Thus also the Son of Man is about to suffer by them. There are numerous instances of this kind of change, which we will consider at greater length in a later chapter. For now I will simply point out a couple of brief examples. Some Christians went so far as to insist that Judaism, the old religion of the Jews, had been completely circumvented by the appearance of Christ.
For some scribes of this persuasion, the parable that Jesus tells of new wine and old wineskins may have seemed problematic. No one places new wine in old wineskins.
But new wine must be placed in new wineskins. And no one who drinks the old wine wishes for the new, for they say, "The old is better. Scribes who found the saying puzzling simply eliminated the last sentence, so that now Jesus says nothing about the old being better than the new. We find this, for example, in the account of Jesus's genealogy in Matthew's Gospel, which starts with the father of the Jews, Abraham, and traces Jesus's line from father to son all the way down to "Jacob, who was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, from whom was born Jesus, who is called the Christ" Matt.
As it stands, the genealogy already treats Jesus as an exceptional case in that he is not said to be the "son" of Joseph. For some scribes, however, that was not enough, and so they changed the text to read "Jacob, who was the father of Joseph, to whom being betrothed the virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus, who is called the Christ.
On occasion scribes modified their texts not because of theology but for liturgical reasons. As the ascetic tradition strengthened in early Christianity, it is not surprising to find this having an impact on scribal changes to the text.
For example, in Mark 9, when Jesus casts out a demon that his disciples had been unable to budge, he tells them, "This kind comes out only by prayer" Mark Later scribes made the appropriate addition, in view of their own practices, so that now Jesus indicates that "This kind comes out only by prayer and fasting. The prayer is also found in Matthew, of course, and it is that longer, Matthean form that was, and is, most familiar to Christians.
Father, hallowed be your name. May your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive our sins, for we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
This scribal tendency to "harmonize" passages in the Gospels is ubiquitous. Sometimes scribes were influenced not by parallel passages but by oral traditions then in circulation about Jesus and the stories told about him. One outstanding example is the memorable story in John 5 of Jesus healing an invalid by the pool of Bethzatha. When he asks the man if he would like to be healed, the man replies that there is no one who can place him in the pool, so that "when the water is troubled" someone always beats him into it.
As I have indicated, the examples are not just in the hundreds but in the thousands. In the early Christian centuries, scribes were amateurs and as such were more inclined to alter the texts they copied—or more prone to alter them accidentally—than were scribes in the later periods who, starting in the fourth century, began to be professionals.
It is also important to see how modern scholars have devised methods for making this kind of determination. The final page of the Gospel of John in the famous Codex Sinaiticus, found in the nineteenth century by the determined discoverer of manuscripts, Tischendorf in St. Catherine's monastery on Mount Sinai. The problem lay dormant, however, through the Middle Ages and down to the seventeenth century, when Mill and others started to deal with it seriously. Instead, according to this view, the Catholics must be right that faith required the apostolic tradition preserved in the Catholic church.
Simon's book is devoted not to uncovering every available variant reading but to discussing textual differences in the tradition, in order to show the uncertainty of the text in places and to argue, at times, for the superiority of the Latin Bible, still held to be the authoritative text by Catholic theologians. As he says in the preface to part 1 of his work: St. This we endeavor to demonstrate in this work, and that the most ancient Greek Exemplars of the New Testament are not the best, since they are suited to those Latin Copies, which St.
Jerome found so degenerous as to need an Alteration. As clever as the argument is, it has never won widespread support among textual critics. On what grounds, though, did Jerome revise his text? On the grounds of earlier manuscripts. For us not to do likewise would be a giant step backward—even given the diversity of the textual tradition in the early centuries.
At one point he asks rhetorically: Is it possible. If the truth of religion had not lived on in the Church, it would not be safe to look for it now in books that have been subjected to so many changes and that in so many matters were dependent on the will of the copyists. Once Mill's edition appeared in , Protestant biblical scholars were driven by the nature of their materials to reconsider and defend their understanding of the faith.
