The Text of Reasoned Eclecticism: Is It Reasonable and Eclectic? Part One of a Four-Part Response to Dan Wallace

Introduction

The 2005 edition of
The New Testament
in the Original Greek -
Byzantine Textform

          In the years since Daniel Wallace wrote The Majority Text and the Original Text:  Are They Identical?,¹ no less than four English translations of the majority (i.e., Byzantine) text of the New Testament have been published, and another version (the Modern English Version) has recently been released which was based on the Textus Receptus.  A definitive edition of the Byzantine New Testament has been published.²  A recent poll showed that the King James Version is the most widely read Bible version in the United States, by a large margin.³  And the Center for Study and Preservation of the Majority Text has been established.

            In this article I will address some of the inaccuracies, overstatements, and poor argumentation in Dr. Wallace’s article.  My purpose here is not to endorse the Byzantine Text in its entirety – I do not subscribe to Byzantine Priority – but to show that Dr. Wallace’s reasons for rejecting it are insufficient (and to clarify some peripheral misstatements in his article). 

            Wallace’s very first paragraph echoes a common put-down of the Textus Receptus:  “In compiling the TR Erasmus simply used about a half dozen late manuscripts that were available to him.”  Although it is true that Erasmus, when preparing the first edition of his Greek text, only had immediate access to less than a dozen Greek manuscripts, during the 1500’s the Textus Receptus went through multiple editions and comparisons involving consultations of patristic references (in which patristic writers cited their manuscripts), Lorenzo Valla’s research (which mentioned other manuscripts), the Complutensian Polyglot (the editors of which claimed to have consulted their ancient manuscripts) and manuscripts that were used in the exchanges between Erasmus and his critics, and by Stephanus and by Theodore Beza. 

            A close examination of the annotations of Erasmus and the textual notes of Beza give a much different picture than Wallace's distant glance.  The editors of the texts that reached their standardized expression in the Textus Receptus tended to stick with the Byzantine readings in their Byzantine manuscripts, but to say that they did not use ancient manuscripts such as Codex Bezae and Codex Claromontanus (and, judging from the contents of the Textus Receptus in Matthew 9:36, Codex Regius⁴) and a list of 365 readings from Codex Vaticanus is blurry reporting.  One can use a manuscript and still reject its readings, as Wallace shows when he says that the Nestle-Aland text is based on over 5,000 manuscripts – over 4,000 of which persistently display Byzantine readings which the editors persistently rejected.               

Preservation and the Byzantine Text

            Wallace targeted Wilbur Pickering’s view of inspiration and preservation as if Pickering’s doctrinal view was the foundation of Pickering’s case for the Byzantine Text (or for a sub-group of it; he currently endorses the f³⁵ text).  Wallace summarized Pickering’s doctrinal premise as follows:  “The doctrine of the preservation of Scripture requires that the early manuscripts cannot point to the original text better than the later manuscripts can, because these early manuscripts are in the minority.”

            When Pickering affirmed the superiority of the majority text over other text-types, he was not really saying much more than what the Westminster Confession of Faith – a major creedal statement in the history of Reformed Christendom, produced in 1646 – said in its first chapter, part eight: 

            “The Old Testament in Hebrew (which was the native language of the people of God of old), and the New Testament in Greek (which, at the time of the writing of it, was most generally known to the nations), being immediately inspired by God, and, by His singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as, in all controversies of religion, the Church is finally to appeal unto them.”

            The producers of the Westminster Confession thus enunciated the doctrine that the New Testament text has been kept pure in all ages – and the text they knew was an essentially Byzantine text.  This purity pertains to the message which was conveyed by manuscript after manuscript, not to the exact form of the text, as if spelling-variations and the quirky mistakes of individual scribes rendered the text impure.  But when one text contains Mark 16:9-20, and Luke 22:43-44, and Luke 23:34a, and John 7:53-8:11, and another text does not contain any of them, but says in Mark 6:22 that Herod’s daughter danced, and says in Matthew 27:49 that Jesus was pierced before He died, what would an impure text look like, if these are both called pure?  These differences significantly shape the message that is being conveyed.  Meanwhile, the differences between the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text are not so immense that they significantly shape the message being conveyed.   

            The doctrine of the preservation of Scripture does not preclude the idea that early manuscripts can preserve the form of the text better than the later manuscripts.  Rather, the doctrinal statement that God has kept the text pure in all ages implies that the message of the original text has been perpetuated in the Greek text used by the church.  And the Greek text used by the church, as displayed in thousands of Greek manuscripts, is the Byzantine Text or a sub-group of it.   

            Perhaps Wallace feels that the Westminster Confession’s statement that God has providentially kept the Biblical text “pure in all ages” is simply false.  (Speaking for myself, I do not subscribe to the Westminster Confession.)  But the thing to see is that Pickering is not introducing anything novel into the doctrinal equation.   

         
            Wallace’s article suddenly jumped to a different topic:  Pickering’s assessment of Hort’s anti-Byzantine view:  “Pickering,” wrote Wallace, “has charged Hort with being prejudiced against the Byzantine texttype from the very beginning of his research: “It appears Hort did not arrive at his theory through unprejudiced intercourse with the facts. Rather, he deliberately set out to construct a theory that would vindicate his preconceived animosity for the Received Text.””
            Wallace did not contradict Pickering on this point, and wisely so, because anyone can consult Hort’s writings and see where, in 1851, near the outset of his research, Hort denounced the Textus Receptus as “vile” and “villainous.”⁵  Instead, Wallace accused Pickering of doing the same thing:  “His particular view of preservation seems to have dictated for him that the majority text must be right.” 

            Such a tu quoque retort misses the point, which is that Hort clearly had some idea, in 1851, of what sort of conclusions he was going to reach by 1881 – yet his clearly expressed prejudice has not prevented very many textual critics from regarding his conclusions as correct.  So why, if Pickering was not the only researcher on earth with an entirely objective and detached mind, should this be used as a basis to reject his conclusions?  When Pickering insists that the purity of the Hebrew and Greek texts of Scripture has been providentially safeguarded for the church in all ages, he is not saying anything that the Reformers who composed the Westminster Confession did not say.  If the mere possession of a doctrinal view is sufficient to dictate one’s conclusions, then we must all be mute, including Wallace. 

            Pickering’s affirmation of a belief in the providential preservation of the purity of the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible is seized by Wallace as if it proves that he worked from presuppositions; i.e., that he was out to prove a premise.  This is, however, only partly true:  Pickering has affirmed that a combination of Scripture-verses may reasonably be taken to imply a promise of the preservation of the Scriptures, “but no intimation is given as to just how God proposed to do it. We must deduce the answer from what He has indeed done.”⁶  Does not Wallace assert a very similar premise about the New Testament text when he states that all of the original text is extant somewhere – that is, it has all been preserved – and it is the task of the textual critic to discover where?

          There is no evidence that Pickering pre-judged the Alexandrian Text to be vile and villainous in the way that Hort pre-judged the Textus Receptus.  Even if Pickering had done so, however, it would not make the Byzantine Priority view right or wrong, any more than Hort’s initial bias against the Textus Receptus rendered any of his text-critical judgments right or wrong. 

Next, Wallace expressed three “serious problems” with the doctrine of preservation as expressed by Pickering.  Please bear with me, reader, as I address these three points in some detail.

(1)  ● Wallace opposes the idea that God providentially preserved the purity of the text in all ages in the majority of Greek manuscripts because it could be that God providentially did so “in a small handful of witnesses.”  Wallace has unfortunately overlooked the phrase “in all ages” and as a result his idea does not make sense, because it is obvious that the Greek text of the small handful of manuscripts that form the primary basis for the Nestle-Aland text has not been used by the church in all ages. 

(2)  ● Wallace opposes the idea that God providentially preserved the purity of the Greek text in all ages in the majority of Greek manuscripts because, “assuming that the majority text is the original, then this pure form of text has become available only since 1982.”  But it is not as if the readings in the Hodges-Farstad Majority Text were created in 1982!  Hodges and Farstad derived them from the majority of manuscripts (which existed long before 1982) and those manuscripts display the text that was in use in Greek-reading Christendom at the times they were produced. 

            In the course of elaborating on this strained objection, Wallace points out that the Textus Receptus differs from the Hodges-Farstad Greek New Testament “in almost 2,000 places.”  This merits some explanation, so let’s pause a moment to consider some of those differences.  Let’s ask, “If a copyist were to make a manuscript that contained exactly the same text that is in the Textus Receptus, to what extent would it be a non-Byzantine manuscript?”  Here is some data to answer that question.  I will list, for each Gospel, the number of differences between the Byzantine Text (where its testimony is not divided) and the Textus Receptus, followed by the number of differences which indicate an origin in a non-Byzantine source other than parableptic errors, itacisms and orthographic variations attributable to an individual copyist.  This will provide some idea of how non-Byzantine the Textus Receptus is. 

