About That "Embarrassment of Riches" (and Quantities of Manuscripts)

“We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the evidence for the New Testament.”   Ever hear that one?  Such a claim is routinely made by Christians who fill, or appear to fill, two roles as apologists and researchers.  And they are mostly right:  the quantity of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament is staggeringly superior to the evidence for any other literary work of a comparable age.  But they are partly wrong, for at least three reasons. 

First, the relative poverty of textual support for specific readings in the works of Suetonius (to pick one ancient author) does not make other authors (such as the authors of the books of the New Testament) rich. 

Second, the New Testament did not initially circulate as a single book, but as 27 books - which were not copied and distributed evenly.  (There are over 1,600 Greek Gospels-manuscripts; there are fewer than 400 Greek MSS of Revelation.) 

Third, quantity is not necessarily quality.  Kurt & Barbara Aland (as in "Nestle-Aland compilation of Novum Testamentum Graece," the primary base-text of the New Testament in the ESV, NIV, CSB, NRSV, NLT, and NASB), after listing numerous Greek manuscripts, candidly stated in their 1981 handbook The Text of the New Testament (translated into English by Erroll F. Rhodes), “All of these minuscules exhibit a purely or predominantly Byzantine text.  And this is not a peculiarity of the minuscules, but a characteristic they share with a considerable number  of uncials.  They are all irrelevant for textual criticism, at least for establishing the original form of the text and its development in the early centuries.”

How many Greek manuscripts did Kurt and Barbara Aland consider “irrelevant” to the task of reconstructing the original New Testament text?  Looking over their list on pages 140-142 (“Table 7”), I count 887 manuscripts.  Aland & Aland, though, seem willing to put “more than 1,175 minuscules” (p. 138) into the category which they dismiss as “irrelevant.”

The number of minuscules that they did not consider “irrelevant” is given on page 138:  “a little more than 175.” 

What about uncials, a.k.a. majuscule MSS?  The total number of majuscules is easy to calculate, since each is identified by a number preceded by a zero, and we saw the addition of 0315 in 2015 – so the current total number of majuscules is just a bit higher than 315, right?  Wrong.  Some majuscule manuscripts were obtained by researchers, and were given identification numbers, after the manuscripts had been torn up.  Only later did researchers discern that they had portions of the same manuscript, with a different identification-number given to each portion. 

029 is same manuscript catalogued (in portions) as 0113, 0125, and 0139. 

070 is the same manuscript catalogued (in portions) as 0110, 0124, 0178, 0179, 0180, 0190, 0191, 0193, 0194, 0124, and 0202. 

063, according to Aland & Aland, “belongs with 0117.”

064 is the same manuscript (in portions) as 074 and 090.  (Part of this manuscript was found among the New Finds at St. Catherine’s monastery.)

073 is the same manuscript as 084.

083 is the same manuscript (in portions) as 0112 and 0235.  (Take note NET-readers; this manuscript is erroneously double-counted in the NET’s notes.)

087 is the same manuscript as 092b.

089 is the same manuscript as 092a and 0293.

0100 is the same manuscript as 0195, and neither one merits an identification-number among continuous-text uncial MSS, because each one is part of lectionary 963.

0102 is probably (according to Aland & Aland) the same manuscript as 0138.       

0129 is the same manuscript as 0203, and neither one merits an identification-number among continuous-text uncial MSS, because each one is part of lectionary 1575.

0137 is the same manuscript as 0138.

0152 is a talisman, technically not a continuous-text uncial manuscript.

0153 is an ostracon, technically not a continuous-text uncial manuscript.

0192 is lectionary 1604.

0212 is not a continuous-text uncial manuscript, and thus does not merit inclusion in the list.

A simple (perhaps too simple) count brings the total number of continuous-text majuscule (uncial) manuscripts down from 315 (in 2015) to 285.    

Uncial manuscripts that display a Byzantine text (according to Aland & Aland), and which are thus “irrelevant,” include 07, 09, 011, 013, 014, 017, 018, 021, 022, 023, 024, 026, 027, 028, 030, 031, 033, 034, 036, 039 (the same manuscript as 566 (Codex L; the text of Matthew and Mark is written in minuscule; Luke and John are written in majuscule – but it is all a single manuscript), 041, 042, 043, 045, 046, 047, 049, 052, 056, 0104, 0116, 0133, 0135, 0197, 0211, 0248, 0253, 0255, and 0257.  These forty majuscules are in the same “irrelevant” category in which Aland & Aland placed about 1,175 minuscules.

