Misquoting Jesus (11 page)

Mill was not exhaustive in his presentation of the data he had collected. He had, in fact, found far more than thirty thousand places of variation. He did not cite everything he discovered, leaving out variations such as those involving changes of word order. Still, the places he noted were enough to startle the reading public away from the complacency into which it had fallen based on the constant republication of the Textus Receptus and the natural assumption that in the T.R. one had the “original” Greek of the New Testament. Now the status of the original text was thrown wide open to dispute. If one did not know which words were original to the Greek New Testament, how could one use these words in deciding correct Christian doctrine and teaching?

T
HE
C
ONTROVERSY
C
REATED BY
M
ILL'S
A
PPARATUS

The impact of Mill's publication was immediately felt, although he himself did not live to see the drama play out. He died, the victim of a stroke, just two weeks after his massive work was published. His untimely death (said by one observer to have been brought on by “drinking too much coffee”!) did not prevent detractors from coming to the fore, however. The most scathing attack came three years later in a learned volume by a controversialist named Daniel Whitby, who in 1710 published a set of notes on the interpretation of the New Testament, to which he added an appendix of one hundred pages examining, in great detail, the variants cited by Mill in his apparatus. Whitby was a conservative Protestant theologian whose basic view was that even though God certainly would not prevent errors from creeping into scribal copies of the New Testament, at the same time he would never allow the text to be corrupted (i.e., altered) to the point that it could not adequately achieve its divine aim and purpose. And so he laments, “I GRIEVE therefore and am vexed that I have found so much in Mill's Prolegomena which seems quite plainly to render the standard of faith insecure, or at best to give others too good a handle for doubting.”
¹⁰

Whitby goes on to suggest that Roman Catholic scholars—whom he calls “the Papists”—would be all too happy to be able to show, on the basis of the insecure foundations of the Greek text of the New Testament, that scripture was not a sufficient authority for the faith—that is, that the authority of the church instead is paramount. As he states: “Morinus [a Catholic scholar] argued for a depravation of the Greek Text which would render its authority insecure from the variety of readings which he found in the Greek Testament of R. Stephens [= Stephanus]; what triumphs then will the Papists have over the same text when they see the variations quadrupled by Mill after sweating for thirty years at the work?”
¹¹
Whitby proceeds to argue that, in fact, the text of the New Testament is secure, since scarcely any variant cited by
Mill involves an article of faith or question of conduct, and the vast majority of Mill's variants have no claim to authenticity.

Whitby may have intended his refutation to have its effect without anyone actually reading it; it is a turgid, dense, unappealing one hundred pages of close argumentation, which tries to make its point simply through the accumulated mass of its refutation.

Whitby's defense might well have settled the issue had it not been taken up by those who used Mill's thirty thousand places of variation precisely to the end that Whitby feared, to argue that the text of scripture could not be trusted because it was in itself so insecure. Chief among those who argued the point was the English deist Anthony Collins, a friend and follower of John Locke, who in 1713 wrote a pamphlet called
Discourse on Free Thinking.
The work was typical of early-eighteenth-century deistic thought: it urged the primacy of logic and evidence over revelation (e.g., in the Bible) and claims of the miraculous. In section 2 of the work, which deals with “Religious Questions,” Collins notes, in the midst of a myriad of other things, that even the Christian clergy (i.e., Mill) have been “owning and labouring to prove the Text of the Scripture to be precarious,” making reference then to Mill's thirty thousand variants.

Collins's pamphlet, which was widely read and influential, provoked a number of pointed responses, many of them dull and laborious, some of them learned and indignant. Arguably its most significant result was that it drew into the fray a scholar of enormous international reputation, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Richard Bentley. Bentley is renowned for his work on classical authors such as Homer, Horace, and Terence. In a reply to both Whitby and Collins, written under the pseudonym Phileleutherus Lipsiensis (which means something like “the lover of freedom from Leipzig”—an obvious allusion to Collins's urging of “free thinking”), Bentley made the obvious point that the variant readings that Mill had accumulated could not render the foundation of the Protestant faith insecure, since the readings existed even
before
Mill had noticed them. He didn't invent them; he only pointed them out!

Bentley, an expert in the textual traditions of the classics, goes on to point out that one would expect to find a multitude of textual variants whenever one uncovers a large number of manuscripts. If there were only one manuscript of a work, there would be
no
textual variants. Once a second manuscript is located, however, it will differ from the first in a number of places. This is not a bad thing, however, as a number of these variant readings will show where the first manuscript has preserved an error. Add a third manuscript, and you will find additional variant readings, but also additional places, as a result, where the original text is preserved (i.e., where the first two manuscripts agree in an error). And so it goes—the more manuscripts one discovers, the more the variant readings; but also the more the likelihood that somewhere among those variant readings one will be able to uncover the original text. Therefore, the thirty thousand variants uncovered by Mill do not detract from the integrity of the New Testament; they simply provide the data that scholars need to work on to establish the text, a text that is more amply documented than any other from the ancient world.

As we will see in the next chapter, this controversy over Mill's publication eventually induced Bentley to turn his remarkable powers of
intellect to the problem of establishing the oldest available text of the New Testament. Before moving to that discussion, however, perhaps we should take a step back and consider where we are today vis-à-vis Mill's astonishing discovery of thirty thousand variations in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.

