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

Internal Evidence

            I now turn to Wallace’s comments sub-titled Internal Evidence.  In this section, Wallace tends to misrepresent the Byzantine Priority position as it is currently framed by its chief advocate, Maurice Robinson.  Wallace cited Michael Holmes to support the idea that majority-text advocates “object quite strenuously to the use of the canons of internal evidence.”  Meanwhile in the real world, Robinson candidly affirms in The Case for Byzantine Priority:  “The basic principles of internal and external evidence utilized by Byzantine-priority advocates are quite familiar to those who practice either rigorous or reasoned eclecticism.”  Robinson proceeds to list and describe eight principles of internal evidence!²³ 

            As much as Wallace might wish that Byzantine-priority advocates disregard internal evidence, that is simply not true.  Rather, Byzantine-priority advocates (and other textual critics with a dislike of propaganda disguised as textual commentary) object to inconsistent applications of internal evidence which are primarily steered, not by the internal evidence as it exists for specific variant-units, but by a model of transmission-history that precludes, or sets ridiculously high hurdles against, the authenticity of Byzantine readings.  In other words, textual critics who believe, as Wallace appears to believe, that the Byzantine Text did not exist until after 300, will approach the internal evidence accordingly, and will consider the most crucial internal aspects of the evidence to be whatever results in the rejection of the Byzantine reading.

            Wallace invited readers to consult Metzger’s A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament to see how internal evidence was used in the United Bible Societies’ compilation-committee decisions to accept one reading over another – especially when the adopted reading was given an “A” rank, which means that the compilers regarded the adopted text as “virtually certain.”²⁴   With apologies for lengthening this composition – Invitation accepted.  Let’s consider four “A” readings from the Gospel of Mark.  (These are not the best examples of the extreme lengths to which the UBS compilers have taken internal evidence as a means to reject Byzantine readings, but as a response to the invitation to use only A-ranked readings, they will have to do.)

Mk 1:14 – Against evidence from the Byzantine Text, the Vulgate, the Gothic version, the Peshitta, and codices D and W (among others – see the textual apparatus for further details) that supports the inclusion of της βασιλείας, Metzger argued for the Alexandrian non-inclusion of the phrase.  The longer reading, he claimed, “was obviously made by copyists in order to bring the unusual Markan phrase into conformity with the much more frequently used expression “the kingdom of God” (cf. ver. 15).”  On the other hand, however, it could be argued from internal evidence that the longer reading is more consistent with Markan style, because nowhere else in Mark does the phrase “gospel of God” appear.  Metzger’s idea requires that somewhere in the ancestry of diverse witnesses such as D, W, the Peshitta, and the Vulgate, they were all influenced by some copyist’s intentional insertion – whereas all that is required to produce the shorter reading is an accidental error that resulted when copyists’ line of sight drifted from the τ in της to the τ in του.

Mk 1:34 – Agreeing with external evidence from the Byzantine Text, the Vulgate, the Old Latin copies, the Gothic version, and the Peshitta, Metzger conceded that the longer reading in the Alexandrian text (Χριστον ειναι, read by Codex Vaticanus, L, and f¹) was an addition, by which copyists harmonized the text in Mark to the text in Luke 4:41.  There would be no reason for copyists to omit the phrase, if it had been present originally, but it would be a natural expansion.

Mk. 7:4 – Agreeing with external evidence from the Byzantine Text, the Vulgate, D, the Old Latins, the Peshitta, the Gothic version, and Origen, Metzger conceded that the Alexandrian reading ραντισωνται (supported by B, À, and the Coptic version) was an alteration introduced by Alexandrian copyists.  (This is given an “A” certainty-rank in UBS-2, but in Metzger’s Textual Commentary it has a “B” rank.)

Mk. 9:29 – Against evidence from P⁴⁵, the Byzantine Text, codices A, D, W, L, f¹, the Old Latin copies, the Vulgate, the Peshitta, and almost everything else, Metzger argued that the shorter reading (supported only by À* B, 0274, one Old Latin copy (Bobbiensis), one Old Georgian copy, and Clement) was original, and that the phrase “and fasting” was the invention of copyists.  Apparently neither Metzger nor Wallace²⁵ could perceive that copyists were troubled by a reading which could be interpreted to suggest that Jesus could not have cast out a particular kind of demon unless He had first fasted, even with the earliest (P⁴⁵) and most diverse evidence (from multiple locales) pointing the way.    