They could not, of course, simply do away with the notion of sola scriptura. For them, the words of the Bible continued to convey the authority of the Word of God. But how does one deal with the circumstance that in many instances we don't know what those words were? One solution was to develop methods of textual criticism that would enable modern scholars to reconstruct the original words, so that the foundation of faith might once again prove to be secure.
Bentley was never one given over to false modesty. He had decided to collate i. The agreements extended even to such matters as word order, where the various manuscripts differed. Mill's thirty thousand places of variation would thereby become a near irrelevancy to those invested in the authority of the text.
Moreover, since Jerome's text would have been that of his predecessor Origen, one could rest assured that this was the very best text available in the earliest centuries of Christianity. And so, Bentley draws what for him was the ineluctable conclusion: By taking two thousand errors out of the Pope's Vulgate, and as many out of the Protestant Pope Stephens' [i. In he published a pamphlet entitled Proposals for Printing designed to bring in support for his project by acquiring a number of financial subscribers.
In it he lays out his proposed method of reconstructing the text and argues for its incomparable accuracy. The author believes that he has retrieved except in very few places the true exemplar of Origen.
Not everyone, however, was sure that Bentley could produce the goods. Bentley remarks that "We need go no further than this paragraph for a specimen of the greatest malice and impudence, that any scribbler out of the dark committed to paper.
After his death, his nephew was forced to return the sums that had been collected by subscription, bringing closure to the entire affair. These were seen as a major challenge to Bengel's faith, rooted as it was in the very words of scripture. If these words were not certain, what of the faith based on them?
First, though, we need to look briefly at Bengel's approach to the Bible. Bengel was a classically trained, extremely careful interpreter of the biblical text. At the heart of this work of exegesis was a trust in the words of scripture. This trust went so far that it took Bengel in directions that today might seem a shade bizarre. He, in fact, believed he knew when the end would come: it would be about a century in the future, in Bengel was not taken aback by verses such as Matt.
By studying the biblical prophecies, in fact, later Christians could come to know. The papacy was the Antichrist, the freemasons may have represented the false "prophet" of Revelation, and the end was but a century away he was writing in the s. Still, let the remainder stand, especially the great termination which I anticipate Clearly, the predictors of doom in our own age—the Hal Lindseys author of The Late Great Planet Earth and the Timothy LaHayes coauthor of the Left Behind series —have had their predecessors, just as they will have their successors, world without end.
If the number of the Antichrist were not but, say, , that would have a profound effect. Since the words matter, it matters that we have the words. And so Bengel spent a good deal of his research time exploring the many thousands of variant readings available in our manuscripts, and in his attempt to get beyond the alterations of later scribes back to the texts of the original authors, he came up with several breakthroughs in methodology. The first is a criterion he devised that more or less summed up his approach to establishing the original text whenever the wording was in doubt.
Scholars before him, such Simon and Bentley, had tried to devise criteria of evaluation for variant readings. Some others, whom we have not discussed here, devised long lists of criteria that might prove helpful. The logic is this: when scribes changed their texts, they were more likely to try to improve them. In every case, the more difficult reading is to be preferred.
He noticed that documents that are copied from one another naturally bear the closest resemblance to the exemplars from which they were copied and to other copies made from the same exemplars. This is useful to know, because in theory one could set up a kind of family tree and trace the lineage of documents back to their source. It is a bit like finding a mutual ancestor between you and a person in another state with the same last name.
Later, we will see more fully how grouping witnesses into families developed into a more formal methodological principle for helping the textual critic establish the original text. For now, it is enough to note that it was Bengel who first had the idea. In he published his great edition of the Greek New Testament, which printed for the most part the Textus Receptus but indicated places in which he thought he had uncovered superior readings to the text. At a young age Wettstein became enthralled with the question of the text of the New Testament and its manifold variations, and pursued the subject in his early studies.
It contains all that is necessary to salvation both for belief and conduct. It involved the text of a key passage in the book of 1 Timothy. The passage in question, 1 Tim. For the text, in most manuscripts, refers to Christ as "God made manifest in the flesh, and justified in the Spirit. Moreover, the horizontal line in the middle of the first letter, Q, was not actually a part of the letter but was a line that had bled through from the other side of the old vellum.
