Misquoting Jesus (18 page)

Another argument scholars have used has to do with the literary structure of the passage. In a nutshell, the passage appears to be deliberately structured as what scholars have called a
chiasmus.
When a passage is chiastically structured, the first statement of the passage corresponds to the last one; the second statement corresponds to the second to last; the third to the third to last, and so on. In other words, this is an intentional design; its purpose is to focus attention on the center of the passage as its key. And so here:

Jesus (a) tells his disciples to “pray lest you enter into temptation”(v. 40). He then (b) leaves them (v. 41a) and (c) kneels to pray (v. 41b).
The center of the passage is (d) Jesus's prayer itself, a prayer bracketed by his two requests that God's will be done (v. 42). Jesus then (
c
) rises from prayer (v. 45a), (
b
) returns to his disciples (v. 45b), and (
a
) finding them asleep, once again addresses them in the same words, telling them to “pray lest you enter into temptation” (vv. 45c–46).

The mere presence of this clear literary structure is not really the point. The point is how the chiasmus contributes to the meaning of the passage. The story begins and ends with the injunction to the disciples to pray so as to avoid entering into temptation. Prayer has long been recognized as an important theme in the Gospel of Luke (more so than in the other Gospels); here it comes into special prominence. For at the very center of the passage is Jesus's own prayer, a prayer that expresses his desire, bracketed by his greater desire that the Father's will be done (vv. 41c–42). As the center of the chiastic structure, this prayer supplies the passage's point of focus and, correspondingly, the key to its interpretation. This is a lesson on the importance of prayer in the face of temptation. The disciples, despite Jesus's repeated request to them to pray, fall asleep instead. Immediately the crowd comes to arrest Jesus. And what happens? The disciples, who have failed to pray,
do
“enter into temptation”; they flee the scene, leaving Jesus to face his fate alone. What about Jesus, the one who
has
prayed before the coming of his trial? When the crowd arrives, he calmly submits to his Father's will, yielding himself up to the martyrdom that has been prepared for him.

Luke's Passion narrative, as has long been recognized, is a story of Jesus's martyrdom, a martyrdom that functions, as do many others, to set an example to the faithful of how to remain firm in the face of death. Luke's martyrology shows that only prayer can prepare one to die.

What happens, though, when the disputed verses (vv. 43–44) are injected into the passage? On the literary level, the chiasmus that focuses the passage on Jesus's prayer is absolutely destroyed. Now the center of the passage, and hence its focus, shifts to Jesus's agony, an agony so terrible as to require a supernatural comforter for strength to bear it. It is significant that in this longer version of the story, Jesus's
prayer does not produce the calm assurance that he exudes throughout the rest of the account; indeed, it is only after he prays “yet more fervently” that his sweat takes on the appearance of great drops of blood falling to the ground. My point is not simply that a nice literary structure has been lost, but that the entire focus of attention shifts to Jesus in deep and heartrending agony and in need of miraculous intervention.

This in itself may not seem like an insurmountable problem, until one realizes that nowhere else in Luke's Gospel is Jesus portrayed in this way. Quite the contrary, Luke has gone to great lengths to counter precisely the view of Jesus that these verses embrace. Rather than entering his passion with fear and trembling, in anguish over his coming fate, the Jesus of Luke goes to his death calm and in control, confident of his Father's will until the very end. It is a striking fact, of particular relevance to our textual problem, that Luke could produce this image of Jesus only by eliminating traditions that contradicted it from his sources (e.g., the Gospel according to Mark). Only the longer text of Luke 22:43–44 stands out as anomalous.

A simple comparison with Mark's version of the story at hand is instructive in this regard (understanding that Mark was Luke's source—which he changed to create his own distinctive emphases). For Luke has completely omitted Mark's statement that Jesus “began to be distressed and agitated” (Mark 14:33), as well as Jesus's own comment to his disciples, “My soul is deeply troubled, even unto death” (Mark 14:34). Rather than falling to the ground in anguish (Mark 14:35), Luke's Jesus bows to his knees (Luke 22:41). In Luke, Jesus does not ask that the hour might pass from him (cf. Mark 14:35); and rather than praying three times for the cup to be removed (Mark 14:36, 39, 41), he asks only once (Luke 22:42), prefacing his prayer, only in Luke, with the important condition, “If it be your will.” And so, while Luke's source, the Gospel of Mark, portrays Jesus in anguish as he prays in the garden, Luke has completely remodeled the scene to show Jesus at peace in the face of death. The only exception is the account of Jesus's “bloody sweat,” an account absent from our earliest
and best witnesses. Why would Luke have gone to such lengths to eliminate Mark's portrayal of an anguished Jesus if in fact Jesus's anguish were the point of his story?

It is clear that Luke does not share Mark's understanding that Jesus was in anguish, bordering on despair. Nowhere is this more evident than in their subsequent accounts of Jesus's crucifixion. Mark portrays Jesus as silent on his path to Golgotha. His disciples have fled; even the faithful women look on only “from a distance.” All those present deride him—passers-by, Jewish leaders, and both robbers. Mark's Jesus has been beaten, mocked, deserted, and forsaken, not just by his followers but finally by God himself. His only words in the entire proceeding come at the very end, when he cries aloud, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani” (My God, my God, why have
you
forsaken me?). He then utters a loud cry and dies.

