering factors such as climate is to introduce a lack of equity into one’s analysis.  

The papyri-discoveries elicited another interesting development.  Before Hort, pioneering scholars such as Griesbach had organized witnesses into three main groups – Western, Byzantine, and Alexandrian.  Each group, characterized by consistent patterns of readings, was considered a text-type, and manuscripts sharing those special patterns of readings were viewed as relatives of one another.  Hort then divided the Alexandrian group into two text-types, calling its earlier stratum the “Neutral” text, supported by Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.  Then, following analysis by Kirsopp Lake, the Caesarean text of the Gospels was added.  But the evidence from the papyri indicates that even in a single locale (Egypt), the text existed in forms other than those four. 

Consider Papyrus 45, a fragmentary copy of the Gospels and Acts from the early 200s (or slightly earlier).  In Mark 7:25-37, when P45 disagrees with either B or the Byzantine Text or both, P45 agrees with B 22% of the time, it agrees with the Byzantine Text 30% of the time, and 48% of the time it disagrees with them both.  Such departures from the usual profiles of text-types has led some textual critics to reconsider the existence of early text-types, arguing instead that the text in the 100s and 200s was in a state of fluctuation.  A plausible alternative is that some of the papyri attest to the existence of localized text-forms which became extinct, without implying that the Western, Byzantine, and Caesarean forms did not exist prior to the 300s.

Competing Greek New Testaments

In the late 1800s, Westcott & Hort’s Greek text of the New Testament faced several obstacles.  First was the popularity of the Textus Receptus, which, as the base-text of the King James Version, had the status of an ancient landmark in English-speaking countries, regardless of how carefully attempts were made to demonstrate that its Reformation-era compilers, or some stealthy editors in ancient times, were the real landmark-movers.   

In 1898, the Würrtemburg Bible Society published the first edition of Novum Testamentum Graece, an inexpensive Greek New Testament which closely resembled the Westcott-Hort compilation, and which was designed to compete with the edition of the Textus Receptus which was being widely disseminated by the British and Foreign Bible Society.  (The leaders of BFBS apparently had not found Hort’s 1881 case for his compilation irresistible.)  

Eberhard Nestle wrote an enthusiastic recommendation of this handy Greek New Testament; his brief review appeared in the Expository Times in June of 1898.  He pointed out how “disgraceful” it would be to continue to circulate Erasmus’ errors in Rev. 17:8 and Rev. 22:19-21.  He invited the British and Foreign Bible Society to begin to circulate Novum Testamentum Graece instead of the Textus Receptus.  In 1904 the British and Foreign Bible Society began circulating the fourth edition of Novum Testamentum Graece.  Its editor:  Eberhard Nestle. 

While that was happening, a scholar named Hermann von Soden was in the process of compiling an edition of the Greek New Testament which textual scholars expected to become definitive, superseding all previous editions.  But when von Soden’s Greek New Testament was released in 1902-1911, it was found to be extremely cumbersome, and it was flawed in various ways.  Nestle’s Novum Testamentum Graece was on hand to meet the need of seminarians and other textual researchers, and it has done so ever since – and it eventually was adopted, in later editions, as the primary base-text for new translations.

But should that be the case?  According to Kurt and Barbara Aland, the 27th edition of NTG differs from the text compiled by Eberhard Nestle “in merely 700 passages.”  Considering the high number of variant-units involved, this implies that the text of the Gospels in NA-27 and UBS-4 is essentially the same text that was published by Eberhard Nestle in the early 1900s.  (See page 20 of The Text of the New Testament:  “In its 657 printed pages the early Nestle differs from the new text in merely seven hundred passages.”  Consider that in the Gospels alone, the 25th and 27th editions of NTG disagree at over 400 places.)

It is as if the papyri (and the research into early versions, and the revisions of patristic writings, and other significant discoveries and research undertaken in the 1900s) have scarcely had an impact, whereas in reality they cracked the transmission-model that was a large part of the foundation of the Westcott-Hort compilation.