But in Codex Alexandrinus and some other manuscripts, the text instead speaks of "the Church of the Lord, which he obtained by his own blood. Alerted to such difficulties, Wettstein began thinking seriously about his own theological convictions, and became attuned to the problem that the New Testament rarely, if ever, actually calls Jesus God. Wettstein's emphasis on such matters started raising suspicions among his colleagues, suspicions that were confirmed for them when, in , Wettstein published a discussion of the problems of the Greek New Testament in anticipation of a new edition that he was preparing.
Included among the specimen passages in his discussion were some of these disputed texts that had been used by theologians to establish the biblical basis for the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. For Wettstein, these texts in fact had been altered precisely in order to incorporate that perspective: the original texts could not be used in support of it.
This raised quite a furor among Wettstein's colleagues, many of whom became his opponents. Even so, this was a magnificent edition, still of value to scholars today, more than years later. No leading scholar of the text subscribes to this bizarre theory.
K ARL L ACHMANN After Wettstein there were a number of textual scholars who made greater or lesser contributions to the methodology for determining the oldest form of the biblical text in the face of an increasing number of manuscripts as these were being discovered that attest variation, scholars such as J. Semler and J. The Textus Receptus, he knew, was based on the manuscript tradition of the twelfth century.
The surviving manuscripts in Greek, along with the manuscripts of Jerome's Vulgate and the quotations of the text in such writers as Irenaeus, Origen, and Cyprian, would at the very least allow that.
And so that is what he did. Thus, in he produced a new version of the text, not based on the T. This was the first time anyone had dared to do so. It had taken more than three hundred years, but finally the world was given an edition of the Greek New Testament that was based exclusively on ancient evidence.
Lachmann's aim of producing a text as it would have been known in the late fourth century was not always understood, and even when understood it was not always appreciated. When he was born completely healthy, she dedicated him to God by giving him this unusual first name.
Tischendorf was an inordinately ardent scholar who saw his work on the text of the New Testament as a sacred, divinely ordained task. As he once wrote his fiancee, while still in his early twenties: "I am confronted with a sacred task, the struggle to regain the original form of the New Testament. Since the pages had not been erased thoroughly, some of the underwriting could still be seen, although not clearly enough to decipher most of the words—even though several fine scholars had done their best.
By Tischendorf's time, however, chemical reagents had been discovered that could help bring out the underwriting. Tischendorf had made a journey to Egypt in , when not yet thirty years of age, arriving on camelback eventually at the wilderness monastery of Saint Catherine.
What happened there on May 24, , is still best described in his own words: It was at the foot of Mount Sinai, in the Convent of St Catherine, that I discovered the pearl of all my researches. What was my surprise to find amid this heap of papers a considerable number of sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek, which seemed to me to be one of the most ancient that I had ever seen. The authorities of the monastery allowed me to possess myself of a third of these parchments, or about forty three sheets, all the more readily as they were designated for the fire.
But I could not get them to yield up possession of the remainder. The too lively satisfaction which I had displayed had aroused their suspicions as to the value of the manuscript. I transcribed a page of the text of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and enjoined on the moniks to take religious care of all such remains which might fall their way. Some nine years later he made a return trip and could find no trace of it. This time Tischendorf found no trace of the manuscript until the last day of his visit.
Tischendorf continues: I unrolled the cover, and discovered, to my great surprise, not only those very fragments which, fifteen years before, I had taken out of the basket, but also other parts of the Old Testament, the New Testament complete, and in addition, the Epistle of Barnabas and a part of the Pastor of Hermas. This was, of course, just one of Tischendorf's many contributions to the field of textual studies.
The strength of the analysis owes more than a little to the genius of Hort in particular. So many alterations on good MS [manuscript] authority made things clear not in a vulgar, notional way, but by giving a deeper and fuller meaning. In another letter to Ellerton on April 19, , Hort relates: I have not seen anybody that I know except Westcott, whom. One result of our talk I may as well tell you. He and I are going to edit a Greek text of the N.