            ■ Matthew:  out of 159 differences, 46 readings in the Textus Receptus are non-Byzantine.

            ■ Mark:  out of 142 differences, 73 readings in the Textus Receptus are non-Byzantine. 

            ■ Luke:  out of 221 differences, 140 readings in the Textus Receptus are non-Byzantine.

            ■ John:  out of 158 differences, 107 readings in the Textus Receptus are non-Byzantine. 

            Thus, in the Gospels, there are 680 differences between the Byzantine Text and the Textus Receptus.  Of those differences, 366 indicate an origin outside the Byzantine transmission-line (i.e., these 366 readings do not look like they began when a copyist was copying from an exemplar that contained nothing but Byzantine readings).  Many of those 366 variants have no effect on the meaning of the text.  (For example, out of the 107 distinctive variants in John, 22 of them are instances where the untranslatable definite article (a single Greek letter) is put before Jesus’ name.) 

            These statistics show that in the Gospels, if one considers Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus to both be good representatives of the Alexandrian Text, then the Textus Receptus must be considered a relatively close representative of the Byzantine Text.  Furthermore, a huge chunk of those differences are found in the text of the book of Revelation.  This is partly because of the unique transmission-history of the text of Revelation, and partly because Erasmus relied heavily on a manuscript of Revelation (2814) which has a text that frequently diverges from the norm.  (I have not counted all the differences, but it looks like the average chapter of Revelation in the Textus Receptus disagrees 30 times with the Byzantine Text.) 

            The statistics may be crunched as follows:  out of 1,838 differences between the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text,⁷ 680 are in the Gospels, about 660 are in Revelation, and about 500 are in Acts and the Epistles.  That’s 1,199 fewer variants between the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text in the entire New Testament than the 3,037 variants that exist between Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, the flagship manuscripts of the Nestle-Aland text.     

            Regarding disagreements between the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text, Wallace claims, “Many of these passages are theologically significant texts.”  However, he provides only two examples:  First John 5:7-8 and Revelation 22:19 – the first of which, albeit an interpolation, is one that expresses a teaching found elsewhere in Scripture, and the second of which conveys the same message no matter whether one refers to the book of life (as in the Textus Receptus and KJV) or to the tree of life.  Wallace scrapes the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, in his search for examples of variants within the Byzantine textual tradition that do not uniformly convey the same message. 

            Furthermore, via these comparisons, Wallace has confused the printed text that was used by the church for several centuries – the Textus Receptus – with the text that was available to the church in the manuscripts.  Perhaps Pickering, via some poor wording, left himself vulnerable to the charge that he believed that whatever printed Greek text the church used must be the preserved, original text.  For whatever reason, Wallace attempts to make Pickering’s arguments require an endorsement of the Textus Receptus – which Pickering clearly does not endorse.  This is a common tactic used by those who wish to dismiss discussion of the value of the Byzantine Text:  make it easy for those viewing the debate from a distance to think that one’s opponents are KJV-Onlyists or advocates of every iota of the Textus Receptus.       

            In the course of pointing out that the Textus Receptus includes minority readings, Wallace claimed that “Virtually no one had access to any other text from 1516 to 1881, a period of over 350 years.”  That is a rather inaccurate claim.  The Complutensian Polyglot was not based on the Textus Receptus.  Anyone who possessed a Byzantine manuscript had access to a Greek text other than the Textus Receptus.  The Orthodox churches continued to use the (essentially Byzantine) text of their lectionaries.  Griesbach’s text, in the 1770’s, was very different from the Textus Receptus; Abner Kneeland’s 1823 English version was very different; Granville Penn’s 1836 version was drastically unlike the Textus Receptus.    

(3) ● Wallace opposes the idea that God providentially preserved the purity of the text in all ages in the majority of Greek manuscripts because this would mean that such a text was available in Egypt in the first four centuries.  “But this is demonstrably not true,” he claims.  As the sole support for his claim, Wallace cites Bart Ehrman’s dissertation on the Gospels-text of Didymus the Blind (who lived in the mid-and late 300’s).  As Wallace mentioned, Ehrman concluded that his findings “indicate that no ‘proto-Byzantine’ text existed in Alexandria in Didymus’ day or, at least if it did, it made no impact on the mainstream of the textual tradition there.”  (Yet, not long after Didymus’ death, Codex W appeared, it would seem, in Egypt.)

            However, Ehrman’s data is capable of being interpreted to support a different conclusion.  I have systematically worked through Ehrman’s data about Didymus’ utilizations of the Gospels, and here are some observations:

            ► In Matthew, Didymus agrees with either B or Byz (but not both) 49 times.  Didymus agrees with B against Byz 24 times (49%).  Didymus agrees with Byz against B 25 times (51%).

            ► Ehrman concedes that the data from Mark is too sparse to justify confidence that it reflects the affinities of Didymus’ Gospels-text.  In three of the four cases where Ehrman concludes that Didymus supports a reading in B in Mark, the grounds seem especially questionable.  With these qualifications in mind, in Mark, Didymus agrees with B against Byz 4 times (80%) and with Byz against B 1 time (20%).

            ► In Luke, Didymus agrees with either B or Byz (but not both) 45 times.  Didymus agrees with B against Byz 28 times (62%).  Didymus agrees with Byz against B 17 times (38%).

            ► In John, Didymus agrees with either B or Byz (but not both) 40 times.  Didymus agrees with Byz against B 23 times (57.5%).  Didymus agrees with B against Byz 17 times (42.5%).⁸

            Thus, rather than concluding that the evidence from Didymus shows that there was no Byzantine or Proto-Byzantine Text available in Egypt (and keeping in mind that we are talking about the Gospels-text used by a man who was blind from his childhood – and also keeping in mind that the evidence from Didymus would never lead us to conclude that a Gospels-text resembling what is found in P45 existed in Egypt; nevertheless there it is), it shows the following:  (1)  Didymus’ text of Matthew agreed with the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Text as much as it agreed with Codex Vaticanus; (2)  We don’t have enough data to discern what Didymus’ text of Mark was like; (3)  Didymus’ text of Luke frequently contained readings that are found in the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Text but not in Codex Vaticanus, and (4)  Didymus’ text of John agreed with the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Text more often than it agreed with the flagship manuscript of the Alexandrian Text. 

            I conclude that the evidence from Didymus’ Gospels-utilizations does not post a problem at all for the idea that the Byzantine Text of the Gospels, or a text very similar to it, was available in Egypt in the 300’s.

            After firing blanks at the Byzantine Text, Wallace attempts to minimize the differences between the Byzantine Text and the Alexandrian Text, arguing that it does not make much doctrinal difference which text-type is used; both, he claims, are doctrinally orthodox:  “For over 250 years, New Testament scholars have argued that no textual variant affects any doctrine.” 

            He’s partly right:  many New Testament scholars (such as D. A. Carson) have made such a claim.  But others, such as George Vance Smith, a Unitarian scholar who was on the translation-committee of the 1881 Revised Version, have made different assessments.  Referring to the changes (some translational, but mostly textual) introduced in the Revised Version, Smith wrote,

          “The changes just enumerated are manifestly of great importance, and are they not wholly unfavourable to the popular theology?  Many persons will deny this, but it is hard to see on what grounds they do so.  Or, if it be true that the popular orthodoxy remains unaffected by such changes, the inference is unavoidable that popular orthodoxy must be very indifferent as to the nature of the foundation on which it stands.”⁹

            As a person who is much more aware of doctrinally significant textual variants and their implications, Wallace is much more careful than Carson when attempting to reassure people that pro-Alexandrian textual criticism poses no doctrinal challenges.  But he still seems willing to make it seem otherwise by holding up Carson’s fuzzy assurances when this subject comes up.  One must jump to footnote #25 in Wallace’s essay to see his actual view:  “No viable variant affects any major doctrine.” 

            But what constitutes a viable variant, and what constitutes a major doctrine?  Is the Sinaitic Syriac’s reading in Matthew 1:16 a viable variant?  Von Soden thought so.¹⁰  Is the belief that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived a major doctrine?  And is the inclusion of the name “Isaiah” in Matthew 13:35 a viable variant?  Eberhard Nestle thought so, and regarded it as the original reading.¹¹  Is the Alexandrian reading of Matthew 27:49 a viable variant?  Hort thought so.¹²  Is the belief that the authors of Scripture did not produce errors a major doctrine?  Or is it, as Wallace has described it, a more peripheral doctrine?  Further examples of doctrinal subjects impacted by textual variants could be listed, such as the importance of fasting, standards for divorce and remarriage, and the bodily resurrection of Christ.      

