Envy and Murder in Galatians 5

          A famous list is found in the fifth chapter of the book of Galatians, in verses 22-23:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  These nine qualities are introduced as the fruit of the Spirit.  Just a few verses earlier, a very different list is provided.  Just as the Spirit-led life produces Christ-like virtues, a life centered on selfish desires produces bad fruit of various kinds – and those vices are listed in verses 19-21:  the works of the flesh.           

          When Paul wrote this, how many items did he include in that list of vices?  A comparison of the ESV and the MLV (Modern Literal Version) shows that the MLV’s list is slightly longer:  

          “Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, unbridled-lusts, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousies, wraths, selfish ambitions, dissensions, sects, envies, murders, drunkenness, revelings and things similar to these.”  

          Adultery and murders are included in the MLV’s list, but neither one is in the ESV’s list.  This is due to a difference in the Greek compilations that were used for each version:  the MLV’s base-text, the Byzantine Text – which represents the vast majority of Greek manuscripts – includes them both in the list (as does the Textus Receptus, the base-text of the KJV, NKJV, and MEV).  The Nestle-Aland/UBS compilation has neither.  

          However, it would be incorrect to think that the ancient witnesses fall into just two groups, in which one group has both words, and the other one has neither.  It would be easy to get that impression if we only looked at Greek manuscripts, but the patristic evidence suggests something more complicated.  

          In the early Latin translation of Book 5 of Irenaeus’ Against Heresies, chapter 11, Irenaeus quoted this list with “adultery” but without “murders” – “Manifesta autem sunt opera carnis, quae sunt:  adulteria, fornicationes, immunditia, luxuria, idololatria, veneficia, inimicitiae, contentiones, zeli, irae, aemulationes, animositates, irritationes, dissensiones, haereses, invidiae, [here one would expect “homicidia,”] ebrietates, comissationes, et hic similia.”  Eighteen vices are named in this list.

          Jerome wrote his Commentary on Galatians in 386 (about 200 years after Irenaeus wrote), but Jerome frequently consulted (and borrowed from) earlier sources, including the commentaries of Origen (fl. 230-250) and Eusebius of Emesa (a student of the more famous Eusebius of Caesarea, earlier in the 300’s).  Jerome commented in detail about the list of vices in Galatians 5:19-21.  His list, containing 15 vices, was as follows:  fornication, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, discord, jealousy, rage, quarrels, dissensions, heresies, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like.

          After commenting in some detail about these vices, he wrote, “In Latinis codicibus adulterium quoque et impudicitia et homicidia in hoc catalogi uitiorum scripta referuntur.  Sed sciendum non plus quam quindecim carnis opera nominata, de quibus et disseruimus.”  That is:  “In the Latin codices, adultery and immodesty and murder are written in this list of vices.  But we understand that no more than 15 works of the flesh are named, and I have covered them above.”  

          Thus, although Latin manuscripts known to Jerome included adultery, immodesty (impudicitia), and murder in the list, Jerome did not include them.  It would appear that either the Latin translation of Irenaeus’ Against Heresies, Book 5, has been conformed to an early Latin text that contained an expansion (the inclusion of “adultery” at the beginning of the list), or else the translation is accurate, in which case Irenaeus had access to a form of the Greek text which Jerome did not.  

          When considering whether copyists, in verse 19 and in verse 21, were likely to enlarge the list, or to shrink it, we should first be aware of the phenomenon known as colometric formatting.  In some manuscripts, when the copyists encountered lists of names or other quantities which tended to begin or end in similar ways, they stopped aligning the right edge of the text-column, and used a verse-like format instead.  

          In some manuscripts, the entire text is written in sense-lines, like poetic verse (each measure is called a cola).  (The stichoi-count in such manuscripts was not intended to represent the total number of lines, but of 16-syllable clusters, or something like that.)  As a result, much of the space in the right half of the column or columns of text is empty.  There are not very many such manuscripts, probably because this format wasted so much space.  The format was used more frequently in the genealogies (in Matthew 1 and Luke 3), in the Beatitudes, and in lists such as this one in Galatians 5.       