For a great mass of the readings, if we separate them in thought from the rest, the labour is wholly disproportionate. But believing it to be absolutely impossible to draw a line between important and unimportant readings, I should hesitate to say the entire labour is disproportionate to the worth of fixing the entire text to the utmost extent now practicable.
It would, I think be utterly unpardonable for us to give up our task. The work was well worth it. The Greek text that Westcott and Hort produced is remarkably similar to the one still widely used by scholars today, more than a century later. Since Bengel had first recognized that manuscripts could be gathered together in "family" groupings somewhat like drawing up genealogies of family members , scholars had attempted to isolate various groups of witnesses into families. Westcott and Hort were very much involved in this endeavor as well.
That is, if two manuscripts have the same wording of a verse, it must be because the two manuscripts ultimately go back to the same source—either the original manuscript or a copy of it.
As the principle is sometimes stated, Identity of reading implies identity of origin. One can then establish family groups based on textual agreements among the various surviving manuscripts.
The two leading witnesses of this Neutral text, in Westcott and Hort's opinion, were Codex Sinaiticus the manuscript discovered by Tischendorf and, even more so, Codex Vaticanus, discovered in the Vatican library.
Then, too, significant manuscript discoveries, especially discoveries of papyri, have been made since their day. Applying it to textual problems can be interesting and even entertaining, as we work to see which variant readings in our manuscripts represent the words of the text as produced by their authors and which represent changes made by later scribes.
After laying out these methods, I will illustrate how they can be used by focusing on three textual variants found in our manuscript tradition of the New Testament. Which manuscripts attest the reading? Are those manuscripts reliable? In thinking about the manuscripts supporting one textual variant over another, one might be tempted simply to count noses, so to speak, in order to see which variant reading is found in the most surviving witnesses.
Most scholars today, however, are not at all convinced that the majority of manuscripts necessarily provide the best available text. The reason for this is easy to explain by way of an illustration. Suppose that after the original manuscript of a text was produced, two copies were made of it, which we may call A and B.
These two copies, of course, will differ from each other in some ways—possibly major and probably minor. Now suppose that A was copied by one other scribe, but B was copied by fifty scribes.
No, not at all—even though by counting noses, it is found in fifty times as many witnesses. In fact, the ultimate difference in support for that reading is not fifty manuscripts to one. One other consideration is the age of the manuscripts that support a reading. This is not to say that one can blindly follow the oldest manuscripts in every instance, of course. No, not necessarily. The second, historical, reason that one cannot simply look at what the oldest manuscript reads, with no other considerations, is that, as we have seen, the earliest period of textual transmission was also the least controlled.
This is when nonprofessional scribes, for the most part, were copying our texts—and making lots of mistakes in their copies. And so, age does matter, but it cannot be an absolute criterion. This is why most textual critics are rational eclecticists. This is a rather tricky assessment, but it works this way: some manuscripts can be shown, on a variety of grounds, to be superior to others. For example, whenever internal evidence discussed below is virtually decisive for a reading, these manuscripts almost always have that reading, whereas other manuscripts usually, as it turns out, the later manuscripts have the alternative reading.
In a way, it is like having witnesses in a court of law or knowing friends whose word you can trust. The same applies to groups of witnesses.
We saw in chapter 4 that Westcott and Hort developed Bengel's idea that manuscripts could be grouped into textual families. The "Byzantine" and "Western" texts, on the other hand, are less likely to preserve the best readings, when they are not also supported by Alexandrian manuscripts.
Internal Evidence Textual critics who consider themselves rational eclecticists choose from a range of readings based on a number of pieces of evidence. In addition to the external evidence provided by the manuscripts, two kinds of internal evidence are typically used. We are able to study, of course, the writing style, the vocabulary, and the theology of an author. This asks, not which reading an author was likely to have written, but which reading a scribe was likely to have created.
In short, determining the original text is neither simple nor straightforward! To illustrate the importance of some textual decisions, I turn now to three textual variants of the latter sort, where the determination of the original text has a significant bearing on how one understands the message of some of the New Testament authors.
Most English translations render the beginning of verse 41 so as to emphasize Jesus's love for this poor outcast leper: "feeling compassion" or the word could be translated "moved with pity" for him.