So the maximum number of continuous-text majuscule parchments that were used for the compilation of the Nestle-Aland NTG is . . . (let’s see:  285 – 40 . . . ) 245.

Most of these are not complete.  It should be kept in mind than even a tiny fragment, if it is not part of another manuscript, receives its own identification-number, and is counted as one manuscript.  A complete New Testament = one manuscript, and a fragment of a single page = one manuscript.  Without this factor constantly in mind, people who hear about the “embarrassment of riches” might tend to imagine that we have 245 relevant majuscule continuous-text copies of the New Testament.  But in real life, as I mentioned, many of the majuscules are fragmentary. 

Instead of referring to “New Testament manuscripts,” majuscule or minuscule, it would be more accurate to refer to “Gospels-manuscripts,” (about 1,800) and to manuscripts of Acts and the Epistles,  and to manuscripts of Revelation, and to manuscripts that contain the entire New Testament, whether majuscule or minuscule, are anomalies.  (I think about 70 such copies exist.)   (Manuscripts with other combinations also exist.)

Minuscules are not immune from the same (or similar) kind of double-counting that slices off the number of real continuous-text majuscule manuscripts by ten percent.  Georgi Parpulov, of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, reported in 2022 in the open-access journal Fragmentology that GA 674 and GA 1284 are portions of the same manuscript.  And one minuscule, GA 2427, which was featured prominently in the apparatus of the Nestle-Aland NTG, but was proven to be a nineteenth-century forgery, has to go.  Another, GA 2795, is lectionary 2198.

Finally we come to lectionaries.  Minuscule 2795 is part of the same manuscript as lectionary 2198.  Parpulov also reported that lectionary 849 and lectionary 309 are portions of the same lectionary.   There are over 2,300 lectionaries to consider (and here again one should differentiate between Gospel-lectionaries, and lectionaries of the remaining New Testament books).  But although lectionaries have been the focus of considerable research, one would think from the apparatus in the Nestle-Aland NTG and the UBS GNT that hardly anyone is considering them.  Almost all of them display (with expansions and modifications) the Byzantine Text that Aland & Aland dismissed as irrelevant.
As Maurice Robinson has observed – as noticed by Peter Gurry in 2017 at the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog – “The resources of the pre-fourth century era unfortunately remain meager, restricted to a limited body of witnesses. Even if the text-critical evidence is extended through the eighth century, there would be only 424 documents, mostly fragmentary.”  

 Am I disturbed by individuals who, in one breath, give soothing assurance about the “embarrassment of riches,” and in the next breath endorse the Nestle-Aland compilation that was made with the working premise that over 1,175 minuscule manuscripts, and 40 majuscule manuscripts, are irrelevant?  Well, to answer that question, I must diverge from today’s main topic. 

It is disturbing that anyone would brag about our “embarrassment of riches” and then proceed to dismiss 85% of the coins in the royal treasury as counterfeit.  (Meaning:  Wallace & Co. talk about our “embarrassment of riches” but at the same time habitually reject the reading found in the vast majority of manuscripts (not just 85%, but sometimes 95% – keeping in mind that MSS should be generally divided into Gospels/Acts-Epistles/Revelation categories) when that reading disagrees with a favored reading in the Alexandrian Text.)

But this is essentially a point against bad rhetoric, bad apologetics, and bloviations (or combinations of all three), not a point against the evidence for the New Testament text, about which I am not disturbed.  I disagree with the idea that the Byzantine text, and the manuscripts supporting it, are irrelevant.  Aland & Aland’s anti-Byzantine bias is obsolete. 

The approach used to compile the New Testament base-text of the ESV, NIV, NLT, CSB, and NRSV is basically the same obsolete, never-was-valid approach that was used for the 1881 edition of Westcott & Hort.  (NA27 and WH1881 fully disagree in only 661 readings; I use “fully” to modify “disagree” because the editors of NA27 made non-decisions at multiple points and put some readings in brackets and double-brackets (a feature which I guarantee was not in the original text).  The number of tenuous disagreements is higher:  1,372, as I have explained here.) 

One doesn’t have to think about that long and hard to discern that the Nestle-Aland compilation is unstable at 711 points – not counting the 34 readings introduced in NA28, which included a conjectural emendation (based on zero Greek manuscripts).  (Many of which are trivial as far as meaning is concerned.)

