Misquoting Jesus (16 page)

Hort's sanguine expectation that this edition would not take long to produce is still in evidence in November of that year, when he indicates that he hopes Westcott and he can crank out their edition “in little more than a year.”
²⁸
As soon as work began on the project, however, the hopes for a quick turnaround faded. Some nine years later Hort, in a letter written to bolster up Westcott, whose spirits were flagging with the prospect of what still lay ahead, urged:

They were not to give up the task, but it became more intricate and involved as time passed. In the end, it took the two Cambridge scholars twenty-eight years of almost constant work to produce their text, along with an Introduction that came from the pen of Hort.

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. It is not that no new manuscripts have been discovered, or that no theoretical advances have been made, or that no differences of opinion have emerged since Westcott and Hort's day. Yet, even with our advances in technology and methodology, even with the incomparably greater manuscript resources at our disposal, our Greek texts of today bear an uncanny resemblance to the Greek text of Westcott and Hort.

It would not serve my purpose here to enter a detailed discussion of the methodological advances that Westcott and Hort made in establishing the text of the Greek New Testament.
³⁰
The area in which their work has perhaps proved most significant is in the grouping of manuscripts. 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. Their view of the matter was based on the principle that manuscripts belong in the
same family line whenever they agree with one another in their wording. 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. For Westcott and Hort there were four major families of witnesses: (1) the
Syrian
text (what other scholars have called the Byzantine text), which comprises most of the late medieval manuscripts; these are numerous but not particularly close in wording to the original text; (2) the
Western
text, made up of manuscripts that could be dated very early—the archetypes must have been around sometime in the second century at the latest; these manuscripts, however, embody the wild copying practices of scribes in that period before the transcription of texts had become the business of professionals; (3) the
Alexandrian
text, which was derived from Alexandria, where the scribes were trained and careful but occasionally altered their texts to make them grammatically and stylistically more acceptable, thereby changing the wording of the originals; and (4) the
Neutral
text, which consisted of manuscripts that had not undergone any serious change or revision in the course of their transmission but represented most accurately the texts of the originals.

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. These were the two oldest manuscripts available to Westcott and Hort, and in their judgment they were far superior to any other manuscripts, because they represented the so-called Neutral text.

Many things have changed in nomenclature since Westcott and Hort's day: scholars no longer talk about a Neutral text, and most realize that
Western text
is a misnomer, since wild copying practices were found in the East as well as in the West. Moreover, Westcott and
Hort's system has been overhauled by subsequent scholars. Most modern scholars, for example, think that the Neutral and Alexandrian texts are the
same:
it is just that some manuscripts are better representatives of this text than are others. Then, too, significant manuscript discoveries, especially discoveries of papyri, have been made since their day.
³¹
Even so, Westcott and Hort's basic methodology continues to play a role for scholars trying to decide where in our surviving manuscripts we have later alterations and where we can find the earliest stage of the text.

As we will see in the next chapter, this basic methodology is relatively simple to understand, once it is laid out clearly. 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.

I
n this chapter we will examine the methods that scholars have devised to identify the “original” form of the text (or at least the “oldest attainable” form) and the form of the text that represents a later scribal alteration. 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. I have chosen these three because each of them is critical for interpreting the book it is in; what is more, none of these variant readings is reflected in most of our modern English translations of the New Testament. That is to say, in my judgment the translations available to most English readers are based on the
wrong
text, and having the wrong text makes a real difference for the interpretation of these books.

First, however, we should consider the methods scholars have developed for making decisions about which textual readings are original and which represent later changes made by scribes. As we will see, establishing the earliest form of the text is not always a simple matter; it can be a demanding exercise.

M
ODERN
M
ETHODS OF
T
EXTUAL
C
RITICISM

The majority of textual critics today would call themselves
rational eclecticists
when it comes to making decisions about the oldest form of the text. This means that they “choose” (the root meaning of
eclectic
) from among a variety of textual readings the one that best represents the oldest form of the text, using a range of (rational) textual arguments. These arguments are based on evidence that is usually classified as either external or internal in nature.
¹

External Evidence

Arguments based on external evidence have to do with the surviving manuscript support for one reading or another. Which manuscripts attest the reading? Are those manuscripts reliable? Why are they reliable or not 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. Then the original manuscript, along with copies
A
and
B,
were lost, so that all that remains in the textual tradition are the fifty-one second-generation copies, one made from
A
and fifty made from
B.
If a reading found in the fifty manuscripts (from
B
) differs from a reading found in the one (from
A
), is the former necessarily more likely to be the original reading? 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. It is a difference of one to
one (
A
against
B
). The mere question of numbers of manuscripts supporting one reading over another, therefore, is not particularly germane to the question of which reading in our surviving manuscripts represents the original (or oldest) form of the text.
²

Scholars are by and large convinced, therefore, that other considerations are far more important in determining which reading is best considered the oldest form of the text. One other consideration is the
age
of the manuscripts that support a reading. It is far more likely that the oldest form of the text will be found in the oldest surviving manuscripts—on the premise that the text gets changed more frequently with the passing of time. This is not to say that one can blindly follow the oldest manuscripts in every instance, of course. This is for two reasons, the one a matter of logic and the other a matter of history. In terms of logic, suppose a manuscript of the fifth century has one reading, but a manuscript of the eighth century has a different one. Is the reading found in the fifth-century manuscript necessarily the older form of the text? No, not necessarily. What if the fifth-century manuscript had been produced from a copy of the fourth century, but the eighth-century manuscript had been produced from one of the third century? In that case, the eighth-century manuscript would preserve the older reading.