            Wallace attempted to minimize the differences between the Byzantine Text and the Nestle-Aland text in terms of quantity:  they disagree, he states, “in only about 6,500 places,” most of which do not affect translation or interpretation.  “The majority text and modern critical texts,” he continues, “are very much alike, in both quality and quantity.”  But if the differences are clearly inconsequential, then why are hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours of labor being spent to collect and (someday) study digital photographs of New Testament manuscripts by the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, of which Wallace is the Executive Director? 

            He does not seem to act as if all the differences are a matter of minutiae.  And rightly so, because well over 2,000 variant-units in the Gospels alone affect translation.  Their effects range from the inclusion/exclusion of two large 12-verse passages (Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11) to the inclusion/exclusion of entire verses, to the inclusion/exclusion of phrases, to the inclusion/exclusion of words that are pivotal to the sense of the sentences in which they occur (or do not occur).   To speak of the importance of textual variants in terms of quantity, as if to say that no one should worry about a low percentage of variation, is a poor way to state the problem.  It’s like telling people that there are only 6,500 stray cats in the city, and the vast majority of them are harmless.  If 65 of them are rabid it is still a concern.
  

- Continued in Part Two - 

_________________

FOOTNOTES

1 – Wallace’s essay seems to have been written sometime in the 1990’s.  All quotations of Wallace in this essay are from that article, unless otherwise noted.

2 – The recently-produced English translations of the New Testament based on the Byzantine Text are:

            ● World English Version (at http://ebible.org/web/ ),

            ● English Majority Text Version (at http://majoritytext.com/  ),

            ● Analytical-Literal Translation of the New Testament (at http://www.dtl.org/books/preview/alt.htm ), and

            ● Eastern/Greek Orthodox New Testament (at http://www.orthodox-church.info/eob/ ),

The second edition of The New Testament in the Original Greek – Byzantine Textform, prepared by Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, was released in 2005, with a generous copyright policy:  “Anyone is permitted to copy and distribute this text or any portion of this text,” effectively placing it in the public domain.  RP-2005 is online, formatted as a PDF, with a collection of other free resources, at https://sites.google.com/a/wmail.fi/greeknt/home/greeknt . 

            Also worthy of mention are The New Testament – The Original Greek (Koine) Text, at

http://www.elpenor.org/books/new-testament/default-en.asp and Wilbur Pickering’s compilation of the f³⁵ text, at http://www.walkinhiscommandments.com/pickering2.htm and his English translation of it, at http://www.walkinhiscommandments.com/pickering1.htm , and the Byzantine Greek New Testament, at http://www.bgnt.net/introduction.html .

            The official website of the Modern English Version (with a Textus Receptus-based New Testament) is at http://modernenglishversion.com/ .

3 – As reported on March 13, 2014, in Christianity Today – see http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2014/march/most-popular-and-fastest-growing-bible-translation-niv-kjv.html – the  poll, carried out by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), found that 55% of Bible-readers in the United States read the KJV; the NIV was first runner-up, at 19%.  

4 – See Wieland Willker’s comment on Matthew 9:36 in A Textual Commentary on the Greek Gospels, Volume 1 – Matthew.  Willker noticed that εκληλυμενοι is in Erasmus’ text, and in Codex L, but not in codices 1 and 2.

5 – See pages 210-211 of Life and Letters of Fenton John Anthony Hort, Volume 1, at https://books.google.com/books?id=Rxc3AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA211 .  According to the sub-headings in the book, Hort made these references to the Textus Receptus as “vile” and “villainous” when he was 23 years old. 

6 – Wilbur Pickering, page 131, The Identity of the New Testament Text, fourth edition.

7 – This sum of 1,838 differences was offered by Wallace in his article Some Second Thoughts on the Majority Text, at https://bible.org/article/some-second-thoughts-majority-text , published June 3, 2004.  It should be noted, however, that his tally is based on a comparison of printed texts; if formatted in the format of ancient uncial manuscripts, with contracted sacred names and no spaces between the words, the sum would be somewhat lower.

8 – In this comparison, “Byz” is the Robinson-Pierpont 2005 Byzantine text.  Ehrman’s research in 1996 used the Textus Receptus as a major representative of the Byzantine Text, so to acquire a more accurate picture of the actual implications of Didymus’ readings, it was necessary to manually consult the RP-2005 text reading-by-reading.

9 – See page 47 of George Vance Smith’s short 1881 book, Textsand Margins of the Revised New Testament Affecting Theological Doctrine BrieflyReviewed.  Readers may also consult page 140 of Volume 2 of Life and Lettersof Fenton John Anthony Hort to see Hort’s statement, in a letter written to Westcott in August of 1870, about the “moral damage that would have been done to the acceptance of the Revision by the laity if Unitarians had been outlawed as such.”  The background of the comment is that there had been objections against the inclusion of George Vance Smith on the Revision Committee, but Westcott and Hort had insisted that he be included.

10 – See the opening paragraphs of Bruce Metzger’ article The Text of Matthew 1.16 on page 105 of New Testament Tools & Studies – Philological, Versional, and Patristic, Vol. 10 (1980).

11 – See page 251 of Eberhard Nestle’s 1901 Introduction tothe Textual Criticism of the Greek New Testament:  referring to the variant δια Ησαϊου του προφήτου, Nestle wrote, “It is certainly, therefore, genuine.”  

12 – Hort did not fully adopt the Alexandrian reading of Matthew 27:49 into his text, but stated on page 22 of Notes on Select Readings that there were two possibilities:  either the phrase “may belong to the genuine text of the extant form of Mt,” or “they may be a very early interpolation.”  He concluded:  “We have thought it on the whole right to give expression to this view [i.e., the view that the passage is an interpolation] by including the words within double brackets, though we did not feel justified in removing them from the text, and are not prepared to reject altogether the alternative position [i.e., the view that they are part of the original text of Matthew].”

The Bible: So Mispresented, It's a Sin (26 Mistakes in Newsweek's Article About the Bible)

Recently (Dec. 23, 2014) Newsweek magazine published a cover-story, "The Bible:  So Misinterpreted, It's a Sin," in which author Kurt Eichenwald made numerous misrepresentations of some text-critical subjects.  This blog-entry and the next few entries will address some of the falsehoods in the Newsweek story, point by point.

(1)  Kurt Eichenwald says nobody has read the Bible:  "At best, we’ve all read a bad translation — a translation of translations of translations of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on, hundreds of times."

Eh? Has he never set eyes on a Hebrew Bible, or on a Greek New Testament?? And can he be so isolated from the enterprise of Bible translation that he foolishly imagines that Bible translators only consult earlier translations -- as "translations of translations" -- and not the compilations of the Hebrew and Greek texts??? Absurd!

(2)  Kurt Eichenwald says that in koine Greek, written in scriptio continua, "a sentence like weshouldgoeatmom could be interpreted as “We should go eat, Mom,” or “We should go eat Mom.”

Eh? That illustration is way out of focus, because it does not mention that in Greek, word-endings make a world of difference -- so much so that the illustration is misleading. It's much, much easier to tell where Greek words separate from each other, when written without spaces between the words, than it is when writing English without spaces between words. There are some passages where more than one word-division is sensible and feasible, but those are anomalies. Eichenwald's impression to the contrary is misleading.

(3)  Eichenwald wrote: "In the past 100 years or so, tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament have been discovered, dating back centuries."

Eh? Was he referring to relatively unimportant medieval Vulgate copies and Armenian copies?  We certainly don't have any such "tens of thousands" of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament books. Can anyone tell from the article what sort of manuscripts the writer is writing about, as in, what languages these "tens of thousands" of manuscripts are in???

(4)  Eichenwald wrote, "An early version of Luke 3:16 in the New Testament said, “John answered, saying to all of them.…” The problem was that no one had asked John anything, so a fifth century scribe fixed that by changing the words to “John, knowing what they were thinking, said.…” Today, most modern English Bibles have returned to the correct, yet confusing, “John answered.” Others, such as the New Life Version Bible, use other words that paper over the inconsistency."