That doesn’t make the Byzantine Text synonymous with the original text of the New Testament.  But it should make it a lot more than “irrelevant.”  English translations that take the Byzantine Text seriously (not the similar Textus Receptus) are already on the market.  More are coming, and I hope some major Bible-publishers will see this as an opportunity to amend the mistakes of publishers in the past 142 years.  So should English Bible-readers who desire the text in their English Bibles (not just the footnotes!) to reflect the text found in the rich manuscript-evidence that is available. 

This should not be interpreted to mean minority readings cannot be original.  Sometimes they are original (as I have repeatedly insisted), and in such cases the reading found in the majority of MSS must give way, lest scribal inventions, no matter how popular, usurp the original text.  But today’s main point should not be diminished:  talk about the “embarrassment of riches” by advocates of a New Testament compilation that is 99% Alexandrian (at points where the Alexandrian Text and Byzantine Text disagree) should stop.

Book Review: To Cast the First Stone

            Last year, Princeton University Press released To Cast the First Stone, a book by Tommy Wasserman and Jennifer Knust about the story of the adulteress (John 7:53-8:11).  Tommy Wasserman (academic dean at Örebro Theological Seminary in Sweden, about 120 miles west of Stockholm) is perhaps best known to American scholars as the author of The Epistle of Jude:  Its Text and Transmission (2006), and as the General Editor of the online TC-Journal.  He is also involved in the International Greek New Testament Project.  Jennifer Knust is a professor of Religious Studies at Duke University, and is the author of Unprotected Texts.

            Back in 2014, Wasserman and Knust were among the participants in a symposium on the pericope adulterae (“section about the adulteress”) at Southeast Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina – a symposium which concluded with an affirmation by all of the participants that the pericope adulterae should be proclaimed in churches.  Instead of a Perspectives-style volume in which all symposium-participants present their views, we have, five years later, To Cast the First Stone:  The Transmission of a Gospel Story.

            This is not the text-critically focused volume that some readers might expect.  Nowhere in its 344 pages (440 if the bibliography and indices are counted) is there a straightforward list of Greek manuscripts in which John 7:53-8:11 follows John 7:52, and of Greek manuscripts which have nothing at all between John 7:52 and John 8:11, and of Greek manuscripts which move all twelve verses to another location (after John 21, or after Luke 21:38, for example), and of Greek manuscripts which have only part of the passage (either John 7:53-8:2, or John 8:3-11).  Readers must reach the table on pages 280-281 to find a presentation of how the passage is treated in uncial manuscripts.  In a book which Bart Ehrman has predicted to be “definitive,” this is a major shortcoming, especially when one notices how much of the book dwells upon minutiae.  The description of patristic evidence presented by Wasserman and Knust is likewise insufficient. (Prosper of Aquitaine?  Faustus?  These names do not appear.)

            Readers are sure to learn much, however, about a wide variety of peripheral subjects.  For example, Marcion (an infamous heretic of the second century) is thoroughly rehabilitated; Wasserman and Knust declare that he was actually “a modest rather than a radical redactor” (p. 113).  Several pages (pp. 185-191) address the question of the provenance of Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus – inconclusively.  Mark 16:9-20 comes up again and again, although Wasserman and Knust avoid going into much detail about the voluminous support this passage receives.  They affirm that the passage should be viewed as “unquestionably canonical” (p. 19). 

            Other subjects covered in the first half of the book include Julius Africanus’ rejection of the book of Susanna, singular omissions in early Greek manuscripts of John, the significance of asterisks and obeloi in Origen’s Hexapla, the story of Judith, the prayer of Sarah in the book of Tobit, an episode in the “Martyrdom of Peter,” the Roman story of the rape of Lucretia, the debauchery of Claudius’ wife Messalina, and even Cleopatra.  Readers may find the first half of the book rather padded.

            Things get better after the first 200 pages.  Chapter 6 begins with an account of fourth-century references to the pericope adulterae in Latin patristic writings.  Unfortunately, little care has been taken to differentiate between quotations and allusions and possible quotations and possible allusions.  A statement by Hilary of Poitiers is called an allusion although it may be a case of coincidental uses of the same common terms.  The authors describe the statement of the monk Gnositheos, including the phrase, “if anyone is without sin,” as “a brief allusion to the adulteress” (p. 203) although the similarity to John 8:7 may be entirely coincidental. 

            Wasserman and Knust go into detail about two pieces of evidence which will doubtlessly be of interest to many readers, for these important details have not been covered in popular materials such as Metzger’s Textual Commentary:  (1)  the Greek base-text of Ambrose’s quotations of the pericope adulterae, and (2) the support given to the pericope adulterae as part of the text of the Gospel of John following 7:52 and preceding 8:12, in the Old Latin capitula, or chapter-summaries.   