Galatians 5:19
in Codex Claromontanus (06)

     

          Let’s take a look at one of the few surviving manuscripts in which the entire text is written in colometric format:  Codex Claromontanus, from the mid-400’s.   In Codex Claromontanus, in Galatians 5, sometimes a line is occupied by just one, two, or three words.  In the text of Galatians 5:19 in Codex Claromontanus, the term “adultery” (μοιχια, usually spelled μοιχεία) appears on the same line as the preceding words.  This format could elicit the loss of the word, if a scriptorium-master, after reading aloud to the copyists, “Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are” jumped to the first indented item.  In two minuscule manuscripts that have a somewhat special text of the Pauline Epistles, 330 and 2400, μοιχεία was initially omitted but was re-inserted after ἀκαθαρσία (uncleanness) as the third item in the list, as if such a mistake was made, but was almost immediately detected.                     

Galatians 5:19b-21
in Codex Claromontanus (06)

          The colometric format had the advantage of making lists easy to read, if one could follow along with one’s finger or with a bookmark.  On the other hand, if a copyist skipped a line – which could easily happen, when several terms in a list ended in the same combination of letters – it would be difficult to detect, since the text of a list, though shorter, would still make sense.          

          In Codex Sinaiticus (ﬡ, Aleph), most of the text of Galatians is written in neat columns, but here in Galatians 5:19-21, the copyist resorted to a colometric format, giving each vice its own line of text. 

          The copyist of Codex Vaticanus (B) was less generous with his use of parchment, and wrote in the entire column, but he conveyed that in his exemplar, the text of the list in Galatians 5:19-21 was written in a colometric format, by adding distinct dots and spaces between the words. 

Galatians 5:20-21a in Latin
in Codex Claromontanus (VL 75).

          A comparison of Codex ﬡ and Codex Claromontanus, separated by about a century, suggests that in an ancient ancestor-manuscript, the text was written colometrically, and μοιχια was written to the right of ατινα εστιν (μοιχια was not written by the copyist of ﬡ, but the word was added there by a later corrector), and in which, in verse 21, the word φθόνοι (envies, or envyings) was followed on the next line by the very similar word φόνοι (murders) – the second word being lost early in a transmission-line in Egypt, but preserved in Codex Claromontanus (in Greek and in Latin – homicidiae appears on the opposite page where the passage is written in Latin), thanks perhaps to a cautious copyist’s observation that it would be a good idea to write both words on a single line to avoid an accidental loss.          

        The text of the important minuscule 6 is consistent with that hypothesis:  written without colometric formatting, it contains μοιχεία in verse 19, and both φθόνοι and φόνοι in verse 21.      

          In minuscule 1739, μοιχεία is not in the text but is added in the margin; 1739 has both φθόνοι and φόνοι in verse 21.            

The passage in minuscule 6.

          Generally, the Greek manuscripts with an Egyptian line of descent do not have  “adultery” (though we cannot be sure about Papyrus 46; damage has claimed its text from Galatians 5:17b-20a), and almost all others do.  

        Occasionally, the accumulation of so many words with similar endings got the better of a copyist:  in minuscules 614 and 2412, for example, after the copyist wrote ερις, ζηλοι, θυμοι, in verse 20, his line of sight jumped forward to the –οι before μέθαι in verse 21, thus skipping all the words in between.  (The mistake apparently was never caught by a proof-reader, even though minuscule 2412 was equipped for lection-reading.)

Minuscule 2412's copyist
skipped some text.

          Moving to versional evidence:  the inclusion of “adultery” at the beginning of the list in verse 19 is not supported by the Peshitta, but envy and murder are both listed in verse 21.  And, as Jerome mentioned, the Old Latin includes adultery and murder.  Detailed information about the versional evidence in verse 19 is not easy to come by (UBS-4 did not even acknowledge the existence of this variant-unit!), but if the UBS-4 apparatus is to be trusted, then the Vulgate, the Harklean Syriac, the Bohairic, Armenian, and Ethiopic versions all support the longer reading in verse 21.  The Old Georgian version is divided, but the Georgian evidence for the shorter reading is so late, and is such a branch of a branch, that I suspect that it may display a relatively late omission rather than echo its ancestral text, as seems to be the case in some Greek lectionaries. 

           

          We already covered some patristic evidence, but there are a few other early writers whose comments on this passage are particularly notable.  

          Clement of Alexandria, in Book 4, chapter 8 of Stromata, quoted the list, without “adultery,” and without “murder.”  

          John Chrysostom (c. 400), in his Fifth Homily on Galatians, used a text with “adultery” at the beginning of the list.

