Misquoting Jesus (14 page)

Once Bentley was alerted to the real identity of his opponent, he was naturally a bit embarrassed about barking up the wrong tree, but he continued his self-defense, and both sides had more than one volley left in the exchange. These defenses hampered the work itself, of course, as did other factors, including Bentley's onerous obligations as an administrator of his college at Cambridge, his other writing projects, and certain disheartening setbacks, which included his failure to obtain an exemption on import duties for the paper he wanted to use for the edition. In the end, his proposals for printing the Greek New Testament, with the text not of late corrupted Greek manuscripts
like those lying behind the Textus Receptus) but of the earliest possible attainable text, came to naught. After his death, his nephew was forced to return the sums that had been collected by subscription, bringing closure to the entire affair.

J
OHANN
A
LBRECHT
B
ENGEL

From France (Simon) to England (Mill, Bentley), and now to Germany, textual problems of the New Testament were occupying the leading biblical scholars of the day in major areas of European Christendom. Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752) was a pious Lutheran pastor and professor who early in his life became deeply disturbed by the presence of such a large array of textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, and was particularly thrown off as a twenty-year-old by the publication of Mill's edition and its thirty thousand places of variation. 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?

Bengel spent much of his academic career working on this problem, and as we will see, he made significant headway in finding solutions to it. First, though, we need to look briefly at Bengel's approach to the Bible.
¹⁴

Bengel's religious commitments permeated his life and thought. One can get a sense of the seriousness with which he approached his faith from the title of the inaugural lecture he delivered when appointed a junior tutor at the new theological seminary in Denkendorf: “De certissima ad veram eruditonem perveniendi ratione per studium pietatis” (The diligent pursuit of piety is the surest method of attaining sound learning).

Bengel was a classically trained, extremely careful interpreter of the biblical text. He is possibly best known as a biblical commentator: he wrote extensive notes on every book of the New Testament,
exploring grammatical, historical, and interpretive issues at length, in expositions that were clear and compelling—and still worth reading today. 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. Thinking that all the words of scripture were inspired—including the words of the prophets and the book of Revelation—Bengel became convinced that God's great involvement with human affairs was nearing a climax, and that biblical prophecy indicated that his own generation was living near the end of days. He, in fact, believed he knew when the end would come: it would be about a century in the future, in 1836.

Bengel was not taken aback by verses such as Matt. 24:36, which says that “of that day and hour no one knows, not the angels in heaven, nor even the Son, but the Father only.” Careful interpreter that he was, Bengel points out that here Jesus speaks in the present tense: in his own
day
Jesus could say “no one knows,” but that doesn't mean that at a later time no one would know. 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 1730s).

Clearly, the predictors of doom in our own age—the Hal Lindseys (author of
The Late Great Planet Earth
) and the Tim LaHaye (co-author of the
Left Behind
series)—have had their predecessors, just as they will have their successors, world without end.

For our purposes here, Bengel's quirky interpretations of prophecy matter because they were rooted in knowing the precise words of scripture. If the number of the Antichrist were not 666 but, say, 616, 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. After intense study of the matter (Bengel studied
everything
intensely), Bengel found that he could summarize the vast majority of proposed criteria in a simple four-word phrase: “Proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua”—
the more difficult reading is preferable to the easier one.
The logic is this: when scribes changed their texts, they were more likely to try to improve them. If they saw what they took to be a mistake, they corrected it; if they saw two accounts of the same story told differently, they harmonized them; if they encountered a text that stood at odds with their own theological opinions, they altered it. In every instance, to know what the oldest (or even “original”) text said, preference should be given not to the reading that has corrected the mistake, harmonized the account, or improved its theology, but to just the opposite one, the reading that is “harder” to explain. In every case, the more difficult reading is to be preferred.
¹⁶

The other breakthrough that Bengel made involves not so much the mass of readings we have at our disposal as the mass of documents that contain them. 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. Certain manuscripts are more like some other manuscripts
than others are. All the surviving documents, then, can be arranged in a kind of genealogical relationship, in which there are groups of documents that are more closely related to one another than they are to other documents. 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 1734 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.