            Ambrose, the authors observe, “appears either to have translated directly from the Greek or to have consulted diverse Latin witnesses or, as is more likely, both options” (p. 220).   They point out that Ambrose’s term amodo, in his quotation of John 8:11, has no support in Latin manuscripts, and should be considered “a calque, that is, a new Latin word designed to match the Greek phrase ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν (or ἀπ’ ἄρτι)”  (p. 222).

            The Latin capitula – a subject I have visited previously – were collected, compared, and published by Donatien De Bruyne in 1914.  Wasserman and Knust present De Bruyne’s data showing that the Latin capitula exist in multiple forms that in one way or another mention the account of the adulteress.  Two of these forms of the capitula are especially interesting:  “Form Cy” (“Cy” stands for Cyprian) was assigned by De Bruyne to the time of Cyprian or shortly thereafter, that is, to the mid-200s.  It has the phrase ub adulteram dimisit at the beginning of a chapter-summary, stating that after Jesus dismissed the adulteress, He testified that He is the light of the world, speaking at the treasury in the temple, etc.  Wasserman and Knust also point out that another form, “Form I,” uses the Greek loanword moechatione; this may confirm that the Old Latin text(s) of the pericope adulterae was translated from Greek.           

            Somewhat surprisingly – considering that Wasserman and Knust repeatedly affirm their belief that the pericope adulterae is not original – the authors grant that if De Bruyne is correct in his dating of the Old Latin capitula forms, and also correct in his view that ub adulteram dimisit is not an interpolation (and Wasserman and Knust present nothing to support any other view), then “the pericope adulterae was present in John in a Latin context by the third century” (p. 263).  This admission – basically conceding that the Old Latin capitula constitute plausible evidence that the story of the adulteress was in the Greek text of John from which Latin translations were made in the 100s (“by the third century”) – renders the earliest evidence for the inclusion of the passage practically contemporary with the earliest manuscript-evidence for its non-inclusion.  (I see no way to reconcile this with the authors’ statement on page 268 that “It seems likely that the Johannine pericope adulterae was interpolated in the early third century.”)

            Other evidence is also covered:  the treatment of John 7:53-8:11 in Codex Bezae and its marginalia, Jerome’s reference to the inclusion of the story of the adulteress in many manuscripts, both Greek and Latin, the assignment of a chapter-heading to the passage in some medieval manuscripts, the support for the pericope adulterae in most Old Latin manuscripts, and corrections of some misinformation that has been spread about the passage.   Regarding this last subject, some readers may be shocked by the mercifully brief critique the authors supply as they test the accuracy of a paragraph from Metzger’s Textual Commentary on page 251.  For those who have trusted D. A. Carson’s claim that “All the early church fathers omit this narrative,” or Steven Cole’s claim that no early versions include the story of the adulteress, the data provided by Wasserman and Knust should be illuminating, the way being struck with a cattle prod is illuminating.     

           

            Some readers may be exasperated by the amount of information in this book that does not pertain directly to the text of the story about the adulteress; it pertains instead to what may be called “ancient Christian book culture.”  The tour of ecclesiastical treatment of the New Testament text is far too scenic.  Yet this may be advantageous to readers who might appreciate being told things such as the following:

            ● Codex Bezae might have been copied from a third-century bilingual exemplar (p. 236).

            ● Eighteen papyri manuscripts from the 100s and 200s with text from the Gospel of John have been found, but only two of them (P66 and P75) contain John 7:52 and 8:12. (p. 67)

            ● “In the case of the Gospel of John, a circle of friends added a series of postresurrection appearances to the end of the Gospel.” (p. 91, footnote, referring to John 21.)

            This last data-nugget may serve as a sort of model for the authors’ solution to the question, “What should be done with the story about the adulteress, and why?”.   It would have seemed heavy-handed if they had said, “The passage is not original, but it should be retained because the Council of Trent said so,” or, “The passage is not original, but it should be retained because it has been declared “inspired, authentic, canonical Scripture” by the Orthodox Church.”  Instead, Wasserman and Knust affirm that the pericope adulterae is not original, but offer a more nuanced basis for an argument for its inclusion:  on balance, ancient Christian book culture affirmed the passage and proclaimed its message.  Can a convincing case be made that John did not write the pericope adulterae as part of the Gospel of John?  Yes, say Wasserman and Knust – but similarly they are convinced that John, anticipating his death, did not write the twenty-first chapter of the Gospel of John; the embrace of the supplemented text in ancient Christian book culture may be considered a better guide, when it comes to defining the canonical text, than strict matters of authorship.