This portrayal, again, stands in sharp contrast to what we find in Luke. In Luke's account, Jesus is far from silent, and when he speaks, he shows that he is still in control, trustful of God his Father, confident of his fate, concerned for the fate of others. En route to his crucifixion, according to Luke, when Jesus sees a group of women bewailing his misfortune, he tells them not to weep for him, but for themselves and their children, because of the disaster that is soon to befall them (23:27–31). While being nailed to the cross, rather than being silent, he prays to God, “Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing” (23:34). On the cross, in the throes of his passion, Jesus engages in an intelligent conversation with one of the robbers crucified beside him, assuring him that they will be together that day in paradise (23:43). Most telling of all, rather than uttering his pathetic cry of dereliction at the end, Luke's Jesus, in full confidence of his standing before God, commends his soul to his loving Father: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (24:46).

It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of these changes that Luke made in his source (Mark) for understanding our textual problem. At no point in Luke's Passion narrative does Jesus lose control; never is he in deep and debilitating anguish over his fate. He is in
charge of his own destiny, knowing what he must do and what will happen to him once he does it. This is a man who is at peace with himself and tranquil in the face of death.

What, then, shall we say about our disputed verses? These are the only verses in the entire Gospel of Luke that undermine this clear portrayal. Only here does Jesus agonize over his coming fate; only here does he appear out of control, unable to bear the burden of his destiny. Why would Luke have totally eliminated all remnants of Jesus's agony elsewhere if he meant to emphasize it in yet stronger terms here? Why remove compatible material from his source, both before and after the verses in question? It appears that the account of Jesus's “bloody sweat,” not found in our earliest and best manuscripts, is not original to Luke but is a scribal addition to the Gospel.
¹¹

H
EBREWS AND A
F
ORSAKEN
J
ESUS

Luke's portrayal of Jesus stands in contrast not only to that of Mark, but also to that of other New Testament authors, including the unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who appears to presuppose knowledge of passion traditions in which Jesus was terrified in the face of death and died with no divine succor or support, as can be seen in the resolution of one of the most interesting textual problems of the New Testament.
¹²

The problem occurs in a context that describes the eventual subjugation of all things to Jesus, the Son of Man. Again, I have placed in brackets the textual variants in question.

Although almost all the surviving manuscripts state that Jesus died for all people “by the grace of God” (CHARITI THEOU), a couple of others state, instead, that he died “apart from God” (CHŌRIS THEOU). There are good reasons for thinking that the latter, however, was the original reading of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

I don't need to go into the intricacies of the manuscript support for the reading “apart from God” except to say that even though it occurs in only two documents of the tenth century, one of these (Ms. 1739) is known to have been produced from a copy that was at least as ancient as our earliest manuscripts. Of yet greater interest, the early-third-century scholar Origen tells us that this was the reading of the majority of manuscripts of his own day. Other evidence also suggests its early popularity: it was found in manuscripts known to Ambrose and Jerome in the Latin West, and it is quoted by a range of church writers down to the eleventh century. And so, despite the fact that it is not widely attested among our surviving manuscripts, the reading was at one time supported by strong external evidence.

When one turns from external to internal evidence, there can be no doubt concerning the superiority of this poorly attested variant. We have already seen that scribes were far more likely to make a reading that was hard to understand easier, rather than make an easy reading harder. This variant provides a textbook case of the phenomenon. Christians in the early centuries commonly regarded Jesus's death as the supreme manifestation of God's grace. To say, though, that Jesus died “apart from God” could be taken to mean any number of things, most of them unpalatable. Since scribes must have created one of these readings out of the other, there is little question concerning which of the two is more likely the corruption.

But was the alteration deliberate? Advocates of the more commonly attested text (“grace of God”) have naturally had to claim that the change was not made on purpose (otherwise their favored text would almost certainly be the modification). By virtue of necessity, then, they have devised alternative scenarios to explain the
accidental
origin of the more difficult reading. Most commonly, it is simply supposed that
because the words in question are similar in appearance (XARITI/XWRIS), a scribe inadvertently mistook the word
grace
for the preposition
apart from.

This view, however, seems a shade unlikely. Is a negligent or absentminded scribe likely to have changed his text by writing a word used
less
frequently in the New Testament (“apart from”) or one used
more
frequently (“grace,” four times as common)? Is he likely to have created a phrase that occurs nowhere else in the New Testament (“apart from God”) or one that occurs more than twenty times (“by the grace of God”)? Is he likely to have produced a statement, even by accident, that is bizarre and troubling or one that is familiar and easy? Surely, it's the latter: readers typically mistake unusual words for common ones and simplify what is complex, especially when their minds have partially strayed. Thus, even a theory of carelessness supports the less-attested reading (“apart from God”) as original.

The most popular theory among those who think that the phrase
apart from God
is not original is that the reading was created as a marginal note: a scribe read in Heb. 2:8 that “all things” are to be subjected to the lordship of Christ, and immediately thought of 1 Cor. 15:27:

According to this theory, the scribe copying Hebrews 2 wanted it to be clear here as well that when the text indicates that everything is to be subjected to Christ, this does not include God the Father. To protect the text from misconstrual, the scribe then inserted an explanatory note in the margin of Heb. 2:8 (as a kind of cross-reference to 1 Cor. 15:27), pointing out that nothing is left unsubjected to Christ, “except for God.” This note was subsequently transferred by a later, inattentive, scribe into the text of the next verse, Heb. 2:9, where he thought it belonged.

Despite the popularity of the solution, it is probably too clever by half, and requires too many dubious steps to work. There is no manuscript that attests
both
readings in the text (i.e., the correction in the margin or text of verse 8, where it would belong,
and
the original text of verse 9). Moreover, if a scribe thought that the note was a marginal correction, why did he find it in the margin next to verse 8 rather than verse 9? Finally, if the scribe who created the note had done so in reference to 1 Corinthians, would he not have written “except for God” (EKTOS THEOU—the phrase that actually occurs in the 1 Corinthians passage) rather than “apart from God” (CHŌRIS THEOU—a phrase not found in 1 Corinthians)?