A blog by James Snapp Jr. about New Testament textual criticism, especially involving variants in the Gospels.
Proverbs 18:9
In Mark 5:21-43 (chapter 21 of the Greek text) and Matthew 9:18-26 and Luke 8:40-56 the testimony of Saint Veronica is related - the woman who had suffered for twelve years from hemorrhages until the day she met Jesus.
In Matthew 9:20, and in Luke 8:44, after the word ηψατο, both read του κρασπέδου του ιματίου αυτου. Mark 5:27, though, reads του ιματίου αυτου, without του κρασπέδου . . . or did he?
It's a natural harmonization to Matthew (and Luke), and entirely benign - but the majority of manuscripts do not have it. Apparently more than one scribe working independently, including the scribe responsible for the archetype of family-1, felt led (erroneously) to add του κρασπέδου to Mark's account.
This means something regarding the literary relationship between the texts of the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Mark, and the Gospel of Luke as we know them (the Synoptic Problem). Advocates of the Two-Source Solution and the Four Source Hypothesis operate on the premise that Matthew and Luke borrowed material from Mark's account - Matthew enlarging Mark's account via the inclusion of his transcripts of Jesus' discourses, and Luke enlarging Mark's account via the inclusion of the testimonies of various eyewitnesses.
Matthew closely followed Mark's report about Jairus' daughter and Veronica - but not in this little detail about specifying that she thought about touching the hem of
his garment. Why did Matthew and Luke both mention this detail and not Mark?
I propose that neither Matthew nor Luke had copies of the Gospel of Mark in front of them when they composed their Gospels. Instead, they had two forms of Proto-Mark - Mark's collections of Peter's remembrances about Jesus as the written collection existed in the early 60s, not as the Gospel of Mark existed when officially released in Rome c. 67-68. And in Proto-Mark, the words του κρασπέδου were present in the text, eliciting their inclusion by Matthew and Luke. When preparing the definitive text of his Gospel, Mark himself committed parablepsis: his line of sight drifted from the του of του κρασπέδου to the του of the following phrase (του ιματίου αυτου).
An interesting lesson in how the Holy Spirit bears with human weakness even in the production of the Word of God.
For reference: My solution to the Synoptic Problem:
Jimmy Wallace, writing for the Cold-Case Christianity apologetics ministry, is guilty of spreading several false statements. Let's review:
"Mark 16:9-20, the last 11 verses of the
Gospel"
They are twelve verses, not just eleven.
"In a letter to a fellow Christian, ancient historian Eusebius (who lived from A.D. 265 – 339) suggested these verses were not authentic to Mark and could be disregarded"
In real life, Eusebius encouraged Marinus to retain Mark 16:9-20, and to resolve the perceived discrepancy with Matthew 28 by understanding that there should be a pause after "Rising." It is of course possible that Eusebius changed his mind later when creating his cross-reference system for the Gospels (the Eusebian Canons).
"Jerome also believed verses 9 – 20 were not authentic: -
False. Jerome utilized part of Eusebius' material, but made it clear in Ad Hedibiam (Epistle 120) that Mark 16:9-20 ought to be retained. He included Mark 16:9-20 in the Vulgate in 383 and later in life he mentioned that he had seen the interpolation now known as the Freer Logion "especially in Greek codices."
"Severus of Antioch agreed with the skepticism surrounding these verses."
Wrong. If brother Wallace had read John Burgon carefully he would have avoided making this kind of mistake.
"In fact, scholars throughout history (and even to the present time) have discussed whether these verses are original to Mark."
In real life, Mark 16:9-20 is supported by over 1,650 Greek copies, ad is absent from three.
" It is more difficult to understand the reverse, wherein the verses were in the original gospel and a later Christian removed the passage."
Is it though? A meticulous scribe in the early second century, regarding what we know as the Gospel of Mark as the record of Peter's recollections about Jesus, perceiving (rightly or wrongly) that verses 9-20 had their origin with Mark, without Petrine approval, could understandably excise the verses in his collection of the Gospels, on the grounds that Peter's recollections, not Mark's, should form the contours of the narrative.
"The earliest and most reliable copies of Mark exclude the passage"
A needlessly vague way to refer to two fourth-century copies.
"Ireneus, an influential church leader who lived from A.D. 130 to 202, quoted Mark 16:9 in his work Against Heresies (written circa 180 A.D.)"
Irenaeus explicitly quoted Mark 16:19.
"As a result, it is clear the verses were added to Mark quickly after the Gospel’s original writing."