            Some readers (myself included) may be disappointed that Wasserman and Knust did not spend more time engaging Maurice Robinson’s theory (presented at the 2014 symposium) that the pericope adulterae is an original segment of the Gospel of John which fell out of the text in an early influential transmission-stream.   Robinson proposed that in an early lection-cycle, the annual reading for Pentecost was John 7:37-52 with 8:12 attached (as it is in the Byzantine lectionary).  An early copyist, either deliberately adjusting the text to make the lector’s job easier, or accidentally misinterpreting marginalia that told the lector to skip ahead to 8:12, omitted 7:53-8:11.  Thus, the theory goes, the pericope adulterae was dropped from the text – not due to anyone’s desire to suppress it, but as a conformation of the form of the text used in a rudimentary lection-cycle. 

            Wasserman and Knust attempt to refute Robinson’s theory by citing the Typikon of the Great Church – a ninth-century liturgical book in which, among other things, Gospels-segments are arranged for each day of the year.  The authors grant that in this source, the Gospels-segment for Pentecost was indeed John 7:37-52 with 8:12 attached.  They also observe that in this Pentecost-lection, there are no instructions to skip from the main segment (John 7:37-52) to the closing segment (8:12), although such skip-from-here-to-there instructions appear for other lections which consist of more than one segment of text.  “This evidence,” Wasserman and Knust state on page 298, “suggests to us that the Johannine pericope adulterae was simply missing from copies available in Constantinople when the Pentecost lection was assigned,” and (p. 299) “It seems fairly certain that the pericope adulterae did not enter Byzantine copies of John until the close of the fourth century, or even later.” 

            Explanations for the Typikon’s non-use of skip-from-here-to-there instructions for the Pentecost lection can easily be imagined, but the thing to see is that the authors’ proposal that the pericope adulterae was not in the text at Constantinople when the Pentecost lection was assigned does not really touch Robinson’s model, in which the basic Byzantine lection-cycle echoes an earlier lection-cycle in which the loss of the pericope adulterae had already occurred.    

            Wasserman and Knust do not adequate address Robinson’s point that it is difficult to picture a Byzantine scribe deciding to insert the pericope adulterae within the lection for Pentecost, when simpler options existed, such as putting it at John 7:36 (so as to immediately precede the Pentecost lection).  They simply acknowledge, “This aspect of Robinson’s argument is convincing.”  So how do they explain the presence of the pericope adulterae within the Pentecost lection in over 1,400 manuscripts of John?  Similarly they offer no explanation for the first sentence of the pericope adulterae:   as Robinson asked in 2014, what kind of freestanding story begins with “Then everyone went home.”???
            A more satisfying explanation is given for the migration of the pericope adulterae to a place after Luke 21:38 in family-13 manuscripts (et al).  As Chris Keith has already shown, the insertion of the pericope adulterae to follow Luke 21:38 is an effect of treating the passage like a lection; the movement to this location made the lector’s job easier; the lector could thus find the lection for Oct. 8 (the Feast of Pelagia) near the lection for Oct. 7 (the Feast of Sergius and Bacchus).  Everything you have read or heard to the effect that the pericope adulterae is shown to be a “floating anecdote” by its appearance after Luke 21:38 in family-13 manuscripts can be safely ignored.

            A few shortcomings of To Cast the First Stone may be covered briefly:

            ● There is no variant-by-variant treatment of the text of the pericope adulterae.  An opportunity has thus been missed to show readers the differences in the forms in which the pericope adulterae appears in various sets of witnesses.  The interesting distinctive readings in the passage in the family-1 manuscripts are never given a spotlight.  In a book that gives two full pages to the Lothair Crystal, this was neglectful. 

            ● Asterisks were discussed briefly but the authors seem to have given up any attempt to analyze their use by scribes producing Gospel-manuscripts:  “The precise meaning of asteriskoi in Byzantine Gospel manuscripts remains opaque,” they acknowledge on page 128.  But what would have been a better occasion to shine a strong light upon copyists’ use of asterisks and other marks than when investigating the pericope adulterae?

