Misquoting Jesus (13 page)

In our oldest and best manuscripts there is no explanation for why this man would
want
to enter the pool once the waters became disturbed, but the oral tradition supplied the lack in an addition to verses 3–4 found in many of our later manuscripts. There we are told that “an angel would at times descend into the pool and disturb the water; and the first to descend after the water was disturbed would be healed.”
²¹
A nice touch to an already intriguing story.

C
ONCLUSION

We could go on nearly forever talking about specific places in which the texts of the New Testament came to be changed, either accidentally or intentionally. As I have indicated, the examples are not just in the hundreds but in the thousands. The examples given are enough to convey the general point, however: there are lots of differences among our manuscripts, differences created by scribes who were reproducing their sacred texts. 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 important to see what kinds of changes, both accidental and intentional, scribes were susceptible of making, because then it is eas
ier to spot the changes and we can eliminate some of the guesswork involved in determining which form of the text represents an alteration and which represents its earliest form. It is also important to see how modern scholars have devised methods for making this kind of determination. In the next chapter we will trace some of that story, starting from the time of John Mill and carrying it down to the present, seeing the methods that have developed for reconstructing the text of the New Testament and for recognizing the ways that it came to be changed in the process of its transmission.

Methods and Discoveries

A
s we have seen, long before Mill published his edition of the Greek New Testament with its notation of thirty thousand places of variation among the surviving witnesses, some (few) scholars had recognized that there was a problem with the New Testament text. Already in the second century, the pagan critic Celsus had argued that Christians changed the text at will, as if drunk from a drinking bout; his opponent Origen speaks of the “great” number of differences among the manuscripts of the Gospels; more than a century later Pope Damasus was so concerned about the varieties of Latin manuscripts that he commissioned Jerome to produced a standardized translation; and Jerome himself had to compare numerous copies of the text, both Greek and Latin, to decide on the text that he thought was originally penned by its authors.

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.
¹
While Mill was in the process of compiling the data
for his landmark edition of 1707, another scholar was also assiduously working on the problem of the New Testament text; this scholar was not English, however, but French, and he was not a Protestant but a Catholic. Moreover, his view was precisely the one that many English Protestants feared would result from a careful analysis of the New Testament text, namely that the wide-ranging variations in the tradition showed that Christian faith could not be based solely on scripture (the Protestant Reformation doctrine of
sola scriptura
), since the text was unstable and unreliable. Instead, according to this view, the Catholics must be right that faith required the apostolic tradition preserved in the (Catholic) church. The French author who pursued these thoughts in a series of significant publications was Richard Simon (1638–1712).

R
ICHARD
S
IMON

Although Simon was principally a Hebrew scholar, he worked on the textual tradition of both the Old and the New Testaments. His magisterial study,
A Critical History of the Text of the New Testament,
appeared in 1689 while Mill was still laboring to uncover variants in the textual tradition; Mill had access to this work and, in the opening discussion of his 1707 edition, acknowledges its erudition and importance for his own investigations even while disagreeing with its theological conclusions.

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. He is all too familiar with key textual problems. He discusses at length, for example, a number of the ones we have examined ourselves to this point: the woman taken in adultery, the last twelve verses of Mark, and the Johannine Comma (which explicitly affirms the doctrine of the Trinity). Throughout his discussion
he strives to show that it was Jerome who provided the church with a text that could be used as the basis for theological reflection. As he says in the preface to part 1 of his work:

This is at heart a clever argument, which we will meet again: the oldest Greek manuscripts are unreliable because they are precisely the degenerate copies that Jerome had to revise in order to establish the superior text; surviving Greek copies produced before Jerome's day, even though they may be our earliest copies, are not to be trusted.

As clever as the argument is, it has never won widespread support among textual critics. In effect, it is simply a declaration that our oldest surviving manuscripts cannot be trusted, but the revision of those manuscripts can. On what grounds, though, did Jerome revise his text? On the grounds of earlier manuscripts. Even he trusted the earlier record of the text. For us not to do likewise would be a giant step backward—even given the diversity of the textual tradition in the early centuries.

In any event, in pursuing his case, Simon argues that
all
manuscripts embody textual alterations, but especially the Greek ones (here we may have more polemic against “Greek schismatics” from the “true” church).

Simon's theological agenda for such observations is clear throughout his long treatise. At one point he asks rhetorically:

His answer, of course, is no. The scriptures do provide a foundation for the faith, but it is not the books themselves that ultimately matter (since they have, after all, been changed over time), but the interpretation of these books, as found in the apostolic tradition handed down through the (Catholic) church.