Rather, it is clear that in three copies of the Gospel of Mark used by men one generation removed from apostolic times, verses 9-20 were present.
There appear to be two competing
versions of Mark in the early days of the faith, with Christians
making copies of version to which they had access.
"The
passages are noted with footnotes and warnings."
"Warnings" misrepresents the evidence.
An accurate and up-to-date presentation of the relevant evidence can be found in the fourth edition of my book Authentic: The Case for Mark 16:9-20.
The tradition about the origin of the Gospel of Mark is that Mark composed it in Rome to preserve a record of Peter's remembrances about Jesus. I see no reason not to subscribe to that.
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| Bart Ehrman |
Dr. Bart Ehrman has recently focused on this, asking his readers about the Gospel of Mark's author, date, and purpose. Let's put some of his claims under my analytical magnifying glass.
He called Sinaiticus and Vaticanus "our oldest two manuscripts, assigning them both to "toward the end of the fourth century (around 375 CE)." In real life Papyrus 45 is older. And Vaticanus probably dates from the early 300s, not the later 300s (by which the Eusebian Sections had become very popular among scribes transcribing the Gospels).
He also stated that "they have the shortest titles," but in real life Sinaiticus has the longer form of the subscription to the Gospel of Mark (see picture).
"The titles were added by a later scribe (in a different hand" he state, and this is correct - but "later" in this case may simply be a matter of days; the diorthotes (supervisor/proofreader) acting as scribe as he finished approving the codex book by book via the addition of the closing titles.
Ehrman then claimed "the manuscripts that the authors of both these 4th century manuscripts used apparently didn’t have titles at all (since they lacked them until the later scribe added them)." At this point Dr. Ehrman was over-extrapolating and making little sense. It is simply baseless to look at a systematic approach to adding page-titles and book subscriptions and conclude that it is an echo of exemplars rather than simply show tighter compartamentalization of the labor assigned to the transcription team of scribes.
Ehrman supposes that it's anyone's guess whether the titles were added a year after 01 and 03 were made, but in real life it would require less than a minute before manuscript-readers of the Gospels in the 300s would encounter no book-titles and no subscriptions before they would demand a refund and/or send it back to the scriptorium to be finished.
For some reason - probably an irrational adherence to skepticism - Ehrman questions the testimony of Papias about Mark's authorship. First he claims "There’s no way of knowing for certain that he’s talking about our Mark. I’m not just being overly skeptical here."
Bart Ehrman certainly is being overly skeptical, as usual. It's not as if there were multiple small books floating around Rome in the late 100s and reporting testimony about Jesus. Papias' report made sense to subsequent generations. If Ehrman really considers it "odd" that second-century writers prior to Irenaeus did not make their reports of the origins of the Gospels more explicit I invite him to consider that they were writing for audiences informed by oral tradition, not for atheistic readers 1900 years later.
Papias wasn't throwing down words from the clear blue sky. As Eusebius of Caesarea wrote, "he shows by the words which he uses that he received the doctrines of the faith from those who were their friends." Papias wrote that he "learned carefully from the elders and carefully remembered" what he heard.
For those new to Papias, I remind everyone what Timothy Mitchell pointed out in 2016, : Papias perpetuated an older tradition when he wrote "And the elder used to say this: "Mark, having become Peter's interpreter, wrote down accurately everything he remembered - though not in systematic order - about the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him. But afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teachings as needed but had no intention of giving an ordered account of the Lord's discourses. Consequently Mark did nothing wrong by writing down some things as he remembered them, for he made it his primary concern not to omit anything which he heard, and to avoid making any false statement in them." This is preserved in Eusebius' Church History Book 3:39.
(I mention in passing that this does not seem to be how anyone would describe Mark's Gospel without 16:9-20.)
Ehrman wrote, "Earlier authors who appear to quote Mark (e.g., Justin in 150 CE) - "
Allow me to pause and consider Ehrman's needless nebulosity. Justin Martyr utilized Mark 3:16-17 when he mentioned that Jesus changed the moniker of the sons of Zebedee to Boanerges (in Dialogue with Trypho 106).
Ehrman claimed that "If we look for any evidence in the Gospel itself that it was written by Mark or from provides Peter’s perspective on Jesus, there’s really nothing there." He is incorrect again, as a thoughtful reading of Broadus' commentary on the Gospel of Mark demonstrates. [Take ten minutes and use the embedded link to obtain this wonderful resource.]
Ehrman assumed that Peter didn't know what Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane - as if Peter and Jesus could not have discussed the subject when Peter and Jesus were eating during the 40 days following Jesus' resurrection. That's his atheism talking.