            ● Only slight attention is given to the pericope adulterae in the Armenian version; no attention is given to the Georgian version.  No explanation is offered for the treatment of the pericope adulterae in a small group of Georgian copies in which the passage appears after John 7:44.  This is unfortunate, inasmuch as the Christian Standard Bible has a footnote which mentions this dislocation; CSB-readers are bound to think (incorrectly) that the footnote describes Greek manuscripts.             

            ● Wasserman and Knust treat Jerome’s affirmation (in Against the Pelagians 2:17) that the story of the adulteress is found in many copies, both Greek and Latin, with unwarranted skepticism:   “The existence of many copies of John “in both Greek and Latin” with the pericope adulterae,” they write on p. 236, “though presupposed by Jerome, cannot easily be confirmed.”  This is certainly true once one no longer considers a statement (not a presupposition but an assertion) from the supreme scholar of his age to be confirmation.  It seems bold – not in a good way – to look back 1,600 years, squint, and say that Jerome’s claim “may have been an exaggeration.” 

            ● Too little attention is given to Codex Macedonianus; unless readers consults a detail in the footnote on pages 280-281, below the two-page table, they could get a false impression from the table.  Codex Ebnerianus should have been featured, and more attention should have been given to the Palestinian Syriac lectionary’s dislocation of John 8:3-11 to the end of the Gospel.  Also, readers could have benefited from some acknowledgement that dozens of the manuscripts in which the pericope adulterae does not appear are copies of the same medieval commentary, and thus boil down to a single relatively late source.

            ● Codex Fuldensis is erroneously assigned to 569 on page 230; the correct date (546) is stated in a footnote on page 4.  Also, it is difficult to explain the description of Codex Fuldensis as “a fifth-century Latin Gospel harmony” on page 260.

            ● No detailed analysis of the lacuna in Codex Alexandrinus was provided; this would have been helpful.

            ● Annotations found in 039 and in minuscules 34, 135, 1187, 1282, and 1424 should have been included in the discussion of critical notes on pages 279ff.

            ● The description of GA 1333’s secondary inclusion of John 8:3-11 between Luke and John is insufficient.

            ● Didymus the Blind stated in his commentary on Ecclesiastes that there had been found, “in certain Gospels” – ἔν τισιν εὐαγγελίοις – an account in which Jesus says, “Whoever has not sinned, let him take up a stone and cast it” regarding a woman the Jews had accused of sin.  The authors’ case for their view that Didymus was referring to some extra-canonical composition as “Gospels,” rather than to copies containing Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, is not solid at all. 

            ● No foundation is given for the recurring claim that Eusebius “omitted the passage” (see p. 11, p. 23, 176ff. 181, 284) when preparing his Canon-tables.  However reasonable it may be to assume that Eusebius preferred a form of John that did not have the passage, Section 86 looks the same in the Eusebian Canons with or without the pericope adulterae.  

            ● The index is somewhat spotty.

            In closing:  Wasserman and Knust have provided a fascinating and valuable portrait of the ancient Christian book culture in which John 7:53-8:11 was accepted as a canonical part of the Gospel of John.  Their proposal that a non-original reading – one which, they argue, was not part of the text of the Gospel of John until a century after John’s death – should be considered canonical because of that ecclesiastical acceptance invites some problems.  For instance, if widespread ecclesiastical acceptance can veto text-critical analysis, why not simplify the text-critical enterprise by accepting all readings upon which the Vulgate, the Peshitta, and the Byzantine Text agree?  Or, even more simply, if ecclesiastical acceptance is decisive, why not accept, as a matter of course, all readings in the Byzantine Text which are supported by over 85% of the extant manuscripts?  

             To Cast the First Stone contains a lot of helpful data; nevertheless, important aspects of the evidence have been overlooked.  This is far from what a definitive book about the story of the adulteress ought to be. 


To Cast the First Stone:  The Transmission of a Gospel Story is Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press. 

P.S. I have written a book, A Fresh Analysis of John 7:53-8:11, maintaining that the pericope adulterae was originally part of the Gospel of John.  It is available as an e-book on Amazon.

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]

John 7:53-8:11 and James White

 In a recent interview at Apologia TV, James White (of Alpha & Omega Ministries) offered some comments about John 7:53-8:11 which reflect a common misunderstanding of some evidence pertaining to that passage.  White, who does not believe that these 12 verses belong in the Bible, turned his attention to them about 52 minutes into the interview, stating that he was going to explain why most scholars are confident that the passage is not genuine.
         White proceeded to explain that although most manuscripts contain the pericope adulterae between John 7:52 and 8:12, it is also found in four other places:  “In manuscript 225, it’s found after John 7:36.  In manuscript 1, it’s found after John 21:25.  And here’s the important part:  in a group of manuscripts called family 13, it’s not in John.  It’s after Luke 21:38.  And in manuscript 1333, it’s after Luke 24:53.”