Simon's anti-Protestant conclusions become even clearer in some of his other writings. For example, in a work dealing with the “principal commentators on the New Testament,” he is forthright in stating:

This kind of intellectually rigorous attack on the Protestant understanding of scripture was taken quite seriously in the halls of acad
eme. Once Mill's edition appeared in 1707, 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. It was this theological agenda that lay behind much of the effort, principally in England and Germany, to devise competent and reliable methods of reconstructing the original words of the New Testament from the numerous, error-ridden copies of it that happened to survive.

R
ICHARD
B
ENTLEY

As we have seen, Richard Bentley, the classical scholar and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, turned his renowned intellect to the problems of the New Testament textual tradition in response to the negative reactions elicited by the publication of Mill's Greek New Testament with its massive collection of textual variation among the manuscripts.
⁷
Bentley's response to the deist Collins,
A Reply to a Treatise of Free-Thinking,
proved to be very popular and went through eight editions. His overarching view was that thirty thousand variations in the Greek New Testament were not too many to expect from a textual tradition endowed with such a wealth of materials, and that Mill could scarcely be faulted for undermining the truth of the Christian religion when he had not invented these places of variation but simply observed them.

Eventually Bentley himself became interested in working on the New Testament textual tradition, and once he turned his mind to it, he concluded that he could in fact make significant progress in establishing
the original text in the majority of places where textual variation existed. In a 1716 letter to a patron, Archbishop Wake, he stated the premise of a proposed new edition of the Greek Testament: he would be able, by careful analysis, to restore the text of the New Testament to its state at the time of the Council of Nicea (early fourth century), which would have been the form of the text promulgated in the preceding centuries by the great textual scholar of antiquity, Origen, many centuries
before
the vast majority of textual variations (Bentley believed) had come to corrupt the tradition.

Bentley was never one given over to false modesty. As he claims in this letter:

Bentley's method of proceeding was rather straightforward. He had decided to collate (i.e., to compare in detail) the text of the most important Greek manuscript of the New Testament in England, the early-fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, with the oldest available copies of the Latin Vulgate. What he found was a wide range of remarkable coincidences of readings, in which these manuscripts agreed time and again with each other but
against
the bulk of Greek manuscripts transcribed in the Middle Ages. The agreements extended even to such matters as word order, where the various manuscripts differed. Bentley was convinced, then, that he could edit both the Latin Vulgate and the Greek New Testament to arrive at the most ancient forms of these texts, so that there would be scarcely any doubt concerning their earliest reading. Mill's thirty thousand places of variation would thereby become a near irrelevancy to those invested in the authority of the text. The logic behind the method was simple: if, in fact, Jerome used
the best Greek manuscripts available for editing his text, then by comparing the oldest manuscripts of the Vulgate (to ascertain Jerome's original text) with the oldest manuscripts of the Greek New Testament (to ascertain which were the ones used by Jerome), one could determine what the best texts of Jerome's day had looked like—and skip over more than a thousand years of textual transmission in which the text came to be repeatedly changed. 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:

Spending further time in collating manuscripts, and in examining the collations made by others, only increased Bentley's confidence in his ability to do the job, to do it right, and to do it once and for all. In 1720 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.

Paring down the significant variants from Mill's thirty thousand to a mere two hundred is obviously a major advance. Not everyone, however, was sure that Bentley could produce the goods. In an anonymous tractate written in response to the
Proposals
(this was an age of controversialists and pamphleteers), which discussed the pamphlet paragraph by paragraph, Bentley was attacked for his program and was said, by his anonymous opponent, to have “neither talents nor materials proper for the work he had undertaken.”
¹¹

Bentley took this, as one can imagine, as a slur on his (self-acknowledged) great talents and responded in kind. Unfortunately, he mistook the identity of his opponent, who was actually a Cambridge scholar named Conyers Middleton, for another, John Colbatch, and wrote a vitriolic reply, naming Colbatch and, as was the style in those days, calling him names. Such controversial pamphlets are a marvel to behold in our own day of subtle polemics; there was nothing subtle about personal grievance in those days. 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.”
¹²
And throughout his reply he provides a smattering of rather graphic terms of abuse, calling Colbatch (who in fact had nothing to do with the pamphlet in question) a cabbage-head, insect, worm, maggot, vermin, gnawing rat, snarling dog, ignorant thief, and mountebank.
¹³
Ah, those were the days.