O
UR
C
URRENT
S
ITUATION

Whereas Mill knew of or examined some one hundred Greek manuscripts to uncover his thirty thousand variations, today we know of far, far more. At last count, more than fifty-seven hundred Greek manuscripts have been discovered and catalogued. That's fifty-seven
times
as many as Mill knew about in 1707. These fifty-seven hundred include everything from the smallest fragments of manuscripts—the size of a credit card—to very large and magnificent productions, preserved in their entirety. Some of them contain only one book of the New Testament; others contain a small collection (for example, the four Gospels or the letters of Paul); a very few contain the entire New Testament.
¹³
There are, in addition, many manuscripts of the various early versions (= translations) of the New Testament.

These manuscripts range in date from the early second century (a small fragment called P
⁵²
, which has several verses from John 18) down to the sixteenth century.
¹⁴
They vary greatly in size: some are small copies that could fit in the hand, such as Coptic copy of Matthew's Gospel, called the Scheide Codex, which measures 4 * 5 inches; others are very large and impressive copies, among them the previously mentioned Codex Sinaiticus, which measures 15 * 13.5 inches, making an impressive spread when opened up completely. Some of these manuscripts are inexpensive, hastily produced copies; some were actually copied onto reused pages (a document was erased and the text of the New Testament was written over the top of the erased pages); others are enormously lavish and expensive copies, including some written on purple-dyed parchment with silver or gold ink.

As a rule, scholars speak of four kinds of Greek manuscripts.
¹⁵
(1) The oldest are
papyrus
manuscripts, written on material manufactured from the papyrus reed, a valuable but inexpensive and efficient writing material in the ancient world; they date from the second to the seventh centuries. (2) The
majuscule
(= large-lettered) manuscripts are made of parchment (= animal skins; sometimes called vellum) and are named after the large letters, somewhat like our capital letters, that are used; these date, for the most part, from the fourth to the ninth centuries. (3)
Minuscule
(= small-lettered) manuscripts are also made of parchment but are written in smaller letters that are frequently combined (without the pen leaving the page) into what looks something like the Greek equivalent of cursive writing; these date from the ninth century onward. (4)
Lectionaries
are usually minuscule in form as well, but instead of consisting of the books of the New Testament, they contain, in a set order, “readings” taken from the New Testament to be used in church each week or on each holiday (like the lectionaries used in churches today).

In addition to these Greek manuscripts, we know of about ten thousand manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate, not to mention the manuscripts of other versions, such as the Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Old Georgian, Church Slavonic, and the like (recall that Mill had access to only a few of the ancient versions, and these he knew only through their Latin translations). In addition, we have the writings of church fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius among the Greeks and Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine among the Latins—all of them quoting the texts of the New Testament in places, making it possible to reconstruct what their manuscripts (now lost, for the most part) must have looked like.

With this abundance of evidence, what can we say about the total number of variants known today? Scholars differ significantly in their estimates—some say there are 200,000 variants known, some say 300,000, some say 400,000 or more! We do not know for sure because, despite impressive developments in computer technology, no one has yet been able to count them all. Perhaps, as I indicated earlier, it is best simply
to leave the matter in comparative terms. There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

K
INDS OF
C
HANGES IN
O
UR
M
ANUSCRIPTS

If we have trouble talking about the
numbers
of changes that still survive, what can we say about the
kinds
of changes found in these manuscripts? Scholars typically differentiate today between changes that appear to have been made accidentally through scribal mistakes and those made intentionally, through some forethought. These are not hard and fast boundaries, of course, but they still seem appropriate: one can see how a scribe might inadvertently leave out a word when copying a text (an accidental change), but it is hard to see how the last twelve verses of Mark could have been added by a slip of the pen.

And so, it might be worthwhile to end this chapter with a few examples of each kind of change. I will start by pointing out some kinds of “accidental” variants.

Accidental Changes

Accidental slips of the pen
¹⁶
no doubt were exacerbated, as we have seen, by the fact that Greek manuscripts were all written in
scriptuo continua
—with no punctuation, for the most part, or even spaces between words. This means that words that looked alike were often mistaken for one another. For example, in 1 Cor. 5:8, Paul tells his readers that they should partake of Christ, the Passover lamb, and should not eat the “old leaven, the leaven of wickedness and evil.” The final word,
evil,
is spelled PONĒRAS in Greek, which, it turns out, looks a lot like the word for “sexual immorality,” PORNEIAS. The difference in meaning may not be overwhelming, but it is striking that in a couple of surviving manuscripts, Paul explicitly warns not against evil in general, but against sexual vice in particular.

This kind of spelling mistake was made even more likely by the
circumstance that scribes sometimes abbreviated certain words to save time or space. The Greek word for “and,” for example, is KAI, for which some scribes simply wrote the initial letter
K,
with a kind of downstroke at the end to indicate that it was an abbreviation. Other common abbreviations involved what scholars have called the
nomina sacra
(= sacred names), a group of words such as
God, Christ, Lord, Jesus,
and
Spirit
that were abbreviated either because they occurred so frequently or else to show that they were being paid special attention. These various abbreviations sometimes led to confusion for later scribes, who mistook one abbreviation for another or misread an abbreviation as a full word. So, for example, in Rom. 12:11, Paul urges his reader to “serve the Lord.” But the word
Lord,
KURIW, was typically abbreviated in manuscripts as KW (with a line drawn over the top), which some early scribes misread as an abbreviation for KAIRW, which means “time.” And so in those manuscripts, Paul exhorts his readers to “serve the time.”