          These multiple locations, White stated, constitute “absolute evidence” that John 7:53-8:11 was not originally part of the Gospel of John, but was instead “a story, very popular, looking for a place to call home.”  (This remark from White is very similar to a sentence in a 2007 essay by Dan Wallace:  “The pericope adulterae has all the earmarks of a pericope that was looking for a home.”)

          In White’s 1995 book, The King James Only Controversy, the same evidence was cited, and in this respect White’s comments closely resemble the contents of Bruce Metzger’s 1971 Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament.  White, like Metzger, has omitted important aspects of the evidence, probably because the depth of White’s research on this subject did not go much further than reading Metzger’s work.  The improbability of White’s idea that the pericope adulterae was “a story looking for a place to call home” should already be obvious to anyone who ponders the contents of the first sentence of the account:  “And everyone went to his own house.”  That is simply not how one begins a story. 

          Before we look in detail at some aspects of the evidence that White did not share in his Apologia TV interview, there is something we should know about the Gospel-lection for Pentecost – that is, the Scripture-selection that was read annually at the Feast of Pentecost (one of the major feast-days of early Christianity, celebrating the coming of the Holy Spirit as related in Acts chapter 2).  This lection began at John 7:37 and continued to John 7:52, at which point the lector (the person designated to read the Scriptures in the church-services) was to skip to 8:12.  In many Gospels-manuscripts that are supplemented by what is known as the lectionary apparatus in their margins, symbols and notes instruct the lector to read the lection in this way.  

          The Pentecost-lection, in other words, consisted of John 7:37-52 plus 8:12.  In lectionaries, the passage is presented in precisely that form, making it easy for the lector to read the entire passage without having to pause and jump forward in the text to find the final portion.  The same motivation that led to the development of lectionaries – a desire to simplify the lector’s task – also led some copyists to reformat the passage that contained the Pentecost-lection in continuous-text manuscripts of the Gospels, with the result that John 7:53-8:11 was transplanted to other locations. 

          When we take a closer look at the manuscripts mentioned by White, it may become clear that once he studies them more carefully, he might not wish to continue to present them as “absolute evidence” in the future.

“In manuscript 225, it’s found after John 7:36.” 

          Which means that a copyist moved it so that it would appear immediately before the Pentecost-lection.  In manuscript 225, John 13:3-17 – the lection for the annual foot-washing commemoration on Maundy Thursday – is likewise moved; it is found not only in its usual place but also is embedded in the text of Matthew, following Mt. 26:20, conforming to the sequence in which it was read on Maundy Thursday.  If one knows nothing about lection-cycles, one might start imagining that John 13:3-17 was a very popular story that was looking for a place to call home, but the more one learns about lection-cycles, the less plausible that becomes.

“In manuscript 1, it’s found after John 21:25.”

          White makes it seem as if this means that someone had the pericope adulterae sitting around as a freestanding composition, and placed it at the end of the Gospel of John.  If, however, one notices the note that appears in manuscript 1 before the passage, a very different impression is received.  The note says:  “The chapter about the adulteress:  in the Gospel according to John, this does not appear in the majority of copies; nor is it commented upon by the divine fathers whose interpretations have been preserved – specifically, by John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria; nor is it taken up by Theodore of Mopsuestia and the others.  For this reason, it was not kept in the place where it is found in a few copies, at the beginning of the 86^th chapter [that is, the 86^th Eusebian section], following, ‘Search and see that a prophet does not arise out of Galilee.’”

          Thus, according to this note, a copyist did not find this passage in most of his copies of the Gospel of John, and he also noticed that it was not commented upon by several patristic writers, so he removed it from where it had been found – after John 7:52 – and placed it at the end of the Gospel.  It had not been “a story in search of a home.”  According to this note, it had already had a home, following John 7:52, before it was moved to the end of the book.

In the Argos Lectionary,
the lection for Saint Pelagia's
feast-day is listed
for October 8.