The marketplace for Greek New Testaments in the early 1900s rapidly became crowded:  Bernard Weiss, Alexander Souter, and J. M. S. Baljon made compilations which rivaled Nestle’s.  F. H. A. Scrivener’s editions of the Textus Receptus remained in circulation. Thomas Newberry’s 1870 Englishman’s Greek New Testament – an interlinear edition of the Textus Receptus which featured a presentation of variants adopted by textual critics prior to Westcott & Hort (Griesbach, Lachmann, Tregelles, Tischendorf, Alford, and Wordsworth) – also remained in print.  The public generally had to choose between either a Greek text similar to the 1881 revision of Westcott & Hort, or the Textus Receptus.  

That changed in 1982, when Zane Hodges and Arthur Farstad published a compilation called The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text.  As its name implies, this text was intended to consist of the readings shared by the majority of Greek manuscripts.  Hodges and Farstad proposed that the Alexandrian Text is a heavily edited, pruned form of the text, and that the Majority Text is much better, inasmuch as “In any tradition where there are not major disruptions in the transmissional history, the individual reading which has the earliest beginning is the one most likely to survive in a majority of documents.”  The work of Hodges and Farstad was the basis for many text-critical footnotes in the New Testament in the New King James Version, which was published around the same time under Dr. Farstad’s supervision. 

A similar work was released in 1991 by Maurice Robinson and William Pierpont, called The New Testament in the Original Greek According to the Byzantine/Majority Textform.  A second edition was published in 2005.  Rejecting any notion of defending the Textus Receptus (which differs from the Byzantine Text at over 1,800 points, about 1,000 of which are translatable), Robinson and Pierpont regarded the Byzantine Text as virtually congruent to the original text.  The Byzantine Textform consists of a series of majority readings, wherever majority readings clearly exist.  Outside the pericope adulterae (John 7:53-8:11) and the book of Revelation, almost no analytical attempts to reconstruct the relationships of variants within the Byzantine tradition seems evident, since the question is usually settled by a numerical count (or, by a consultation of representative manuscripts, using data from von Soden’s work).

In some respects, Hodges & Farstad and Robinson & Pierpont have paved a trail that was blazed in the 1800s by John Burgon, who opposed the theories of Westcott & Hort.  Burgon’s aggressive writing-style sometimes overshadowed his argumentation; nevertheless some of his views have been vindicated by subsequent research.  

For example, Hort asserted that “even among the numerous unquestionably spurious readings of the New Testament there are no signs of deliberate falsification of the text for dogmatic purposes,” but Burgon insisted that the opposite was true.  Burgon’s posthumously published Causes of Corruption (1896) even included a sub-chapter titled “Corruption by the Orthodox.”  Almost a century later in 1993, a variation on Burgon’s theme was upheld by Bart Ehrman in the similarly titled book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.  As a result, although Ehrman exaggerated his case in many respects, no textual critics now consider Hort’s assertion to be correct. 

Many scholars and interested bystanders, noticing that the weaknesses of several of Hort’s key premises and assertions have been exposed, have been willing to consider the model of transmission-history proposed by the supporters of the Byzantine Textform.  Others have irresponsibly attempted to associate it with the fundamentalist doctrine of King James Onlyism.  

Others have rejected it because, despite detailed lists of principles of internal and external evidence in Dr. Robinson’s essay The Case for Byzantine Priority, the factor that usually determines the adoption of a variant in the approach advocated by Robinson is its attestation in over 80% of the Greek manuscripts.  Patristic evidence and the testimony of early versions are not included in the equation of what constitutes the majority reading.  Distinctive Alexandrian variants, Western variants, Caesarean variants, and even minority readings attested by the oldest Byzantine witnesses (such as parts of Codices A and W) have no chance of being adopted; generally, if a variant is supported by over 80% of the Greek manuscripts, it is adopted.  

The validity of such an approach depends upon the validity of the premise that the transmission of the text of the Gospels was free from “major disruptions.”  However, major disruptions have had enormous impacts upon the transmission of the text.  Roman persecutions – followed by Roman sponsorship – wartime and peacetime, dark ages and golden ages – all these things, plus innovations and inventions related to the copying of manuscripts, drastically changed the circumstances in which the text was transmitted, and while all text-types were affected by them, they were not all affected to the same extent.  It is no more scientifically valid to adopt a reading because it was favored in Byzantine scriptoriums than it is to adopt a reading because the manuscripts that support it were kept in an area with low humidity (namely Egypt) and thus lasted longer than the manuscripts in other places.        

[Continued in Part 2]