In doing so, these translations are following the Greek text found in most of our manuscripts. It is certainly easy to see why compassion might be called for in the situation. We don't know the precise nature of the man's disease—many commentators prefer to think of it as a scaly skin disorder rather than the kind of rotting flesh that we commonly associate with leprosy.
Moved with pity for such a one, Jesus reaches out a tender hand, touches his diseased flesh, and heals him. The simple pathos and unproblematic emotion of the scene may well account for translators and interpreters, as a rule, not considering the alternative text found in some of our manuscripts. Here, rather than saying that Jesus felt compassion for the man, the text indicates that he became angry.
Because of its attestation in both Greek and Latin witnesses, this other reading is generally conceded by textual specialists to go back at least to the second century. Is it possible, though, that this is what Mark himself wrote?
As we have already seen, we are never completely safe in saying that when the vast majority of manuscripts have one reading and only a couple have another, the majority are right. Once a change made its way into the manuscript tradition, it could be perpetuated until it became more commonly transmitted than the original wording.
Which one is original? If Christian readers today were given the choice between these two readings, no doubt almost everyone would choose the one more commonly attested in our manuscripts: Jesus felt pity for this man, and so he healed him. The other reading is hard to figure out: what would it mean to say that Jesus felt angry?
Isn't this in itself sufficient ground for assuming that Mark must have written that Jesus felt compassion? On the contrary, the fact that one of the readings makes such good sense and is easy to understand is precisely what makes some scholars suspect that it is wrong. For, as we have seen, scribes also would have preferred the text to be nonproblematic and simple to understand. Which reading better explains the existence of the other? When seen from this perspective, the latter is obviously more likely.
But we do have two authors who copied this story within twenty years of its first production. Scholars have long recognized that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, and that both Matthew and Luke used Mark's account as a source for their own stories about Jesus. When we do this, we find that Matthew and Luke have both taken over this story from Mark, their common source. Which word, then, do they use to describe Jesus's reaction? Does he become compassionate or angry?
If the text of Mark available to Matthew and Luke had described Jesus as feeling compassion, why would each of them have omitted the word? Would they have been inclined to eliminate that emotion? There are, in fact, other occasions on which Jesus becomes angry in Mark.
In each instance, Matthew and Luke have modified the accounts. Luke has the verse almost the same as Mark, but he removes the reference to Jesus's anger. Matthew completely rewrites this section of the story and says nothing of Jesus's wrath. Similarly, in Mark Jesus is aggravated at his disciples a different Greek word is used for not allowing people to bring their children to be blessed.
Both Matthew and Luke have the story, often verbally the same, but both delete the reference to Jesus's anger Matt. In sum, Matthew and Luke have no qualms about describing Jesus as compassionate, but they never describe him as angry. Thus, whereas it is difficult to understand why they would have removed "feeling compassion" from the account of Jesus's healing of the leper, it is altogether easy to see why they might have wanted to remove "feeling anger.
One other point must be emphasized before we move on. I have indicated that whereas Matthew and Luke have difficulty ascribing anger to Jesus, Mark has no problem doing so. Even in the story under consideration, apart from the textual problem of verse 41, Jesus does not treat this poor leper with kid gloves.
After he heals him, he "severely rebukes him" and "throws him out. They are harsh terms, used elsewhere in Mark always in contexts of violent conflict and aggression e.
At what, though, would Jesus be angry? Some scholars who have preferred the text that indicates that Jesus "became angry" in this passage have come up with highly improbable interpretations. Uploaded by pamuk7 on May 4, Internet Archive's 25th Anniversary Logo. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in.
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Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to non fiction, history lovers.
Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Ehrman Submitted by: Jane Kivik. To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. To browse Academia. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Misquoting Jesus. Andy Huy. A short summary of this paper. Ehrman, I want to deliver some comments on the book, as well as the way Ehrman presented his argument.
On the overall, this book is easy to read and understand. I think this is also the main thesis of Misquoting Jesus. Also, the targeted audiences of Ehrman are not specifically Christians, but whoever has interest in the field of history, religion.
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