Kurt Eichenwald is one confused dude who has made multiple mistakes:
(A) The variant in Luke 3:16 that consists of the insertion "Knowing what they were thinking" is an anomaly. It's not in the Byzantine Text -- the text-type represented by over 85% of the manuscripts. Nor is it in the Alexandrian Text -- the text-type that forms the primary basis for most modern versions of the New Testament. It is a variant in Codex Bezae, a manuscript famous (or, rather, infamous) for its interpolations and quirks.
(B) Most likely it was not the fifth-century copyist of Codex Bezae, but a copyist of some ancestor-manuscript, who invented this reading.
(C) It is virtually libelous to say that "most modern English Bibles have returned to the correct" reading, because anyone can consult the English Bibles from the 1500s as well as the King James Bible and turn to Luke 3:16 and see that they never adopted Codex Bezae's variant in the first place. So when Eichenwald says that English Bibles "returned" to the correct reading, it's like saying that there was time when English Bibles' text of Luke 3:16 was based on Codex Bezae, which is simply false.  A responsible publication would retract, and apologize for, this demonstrably untrue statement.
(D) I consulted the New Life Version online, and it accurately conveys the meaning of the Greek text of Luke 3:16. Nothing is "papered over."  The gracious conclusion to draw is that Eichenwald simply does not know the Greek text well enough to make an informed judgment on this point. (NLV, Luke 3:16a: "But John said to all of them," -- Greek text: APEKRINATO LEGWN PASIN O IWANNHS. Likewise the KJV: "John answered, saying unto them all,".)

(5)  Kurt Eichenwald's comments about John 7:53-8:11 look like they were extracted from a book by Bart Ehrman, and Eichenwald even repeats Ehrman's ridiculous statement that scribes in the Middle Ages made up this story.  Ehrman told a radio-interviewer in 2006 that "in the Middle Ages," a scribe added the story to the Gospel of John, but Eichenwald stretches the lie even further in Newsweek, claiming, “Scribes made it up sometime in the Middle Ages.”

Meanwhile, in a world apparently inaccessible to Ehrman and Eichenwald, Ambrose of Milan (c. 380) utilized the story of the adulteress repeatedly; Augustine (early 400s) discussed it at length, and Jerome (late 300s) stated that he had found the story of the adulteress in many manuscripts, both Greek and Latin.  Newsweek's dissemination of such laughably out-of-focus descriptions of the evidence, as if John 7:53-8:11 did not come along until the Middle Ages, is deplorable and irresponsible. Granting that the passage is not in 267 Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of John, it is present in 1,476. The case is not nearly as one-sided as Eichenwald pretends.

Eichenwald claims that the passage "does not appear in any of the three other Gospels," but this is true of most of the events in the Gospel of John! Does he not know this? Or is he just grasping at anything that will give the appearance of supporting his claim?

Likewise he claimed that the passage is not "in any of the early Greek versions of John," but while this may be true of manuscripts from Egypt, it is certainly not true of manuscripts used by Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Pacian, Augustine, and others. Plus, the passage about the adulterous woman is found in Codex Bezae, the quirky manuscript that Eichenward himself referred to as an "early version."

(6)  Kurt Eichenwald's cherry-picking of evidence regarding Mark 16:9-20 is shamefully misleading. He stated, "The earliest versions of Mark stop at 16:8." That is partly true:  the two earliest copies of Mark 16, both produced in the 300s, end Mark's text at the end of 16:8. But this is hardly the whole truth.

In one of those two copies - Codex Vaticanus - the copyist reserved blank space after verse 8, instead of beginning the Gospel of Luke in the following column.  In the other copy - Sinaiticus - all of the text from Mark 14:54 to Luke 1:56 is on a cancel-sheet, that is, replacement-pages, and the copyist made extra effort to avoid leaving a blank column between Mark 16:8 and Luke 1:1, and drew a heavy decorative frame after 16:8. Both manuscripts, in different ways, indicate their copyists' awareness of material beyond verse 8.

Out of over 1,600 Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark, those two are the only Greek manuscripts of Mark in which the text clearly ends at verse 8, followed by the closing-title of the book. Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Washingtoniensis, Codex Bezae, Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus -- the passage is in them all, representing different copying-centers in different locales. Kurt Eichenwald's statement that Mark 16:9-20 is not "in early copies of the original Greek writings," is only partly true:  the text ends at 16:8 in two early Greek copies, echoing an early Alexandrian form of the text. But those two manuscripts are two among a bunch.

None of these manuscripts are the earliest evidence regarding Mark 16:19. It is for some reason a secret, from which Newsweek-readers must be kept, that Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180, specifically quoted Mark 16:19 from his copy of the Gospel of Mark -- a manuscript which must have been over a century older that the manuscripts produced in the 300s.  (Irenaeus' quotation is in Against Heresies Book 3.)  And around 170, a man named Tatian, in the course of composing the Diatessaron -- a blended account of all four Gospels into one narrative -- included Mark 16:9-20 in the account.  And, around the year 160, Justin Martyr made a strong allusion to Mark 16:20, using its verbiage in his First Apology, chapter 45. Even the pagan author Hierocles, c. 305, probably recycling material written by his mentor Porphyry, used Mark 16:17-18 in an anti-Christian jibe.

Does Kurt Eichenwald think that the utilizations of Mark 16:9-20 by writers in the 100s-early 300s, earlier than the earliest manuscripts of Mark 16, are not worth mentioning? Or did he decide that Newsweek-readers should not be told about them because this might interfere with the thesis of his article? Or is he simply clueless when it comes to New Testament patristics?

(7)  Kurt Eichenwald wrote that First John 5:7, Luke 22:20, and Luke 24:51 "first appeared in manuscripts used by the translators who created the King James Bible, but are not in copies from hundreds of years earlier."

As far as Greek manuscripts of First John 5:7 (the "Comma Johanneum") is concerned, that is true (although the verse in question was used in North Africa, in Latin, in the late 400s). Regarding Luke 22:20 and Luke 24:51, however, Kurt Eichenwald's statement in Newsweek is horsefeathers.

Luke 22:20 is attested by the early manuscripts Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Washingtoniensis, and many more; the verse was included in the Vulgate by Jerome in 383 -- which is, I believe even Mr. Eichenwald will concede, hundreds of years before the King James Version was produced. Luke 22:20 is also included in Papyrus 75. Kurt Eichenwald apparently has stumbled upon and swallowed a pet theory of Ehrman, who favors Codex Bezae's quirky liturgical adjustment that resulted in the non-inclusion of this verse -- but that is no excuse for mangling the presentation of evidence. The only difference between Kurt Eichenwald and someone lying about the evidence pertaining to Luke 22:20 is that a liar knows what he's doing.

Luke 24:51, likewise, is included in Papyrus 75 and in Codex Vaticanus and a plethora of other manuscripts. Papyrus 75 is typically assigned a production-date by paleographers in the early 200s -- which is earlier than Codex Bezae (fifth or sixth century) and much earlier than the manuscripts used by the translators of the King James Bible. Newsweek is spreading distortions and nonsense by publishing claims that give an impression to the contrary.

(8)  Eichenwald claimed that when the King James Version was made, “A Church of England committee relied primarily on Latin manuscripts translated from Greek.”  Certainly the KJV’s translators consulted Latin, Syriac, French, Italian, and other translations.  However, the KJV’s Preface (“The Translators to the Reader”) addressed this very question about the translators’ base-text:  “If you aske what they had before them, truely it was the Hebrew text of the Olde Testament, the Greeke of the New.”  The Greek New Testament had been in print since the early 1500s, and had been reprinted in numerous revisions by scholars such as Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza (the owner of Codex Bezae, which Eichenwald described as an “early version”).  Eichenwald’s claim that the KJV’s translators “relied primarily” on Latin manuscripts is simply false.

(9)  Eichenwald grossly oversimplified the reasons why English translations differ, claiming that this is due to “guesses of the modern translators” about the meaning of the Greek text, as if koine Greek is horribly obscure.  I am willing to grant that on this particular point, Eichenwald is only mostly wrong.  There are some obscure words in the New Testament regarding which the meaning is not entirely secure, such as the exact species of tree that Zaccheaus climbed.  But this sort of thing is not nearly the perplexing linguistic puzzle that Eichenwald depicts it to be.  The differences in translation-methods – whether the goal is a technical precision or contemporary clarity – have far more impact than opaque terms in the text. 

(10)  When Eichenwald attempted to illustrate his claim that “religious convictions determined translation choices” in modern translation, he blatantly misrepresented the New American Standard Bible.  He stated that when the New American Standard Bible (and the NIV and the Living Bible) translated the word προσκυνέω – which is routinely translated as “worship” in the KJV – the translators of the New American Standard Bible “dropped the word worship when it referenced anyone other than God or Jesus.”  Thus, Eichenwald contended, “Each time προσκυνέω appeared in the Greek manuscript regarding Jesus, in these newer Bibles he is worshipped, but when applied to someone else, the exact same word is translated as “bow” or something similar.”

More than a dozen examples that contradict Eichenwald’s claim could be presented; in the interest of brevity let’s just look at Acts 10:25 from the New American Standard Bible:
“When Peter entered, Cornelius met him, and fell at his feet and worshiped him.” (NASB)
Voila.  Newsweek's claim that the NASB “dropped the word worship when it referenced anyone other than God or Jesus” is false and should be retracted.

(11)  In his discussion of church history, claimed that Constantine “changed the course of Christian history, ultimately influencing which books made it into the New Testament.”  In real life, Constantine had practically no influence on the canon of the New Testament.  Eichenwald brought up this point as if the New Testament canon was debated at the Council of Nicea, but that is not what happened at Nicea.  The fourth-century historian/bishop Eusebius of Caesarea reported that on a separate occasion, Constantine instructed him to produce 50 Bibles for the churches in Constantinople, but there is no basis for any suggestion that Constantine was ever involved in any decisions about which books should be included. 

(12)  Eichenwald wrote that at the Council of Nicea, “The primary disputes centered on whether Jesus was God—the followers of a priest named Arius said no, that God created Jesus.  But the Bishop of Alexander said yes, that Jesus had existed throughout all eternity.”  This should not have made it past Newsweek’s editors.  The vocal opponent of Arius was Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, not the “Bishop of Alexander.”
 
(13)  Eichenwald gave his readers the impression that at the Council of Nicea in 325, Constantine arranged for the Sabbath-day to be shifted from Saturday to Sunday.  This part of his article reads like something based on bad Seventh-Day Adventism propaganda.  Justin Martyr, writing c. 160, stated forthrightly in his First Apology, chapter 67:

“On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read,” and, “Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Savior on the same day rose from the dead.”

This is easily corroborated by quotations from other patristic writers who lived before Constantine, such as Irenaeus and Tertullian.  Eichenwald’s claim that “Many theologians and Christian historians” believe that the Sabbath-day was moved at the Council of Nicea might aptly describe theologians and historians who are as misinformed as Eichenwald is, but it does not reflect what actually happened; the decree was concerned with standardizing the liturgical calendar, not with introducing a new day of worship.    

(14)  Eichenwald gave readers the impression that December 25 was identified as Christmas-day at Nicea because this was when “the birth of the sun god was celebrated.”  Two things should be noted in response.  First, Romans had so many pagan holidays that you couldn’t throw a dart at a calendar without having a good chance of hitting some deity’s special celebratory day.  Second, Christians in the western part of the Roman Empire had been observing December 25 as Jesus’ birthday since at least the time of Hippolytus of Rome, in the very early 200s.  Hippolytus mentioned its observance in his commentary on Daniel.  And Hippolytus, a rather strict and austere theologian, had no motive to associate Jesus’ birthday with celebrations held by his pagan persecutors.

(15)  Eichenwald claimed that after the Council of Nicea had developed the Nicene Creed, “Those who refused to sign the statement were banished. Others were slaughtered.”  Could he, perhaps, name a few of the bishops who attended the council who were afterwards slaughtered for refusing to adhere to the Nicene Creed?  I don’t know of a single one. 

(16)  Eichenwald described the decrees of the First Council of Constantinople (in 381) by saying that the bishops there agreed that “Jesus wasn’t two, he was now three—Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”  This is nonsense.   The First Council of Constantinople expressed that the church believes in the Holy Spirit as “the holy, the lordly and life-giving one, proceeding forth from the Father, co-worshipped and co-glorified with Father and Son, the one who spoke through the prophets.”  It did not decree that Jesus is the Holy Spirit or that Jesus is the Father; the idea was that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct Persons sharing one divine and uncreated essence.
 
(17)  Eichenwald continued to misrepresent church history when he claimed that “By the fifth century, the political and theological councils voted on which of the many Gospels in circulation were to make up the New Testament.”  In real life, none of the church councils that had an impact on the New Testament canon were debating whether or not the Gnostic texts should be regarded as canonical.  The four-Gospel canon was already established in the 100s, as shown in the writings of Irenaeus.  In the early 300s, the Gnostic pseudo-gospels were not in the mix, and never had been, except to the Gnostics.

(18)  Eichenwald bizarrely misinterpreted New Testament passages about the value of the family unit.  He reads Matthew 19:29 and concludes that “To Jesus, family was an impediment to reaching God.”  This is sad caricature-drawing.  Jesus was not anti-family, as many other verses (Matthew 10:2-9, for example) prove.  Matthew 19:29 is about priorities, particularly in times of persecution when Christians face choices between loyalty to Christ, or to non-Christian family members, or to wealth.  Saying that this makes Jesus “anti-family” is just absurd. 

(19)  Eichenwald presented his interpretation of Mark 13:30 as if “all of it is fact” instead of being his own interpretation.  Citing Jesus’ statement, “This generation shall not pass, till all these things be done,” Eichenwald asserted that this meant that "the people alive in his [Jesus’] time would see the end of the world.”  But this overlooks the nature of the questions that Jesus was answering in his apocalyptic discourse in Mark 13.  Another interpretation is that Jesus’ remarks about the end of the world in Mark 24-27 are parenthetical, and that when he says that “this generation” will see the foretold events, He is referring to events described earlier in the chapter, and to the destruction of Jerusalem which occurred in the First Revolt in the late 60’s – within a generation of the time of Jesus. 
    
(20)  Eichenwald misrepresented the Greek term ἀρσενοκοῖται as if its meaning is obscure, stating, “The King James Version translated that as “them that defile themselves with mankind.”  Perhaps that means men who engage in sex with other men, perhaps not.”  Granting that the KJV rendered the term euphemistically, it does not require a degree in philology to discern what ἀρσενοκοῖται means:  those who participate in male-to-male coitus.  Just reduce the word to its Greek roots and this is obvious.  Eichenwald claimed that translators “manipulated sentences to reinforce their convictions,” but if anyone is manipulating words in an attempt to blur the meaning of the text in this case, it’s Kurt Eichenwald.

(21)  Eichenwald asserted that “Every sin is equal in its significance to God.”  Granting that all sin separates sinners from God, Eichenwald’s claim does not square up with statements in the New Testament such as John 19:11, where Jesus tells Pilate, “The one who delivered Me to you has the greater sin,” and First John 5:16-17, where a differentiation is made between sins that lead to death, and sins that do not.  All sins should be avoided, but not all sins have equal consequences, and not all sinners have the same level of culpability.

(22)  Eichenwald misrepresented the contents of First Timothy 2:9-10, stating, “It says women must dress modestly, can’t embroider their hair, can’t wear pearls or gold and have to stay silent.”  Wrong.  These verses are preceded by verse 8, where Paul specifically prefaces his statement by saying “I desire” that these things would be done.  Paul’s expression of his own preferences are not the equivalent of a “Thus saith the Lord.”  He similarly told the Corinthians (in First Corinthians 7:7) that he desired for everyone to be celibate, like him, but he did not make that a command.  Paul’s statements about hair and pearls should be interpreted through the usual interpretive lens that takes first-century Roman culture into account.  When Eichenwald ignores context in an attempt to score rhetorical points, he is guilty of the same sort of oversimplification that he accuses others of committing.

(23)  Eichenwald’s attempted application of First Timothy 2:12, as if it means that “Every female politician who insists the New Testament is the inerrant word of God needs to resign immediately or admit that she is a hypocrite,” is ludicrous.  In this passage, Paul is laying part of the groundwork for the list of qualifications for elders and deacons, which follow in chapter three.  A modicum of consideration of the context shows that Paul is focused on goings-on in the churches, not in the political arena.  If Eisenwald’s myopic misapplication is the best he is capable of, then it’s Eichenwald, not Michele Bachmann, who “should shut up and sit down.”   

(24)  Eichenwald’s misapplication of Romans 13:1-8 was erroneous to a humorous degree.  In that passage, Paul calls on Christians to be law-abiding Roman citizens, to pay their taxes, and to be respectful toward those who hold government offices.  From those instructions, Eichenwald drew the conclusion that Christians are forbidden from criticizing the government; “There are eight verses condemning those who criticize the government,” he wrote.  But Paul was not writing about criticizing the government; he was writing about disobeying the government.  He did not want church-members to give anyone a basis to brand the Christian churches as politically driven revolution-clubs.