          In addition, this note – which is also found in manuscript 1582, and thus echoes the archetype of family-1 – may be a copyist’s guess about how it ended up at the end of John’s Gospel, rather than an observation.  In two of the manuscripts that formed the basis for the Palestinian Aramaic lectionary, John 8:3-11, rather than 7:53-8:11, was transferred to the end of the Gospel of John.  This displacement of John 8:3-11 was not motivated by text-critical principles; like the dislocation of the entire pericope adulterae in 225, it was done to make the lector’s job on Pentecost a little easier – the difference being that in these manuscripts’ locale, the Gospels-lection for Pentecost included John 7:53-8:2.  Eighteen Greek manuscripts echo the same treatment of John 8:3-11, with the difference that instead of being transferred to the end of the Gospel of John, these nine verses have been dropped entirely from the text of these manuscripts, although 7:53-8:2 remains in the text after 7:52. 

          John 8:3-11 (or 8:1-11; there was some variation) was the lection for the feast-day of Saint Pelagia, or for The Penitents (this refers to a group of women famous for their penitence and austerity).  In dozens of manuscripts of John, 8:3-11 – not the entire pericope adulterae – are accompanied by symbols in the margin, not (as some researchers have claimed) to convey scribal doubt about the passage (as if the copyists accepted 7:53-8:2 but were suspicious about 8:3-11), but to thus show where, embedded within the Pentecost-lection, one could find the lection for the feast-day of Saint Pelagia, or for the Penitents, which was October 8. 

“And here’s the important part:  in a group of manuscripts called family 13, it’s not in John.  It’s after Luke 21:38.”

          The text of the pericope adulterae has been altered in the family-13 manuscripts; in 8:2-3, instead of reading “and all the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them.  Then brought the scribes,” they read, “And the scribes presented to him,” in order to avoid repeating material similar to the contents of Luke 21:37-38.
          Once again when we notice details which White did not mention (not due to any malevolent intent, of course, but due to plain ignorance of the evidence), the picture changes significantly.
         What has happened here is that someone who had a manuscript in which John 7:53-8:11 had been transferred to the end of John took things a step further to simplify things for the lector.  When transferred to the end of Luke 21, the passage would be easy to find in the cycle of readings for feast-days in the Menologion:  the lection for October 7, for Saints Sergius and Bacchus, was nearby, in Luke 21:12-19.  Almost all of the remainder of Luke 21 is discourse, making the end of the chapter the nearest convenient place in which to insert the narrative that constituted the lection for the next day, namely, October 8, for Saint Pelagia/the Penitents.         

“And in manuscript 1333, it’s after Luke 24:53.”

          When we consider the details which the shallowness of White’s research prevented him from detecting, the implications of the evidence drastically change from what he misrepresented them to be.  In manuscript 1333, John 8:3-11 is written on the page that follows the page on which the Gospel of Luke concludes, before the chapter-list for the Gospel of John.  

          What has happened is that after the text of John was written in 1333 without John 7:53-8:11, someone noticed that the passage used for Saint Pelagia’s feast-day was missing, and this person added it, preferring to use the blank page after the end of Luke instead of writing the passage in the margin alongside the end of chapter 7.  According to Maurice Robinson, in manuscript 1333, the verses are accompanied by abbreviated rubrics in the margin; one says, “The Gospel-reading for October 8, for Saint Pelagia,” and the other one says, “From the Gospel according to John.”  

          So instead of weighing in as evidence that the pericope adulterae was “a story looking for a place to call home,” as White has claimed, 1333 simply shows that John 8:3-11 was a lection designated to be read annually on October 8, and that even after someone made 1333 based on an exemplar that did not contain John 7:53-8:11, the lack of the lection for St. Pelagia’s Day was so problematic that someone saw fit to add the lection on a blank page of the manuscript.

          James White has asked, “If it was original, why, why, why?  If it was original, why would there be all this chopping-up of it?  It doesn’t make any sense” –  I interrupt to mention that he seems to have asked that question out of sincere perplexity.  But one’s perplexity should not be regarded as a platform from which to jump to a conclusion.  Nevertheless that is what White has done; his statement concludes:  – “unless it wasn’t original.”  Such a text-critical method is highly dubious.  It would be better to investigate the evidence more thoroughly, in order to answer the questions, as we have done here.

           This is, of course, not all that could be said about the pericope adulterae.  (I intend to say much more soon in a book on the subject.)  It should, however, justify a measure of concern when one encounters the claim that the transference of John 7:53-8:11 to locations after the end of John, or to one side or the other of the Pentecost-lection, or to the end of Luke 21, constitutes “absolute evidence” that these 12 verses were “looking for a home” or similar nonsense.  Such claims say more about the shallowness of the authors’ research than they say about how copyists treated the pericope adulterae and why they did so.