John 5:3b-4: Original or Not?

            Metzger’s observation that 5:3b contains two “non-Johannine” words is lightweight, considering that John had few other occasions to use either ἐκδέχεσθαι or κίνησις.

            (I commend to readers both the article written by Zane Hodges in 1979 in Bibliotheca Sacra 136, pp. 25-39, and the article by Gordon Fee which appeared in Evangelical Quarterly 54 (pp. 207-218.)              

            Before reaching a conclusion about John 5:3b, let’s investigate 5:4.  Dr. Bill Mounce addressed this variant briefly, but his treatment is extremely oversimplified.  More is required.  First, we must get an idea of how much textual variation there is within this verse.  In A K L Y Δ Π, κυρίου (ΚΥ) appears after αγγελος γαρ (or, in L, αγγελος δε).  And instead of κατέβεινεν, A K Π Ψ 579 have ἐλούετο.  And A (supported by some Bohairic manuscripts) has ουν between δήποτ’ and κατείχετο.  Instead of δήποτε, K and Π have δ’ αν.  In C^c H M U Y Δ Λ Π 078 and at least 17 lectionaries, instead of ἐτάρασσεν, the text reads ἐταράσσετο.  The Ethiopic version also supports ἐταράσσετο.   Swanson erroneously lists Δ as if it reads ἐταράσσετο and ἐτάρασσεν; a check of the manuscript show that it supports ἐταράσσε το (the το being the το before ὕδωρ).  

            Plus, in S Λ Π 047, and 72 minuscules, the passage is marked with asterisks.  The Harklean Syriac also features the verse marked with asterisks.

             The external evidence mostly aligns with the external evidence for 5:3b – but not quite. D W^supp 33, 2718, and the Armenian and Georgian versions, which include 4:3b, do not imclude 5:4.  5:4 is supported by Tatian’s Diatessaron (as demonstrated by a comment by Ephrem in his commentary ), by Ambrose, by Tertullian, by Chrysostom (who was listed in UBS1 as a witness for both inclusion and non-inclusion), and Cyril.  

            Tertullian, in De Baptismo 5, near the end of the chapter, wrote, “If it seems an unheard-of thing that an angel should interfere with water, there was a precedent for that which was to be. The pool of Bethsaida ‘was stirred’ by the intervention of ‘an angel.’  Those who complained of their health used to watch for him. For anyone who had first descended there ceased to complain after a bath. This picture of bodily cure was prophetic of spiritual cure, according to the practice by which things carnal always precede, being a picture of things spiritual. As, therefore, the grace of God spread among men, greater power was added to the waters and the angel.”

            Tertullian goes on to say, “Those who healed bodily defects now heal the spirit.  Those who worked temporal salvation now restore for us everlasting salvation.  Those who freed one once a year, [this indicates how Tertullian understood κατά καιρόν] now daily save communities, death being destroyed by the washing away of sins.”  Tertullian clearly had no problem reading this verse and applying it to the life of the church.

            Chrysostom commented on 5:3b-4 in detail in his commentary on John, perceiving in the paralytic’s healing a thematic template of baptism and salvation. 

            Tertullian, in Latin, and Chrysostom, in Greek, demonstrate the antiquity of the passage in the text, as early as two papyri from c. 200 and c. 400 would.  Chrysostom also shows that John 5:4 was read in the text of the church in Byzantium during his bishopric.  Amphilochius of Iconium (340-403; bishop after 374) – cousin of Gregory of Nazianzus – does not include 5:4 in the text he used.  Both the non-inclusion and inclusion of 5:4 are very early readings.

            What phenomenon, occurring sometime between 90 (when the Gospel of John was written – unless John Robinson’s redating to pre-70 – in light of (among other things) 5:2 – is adopted) and 200, could elicit one transmission-stream to include John 5:4 (in the case of Tertullian’s text of John), and another transmission-stream to not include John 5:4 (in the case of P75, À, and B)? 

            I am willing to posit that an anomaly in the autograph of the Gospel of John itself elicited different treatments of John 5:3b-4.  Picture John reading chapter 5 to his listeners from the autograph for the very first time – without 5:3b-4.  Inevitably, someone would ask, “John, why were these sick, blind, lame, and paralyzed people waiting near the pool instead of swimming in its water?”  And I can imagine that John added an explanatory note in the margin, “waiting for the moving of the waters.”

            And then someone asked, “What agitated the pool’s water?”.  And John, realizing that his listeners in Ephesus were oblivious to the background of the pool at Bethesda, added another note – and thus verse 4 came into existence as a second marginal note.  When John died, the autograph was entrusted to the Christian community at Ephesus – and they treated the annotations in three different ways in the next generation:

            In the ancestor of Byzantine manuscripts, the notes were either blended into the main text (as John 21 has been), or else copies just the way they appeared in the autograph, in the margin with symbols to connect them to John 5:3-5.  In the ancestor of Alexandrian manuscripts, receiving the text of the autograph slightly later (being in Egypt, not Ephesus), the notes were assumed to have originated with someone other than John, and were therefore not considered worthy to be included in either the main text or in the margin. 

            Another consideration might have been in play in the mind of the early Alexandrian scribe who decided not to include verse 4:  a desire to protect John from the charge of promoting superstition.  A scribe who thought he knew that water in the pool of Bethesda was agitated by entirely natural forces could easily persuade himself that the marginal note in his exemplar, stating that an angel of the Lord bathed in the pool of Bethesda, could not have been written by an inspired author; in addition, he did not wish to appear to commend Asklepieions.

            The testimony of P and its relatives which have John 5:4 with asterisks commends family P as an excellent representative of the autograph of the text of the Gospels.  The form of verse 4 that appears in Codex P is the form which should be adopted, instead of the readings found in the majority of manuscripts.

            An addition question is sure to be asked:  what should English Bible editors do with John 5:3-4?  I have no objection to the inclusion of 5:3-4 in the main text, or in the margin, with a note stating that the passage appears in the margin, or not at all, in a few early manuscripts.  But to omit it entirely would guarantee that English readers would perpetually ask, as John’s first listeners did, “Why weren’t they all swimming?” or, “Who or what stirred up the waters?”

            Another question may be on the minds of some readers:  Would an inspired author expand on his own narrative in this way, adding marginalia?  I see no reason why not.  Many a Spirit-led preacher reading from a manuscript he wrote has spontaneously clarified himself mid-sermon.  Even Saint Paul, in First Corinthians 1:16, clarified that he had baptized the household of Stephanas (who, according to tradition, was the jailor in Acts 16), right after saying, “I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius.”  I Cor. 1:16 may have originally been a note in the margin added by Paul as he proof-read the letter; no one at Corinth, however, would have doubted its veracity.

 

Sinaiticus Versus Cyprius: Which is More Accurate in Matthew 5:1-20?

          The axiom, “Prefer the reading with the oldest manuscript-support” is one of the standard guidelines of New Testament textual criticism.  It is natural to assume that an old manuscript’s text is more reliable than a young manuscript’s text, because the passage of time allowed more copies to be made, and every time a copy was made, copyists had another opportunity to make mistakes.

          However, guidelines are not rules.  The accuracy of a manuscript’s text depends on how accurately copyists reproduced the contents of the exemplar, and the exemplar’s exemplar, and so forth, all the way back to the autograph (that is, the original document).

          To test the validity of the practice of giving a manuscript special value (or “weight”) just because it is older, let’s have a contest between Codex Sinaiticus (À [the Hebrew letter Aleph], 01) – hailed as “The World’s Oldest Bible,” made in the mid-300’s – and Codex Cyprius (K, 017), a medieval Gospels-manuscript.  (William H. P. Hatch proposed in 1937 that “It is altogether probable that Codex Cyprius was copied about 1000 A.D.,” but other researchers have assigned it to the 800’s.) 

          In the 1800’s, Codex K was regarded as an important manuscript, but this estimate of its value changed after the publication of Westcott & Hort’s compilation in 1881.  In 1901, F. G. Kenyon stated, referring to Codex K, “It is one of the nine extant complete uncial copies of the Gospels, but as it is as late as the ninth century, and contains the normal α-text [that is, the Byzantine Text], it is not of remarkable value.”  The people who made the fourth edition of the United Bible Societies’ compilation of the Greek New Testament seem to have agreed with Kenyon, inasmuch as they did not even mention Codex Cyprius in the apparatus.  In Bruce Metzger’s handbook The Text of the New Testament, the description of Codex Sinaiticus fills over four pages, while the description of Codex Cyprius consists of one sentence, occupying three lines.

          If we were to evaluate the accuracy of À and K using the Byzantine Text as the standard of what constitutes an accurate text, there can be no doubt that the comparison would demonstrate that the text in Codex K is far superior.  But what happens when the standard is, instead, the Nestle-Aland compilation?  When we strictly compare the text of Matthew 5:1-20 in Codex À to the text of NA27, we get the following results:

Codex À omits the letter ε eight times (in verses 3, 5, 8, 10, 13a, 13b, 15, and 19).

Codex À omits the letter ς twice (in verse 13).

Codex À omits the letter ι once (in verse 20).

Codex À omits 14 words (in verse 19, consisting of 62 letters).

Codex À has the letter ε six times where the Nestle-Aland text has the letters αι (in verses 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, and 20).

Codex À has the letters ου where the Nestle-Aland text has the letter ω one time (in verse 11).

Part of the Beatitudes
from Matthew 5 in Codex Cyprius.

          Thus, if we treat NA27 as if it represents the original text, we conclude that Sinaiticus deviates from the original text via the loss of 11 individual letters, and via the loss of the fourteen-word phrase ος δ’ αν ποιήση και διδάξη, ουτος μέγας κληθήσεται εν τη βασιλεία των ουρανων (that is, in English, “But whoever shall do and teach them, that one shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven”), and via seven vowel-interchanges (itacisms) that yield a net loss of 13 original letters.  In these 20 verses, it thus appears that somewhere along the way from the original text of the Gospel of Matthew to the pages of Codex Sinaiticus, the original text lost 14 words and, in addition, 24 letters.

          In Codex K, the following deviations from NA27 are observed in Matthew 5:1-20:

Codex K omits the letter ν six times (in verses 4, 11a, 11b, 15, and 16).

Codex K has ο instead of α (in verse 1), ο instead of ω (in verse 3), and ε instead of αι (in verse 14), for a total loss of four letters via itacistic interchange.

Codex K omits the word αυτοι (in verse 7), the word οι (in verse 9), and the word τους (after προφητας in verse 12).  (Αυτοι is in the side-margin, and this is probably a first-hand correction; nevertheless I did not include it as part of the text in my calculations.)

Codex K adds the word ρημα (in verse 11), and the word και (after εγω in verse 13).

Codex K reads βληθηναι instead of βληθεν (in verse 13).

          Thus, if we treat NA27 as if it represents the original text, we conclude that Codex K deviates from the original text via the loss of six letters, and via the loss of three words, and via three itacistic changes that result in the loss of four original letters, and via the addition of two words (ρημα and και, for a total of seven letters), and via one substitution (βληθηναι instead of βληθεν in verse 13).

           

          Side by side:

          À lost 14 words (consisting of 62 letters), and also lost 24 letters, with 1 one-letter accretion.

          Κ lost 3 words (consisting of a total of 11 letters), and also lost 10 letters, with accretions totaling 10 letters.   

          Thus if we assign a penalty to each manuscript for each word or letter that deviates from the original text, whether due to subtraction, addition, or substitution, À receives 39 penalty-points, and K receives 23 penalty-points.

          If we simplify the comparison, and give each manuscript a penalty-point for each letter that deviates from the original text, whether it subtracts an original letter, or adds a non-original letter, Codex Cyprius receives 31 penalty-points, and Codex Sinaiticus receives 87 penalty-points.    

          There seems to be no way to avoid the conclusion that in Matthew 5:1-20, the text of Codex Cyprius – a manuscript with an essentially Byzantine Text of the Gospels – has descended from the autograph with much less corruption than the text of Codex Sinaiticus, even though Codex Cyprius had a much longer transmission-history.  This amply demonstrates that the idea of assigning special value to a particular manuscript because of its age is not well-grounded.

          (Readers are invited to double-check this data.  Contracted nomina sacra were not treated as errors.  Codex Sinaiticus has its own website, and fully indexed page-views of Codex Cyprius are available at the website of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.  Codex K can also be viewed and downloaded at Gallica.)