That is a long way from saying that Christians should not criticize anything that is done by anyone holding a political office.”  Does Eichenwald serious think that anyone trained in Judaism, as Paul was, and who was aware of how the Old Testament prophets criticized various kings and government officials, would say that it would be sinful to criticize the actions of a king?  Acts 16:37 reports that Paul himself protested against the way government-officials treated him.  Would Eichenwald conclude that Paul, by protesting unjust treatment from the government, was sinning?  Surely not, I hope.  Eichenwald’s abuse of Romans 13:1-8 is preposterous rhetoric which I hope he will someday recollect with a sense of shame.      
 
(25)  Although Eichenwald offered some valid criticisms of “prayer shows,” I noticed that he named Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal.  (He did not mention Barack Obama – who proclaimed May 1, 2014 as a National Day of Prayer and stated, “I invite the citizens of our nation to give thanks, in accordance with their own faiths and consciences, for our many freedoms and blessings, and I join all people of faith in asking for God’s continued guidance, mercy, and protection.”)  But how can he express this criticism of the actions of government officer-holders after stating that Romans 13:1-8 condemns those who criticize government office-holders?  Apparently even Eichenwald does not take Eichenwald’s interpretation of Romans 13:1-8 seriously, even within the same article.

(26)  Eichenwald seemed to imagine that Jesus’ command in Matthew 7:1, “Judge not lest ye be judged,” means that Christians should not warn and plead with people not to break God’s commandments.  God alone can look into a person’s heart, and God is the one Lawgiver and Judge.  That does not mean that Christians should keep quiet about what God has said that He wants people to do, and what God has said He wants people to avoid doing.  It is not wrong for Christians to warn others who are stumbling, wandering, or lost.  Just the opposite:  in a free country, a church that is not calling people to repent and surrender to God is guilty of profound apathy and distraction, as if the church’s top priority ought to be keeping people well-fed on the outside while they are starving and eating dirt on the inside.  Jesus said that the second-greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself.  When Christians warn adulterers, sodomites, liars, and sinners of every sort that they need to repent, and that they are lost, and that they need to receive a new spiritual nature from God, they are doing what they wish someone would lovingly do for them if they were lost in sin.

These were not the only problematic aspects of Eichenwald’s Newsweek article but they are sufficient, I believe, to warrant a request for retractions and apologies.

The Bible: So Misrepresented, It's a Sin (Part Three)

Some other writers have responded to Kurt Eichenwald’s Dec. 23, 2014 Newsweek article about the Bible.  I haven't covered every detail, so those who have additional questions may want to seek out the following blog-entries:  

http://labarum.net/celebrating-a-christmas-tradition-at-newsweek-part-1-textual-transmission/ ,

http://labarum.net/celebrating-a-christmas-tradition-at-newsweek-part-2-constantine-and-nicaea/

and
http://michaeljkruger.com/a-christmas-present-from-the-mainstream-media-newsweek-takes-a-desperate-swipe-at-the-integrity-of-the-bible-part-1/

and

http://michaeljkruger.com/a-christmas-gift-from-the-mainstream-media-newsweek-takes-a-desperate-swipe-at-the-integrity-of-the-bible-part-2/

and

http://danielbwallace.com/2014/12/28/predictable-christmas-fare-newsweeks-tirade-against-the-bible/

and

http://www.albertmohler.com/2014/12/29/newsweek-on-the-bible-so-misrepresented-its-a-sin/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=newsweek-on-the-bible-so-misrepresented-its-a-sin .

(James White also made a 90-minute video that included a response to Eichenwald, but due to its mistakes and meanderings I do not recommend it.)

And now back to the list of things wrong with Kurt Eichenwald’s Newsweek article.

(8)  Eichenwald claimed that when the King James Version was made, “A Church of England committee relied primarily on Latin manuscripts translated from Greek.”  Certainly the KJV’s translators consulted Latin, Syriac, French, Italian, and other translations.  However, the KJV’s Preface (“The Translators to the Reader”) addressed this very question about the translators’ base-text:  “If you aske what they had before them, truely it was the Hebrew text of the Olde Testament, the Greeke of the New.”  The Greek New Testament had been in print since 1516, and had been reprinted in numerous revisions by scholars such as Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza (the owner of Codex Bezae, which Eichenwald described as an “early version”).  Eichenwald’s claim that the KJV’s translators “relied primarily” on Latin manuscripts is simply false.   

(9)  Eichenwald grossly oversimplified the reasons why English translations differ, claiming that this is due to “guesses of the modern translators” about the meaning of the Greek text, as if koine Greek is horribly obscure.  I am willing to grant that on this particular point, Eichenwald is only mostly wrong.  There are some obscure words in the New Testament regarding which the meaning is not entirely secure, such as the exact species of tree that Zaccheaus climbed.  But this sort of thing is not nearly the perplexing linguistic puzzle that Eichenwald depicts it to be.  The differences in translation-methods – whether the goal is a technical precision or contemporary clarity – have far more impact than opaque terms in the text. 

(10)  When Eichenwald attempted to illustrate his claim that “religious convictions determined translation choices” in modern translation, he blatantly misrepresented the New American Standard Bible.  He stated that when the New American Standard Bible (and the NIV and the Living Bible) translated the word προσκυνέω – which is routinely translated as “worship” in the KJV – the translators of the New American Standard Bible “dropped the word worship when it referenced anyone other than God or Jesus.”  Thus, Eichenwald contended, “Each time προσκυνέω appeared in the Greek manuscript regarding Jesus, in these newer Bibles he is worshipped, but when applied to someone else, the exact same word is translated as “bow” or something similar.”

More than a dozen examples that contradict Eichenwald’s claim could be presented; in the interest of brevity let’s just look at Acts 10:25 from the New American Standard Bible:

“When Peter entered, Cornelius met him, and fell at his feet and worshiped him.” (NASB)

Voila.  Eichenwald’s claim that the NASB “dropped the word worship when it referenced anyone other than God or Jesus” is false. 

(11)  In his discussion of church history, claimed that Constantine “changed the course of Christian history, ultimately influencing which books made it into the New Testament.”  In real life, Constantine had practically no influence on the canon of the New Testament.  Eichenwald brought up this point as if the New Testament canon was debated at the Council of Nicea, but that is not what happened at Nicea.  The fourth-century historian/bishop Eusebius of Caesarea reported that on a separate occasion, Constantine instructed him to produce 50 Bibles for the churches in Constantinople, but there is no basis for any suggestion that Constantine was ever involved in any decisions about which books should be included. 

(12)  (This one's just about a typing-mistake.)  Eichenwald wrote that at the Council of Nicea, “The primary disputes centered on whether Jesus was God—the followers of a priest named Arius said no, that God created Jesus.  But the Bishop of Alexander said yes, that Jesus had existed throughout all eternity.”  This should not have made it past Newsweek’s editors.  The vocal opponent of Arius was Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, not the “Bishop of Alexander.”

 

(13)  Eichenwald gave his readers the impression that at the Council of Nicea in 325, Constantine arranged for the Sabbath-day to be shifted from Saturday to Sunday.  This part of his article reads like something based on bad Seventh-Day Adventism propaganda.  Justin Martyr, writing c. 160, stated forthrightly in his First Apology, chapter 67:

“On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read,” and, “Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Savior on the same day rose from the dead.”

This is easily corroborated by quotations from other patristic writers who lived before Constantine, such as Irenaeus and Tertullian.  Eichenwald’s claim that “Many theologians and Christian historians” believe that the Sabbath-day was moved at the Council of Nicea might aptly describe theologians and historians who are as misinformed as Eichenwald is, but it does not reflect what actually happened; the decree was concerned with standardizing the liturgical calendar, not with introducing a new day of worship.    

(14)  Eichenwald gave readers the impression that December 25 was identified as Christmas-day at Nicea because this was when “the birth of the sun god was celebrated.”  Two things should be noted in response.  First, Romans had so many pagan holidays that you couldn’t throw a dart at a calendar without having more than a 50% chance of hitting some deity’s special celebratory day.  Second, Christians in the western part of the Roman Empire had been observing December 25 as Jesus’ birthday since at least the time of Hippolytus of Rome, in the very early 200’s; Hippolytus mentioned its observance in his commentary on Daniel.  And Hippolytus, a rather strict and austere theologian, had no motive to associate Jesus’ birthday with celebrations held by his pagan persecutors.

(15)  Eichenwald claimed that after the Council of Nicea had developed the Nicene Creed, “Those who refused to sign the statement were banished. Others were slaughtered.”  Could he, perhaps, name a few of the bishops who attended the council who were afterwards slaughtered for refusing to adhere to the Nicene Creed?  I don’t know of a single one. 

(16)  Eichenwald described the decrees of the First Council of Constantinople (in 381) by saying that the bishops there agreed that “Jesus wasn’t two, he was now three—Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”  This is nonsense.   The First Council of Constantinople expressed that the church believes in the Holy Spirit as “the holy, the lordly and life-giving one, proceeding forth from the Father, co-worshipped and co-glorified with Father and Son, the one who spoke through the prophets.”  It did not decree that Jesus is the Holy Spirit or that Jesus is the Father; the idea was that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct Persons sharing one divine and uncreated essence. 

(17)  Eichenwald continued to misrepresent church history when he claimed that “By the fifth century, the political and theological councils voted on which of the many Gospels in circulation were to make up the New Testament.”  In real life, none of the church councils that had an impact on the New Testament canon were debating whether or not the Gnostic texts should be regarded as canonical.  The four-Gospel canon was already established in the 100’s, as shown in the writings of Irenaeus.  In the early 300’s, the Gnostic pseudo-gospels were not in the mix, and never had been, except to the Gnostics.

(18)  Eichenwald bizarrely misinterpreted New Testament passages about the value of the family unit.  He reads Matthew 19:29 and concludes that “To Jesus, family was an impediment to reaching God.”  This is sad caricature-drawing.  Jesus was not anti-family, as many other verses (Matthew 10:2-9, for example) prove.  Matthew 19:29 is about priorities, particularly in times of persecution when Christians face choices between loyalty to Christ, or to non-Christian family members, or to wealth.  Saying that this makes Jesus “anti-family” is just absurd. 

(19)  Eichenwald presented his interpretation of Mark 13:30 as if “all of it is fact” instead of being his own interpretation.  Citing Jesus’ statement, “This generation shall not pass, till all these things be done,” Eichenwald asserted that this meant that "the people alive in his [Jesus’] time would see the end of the world.”  But this overlooks the nature of the questions that Jesus was answering in his apocalyptic discourse in Mark 13.  Another interpretation is that Jesus’ remarks about the end of the world in Mark 24-27 are parenthetical, and that when he says that “this generation” will see the foretold events, He is referring to events described earlier in the chapter, and to the destruction of Jerusalem which occurred in the First Revolt in the late 60’s – within a generation of the time of Jesus.       

(20)  Eichenwald misrepresented the Greek term ἀρσενοκοῖται as if its meaning is obscure, stating, “The King James Version translated that as “them that defile themselves with mankind.”  Perhaps that means men who engage in sex with other men, perhaps not.”  Granting that the KJV rendered the term euphemistically, it does not require a degree in philology to discern what ἀρσενοκοῖται means:  those who participate in male-to-male coitus.  Just reduce the word to its Greek roots and this is obvious.  Eichenwald claims that translators “manipulated sentences to reinforce their convictions,” but if anyone is manipulating words in an attempt to blur the meaning of the text in this case, it’s Kurt Eichenwald.

(21)  Eichenwald asserted that “Every sin is equal in its significance to God.”  Granting that all sin separates sinners from God, Eichenwald’s claim does not square up with statements in the New Testament such as John 19:11, where Jesus tells Pilate, “The one who delivered Me to you has the greater sin,” and First John 5:16-17, where a differentiation is made between sins that lead to death, and sins that do not.  All sins should be avoided, but not all sins have equal consequences, and not all sinners have the same level of culpability.

(22)  Eichenwald misrepresented the contents of First Timothy 2:9-10, stating, “It says women must dress modestly, can’t embroider their hair, can’t wear pearls or gold and have to stay silent.”  Wrong.  These verses are preceded by verse 8, where Paul specifically prefaces his statement by saying “I desire” that these things would be done.  Paul’s expression of his own preferences are not the equivalent of a “Thus saith the Lord.”  He similarly told the Corinthians (in First Corinthians 7:7) that he desired for everyone to be celibate, like him, but he did not make that a command.  Paul’s statements about hair and pearls should be interpreted through the usual interpretive lens that takes first-century Roman culture into account.  When Eichenwald ignores context in an attempt to score rhetorical points, he is guilty of the same sort of oversimplification that he accuses others of committing.

(23)  Eichenwald’s attempted application of First Timothy 2:12, as if it means that “Every female politician who insists the New Testament is the inerrant word of God needs to resign immediately or admit that she is a hypocrite,” is ludicrous.  In this passage, Paul is laying part of the groundwork for the list of qualifications for elders and deacons, which follow in chapter three.  A modicum of consideration of the context shows that Paul is focused on goings-on in the churches, not in the political arena.  If Eisenwald’s myopic misapplication is the best he is capable of, then it’s Eichenwald, not Michele Bachmann, who “should shut up and sit down.”    

(24)  Eichenwald’s misapplication of Romans 13:1-8 was erroneous to a humorous degree.  In that passage, Paul calls on Christians to be law-abiding Roman citizens, to pay their taxes, and to be respectful toward those who hold government offices.  From those instructions, Eichenwald drew the conclusion that Christians are forbidden from criticizing the government; “There are eight verses condemning those who criticize the government,” he wrote.  But Paul was not writing about criticizing the government; he was writing about disobeying the government.  He did not want church-members to give anyone a basis to brand the Christian churches as politically driven revolution-clubs.

That is a long way from saying that Christians should not criticize anything that is done by anyone holding a political office.”  Does Eichenwald serious think that anyone trained in Judaism, as Paul was, and who was aware of how the Old Testament prophets criticized various kings and government officials, would say that it would be sinful to criticize the actions of a king?  Acts 16:37 reports that Paul himself protested against the way government-officials treated him.  Would Eichenwald conclude that Paul, by protesting unjust treatment from the government, was sinning?  Surely not, I hope.  Eichenwald’s abuse of Romans 13:1-8 is preposterous rhetoric which I hope he will someday recollect with a sense of shame.         

(25)  Although Eichenwald offered some valid criticisms of “prayer shows,” I noticed that he named Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal.  (He did not mention Barack Obama – who proclaimed May 1, 2014 as a National Day of Prayer and stated, “I invite the citizens of our nation to give thanks, in accordance with their own faiths and consciences, for our many freedoms and blessings, and I join all people of faith in asking for God’s continued guidance, mercy, and protection.”)  But how can he express this criticism of the actions of government officer-holders after stating that Romans 13:1-8 condemns those who criticize the government?  Apparently even Eichenwald does not take Eichenwald’s interpretation of Romans 13:1-8 seriously, even within the same article.

(26)  Eichenwald seemed to imagine that Jesus’ command in Matthew 7:1, “Judge not lest ye be judged,” means that Christians should not warn and plead with people not to break God’s commandments.  God alone can look into a person’s heart, and God is the one Lawgiver and Judge.  That does not mean that Christians should keep quiet about what God has said that He wants people to do, and what God has said He wants people to avoid doing.  It is not wrong for Christians to warn others who are stumbling, wandering, or lost.  Just the opposite:  a church that is not calling people to repent and surrender to God is guilty of profound apathy and distraction, as if the church’s top priority ought to be keeping people well-fed on the outside while they are starving and eating dirt on the inside.  Jesus said that the second-greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself.  When Christians warn adulterers, sodomites, liars, and sinners of every sort that they need to repent, and that they are lost, and that they need to receive a new spiritual nature from God, they are doing what they wish someone would lovingly do for them if they were lost in sin.

These were not the only problematic aspects of Eichenwald’s “Newsweek” article but they are sufficient, I believe, to warrant a request for retractions and apologies.

The Bible: So Mispresented, It's a Sin (Part Two)

Continuing the corrections of Kurt Eichenwald's Newsweek article, "The Bible:  So Misinterpreted, It's a Sin" -- 

(4)  Eichenwald wrote, "An early version of Luke 3:16 in the New Testament said, “John answered, saying to all of them.…” The problem was that no one had asked John anything, so a fifth century scribe fixed that by changing the words to “John, knowing what they were thinking, said.…” Today, most modern English Bibles have returned to the correct, yet confusing, “John answered.” Others, such as the New Life Version Bible, use other words that paper over the inconsistency."