J
OHANN
J. W
ETTSTEIN

One of the most controversial figures in the ranks of biblical scholarship in the eighteenth century was J. J. Wettstein (1693–1754). 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. The day after his twentieth birthday, on March 17, 1713, he presented a thesis at the University of Basel on “The Variety of Readings in the Text of the New Testament.” Among other things, the Protestant Wettstein argued that variant readings “can have no weakening effect on the trustworthiness or integrity of the Scriptures.” The reason: God has “bestowed this book once and for all on the world as an instrument for the perfection of human character. It contains all that is necessary to salvation both for belief and conduct.” Thus, variant readings may affect minor points in scripture, but the basic message remains intact no matter which readings one notices.
¹⁷

In 1715 Wettstein went to England (as part of a literary tour) and was given full access to the Codex Alexandrinus, which we have already heard about in relation to Bentley. One portion of the manuscript particularly caught Wettstein's attention: it was one of those tiny matters with enormous implications. It involved the text of a key passage in the book of 1 Timothy.

The passage in question, 1 Tim. 3:16, had long been used by advocates of orthodox theology to support the view that the New Testament itself calls Jesus God. For the text, in most manuscripts, refers to Christ as “God made manifest in the flesh, and justified in the Spirit.” As I pointed out in chapter 3, most manuscripts abbreviate sacred names (the so-called
nomina sacra
), and that is the case here as well, where the Greek word
God
(ΘEOΣ) is abbreviated in two letters, theta and sigma (ΘΣ), with a line drawn over the top to indicate that it is an abbreviation. What Wettstein noticed in examining Codex Alexandrinus was that the line over the top had been drawn in a different ink from the surrounding words, and so appeared to be from a
later
hand (i.e., written by a later scribe). Moreover, the horizontal line in the middle of the first letter, Θ, was not actually a part of the letter but was a line that had bled through from the other side of the old vellum. In other words, rather than being the abbreviation (theta–sigma) for “God” (ΘΣ), the word was actually an omicron and a sigma (OΣ), a different word altogether, which simply means “who.” The original reading of the manuscript thus did not speak of Christ as “God made manifest in the flesh” but of Christ “
who
was made manifest in the flesh.” According to the ancient testimony of the Codex Alexandrinus, Christ is no longer explicitly called God in this passage.

As Wettstein continued his investigations, he found other passages typically used to affirm the doctrine of the divinity of Christ that in fact represented textual problems; when these problems are resolved on text-critical grounds, in most instances references to Jesus's divinity are taken away. This happens, for example, when the famous Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7–8) is removed from the text. And it happens in a
passage in Acts 20:28, which in many manuscripts speaks of “the Church of God, which he obtained by his own blood.” Here again, Jesus appears to be spoken of as God. 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.” Now Jesus is called the Lord, but he is not explicitly identified as God.

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. And he began to be annoyed with his fellow pastors and teachers in his home city of Basel, who would sometimes confuse language about God and Christ—for example, when talking of the Son of God as if he were the Father, or addressing God the Father in prayer and speaking of “your sacred wounds.” Wettstein thought that more precision was needed when speaking about the Father and the Son, since they were not the same.

Wettstein's emphasis on such matters started raising suspicions among his colleagues, suspicions that were confirmed for them when, in 1730, 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. They insisted to the Basel city council that Wettstein not be allowed to publish his Greek New Testament, which they labeled “useless, uncalled for, and even dangerous work”; and they maintained that “Deacon Wettstein is preaching what is unorthodox, is making statements in his lectures opposed to the teaching of the Reformed Church, and has in hand the printing of a Greek New Testament in which some dangerous innovations very suspect of
Socinianism [a doctrine that denied the divinity of Christ] will appear.”
¹⁸
Called to account for his views before the university senate, he was found to have “rationalistic” views that denied the plenary inspiration of scripture and the existence of the devil and demons, and that focused attention on scriptural obscurities.

He was removed from the Christian diaconate and compelled to leave Basel; and so he set up residence in Amsterdam, where he continued his work. He later claimed that all the controversy had forced a delay of twenty years in the publication of his edition of the Greek New Testament (1751–52).

Even so, this was a magnificent edition, still of value to scholars today, more than 250 years later. In it Wettstein does print the Textus Receptus, but he also amasses a mind-boggling array of Greek, Roman, and Jewish texts that parallel statements found in the New Testament and can help illuminate their meaning. He also cites a large number of textual variants, adducing as evidence some twenty-five majuscule manuscripts and some 250 minuscules (nearly three times the number available to Mill), arranging them in a clear fashion by referring to each majuscule with a different capital letter and using arabic numerals to denote the minuscule manuscripts—a system of reference that became standard for centuries and is still, in essence, widely used today.