Ehrman correctly observed that "Peter is not portrayed in a positive light in the Gospel: he cannot understand who Jesus is, he puts his foot in his mouth, he denies him three times, and at one point Jesus calls him Satan." So what? Peter did not want to brag about himself; he honestly pointed out some of his faults to his Roman audience. Of course he wanted to point to Jesus and Mark in his Gospel recorded Peter's accounts.
Ehrman's irrational skepticism is on display when he wrote that Mark "almost certainly could not have written this kind of subtle and elaborate account in Greek" on the grounds that Mark's native tongue was Aramaic. Dr. Ehrman simply underestimated how thoroughly being raised in a bilingual society - in this case, Judea-Samaria-Galilee - produced a literate mind such as that of Mark. His incredulosity that Mark produced his Gospel (totaling 52 page if written in a tidy little book today) in the course of his lifetime is hard to understand anything other than a theatrical effect.
Ehrman claimed that to compose Mark's little Greek book "was highly unusual." Considering the educational system organized by Queen Salome Alexandra that was already in place when Mark was born this assumption is unwarranted. The Septuagint was in play. Many Jews in Roman-occupied Judea were literate in Greek.
When Ehrman asked why the Gospel of Mark was attributed to Mark he seems to overlook the historical reason that the Christians at Rome who knew Peter and Mark were aware that Mark was writing a composition to preserve Peter's recollections about Jesus, and when Mark passed his work along to them it was simply the natural thing to do.
Like most liberals, Ehrman assigned the Gospel of Mark to "maybe" 70-75. Being a skeptic who denies the miraculous he seemingly considers certain sayings of Jesus foreseeing the destruction of Jerusalem as if they were concocted after the fact. A production-date in the mid-60s (not to put too fine a line on it but I suspect 68) seems to me more probable, with earlier stages of the composition being accessible to Christians such as Luke. (Independent records of early apostolic traditions about Jesus were also circulating as Luke attested in the opening verses of his Gospel).
Ehrman didn't go far enough when he observed that in the Gospel of Mark "Jesus repeatedly declares he has to die for others and not even his closest intimates can get their minds around it." Peter and his fellow apostles didn't have an accurate idea of Jesus' mission prior to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ - but afterwards, following the coming of the Holy Spirit, they did. Their enlightenment didn't start with the composition of Mark's Gospel; Mark's Gospel echoes Peter's education. Considering that Peter died as a crucified martyr rather than deny Christ, that ought to say something about his integrity and the truthfulness of his testimony about Jesus as written by Mark.
In the ninth lecture in my online introduction to New Testament textual criticism, I describe text-types. There has been a recent wave of resistance in academia to affirm the reality of text-types, on the grounds that only the Byzantine text has an archetype capable of confident reconstruction. This resistance is due to a failure to acknowledge the proper way to define a text-type. Instead of profiling entire collections of readings in separate genres of the New Testament (Gospels, Acts, General Epistles, Pauline Epistles, Revelation) , a constellation of 50 or less distinct readings is all that is needed to separate manuscripts into the traditionally recognized text-types (Alexandrian, Byzantine, Western, Caesarean).
Because of pervasive mixture and each manuscript's scribe's uniqueness, once each text-type's distinct variants - the stars in the constellation, so to speak - are identified, 45 out of 50 variants, rather than 50 out of 50, sufficiently shows the type of text a manuscript contains.
This approach is applicable to the full text across a genre; it does not apply to small fragmentary manuscripts, the classification of which should be made and which should also be considered provisional. Why provisional? Because block-mixture is real. It was once proposed that a small sample is sufficient to show the text-type of a manuscript: the text-type of the extant sample was extrapolated to apply hypothetically to the non-extant portion. The logic seemed sound: if you open a jar and stick a spoon inside and pull it out full of grape jelly, it's reasonable to conclude that the whole jar is full of grape jelly.
When we have the text of a full genre preserved in a manuscript, its text can be validly assigned to a type. Over a century ago, Edward Ardron Hutton, assisted by F. C. Burkitt, helpfully wrote An Atlas of Textual Criticism in which he presented (or re-presented) a valid basis for dividing groups of manuscripts' text into families. Hutton affirmed that "The test of antiquity is decidedly against the Syrian," i.e., against the Byzantine text. Built into his statement is the assumption that we can identify what the Byzantine text is.
The text of a non-fragmentary manuscript can easily be assigned to a text-type, or be recognized as mixed, on the basis of Hutton's Triple Readings. There is no need to add comets and fireflies to the constellation while the stars are blazing bright.
