Misquoting Jesus (15 page)

Despite the enormous value of Wettstein's edition, the textual theory lying behind it is usually seen as completely retrograde. Wettstein ignored the advances in method made by Bentley (for whom he had once worked, collating manuscripts) and Bengel (whom he considered an enemy) and maintained that the ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament could not be trusted because, in his view, they had all been altered in conformity with the Latin witnesses. There is no evidence of this having happened, however, and the end result of using it as a major criterion of evaluation is that when one is deciding on a textual variant, the best procedure purportedly is not to see what the oldest witnesses say (these, according to the theory, are farthest removed from the originals!), but to see what the more recent ones (the
Greek manuscripts of the Middle Ages) say. 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. J. Griesbach. In some ways, though, the major breakthrough in the field did not come for another eighty years, with the inauspicious-looking but revolutionary publication of a comparatively thin edition of the Greek New Testament by the German philologist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851).
¹⁹

Early on in his work, Lachmann decided that the textual evidence was simply not adequate to determine what the original authors wrote. The earliest manuscripts that he had access to were those of the fourth or fifth centuries—hundreds of years after the originals had been produced. Who could predict the vicissitudes of transmission that had occurred between the penning of the autographs and the production of the earliest surviving witnesses some centuries later? Lachmann therefore set for himself a simpler task. The Textus Receptus, he knew, was based on the manuscript tradition of the twelfth century. He could improve upon that—by eight hundred years—by producing an edition of the New Testament as it would have appeared at about the end of the
fourth
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. Relying on a handful of early majuscule manuscripts plus the oldest Latin manuscripts and the patristic quotations of the text, he chose not simply to edit the Textus Receptus wherever necessary (the tack followed by his predecessors who
were dissatisfied with the T.R.), but to abandon the T.R. completely and to establish the text anew, on his own principles.

Thus, in 1831 he produced a new version of the text, not based on the T.R. 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. Many readers thought that Lachmann was claiming to present the “original” text and objected that in doing so he had, on principle, avoided almost all the evidence (the later textual tradition, which contains an abundance of manuscripts). Others noted the similarity of his approach to that of Bentley, who also had the idea of comparing the earliest Greek and Latin manuscripts to determine the text of the fourth century (which Bentley took, however, to be the text known to Origen in the early third century); as a result, Lachmann was sometimes called Bentley's Ape. In reality, though, Lachmann had broken through the unhelpful custom established among printers and scholars alike of giving favored status to the T.R., a status it surely did not deserve, since it was printed and reprinted not because anyone felt that it rested on a secure textual basis but only because its text was both customary and familiar.

L
OBEGOTT
F
RIEDRICH
C
ONSTANTINE VON
T
ISCHENDORF

While scholars like Bentley, Bengel, and Lachmann were refining the methodologies that were to be used in examining the variant readings of New Testament manuscripts, new discoveries were regularly being made in old libraries and monasteries, both East and West. The nineteenth-century scholar who was most assiduous in discovering
biblical manuscripts and publishing their texts had the interesting name Lobegott Friedrich Constantine von Tischendorf (1815–1874). He was called Lobegott (German for “Praise God”) because before he was born, his mother had seen a blind man and succumbed to the superstitious belief that this would cause her child to be born blind. 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 fiancée, while still in his early twenties: “I am confronted with a sacred task, the struggle to regain the original form of the New Testament.”
²⁰
This sacred task he sought to fulfill by locating every manuscript tucked away in every library and monastery that he could find. He made several trips around Europe and into the “East” (meaning what we would call the Middle East), finding, transcribing, and publishing manuscripts wherever he went. One of his earliest and best-known successes involved a manuscript that was already known but that no one had been able to read. This is the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The codex was originally a fifth-century Greek manuscript of the New Testament, but it had been erased in the twelfth century so that its vellum pages could be reused to record some sermons by the Syriac church father Ephraim. 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. Applying these reagents carefully, and plodding his way slowly through the text, Tischendorf could make out its words, and so produced the first successful transcription of this early text, gaining for himself something of a reputation among those who cared about such things.