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. They believe that they have to look at a range of arguments for one reading or another, not simply count the manuscripts or consider only the verifiably oldest ones. Still, at the end of the day, if the
majority
of our
earliest
manuscripts support one reading over another, surely that combination of factors should be seen as carrying some weight in making a textual decision.

Another feature of the external evidence is the geographical range of manuscripts in support of one reading over another. Suppose a reading is found in a number of manuscripts, but all these manuscripts can be shown to have originated, say, in Rome, whereas a wide range of other manuscripts from, say, Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor, and Gaul all represent some other reading. In that case, the textual critic might suspect that the one reading was a “local” variant (the copies in Rome all having the same mistake) and that the other reading is the one that is older and more likely to preserve the original text.

Probably the most important external criterion that scholars follow is this: for a reading to be considered “original,” it normally should be found in the best manuscripts and the best groups of manuscripts. 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. The principle involved here states that if some manuscripts are known to be superior in readings when the oldest form is obvious, they are more likely to be superior also in readings for which internal evidence is not as clear. In a way, it is like having witnesses in a court of law or knowing friends whose word you can trust. When you
know
that a person is prone to lying, then you can never be sure that he or she is to be trusted; but if you know that a person is completely reliable, then you can trust that person even when he or she is telling you something you can't otherwise verify.

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. Some of these textual groupings, as it turns out, are more to be trusted than others, in that they preserve the oldest and best of our surviving witnesses and, when tested, are shown
to provide superior readings. In particular, most rational eclecticists think that the so-called Alexandrian text (this includes Hort's “Neutral” text), originally associated with the careful copying practices of the Christian scribes in Alexandria, Egypt, is the superior form of text available, and in most cases provides us with the oldest or “original” text, wherever there is variation. 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. The first involves what are called
intrinsic
probabilities—probabilities based on what the author of the text was himself most likely to have written. We are able to study, of course, the writing style, the vocabulary, and the theology of an author. When two or more variant readings are preserved among our manuscripts, and one of them uses words or stylistic features otherwise not found in that author's work, or if it represents a point of view that is at variance with what the author otherwise embraces, then it is unlikely that that is what the author wrote—especially if another attested reading coincides perfectly well with the author's writing elsewhere.

The second kind of internal evidence is called
transcriptional
probability. This asks, not which reading an author was likely to have written, but which reading a
scribe
was likely to have created. Ultimately, this kind of evidence goes back to Bengel's idea that the “more difficult” reading is more likely to be original. This is premised on the idea that scribes are more likely to try to correct what they take to be mistakes, to harmonize passages that they regard as contradictory, and to bring the theology of a text more into line with their own theology. Readings that might seem, on the surface, to contain a “mistake,”
or lack of harmony, or peculiar theology, are therefore more likely to have been changed by a scribe than are “easier” readings. This criterion is sometimes expressed as:
The reading that best explains the existence of the others is more likely to be original.
³

 

I have been laying out the various external and internal forms of evidence that textual critics consider, not because I expect everyone reading these pages to master these principles and start applying them to the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, but because it is important to recognize that, when we try to decide what the original text was, a range of considerations must be taken into account and a lot of judgment calls have to be made. There are times when the various pieces of evidence are at odds with one another, for example, when the more difficult reading (transcriptional probabilities) is not well attested in the early manuscripts (external evidence), or when the more difficult reading does not coincide with the writing style of the author otherwise (intrinsic probabilities).

In short, determining the original text is neither simple nor straightforward! It requires a lot of thought and careful sifting of the evidence, and different scholars invariably come to different conclusions—not only about minor matters that have no bearing on the meaning of a passage (such as the spelling of a word or a change of word order in Greek that can't even be replicated in English translation), but also about matters of major importance, matters that affect the interpretation of an entire book of the New Testament.

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.
⁴
As it turns out, in each of these cases I think most English translators have chosen the wrong reading and so present a translation not of the original text but of the text that scribes created when they altered the original. The first of these texts comes from Mark and has to do with Jesus's becoming angry when a poor leper pleads with him to be healed.

M
ARK AND AN
A
NGRY
J
ESUS

The textual problem of Mark 1:41 occurs in the story of Jesus healing a man with a skin disease.
⁵
The surviving manuscripts preserve verse 41 in two different forms; both readings are shown here, in brackets.

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. In any event, he may well have fallen under the injunctions of the Torah that forbade “lepers” of any sort to live normal lives; they were to be isolated, cut off from the public, considered unclean (Leviticus 13–14). Moved with pity for such a one, Jesus reaches out a tender hand, touches his diseased flesh, and heals him.