Mk. 11:26 – Against evidence from the Byzantine Text, almost all the Old Latin copies, the Vulgate, the Peshitta, and the Gothic version, Metzger rejected the inclusion of verse 26, supposing it to be an insertion based on Matthew 6:15, even though its correspondence to that verse is loose.  This is an instructive example of favoring external evidence over internal evidence, because Metzger noticed that it would have been very easy for copyists to skip verse 26 if their line of sight drifted from the words τα παραπτωματα υμων at the end of verse 25 to the exact same words at the end of verse 26, but did not consider this internal consideration to be persuasive against the Alexandrian witnesses.  Metzger argued that the shorter reading is in “early witnesses that represent all text-types,” although the same thing can be said about the longer reading, which is supported by Byzantine, Western, and Caesarean witnesses).      

These four samples indicate that internal evidence can be a very slippery thing, and that its force often depends upon the extent to which the textual critic is willing to engage his imagination to devise explanations for the origination of whatever reading is least consistent with his model of the text’s transmission-history.  Were we to explore Metzger’s Textual Commentary in detail, we would see that very frequently, the UBS compilation-committee attributed longer readings to scribal creativity where the shorter reading is attributable to scribal carelessness – especially when the shorter reading is Alexandrian.²⁶ 

Only when the Alexandrian reading is longer (as in Mark 1:34), or when the Alexandrian reading is so obviously secondary that no amount of ingenuity can plausibly salvage it (as in Mark 7:4), does internal evidence seem to have the ability to outweigh Alexandrian external evidence.  Metzger and his fellow UBS committee-members were not alone in their consideration of the length of rival variants as an internal consideration by which to judge between them:  the canon, “prefer the shorter reading” has been a major text-critical canon for a very long time, and in the late 1800’s and throughout the 1900’s, it was appealed to very frequently as a pivotal consideration, resulting in the rejection of very many longer Byzantine readings, in favor of shorter Alexandrian readings.  When the Byzantine Text has the shorter reading – as it does hundreds of times, for example in James 4:12 (“and Judge” is not in the Byzantine Text) and Jude v. 25 (“through Jesus Christ our Lord” is not in the Byzantine Text) – the compilers seem to have no problem recognizing parableptic errors, but when the Alexandrian Text has the shorter reading, the theory of first resort is that the longer reading originated with copyists.²⁷

Not only is this inconsistent, but it defies the analysis which James Royse provided of the text of some early New Testament papyri, showing that the copyists of those manuscripts tended to make more omissions than additions, at a proportion of three omissions for every two additions.²⁸  This tends to altogether invalidate the “prefer the shorter reading” canon, and indicates that every variant-unit that has been decided on the basis of that internal consideration ought to be revisited.

- Continued in Part Four - 

_______________

FOOTNOTES

23 – Of course Wallace could not anticipate, in the 1990’s, what Maurice Robinson would write in 2001.  But it is 2015 and Wallace’s article remains online, spreading false impressions about the nature of the view of the leading proponents of Byzantine Priority. 

24 – See page x of the introduction to the second edition of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament:  “The letter A signifies that the text is virtually certain.”

25 - See the NET’s note on this variant-unit:  “a good reason for the omission is difficult to find.”

26 – See Dennis Kenaga’s Skeptical Trends in New Testament Textual Criticism for additional critiques of inconsistencies in Metzger’s use of internal evidence. 

27 – The treatment of Matthew 12:47, which is absent in À and B and the Sahidic version (et al), is an outstanding example of pro-Alexandrian compilers’ reluctance to recognize parableptic omissions in the Alexandrian text.  Internal evidence has prevailed, but just barely.  Although the cause of a parableptic error is obvious – verses 46 and 47 end with the same word, λαλησαι – the UBS compilers assigned it a “C” rank (meaning that they harbor a “considerable degree of doubt” about the adopted text) and, echoing Nestle’s earlier treatment, bracketed the verse (to emphasize that the enclosed words have “dubious textual validity”).  