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At Wikipedia one can read details about its text.
● 5:8a – 0206 reads ο before διαβολος along with p72 and 33, disagreeing with NA27 and the Byzantine Text.
● 5:8b – after ζητων 0206 lacks τινα, agreeing with Codex Vaticanus, and disagreeing with the Byzantine Text. NA 27 has τινα in brackets.
●5:9b – 0206 lacks τω, agreeing with the Byzantine text and disagreeing with Papyrus 72 and Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Again the NA27 uselessly resorted to brackets.
● 5:9c – 0206 reads επιτελεισθαι (to be experiencing) along with the majority, disagreeing with Papyrus 72 (επειτελειται) and with Vaticanus and Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus and (επιτελεισθε) (you are experiencing).
● 5:10 – 0206 lacks τω agreeing with the Byzantine Text, disagreeing with Papyrus 72 and Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.
● 5:10 – 0206 lacks the nomina sacra for “Jesus” agreeing with Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. NA27 resorts to brackets.
● 5:10 – 0206 reads καταρτιει (an orthographic error, probably elicited by the scribe's line of sight drifting ahead in the text of his exemplar. The word υμας is not included, disagreeing with the Byzantine text.
● 5:10 – the final word of the verse θεμελιώσει is absent, a parableptic error elicited by homoeoteleuton.
● 5:11a – 0206 reads αυτω κρατος (to whom [is to be attributed] dominion), agreeing with NA27 and Papyrus 72 02 03, disagreeing with the longer Byzantine reading αυτω η δοξα και το κρατος. (A liturgical flourish appears to be have been added to the Byzantine text here.)
● 5:11b – 0206 reads εις τους αιωνας των αιωνων αμην (to the ages of the ages, Amen), agreeing with the Byzantine text and disagreeing with the more economical Papyrus 72 and Vaticanus and NA27 (εις τους αιωνας αμην) (to the ages Amen). Simple parablepsis accounts for the shorter reading.
● 5:12 – 0206 lacks the του after χαριν, agreeing with Papyrus and disagreeing with the Byzantine text and NA27.
First Corinthians 13:1-5 is the arena for today's combat. In the Evangelical Heritage Version this passage runs as follows: "If I speak in the tongues[a] of men and of angels but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and know all the mysteries and have all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I give up my body that I may be burned[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy. It does not brag. It is not arrogant. It does not behave indecently. It is not selfish. It is not irritable. It does not keep a record of wrongs."
Our combatants are a lectionary from the 1300s - GA l2466 - and Papyrus 46, which despite some evangelicals' desire to give it a dating earlier than it really merits I assign to the first half of the 200s. The text of First Corinthians 13:1-5 in lectionary 2466 is almost perfectly Byzantine, agreeing with either the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform or the Hodges-Farstad Majority Text throughout, except for the omicron in καυθήσομαι.
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1 - no variants
2 - μεθιστάνειν – UBS 4 has μεθιστάναι (+2, -1)
3 - καὶ ἐὰν – UBS4 has καν (+3)
3 – καυθήσομαι – UBS4 has καυχησωμαι (+2 , -2)
4 - η αγαπη – UBS4 has ἡ αγάπη in brackets [inasmuch as brackets were not in the autograph this variant is not counted]
5
- no variants
With 7 letters' worth of addition and 4 letters' worth of omissions l2466 has a total of 11 letters' worth of corruption in First Corinthians 13:1-5.
1 – ει τι (after και) – (+1)
1 – υμειν (instead of υμιν) – (+1)
2 – καν (instead of και εαν) – (-3)
2 – καν (instead of και εαν) – (-3)
3 – και (instead of και εαν) – (-2)
3
– ουθεν
(instead of ουδεν)
– (+1, -1)
4 – η
αγαπη after περπερεύεται - (+6) [inasmuch
as brackets were not in the autograph this variant is not counted]
5 – ευσχμονει (instead of ασχημονει) – (+2, -1)
5
– το
(instead
of
τα)
– (+1,
-1)
Thus,
ignoring the non-decision of the UBS editorial team in v. 4, the text
of P46 has 6 letters’ worth of additions and 11 letters’ worth of
omission, for a total of 17 letters’ worth of corruption.
The
victor: l2466.
How
did a lectionary from the 1300s manage to preserve a more accurate
text of First Corinthians 13:1-5 than a papyrus from the 200s?
The impact of proof-reading in the Byzantine transmission-line, and
the lack of consistent careful proof-reading in the early Alexandrian
transmission-line, cannot be underestimated.
This post was created at the request of Larry Thompson Jr.