          Epiphanius, who was a bishop of Salamis on the island of Cyprus in the late 300’s, wrote an immense composition opposing various heresies, called the Panarion, and in Book 42 of this work, Epiphanius’ target is the second-century heretic Marcion and his followers.  Marcion, according to Epiphanius, not only butchered the Gospel of Luke, but also made numerous alterations even to the ten Epistles of Paul that he accepted – and Epiphanius even cites numerous detailed examples, as if he himself has sifted through a copy of Marcion’s text.  

          Galatians 5:19-21 is among the passages listed by Epiphanius as having been altered by Marcion; Epiphanius states in Panarion, Book 42, part 11:8, that Marcion’s list ran as follows:  “Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these:  adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, factions, envyings, drunkenness, carousings.”  Notably, adultery is present, and murder is absent.       

          This list is repeated in part 12:3 of the same book.  Some researchers have noted a slight difference in the two quotations; in at least one manuscript of Epiphanius, “murder” is present and not “envy.”  However, that may be a mere mistake by a copyist of Panarion.  It seems doubtful that Epiphanius would present two different versions of the same citation from Marcion’s text without making a note about the difference.                

          The reading of Galatians 5:19-21 with “adultery,” and without “murders,” is thus associated with Marcion – either as a feature of the text that he found and adopted, or which he initiated, for whatever reason.  It is unlikely that Marcion, whose opponents one and all accused him of fornication early in life, and who later practiced celibacy, would invent the addition of “adultery.”  In addition, in the course of his retort against the long-dead Marcion, Epiphanius stated, “How can the holy Mary not inherit the kingdom of heaven, flesh and all, when she did not commit fornication or uncleanness or adultery or do any of the intolerable deeds of the flesh, but remained undefiled?”  This indicates that “adultery” was also included in Epiphanius’ own text of Galatians 5:19.            

The list of the works of the flesh
in minuscule 604.

        So, although a few early manuscripts support a form of Galatians 5:19-21 without “adultery” and without “murders,” and this form of the Greek text was also known to Clement and Jerome, these two non-inclusions are accounted for by natural scribal accidents – misreading an exemplar with colometrically arranged text, in the first case, and simple parablepsis (jumping from one set of letters to a recurrence of the same (or similar) letters further along in the text) in the other.  Both “adultery” and “murders” belong in the text.

          There is another passage with an interesting history involving the similarity of the Greek words for envy and murder which I wanted to mention today, but it will have to wait for another time.  In the meantime, whether you accept the complete form of the list of vices, or the shorter one, let us acknowledge that the Scriptures elsewhere oppose both adultery and murder.  And, for those who would like to look into the text of Galatians more closely, I commend to you two online resources:  Stephen Carlson’s dissertation, and a new compilation of Galatians by Robert Waltz, whose Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism was recently updated and expanded.         

          May we all avoid the works of the flesh, and instead bear the fruit of the Spirit!

  

Nick Lunn's Book about Mark 16:9-20 - Reviewing a Review

Yet another author supports the
genuineness of Mark 16:9-20 --
and the defenders of the status quo
are getting nervous.

Recently a review of Nick Lunn’s book, The Original Ending of Mark: A New Case for the Authenticity of Mark 16:9–20 appeared online at the website of the Australian Biblical Review.  I believe that that poor quality of the review demands a response.  In the following eight ways, and more, reviewer Stephen Carlson has done a disservice to readers of ABR.

(1)  The paperback edition of The Original Ending of Mark: A New Case for the Authenticity of Mark 16:9–20 might be $53 in Australian dollars (in the USA, it is currently $43 at Amazon), but the Kindle e-book is $9.99 US.  The availability of the book in an electronic format (available since at least November of 2014) that can save readers $33 is worth mentioning. 

(2)  Carlson frames Lunn’s view as something that goes “against the weight of critical opinion.”  That’s okay.  But then he goes further and says, “This issue is no longer disputed among New Testament textual critics.”  This is mere “poison-the-well” rhetoric.  It is like beginning the review of a restaurant by saying, “True connoisseurs do not visit this restaurant.”  

          One could similarly claim that before the 28th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece was released, the reading of Second Peter 2:18 was no longer disputed among textual critics; the adoption of ολιγως instead of οντως received an “A” from the UBS Committee; implying, as the UBS Introduction says, that “the text is certain.”  It was certain, until the decision about this variant-unit was reversed in the 28th edition!  Meanwhile, advocates of the Byzantine Text had favored οντως the whole time.        