28 – See James R. Royse’s painstakingly prepared Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri, released in 2008.  

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

External Evidence

            Wallace began his consideration of what external evidence implies about the Byzantine Text with a simple misrepresentation.  He stated that the primary premise in the Byzantine Priority view is, “Any reading overwhelmingly attested by the manuscript tradition is more likely to be original than its rivals,” he added, “In other words when the majority of manuscripts agree, that is the original.”  But somewhere in those other words, the word “overwhelmingly” was murdered – sacrificed for the sake of caricature-drawing.  A majority might be 50.1%.  The overwhelming support for Byzantine readings that Wallace routinely vetoes in favor of Alexandrian readings include majorities of 85%, 98% and 99% and higher proportions of the manuscript-evidence. 

            Wallace says, “In historical investigation, presumption is only presumption.”  But when facing textual variants in which 99% of the Greek manuscripts disagree with the Alexandrian reading, we do not face mere presumptions; we face implications:  either a corruption permeated 99% of all Greek manuscripts, or else a corruption was adopted in 1% of them.  In general, which is more likely:  that many copyists in many places created or adopted a non-original reading, or that few copyists in few places did so?  The original text is the text with the head start, so to speak, and if one is to posit that a non-original reading overtook it so as to become more popular, one must explain how that happened – and this is not easy to do without making some assumptions, or presumptions.  So let the axiom, “Presumption is only presumption,” be aimed at all presumptions, not just those that maintain Byzantine Priority. 

            Moving along.  Wallace claimed that if the Byzantine Text were the original text, then one would expect to find it “in the earliest Greek manuscripts, in the earliest versions, and in the earliest church fathers,” and “One would expect it to be in a majority of manuscripts, versions, and fathers.”

            “But,” he continues, “that is not what is found.”  However, by definition, the majority text is what is found in the majority of manuscripts (at least in passages where a majority exists, rather than a split-decision among three or more rival variants).  Wallace attempts to circumvent this obvious fact by redefining the majority as the majority of long-lived manuscripts.  “As far as the extant witnesses reveal,” he claims, “the majority text did not exist in the first four centuries.” 

            Considering that it comes from someone attempting to avoid presumptions, that is an extremely presumptive claim.  Other than the papyri from Egypt, there is not much New Testament manuscript-evidence to indicate what texts were being used throughout the Roman Empire before the year 400.  The available manuscript-evidence is not remotely close to being extensive enough to justify statements about what the majority of manuscripts read in the second or third centuries, at points where the testimony of the extant evidence is diverse.  To presume that the manuscript-evidence from Egypt depicts the text that was used in other locales is a huge presumption.  By the year 235 or so, Origen stated that the manuscripts were in disagreement with each other.¹³  That is difficult to reconcile with the idea that a uniform Alexandrian Text, or any text-type, was an established standard text at that time in a multitude of non-Egyptian locales. 

             When Wallace appeals to the papyri as vindication for his idea that the Byzantine Text did not exist in the first three centuries of Christendom, he states, “More than fifty of these came from before the middle of the fourth century. Yet not one belongs to the majority text.”  That is not quite true.  Papyrus 104, which currently contends with Papyrus 52 for the claim of earliest-known-New-Testament-manuscript, is a fragment of text from Matthew 21 that agrees with the Byzantine Text as much as it agrees with the text of Codex Vaticanus.¹⁴  In addition, large portions of Codex W (from the late 300’s or early 400’s) display the Byzantine Text.¹⁵  

            Papyrus 98, a fragment from the late 100’s or early 200’s which contains text from Revelation 1:13-2:1, disagrees twice with the Byzantine Text (though in one of these two instances, the Byzantine Text is divided), and disagrees once with the Nestle-Aland text – so it is rather presumptive to say that the fragment favors one text-type significantly more than the other, especially since P⁹⁸ disagrees with Codex Sinaiticus five times.  Papyrus 16, a fragment from the 300’s with text from Philippians, diverges from the Byzantine Text eleven times, but it also disagrees with Codex Vaticanus nine times.  The much-mutilated Papyrus 45, which is currently the earliest known manuscript of the Gospel of Mark, from the early 200’s, agrees much more closely with the text of Mark in Codex W than with the text of Mark in Codex Vaticanus, and in Mark 7, P⁴⁵ agrees repeatedly with the Byzantine Text.  Papyrus 46 also frequently disagrees with the Nestle-Aland text.¹⁶

            Wallace can’t have it both ways:  if the mere existence of a non-Byzantine local text displayed in the early papyri constitutes strong evidence that the Byzantine Text did not exist, then the existence of a non-Alexandrian text in the early papyri (such as what is seen in P⁴⁵) constitutes strong evidence that the Alexandrian Text didn’t exist.  Obviously this sort of reasoning is an overextrapolation, since witnesses such as P⁷⁵ show that the parts of the Alexandrian Text that they contain did exist in the 200’s.  The non-existence of Byzantine papyri in Egypt does not imply the non-existence of Byzantine papyri in other locales, just as non-Alexandrian readings in some Egyptian papyri do not imply the non-existence of Alexandrian readings in other Egyptian papyri.

            Wallace stated, “Many hypotheses can be put forth as to why there are no early Byzantine manuscripts.  But once again an ounce of evidence is worth a pound of presumption.”  As if there is some mystery about it!  Until the 300’s, New Testament manuscripts were made of papyrus, which decomposes in virtually every climate except for the low-humidity climate of Egypt.  This is not a presumption; it is a scientific fact.  High humidity was even more systematic and thorough than the Roman persecutors who destroyed Christian manuscripts during the Diocletian persecution. 

            This is a perfectly reasonable explanation why we have New Testament manuscripts – and fragments of the works of Homer, and Greek poetry, and tax-receipts, etc. – from Egypt, and not from very many other locales, from the 200’s and 300’s.  It’s not as if Christians in other locales were not reading the Gospels, or reading the Iliad, or writing receipts and letters.  The unique climate of Egypt is the factor that has resulted in the preservation of papyrus documents there.  And they provide a fairly good sample of the texts that were used in Egypt (especially at Oxyrhynchus).  But they cannot do the impossible; they do not tell us what sort of New Testament text was in use elsewhere. 

            Wallace moves on to consider the early versions.  He correctly points out that the Old Latin evidence is consistently Western (where its witnesses are not barnacled by Vulgate readings, at least).  However, some Old Latin witnesses habitually collide with other Old Latin witnesses; there was not one monolithic Old Latin tradition; there were, instead, numerous independent Latin versions, as Jerome indicated in his preface to the Vulgate Gospels.  The extant Old Latin manuscripts are samples from that collection.  And while the Old Latin texts are not Byzantine, they agree with the Byzantine Text much more than they agree with the Alexandrian Text.  This is no more proof of the non-existence of the Byzantine Text than it is proof of the non-existence of the Alexandrian Text. 

            The Coptic version, Wallace states, “goes back to an early date, probably the second century.”  There was not just one Coptic version.  What we have are New Testaments (or at least portions of the New Testament) in several Egyptian dialects, displaying several different forms of the text from different areas and different eras:  Sahidic, Bohairic, Achmimic, Sub-Achmimic, Middle Egyptian, and Fayyumic.  Part of the Sahidic version is strongly Alexandrian, but the collective testimony of the Coptic versions is very far from a uniform endorsement of the Alexandrian Text; the Coptic Glazier Codex (Cop^G67), for example, displays a thoroughly Western text of Acts.  In addition, one should consider that the second-century origin of the Sahidic version is a calculated guess.  Due to the uniformity of Coptic lettering across centuries, the production-dates of Coptic manuscripts are notoriously difficult to specify on a paleographical basis.    

            Wallace next turns his attention to the Gothic version, which he, in agreement with Metzger, affirms to be the earliest representative of the Byzantine Text.  However, he blurs its production-date, stating that it was produced “at the end of the fourth century,” i.e., the late 300’s.  The Gothic version was produced by Wulfilas, who was appointed to be a bishop in 341; he undertook his translation-work shortly after that, in the mid-300’s, that is, at about the same time Codex Sinaiticus was produced.

            What does the existence of these early versions imply about the Byzantine Text?  Wallace proposes two implications.  First, he proposes that “If the majority text view is right, then each one of these versions was based on polluted Greek manuscripts.”  As far as the Old Latin versions are concerned, that sword cuts both ways:  advocates of the Alexandrian Text consider the Old Latin versions’ texts to be thoroughly corrupt.  Wallace has no right to treat this as a problem, since he believes it too.    

            Second, he proposes that the early versions represent the texts used in a wide variety of locales:  “the Coptic, Ethiopic, Latin, and Syriac versions came from all over the Mediterranean region. In none of these locales was the Byzantine text apparently used.”  (Did you see how he just threw the Ethiopic version in there, as if it existed before the 300’s?)  I challenge Wallace to name a single Byzantine reading anywhere in the Gospels that does not have some support from one or more of these versions.  The Syriac Peshitta version, in particular, exhibits strong alignment with the Byzantine Text.  And neither the Sinaitic Syriac nor the Curetonian Syriac displays an Alexandrian Text; put either one alongside the text of Vaticanus or Sinaiticus and you will observe a plethora of disagreements.  So when Wallace’s sentence is filtered by reality, and only versions from before the 300’s are in view, this is what survives:  “The Sahidic, Latin, and Syriac versions came from all over the Mediterranean region.  Only in the Sahidic version was the Alexandrian Text apparently used.”   

            The early Sahidic version did not come from all over the Mediterranean region.  It was a local text.    

            Rather than constituting “strong evidence that the Byzantine text simply did not exist in the first three centuries—anywhere,” the Old Latin evidence that Wallace has called to the stand testifies that diverse forms of the Western Text were used as the basis for Latin translations.  They are no more anti-Byzantine than they are anti-Alexandrian.  And, I note in passing, that in many cases, the Old Latin aligns with the Byzantine Text and not with the Alexandrian Text.  (This alignment provides pro-Alexandrian critics with an excuse to see only a few early Byzantine readings:  when a Byzantine reading agrees with a Western witness, the reading is categorized as Western.) 

            Again:  the only early version with a strongly Alexandrian Text is the Sahidic made-in-Egypt version.  Thus, what Wallace has in the early versions – even when the Gothic version and the Peshitta are set aside – is not evidence that the Byzantine Text did not exist anywhere.  The evidence does not come remotely close to warranting such a sweeping conclusion.  It implies, rather, that by the time the Old Latin versions were made, the Western Text had already developed, and that by the time the earliest strata of the Sahidic version was made, the Alexandrian Text had developed in Egypt.  It does not, and cannot, inform us about the text that was being used in other locales.

            What about the early patristic writers?  Wallace affirms that “Many of them lived much earlier than the date of any Greek manuscripts now extant for a particular book.”  His readers could easily get the impression that many patristic authors before the year 300 wrote so extensively that researchers can confidently observe what text-type they used in their utilizations of the New Testament.  However, in 1881, Hort wrote,

            “The only extant patristic writings which to any considerable extent support Pre-Syrian readings at variance with Western readings are connected with Alexandria, that is, the remains of Clement and Origen, as mentioned above (§ 159), together with the fragments of Dionysius and Peter of Alexandria from the second half of the third century, and in a certain measure the works of Eusebius of Caesarea, who was deeply versed in the theological literature of Alexandria.”¹⁷

            In other words, if one searches through all the known patristic literature produced before 300, the only places one finds substantial agreement with non-Byzantine, non-Western forms of the New Testament are in the writings of a few individuals who were linked to Egypt either geographically (Clement of Alexandria lived in Alexandria, of course, and Origen worked there prior to moving to Caesarea around 230) or in terms of training (Eusebius of Caesarea was a fan and defender of Origen).  

            Even in some of the writings of individuals who were either in, or from, Egypt – where one would naturally expect the local Alexandrian Text to exert the most influence – there is as much evidence for the Byzantine Text as for the Alexandrian Text.  In Carl Cosaert’s analysis of the Gospels-text used by Clement of Alexandria, Cosaert listed 125 utilizations of the text of the Gospel of Luke in which Clement’s text agrees with either one or two members of a group consisting of Codex Vaticanus, Codex Bezae, and the Textus Receptus.  Clement’s text, according to Cosaert, agrees with D 62 times (49.6%), with B 65 times (52%), and with the Byzantine Text 68 times (54.4%).¹⁸  This is not evidence that Clement used a manuscript of Luke that closely resembled the Byzantine Text – but it is evidence (contrary to what Wallace is trying to show) that Clement’s support for the idea that the Byzantine Text of Luke was non-existent when he wrote is not any greater than Clement’s support for the idea that the Alexandrian Text of Luke was non-existent when he wrote.

            None of the patristic research conducted in the last 80 years has shown that any writers outside Egypt and Caesarea prior to the year 300 used the Alexandrian Text.  There simply are not “many” patristic writers before 300 who wrote enough, and cited the New Testament enough, to clearly show that they favored the Alexandrian Text.     

            Wallace’s claim that “The early fathers had a text that keeps looking more like modern critical editions” does not accurately describe a single early patristic writer outside the borders of Egypt and Caesarea.  It does not even accurately describe the text used by Clement of Alexandria.  In some cases, the texts used by early patristic writers look more Byzantine than Alexandrian.  For example, the Alexandrian Text does not contain Mark 16:9-20, but utilizations of Mark 16:9-20 are found in the writings of Justin Martyr (160), Tatian (172), Irenaeus (180’s), Hippolytus (220’s), and the pagan author Hierocles (305), who was very likely recycling material composed by Porphyry in the 270’s.  Matthew 17:21 is another example of a non-Alexandrian reading supported by a patristic author who is supposed to have an Alexandrian text:  this verse was cited by Origen, but the entire verse is absent in the Alexandrian Text.¹⁹ 

            Wallace presents the Greek manuscripts, the early versions, and early patristic quotations as “a threefold cord” of testimony.  But in reality those three things do not come together:  the early Egyptian papyri display the texts used in Egypt.  The texts in the Old Latin versions and the Sinaitic Syriac and Curetonian Syriac are not Byzantine, but they are certainly not Alexandrian either.  Early patristic evidence from outside Egypt-and-Caesarea does not support the Alexandrian Text, and even some writers in Egypt and Caesarea support readings that are in the Byzantine Text, against the Alexandrian Text. 

            Everything we see in these three forms of evidence – manuscripts, versions, and patristic utilizations of the New Testament – indicates that the New Testament text was disseminated in localized forms.  And a local text, while capable of showing us what text was used in a specific locale, does not show us what text was being used in another locale hundreds of miles away.  We don’t look at an early Old Latin manuscript such as Codex Vercellensis and conclude that it reveals the local text of Alexandria.  Nor do we look at the Sinaitic Syriac and conclude that it reveals the local text of southern Italy.  But Wallace apparently wants us to look at a local Greek text of Egypt, and very different local Latin texts from who-knows-where – possibly also from Egypt, in some cases²⁰ – and conclude that they reveal the local texts of Antioch, Asia, Cyprus, Edessa, Nicomedia, and the cities of Greece. 

            What text of the New Testament was being used by Christians in that vast territory before the year 300?  We do not know:  manuscripts, versions, and substantial patristic writings from that area, in the ante-Nicene era, are not extant.  But in the 400’s, the Byzantine Text was the Greek text that was in use in the Greek-speaking churches in these areas, and the Peshitta was the Syriac text that was in use in the Syriac-speaking churches.  In addition, we observe that

            ● the Gospels-text in Codex Alexandrinus (from around 400) is mainly Byzantine,

            ● portions of the Gospels in Codex W (from the late 300’s or 400’s) are Byzantine,

            ● Basil of Caesarea (330-379) used a text of Matthew that was primarily Byzantine,²¹

            ● The texts of John and the Pauline Epistles used by Gregory of Nyssa (335-395) agree more with the Byzantine Text than with any other text-type.²²