Some such people were induced to provide financial support for Tischendorf 's journeys to other lands in Europe and the Middle East
to locate manuscripts. By all counts, his most famous discovery involves one of the truly great manuscripts of the Bible still available, Codex Sinaiticus. The tale of its discovery is the stuff of legend, although we have the account direct from Tischendorf's own hand.

Tischendorf had made a journey to Egypt in 1844, when not yet thirty years of age, arriving on camelback eventually at the wilderness monastery of Saint Catherine. What happened there on May 24, 1844, is still best described in his own words:

Tischendorf attempted to retrieve the rest of this precious manuscript but could not persuade the monks to part with it. Some nine years later he made a return trip and could find no trace of it. Then in 1859 he set out once again, now under the patronage of Czar Alexander II of Russia, who had an interest in all things Christian, especially Christian antiquity. This time Tischendorf found no trace of the manuscript until the last day of his visit. Invited into the room of the convent's steward, he discussed with him the Septuagint (the Greek
Old Testament), and the steward told him, “I too have read a Septuagint.” He proceeded to pull from the corner of his room a volume wrapped in a red cloth. Tischendorf continues:

Tischendorf immediately recognized the manuscript for what it was—the earliest surviving witness to the text of the New Testament: “the most precious Biblical treasure in existence—a document whose age and importance exceeded that of all the manuscripts which I had ever examined.” After complicated and prolonged negotiations, in which Tischendorf not so subtly reminded the monks of his patron, the Czar of Russia, who would be overwhelmed with the gift of such a rare manuscript and would no doubt reciprocate by bestowing certain financial benefactions on the monastery, Tischendorf eventually was allowed to take the manuscript back to Leipzig, where at the expense of the Czar he prepared a lavish four-volume edition of it that appeared in 1862 on the one-thousandth anniversary of the founding of the Russian empire.
²³

After the Russian revolution, the new government, needing money and not being interested in manuscripts of the Bible, sold Codex Sinaiticus to the British Museum for £100,000; it is now part of the permanent collection of the British Library, prominently displayed in the British Library's manuscript room.

This was, of course, just one of Tischendorf's many contributions to the field of textual studies.
²⁴
Altogether he published twenty-two editions of early Christian texts, along with eight separate editions of
the Greek New Testament, the eighth of which continues to this day to be a treasure trove of information concerning the attestation of Greek and versional evidence for this or that variant reading. His productivity as a scholar can be gauged by the bibliographical essay written on his behalf by a scholar named Caspar René Gregory: the list of Tischendorf's publications takes up eleven solid pages.
²⁵

B
ROOKE
F
OSS
W
ESTCOTT AND
F
ENTON
J
OHN
A
NTHONY
H
ORT

More than anyone else from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is to two Cambridge scholars, Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828–1892), that modern textual critics owe a debt of gratitude for developing methods of analysis that help us deal with the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. Since their famous work of 1881,
The New Testament in the Original Greek,
these have been the names that all scholars have had to contend with—in affirming their basic insights, or in tinkering with the details of their claims, or in setting up alternative approaches in view of Westcott and Hort's well-defined and compelling system of analysis. The strength of the analysis owes more than a little to the genius of Hort in particular.

Westcott and Hort's publication appeared in two volumes, one of which was an actual edition of the New Testament based on their twenty-eight years of joint labor in deciding which was the original text wherever variations appeared in the tradition; the other was an exposition of the critical principles they had followed in producing their work. The latter was written by Hort and represents an inordinately closely reasoned and compelling survey of the materials and methods available to scholars wanting to undertake the tasks of textual criticism. The writing is dense; not a word is wasted. The logic is compelling; not an angle has been overlooked. This is a great book,
which in many ways is
the
classic in the field. I do not allow my graduate students to go through their studies without mastering it.

In some ways, the problems of the text of the New Testament absorbed the interests of Westcott and Hort for most of their publishing lives. Already as a twenty-three-year-old, Hort, who had been trained in the classics and was not at first aware of the textual situation of the New Testament, wrote in a letter to his friend John Ellerton:

Only a couple of years later, Westcott and Hort had decided to edit a new edition of the New Testament. In another letter to Ellerton on April 19, 1853, Hort relates: