Have you
ever been misled by “cherry-picking”? I
bought a new car last week! – a new Hot Wheels car. I won half a million dollars yesterday! – in a
game of Monopoly. Details matter, and
the omission of important details can result in the spread of false impressions.
Teachers
and commentators who describe evidence very selectively
risk giving false impressions to their students and readers. This is unfortunately a frequent phenomenon
when it comes to the way the evidence pertaining to John 7:53-8:11 and Mark
16:9-20 is described, The result: students leave the classroom, or readers leave
the commentary, with a thoroughly distorted picture of the evidence. It’s not that anyone has lied to them. They simply have not been told the whole
story. Consider an example: the recent descriptions of evidence pertaining to those two passages made by Dr.
Larry Hurtado of the University
of Edinburgh
In
a recent blog-post titled More
on Rethinking the Textual Transmission of the Gospels, Dr. Hurtado
claimed that John 7:53-8:11 “first appears in the extant manuscripts in the
fifth century.” Technically, it is true that we have no manuscripts made before the 400s in which the passage appears, just as it is technically true that I recently bought a new car and won
half a million dollars. But the
impression that that statement gives – that the passage did not began to occupy that
location in the Gospels until the 400s – is false.
The
risk of conveying such a false impression could have been avoided if Dr.
Hurtado had shared just one more bit of evidence: Jerome’s testimony that he had found the
story of the adulteress in many manuscripts, both Greek and Latin. Or, if Jerome is too obscure an author to be
considered worth mentioning, perhaps the testimony of Ambrose would have been
sufficient.
A
writer resorting to less cherry-picking might inform readers and students about
the different types of early Latin breves,
or chapter-summaries, which refer to the story about the adulteress in its
usual place in the Gospel of John – including Type I (generally regarded as
contemporary with Ambrose, and with Zeno of Verona) and Type Cy; the “Cy”
stands for Cyprian, the prominent author and bishop in the 200s; this form of
the breves has been assigned to the
time of Cyprian or slightly later. If
the composition-dates that have been given to these chapter-summaries are
correct, then their testimony implies that the pericope adulterae was in Latin copies of the Gospel of John in the
200s.
When
these pieces of evidence are added to the equation, though, there is a
cost: the narrative in which John
7:53-8:11 doesn’t show up until the fifth century crumbles to pieces. A wider, fuller view of the evidence does not
support Dr. Hurtado’s contention that this passage became part of the text of
the Gospel of John “not in some early “wild” period, but later, in
the period of supposed textual stability.”
More
cherry-picking is in Dr. Hurtado’s description of evidence pertaining to Mark
16:9-20. “The first Greek manuscripts
that allow us to check the matter are Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus,
which don’t have these verses.” That is
technically true, but why has Dr. Hurtado mentioned these two manscripts from
the fourth century without mentioning the much earlier testimony of Tatian and Irenaeus? Tatian incorporated the passage into his
Diatessaron in the 170s, and Irenaeus specifically quoted Mark 16:19 from the
Gospel of Mark, in Against Heresies Book 3, chapter 10, around the year 180. Here we have
two pieces of evidence, both well over a century older than Vaticanus and
Sinaiticus. Why are they hidden from
view? Some of Dr. Hurtado’s readers
might imagine that the testimony of Tatian and Irenaeus has been avoided
because if their testimony were given a spotlight, it would be extremely difficult
to convince anyone that the picture that Dr. Hurtado has painted of the history
of Mark 16:9-20 can be plausibly maintained.
 |
| Codex Vaticanus, with Mark 16:9-20 added in the space that appears in the manuscript after 16:8. |
And
why did Dr. Hurtado mention Vaticanus without also mentioning its special blank space after Mark 16:8? Why did Dr.
Hurtado mention Sinaiticus without mentioning that the last part of Mark and the first part of Luke occupy a cancel-sheet – that is, four replacement-pages,
on which the lettering has unusual features that indicate the copyist’s
awareness of the absent verses? Again,
students and readers might be forgiven for imagining that such information has
not been shared because it makes Dr. Hurtado’s theory appear contrived.
Finally, why
did Dr. Hurtado describe Mark 16:9-20 as part of “the Medieval text of Mark,”
instead of “The Second-Century Text of Mark,” in light of the testimony of
Tatian and Irenaeus? (And the testimony of Apostolic Constitutions and Ambrose and Augustine and Macarius Magnes and Marcus Eremita and some others who wrote in the time of the Roman Empire). How is that not
just spin? Spin is exactly what it is.
Dr. Hurtado stated, “To find the variant in
the manuscript tradition we have to go to later, to the fifth/sixth century, in
Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Bezae, and others.” (As if the presence of Mark 16:9-20 in Codices
A, D, W, the Vulgate, and the Peshitta does not imply a much earlier
ancestry.) But we have more evidence besides
just manuscripts; why would anyone put on blinders by ignoring the widespread patristic
evidence that demonstrates that Mark 16:9-20 was in widespread use in the early
centuries of Christianity? Why point out the testimony from Sinaiticus (c. 350) without mentioning the testimony of Aphrahat (337)? It might seem
to some readers and students that a lot of evidence that is inconvenient for
their professor’s proposal has not been presented – at least, it would seem so, if somehow they were to learn
about that evidence’s existence.
A third variant was mentioned by Dr. Hurtado, and I will
mention it just for the sake of thoroughness.
The scenarios involving John 7:53-8:11 and
Mark 16:9-20 are nothing like the scenario involving Dr. Hurtado’s third
variant, the Comma Johanneum. Its adoption in the Textus Receptus was the result of Erasmus’ statement (after he had
compiled the Greek text without the Comma) that if he had possessed a Greek
manuscript with the passage, he would have included it), plus two other
things: Erasmus’ desire to make another
edition, and the premiere of Codex Montfortianus. This is no more like the situation regarding
Mark 16:9-20 – a passage with second-century patristic support, and which is
included in over 99% of the Greek manuscript of Mark – than Barney Fife is like
the Incredible Hulk.
If
you want to be taught about the transmission of the early New Testament text in
a way that treats the evidence fairly, without having your professor mold the
evidence, and pick and choose which evidence gets a megaphone, and which
evidence is silenced – my impression is that you won’t find what you’re looking
for at the
One
more thing: Dr. Hurtado recommended
Bruce Metzger’s Textual Commentary to
those who want more information about the variants he mentioned. Let it be noted that Metzger’s Textual Commentary contains misleading statements about Mark 16:9-20. Also, dislocations of John 7:53-8:11 occurred
due to the influence of lection-cycles, not (contra Metzger, Wallace, White, et
al) due to the untenable idea that the pericope adulterae was a “floating”
text (a theory which has
been tested, and dismantled).
One
more one more thing: from now till
Christmas, upon the request of any student at the University of Edinburgh and Asbury
Theological Seminary, I will gladly send a digital copy of my research-books, Authentic: The Case for Mark 16:9-20, and A
Fresh Analysis of John 7:53-8:11, free of charge.
Readers are invited to explore the embedded links in this post for additional resources.
Readers are invited to explore the embedded links in this post for additional resources.