            Before moving on to address Wallace’s comments about internal evidence, there is one more of his claims about external evidence that invites a response:  he stated that some patristic statements show that what is the majority-reading now was not the majority-reading when those statements were made.  Wallace provided only two specific examples of this:  (1)  Jerome’s statement (in Ad Hedibiam) that Mark 16:9-20 “is met with in only a few copies of the Gospel – almost all the codices of Greece being without this passage,” and (2) Jerome’s statement that at Matthew 5:22 “most of the ancient copies” do not contain εικη.   Regarding the first example, I believe that anyone who takes the time to compare Jerome’s comments in Ad Hedibiam to Eusebius’ comments in Ad Marinum will conclude that the part of Jerome’s composition in which this statement is found is essentially a loose recycling of Eusebius’ material; in the course of answering Hedibia’s broad question about how to reconcile the Gospels’ accounts of events after Christ’s resurrection, Jerome utilized three of Marinus’ specific questions on the subject, as well as three of Eusebius’ answers, in the same order in which they appear in Ad Marinum. 

            This should provide some instruction about the high degree of caution that should accompany patristic references to quantities of manuscripts.  In some cases, such as we see in Ad Hedibiam, the claim may have been borrowed second-hand from a source who was describing manuscripts in a different time and place.  In other cases, it may indeed reflect what the author has encountered, but it would be quite a leap to conclude that what the author encountered is what one would encounter when surveying all manuscripts everywhere that were contemporary to him.  In other words, there is no justification for the assumption that a reading found in the majority of manuscripts known to a specific author would also be found in the majority of manuscript that were not known to that author.  When we approach a statement about manuscripts that an author knows about, that is what we should understand it to be – not a statement about manuscripts about which the author knows nothing.  There is no necessary correlation between the contents of majorities of manuscripts known to Origen, or to Eusebius, or to Jerome, and the contents of actual majorities of manuscripts at the time of Origen, or Eusebius, or Jerome.  This point seems to have completely eluded Wallace.

- Continued in Part Three - 

_______________

FOOTNOTES

13 – See Metzger’s quotation of Origen on page 88 of New Testament Tools & Studies – Historical and Literary Studies, Vol. 8 (1968), at the outset of his article, Explicit References in the Works of Origen to Variant Readings in New Testament Manuscripts:  “The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyist or through the perverse audacity of others,” etc.

14 – A thorough description of P¹⁰⁴ is among the files of the NT Textual Criticism group on Facebook.

15 – Specifically, Codex W is essentially Byzantine in Matthew and in Luke 8:13-24:53.  In Mark 5-12, it seems to be loosely, and uniquely, aligned with the text found in P⁴⁵.  The text of Luke 1:1-8:12 and John 5:12-21:25 is essentially Alexandrian.  This block-mixture shows that it was possible for rival text-types to exist side-by-side in the same locale.

16 – See the comments by Dennis Kenaga regarding P⁴⁶ on page of Skeptical Trends in New Testament TextualCriticism:  “The oldest witness, P46, was rejected 303 times, 30% of the time, in 1 Corinthians.”  (The wording of this sentence could be improved, but the basic point is correct.)    

17 – See page 127 of Hort’s Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek.

18 – See the data in Carl P. Cosaert’s The Text of the Gospels in Clement of Alexandria, © 2008 by the Society of Biblical Literature.  A preview is at https://books.google.com.au/books?id=27U9z0LKccIC .

19 – It is feasible that Origen was quoting from Mark 9:29, but he tended to quote from Matthew much more frequently than from Mark.  Even if one were to grant that Origen was quoting Mark 9:29, the quotation is clearly not based on the Alexandrian Text, because Origen includes the words “and fasting,” which are not in the Alexandrian Text of Mark 9:29.

20 – See Metzger’s comment on page 37 of The Bible in Translation:  The Coptic versions of the Old Testament frequently show a relationship with the Old Latin version . . . . This is not surprising, because the Old Latin version is regarded as having been of preeminent importance for the African Church.”

21 – See Jean-Francoise Racine’s 2004 book, The Text of Matthew in the Writings of Basil of Caesarea.

22 – See James A. Brooks’ 1991 book, The New Testament Text of Gregory of Nyssa.      

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.