          Furthermore, Carlson’s statement is flatly wrong.  In the 2007 book Perspectives on the Ending of Mark, Dr. Maurice Robinson and Dr. David Alan Black both argued for the genuineness of Mark 16:9-20.  Dr. Dave Miller has advocated the genuineness of the passage.  Dr. David Hester has offered a case that “modern day readers of the Gospel of Mark should use the verses as part of Scripture.”  I, too, have written a detailed defense of the passage, which members of the NT Textual Criticism group on Facebook can obtain for free, in an expanded and updated edition.  Several recent English translations, including Gary F. Zeolla’s Analytical-Literal Translation (based on the Byzantine Text), the New Heart English Bible, the World English Bible, the English Majority Text Version, the Eastern/Greek Orthodox New Testament, and the Modern English Version (the MEV is based on the Textus Receptus) also format Mark 16:9-20 as part of the text.  Does Carlson truly have the temerity to deny that there are textual critics who accept Mark 16:9-20 as authentic, or is he merely out of touch?

          It is understandable that Carlson, having claimed that Lunn is not likely to convince textual critics, did not mention what Craig Evans says about Lunn’s book on its cover.  Craig Evans’ misrepresentations of important aspects of the relevant evidence still circulate in his commentary on Mark; nevertheless Evans acknowledges:  “Nicholas Lunn has thoroughly shaken my views concerning the ending of the Gospel of Mark,” and, “As in the case of most gospel scholars, I have for my whole career held that Mark 16:9-20, the so-called ‘Long Ending,’ was not original.  But in his well-researched and carefully argued book, Lunn succeeds in showing just how flimsy that position really is,” and, “I will not be surprised if Lunn reverses scholarly opinion on this important question,” and so forth.  

          I do not think that Carlson could gather a list of very many textual critics who reject Mark 16:9-20 if, in order to be on the list, one would have to have not written anything erroneous about the passage.  (This would certainly rule out Bruce Metzger and Daniel Wallace; Wallace’s writings on the passage are a veritable cornucopia of misinformation.)  As a New Testament textual critic who regards Mark 16:9-20 as part of the original text, and who has documented an epidemic of inaccuracies in commentators’ treatments of the evidence pertaining to these verses, I regard Carlson’s insinuation that if one is really a textual critic, one cannot think that Mark 16:9-20 is genuine, to be nothing but hollow, desperate rhetoric that is inappropriate in a book-review.      

(3)  Carlson states that Lunn’s arguments “often contain factual mistakes.”  Granting that Lunn overplays the differences between the wording of the resurrection-predictions in 8:31, 9:31, and 10:34 and the wording in 16:6, this is a minor consideration that is nowhere near the core of Lunn’s case.  In addition, Carlson seems to think that the angelic announcement that Jesus has been raised and will be see in Galilee – without any narrative about His post-resurrection appearance – satisfies the prediction in 14:28, and that Lunn’s denial of this is problematic.  Whether this is or is not the case, we are dealing here with a point of interpretation, not a “factual mistake.”    

(4)  Carlson put his own spin on Lunn’s descriptions of the evidence, as if Lunn has somehow minimized some of the main witnesses for the abrupt ending at 16:8:  when Lunn points out (correctly) that “within the confines of the Greek evidence both the abrupt and the shorter endings are restricted to the Alexandrian text-type,” Carlson objects that “The limitation of this argument to Greek evidence weakens the argument.”  However, Lunn does not ignore the non-Greek evidence.  He describes it and even devotes several paragraphs to Codex Bobiensis.  Readers of Carlson’s review – particularly his claim about “Lunn’s attempt to avoid this Western witness” – are likely to get a different impression, that is, a false impression.   

(5)  Carlson’s misrepresentation of Lunn’s treatment of Codex Bobiensis is particularly blatant.  Here is Carlson’s sentence:  “Lunn’s attempt to avoid this Western witness because it is “geographically closer to Alexandria” is simply wrong because Carthage is twice as far from Alexandria as it is from Rome.”  But consider Lunn’s entire sentence:   after proposing that Codex Bobiensis “most probably originated in North Africa,” Lunn states:  “This places it geographically closer to Alexandria in Egypt than the European Old Latin manuscripts.” 