Kurt Eichenwald is one confused dude who has made multiple mistakes:
(A) The variant in Luke 3:16 that consists of the insertion "Knowing what they were thinking" is an anomaly. It's not in the Byzantine Text -- the text-type represented by over 85% of the manuscripts. Nor is it in the Alexandrian Text -- the text-type that forms the primary basis for most modern versions of the New Testament. It is a variant in Codex Bezae, a manuscript famous (or, rather, infamous) for its interpolations and quirks. 
(B) Most likely it was not the fifth-century copyist of Codex Bezae, but an earlier copyist, of some ancestor-manuscript, who invented this reading.
(C) It is virtually libelous to say that "most modern English Bibles have returned to the correct" reading, because anyone can consult the English Bibles from the 1500s as well as the King James Bible and turn to Luke 3:16 and see that they never adopted Codex Bezae's variant in the first place. So when Eichenwald says that English Bibles "returned" to the correct reading, it's like saying that there was time when English Bibles' text of Luke 3:16 was based on Codex Bezae, which is simply false.  A responsible publication would retract, and apologize for, this demonstrably untrue statement.
(D) I consulted the "New Life Version" online, and it accurately conveys the meaning of the Greek text of Luke 3:16. Nothing is "papered over."  The gracious conclusion to draw is that Eichenwald simply does not know the Greek text well enough to make an informed judgment on this point. (NLV, Luke 3:16a: "But John said to all of them," -- Greek text: APEKRINATO LEGWN PASIN O IWANNHS. Likewise the KJV: "John answered, saying unto them all,".)

(5)  Kurt Eichenwald's comments about John 7:53-8:11 look like they were extracted from a book by Bart Ehrman, and Eichenwald even repeats Ehrman's ridiculous statement that scribes in the Middle Ages made up this story.  Ehrman told a radio-interviewer in 2006 that "in the Middle Ages," a scribe added the story to the Gospel of John, but Eichenwald stretches the lie even further in Newsweek, claiming, "S͋cribes made it up sometime in the Middle Ages." 

Meanwhile, in a world apparently inaccessible to Ehrman and Eichenwald, Ambrose of Milan (c. 370/380) utilized the story of the adulteress repeatedly; Augustine (early 400s) discussed it at length, and Jerome (late 300s) stated that he had found the story of the adulteress in many manuscripts, both Greek and Latin. Newsweek's dissemination of such laughably out-of-focus descriptions of the evidence, as if John 7:53-8:11 did not come along until the Middle Ages, is deplorable and irresponsible. Granting that the passage is not in 267 Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of John, it is present in 1,476. The case is not nearly as one-sided as Eichenwald pretends. 

Eichenwald claims that the passage "does not appear in any of the three other Gospels," but this is true of most of the events in the Gospel of John! Does he not know this? Or is he just grasping at anything that will give the appearance of supporting his claim?

Likewise he claimed that the passage is not "in any of the early Greek versions of John," but while this may be true of manuscripts from Egypt, it is certainly not true of manuscripts used by Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Pacian, Augustine, and others. Plus, the passage about the adulterous woman is found in Codex Bezae, the quirky manuscript that Eichenward himself referred to as an "early version."

(6)  Kurt Eichenwald's cherry-picking of evidence regarding Mark 16:9-20 is shamefully misleading. He stated, "The earliest versions of Mark stop at 16:8." That is partly true: the two earliest copies of Mark 16, both produced in the 300s, end Mark's text at the end of 16:8. But this is hardly the whole truth.

In one of those two copies - Codex Vaticanus - the copyist reserved blank space after verse 8, instead of beginning the Gospel of Luke in the following column. 

In the other copy - Sinaiticus - all of the text from Mark 14:54 to Luke 1:56 is on a cancel-sheet, that is, replacement-pages, and the copyist made extra effort to avoid leaving a blank column between Mark 16:8 and Luke 1:1, and drew a heavy decorative frame after 16:8. Both manuscripts, in different ways, indicate their copyists' awareness of material beyond verse 8.

Out of over 1,600 Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark, those two are the only Greek manuscripts of Mark in which the text clearly ends at verse 8, followed by the closing-title of the book. Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Washingtoniensis, Codex Bezae, Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus -- the passage is in them all, representing different copying-centers in different locales. Kurt Eichenwald's statement that Mark 16:9-20 is not "in early copies of the original Greek writings," is not entirely true. The text ends at 16:8 in two early Greek copies, echoing an early Alexandrian form of the text. But those two manuscripts are two among a bunch.

None of these manuscripts are the earliest evidence regarding Mark 16:19. It is for some reason a secret which Newsweek-readers must be kept from that Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180, specifically quoted Mark 16:19 from his copy of the Gospel of Mark -- a manuscript which must have been over a century older that the manuscripts produced in the 300s.  (Irenaeus' quotation is in Against Heresies Book 3.)  And around 170, a man named Tatian, in the course of composing the Diatessaron -- a blended account of all four Gospels into one narrative -- included Mark 16:9-20 in the account.  And, around the year 160, Justin Martyr made a strong allusion to Mark 16:20, using its verbiage in his First Apology, chapter 45. Even the pagan author Hierocles, c. 305, probably recycling material written by his mentor Porphyry, used Mark 16:17-18 in an anti-Christian jibe.

Does Kurt Eichenwald think that the utilizations of Mark 16:9-20 by writers in the 100s-early 300s, earlier than the earliest manuscripts of Mark 16, are not worth mentioning? Or did he decide that Newsweek-readers should not be told about them because this might interfere with the thesis of his article? Or is he simply clueless when it comes to New Testament patristics?

(7)  Kurt Eichenwald wrote that First John 5:7, Luke 22:20, and Luke 24:51 "first appeared in manuscripts used by the translators who created the King James Bible, but are not in copies from hundreds of years earlier."

As far as First John 5:7 (the "Comma Johanneum") is concerned, that is certainly true. Regarding Luke 22:20 and Luke 24:51, however, Kurt Eichenwald's statement in Newsweek is . . . let's say, horsefeathers.

Luke 22:20 is attested by the early manuscripts Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Washingtoniensis, and many more; the verse was included in the Vulgate by Jerome in 383 -- which is, I believe even Mr. Eichenwald will concede, hundreds of years before the King James Version was produced. Luke 22:20 is also included in Papyrus 75. Kurt Eichenwald apparently has stumbled upon and swallowed a pet theory of Ehrman, who favors Codex Bezae's quirky liturgical adjustment that resulted in the non-inclusion of this verse -- but that is no excuse for mangling the presentation of evidence. The only difference between Kurt Eichenwald and someone lying about the evidence pertaining to Luke 22:20 is that a liar knows what he's doing.

Luke 24:51, likewise, is included in Papyrus 75 and in Codex Vaticanus and a plethora of other manuscripts. Papyrus 75 is typically assigned a production-date by paleographers in the early 200s -- which is earlier than Codex Bezae (fifth or sixth century) and much earlier than the manuscripts used by the translators of the King James Bible. Newsweek is spreading distortions and nonsense by publishing claims that give an impression to the contrary.

I call on Newsweek's editors to retract the errors in this story/article/mess.

The Bible: So Misrepresented, It's a Sin (Part One)

Recently (Dec. 23, 2014) Newsweek magazine published a cover-story, "The Bible:  So Misinterpreted, It's a Sin," in which author Kurt Eichenwald made numerous misrepresentations of some text-critical subjects.  This blog-entry and the next few entries will address some of the pernicious falsehoods in the Newsweek story, point by point.

(1)  Kurt Eichenwald says nobody has read the Bible -- "At best, we’ve all read a bad translation—a translation of translations of translations of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on, hundreds of times."

Eh? Has he never set eyes on a Hebrew Bible, or on a Greek New Testament?? And can he be so isolated from the enterprise of Bible translation that he foolishly imagines that Bible translators only consult earlier translations -- as "translations of translations" -- and not the compilations of the Hebrew and Greek texts??? Absurd!

(2)  Kurt Eichenwald says that in koine Greek, written in scriptio continua, "a sentence like weshouldgoeatmom could be interpreted as “We should go eat, Mom,” or “We should go eat Mom.” 

Eh? That illustration is way out of focus, because it does not mention that in Greek, word-endings make a world of difference -- so much so that the illustration is misleading. It's much, much easier to tell where Greek words separate from each other, when written withing spaces between the words, than it is when writing English without spaces between words. There are some passages where more than one word-division is sensible and feasible, but those are anomalies. Eichenwald's impression to the contrary is misleading.

(3)  Eichenwald wrote: "In the past 100 years or so, tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament have been discovered, dating back centuries." 

Eh? Was he referring to relatively unimportant medieval Vulgate copies and Armenian copies?  Tens of thousands? Really? We certainly don't have "tens of thousands" of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament books. Can anyone tell from the article what sort of manuscripts the writer is writing about, as in, what languages these "tens of thousands" of manuscripts are in???

To be continued . . .