          Either the point of Lunn’s sentence did not register to Carlson, or Carlson is guilty of misrepresenting Lunn’s position about this, which is simply that Old Latin transmission-streams on the European continent were a greater distance away from Egypt (by land-travel) than North Africa is, rendering the Old Latin transmission-stream in North Africa relatively more vulnerable to the sustained influence of the transmission-stream in Egypt.  Lunn clearly acknowledges that “the negative testimony begins to take on a broader shape” when versional evidence is considered.  But perhaps Carlson, instead of taking a cheap shot via his claim that Lunn “avoids” some evidence, was working under a tight deadline, and simply failed to notice what Lunn wrote about the versional evidence as a whole. Either way, the picture painted by Carlson is sadly out of focus to the point of being useless.

          What gets lost (or obscured) in Carlson’s comments is Lunn’s conclusion about the Old Latin evidence in general that “Bobiensis displays an entirely unique manner of ending Mark, while the weight of the testimony of other Old Latin Gospels is decidedly in favor of including 16:9-20.”  (This point alone should compel numerous commentators (such as James R. Edwards) to rewrite their comments about the testimony of the Old Latin regarding Mark 16:9-20.)

(6)  Carlson states, “Lunn admits that the Old Syriac witnesses in favour of the short ending is Western.”  Not only is this claim grammatically challenged, but it obscures Lunn’s description of the Syriac evidence, which consists of much more than the Sinaitic Syriac:  Lunn affirms that Tatian’s Diatessaron (produced around the 170’s), the Syriac Didascalion (third century), Aphrahat the Persian (early fourth century), Doctrine of Addai (fourth century), and Ephrem the Syrian (around the middle of the fourth century) support the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20.  
          Lunn describes the Sinaitic Syriac as “quite exceptional among the various Syriac witnesses” due to its non-inclusion of Mark 16:9-20.  [In the interests of brevity I will not address some quirks/mistakes in the nomenclature used by Lunn.]  Lunn also points out that in the Curetonian Syriac, the only text from Mark that has survived is 16:17b-20.  His conclusion regarding the Syriac evidence is that with the exception of the Sinaitic Syriac, “every other shred of evidence, both earlier (Diatessaron, Didascalion, Aphrahat, etc.) and later (Curetonian, Peshitta, Harklean) testifies to the existence of 16:9-20 as the ending of Mark in the Syriac tradition.”  This is a much more significant point that the point that the Sinaitic Syriac is a Western witness (which Lunn readily grants).            

(7)  As is often the case with commentaries about Mark 16:9-20, one must consider what is left out.  (Like when the NET’s note on Mark 16:9-20 does not mention Irenaeus.  Epic fail, NET!)  Carlson does not mention Lunn’s evisceration of Wallace’s flimsy dismissal of the blank spaces in the Old Testament portion of Vaticanus.  Nor does Carlson mention Lunn’s analysis of the blank space that follows Mark 16:8 in Vaticanus:  Lunn concludes that Vaticanus “provides indirect evidence for the prior existence of 16:9-20.”  Isn’t this something that Carlson’s readers might like to know?  In addition, Carlson does not mention Lunn’s analysis of the decorative design in Sinaiticus which follows Mark 16:8; Lunn concludes that it is plausible that via this feature, “Sinaiticus joins Vaticanus in its implicit testimony to the existence of a Markan ending beyond that which these two present.”  Did Carlson think that news of this would bore the readers of his review?

(8)  Again:  Carlson did not mention Lunn’s investigation into external evidence that has only rarely been covered by commentators.  Regardless of what one’s view on the main question is, Lunn should be thanked for offering an apparatus-listing for Mark 16:9-20 that is a substantial improvement upon the comparatively meager apparatus offered in the Nestle-Aland and USB compilations.  Lunn’s chapter on patristic citations, in the portion sub-titled “Evidence Prior to AD 150,” is bound to be interesting to all readers, whether they are persuaded or not.  Lunn proposes that the Epistle of Clement, and the Shepherd of Hermas, and Barnabas probably contain utilizations of the contents of Mark 16:9-20.  He also offers evidence for utilizations of Mark 16:9-20 from the Gospel of Mary and the Epistula Apostolorum and other works that are not found in the UBS apparatus.  He also upgrades the testimony of Justin Martyr:  rather than consider Justin as merely a highly probable witness for Mark 16:9-20, Lunn affirms, with detailed analysis, that this is “a certainty.”  Is this not worth mentioning in a review?    

More could be said about Carlson’s spin on Lunn’s approach to the internal evidence and his strange selectivity of detail when describing the contents of Lunn’s book.  But you get the idea.  If there is a sufficiently detailed, careful, and unbiased review to be had of Lunn’s book, it is not likely to come from Stephen Carlson.