Misquoting Jesus (12 page)

Similarly, in 1 Cor. 12:13, Paul points out that everyone in Christ has been “baptized into one body” and they have all “drunk of one Spirit.” The word
Spirit
(PNEUMA) would have been abbreviated in most manuscripts as——PMA, which understandably could be—and was—misread by some scribes as the Greek word for “drink” (POMA); and so in these witnesses Paul is said to indicate that all have “drunk of one drink.”

One common type of mistake in Greek manuscripts occurred when two lines of the text being copied ended with the same letters or the same words. A scribe might copy the first line of text, and then when his eye went back to the page, it might pick up on the
same
words on the
next
line, instead of the line he had just copied; he would continue copying from there and, as a result, leave out the intervening words and/or lines. This kind of mistake is called
periblepsis
(an “eye-skip”) occasioned by
homoeoteleuton
(the “same endings”). I teach my students that they can lay claim to a university education when they can speak intelligently about periblepsis occasioned by homoeoteleuton.

How this works can be illustrated by the text of Luke 12:8–9, which reads:

Our earliest papyrus manuscript of the passage leaves off all of verse 9; and it is not difficult to see how the mistake was made. The scribe copied the words “before the angels of God” in verse 8, and when his eye returned to the page, he picked up the same words in verse 9 and assumed those were the words just copied—and so he proceeded to copy verse 10, leaving out verse 9 altogether.

Sometimes this kind of error can be even more disastrous to the meaning of a text. In John 17:15, for example, Jesus says in his prayer to God about his followers:

In one of our best manuscripts (the fourth-century Codex Vaticanus), however, the words “world…from the” are omitted, so that now Jesus utters the unfortunate prayer “I do not ask that you keep them from the evil one”!

Sometimes accidental mistakes were made not because words
looked
alike, but because they
sounded
alike. This could happen, for example, when a scribe was copying a text by dictation—when one scribe would be reading from a manuscript and one or more other scribes would be copying the words into new manuscripts, as sometimes happened in scriptoria after the fourth century. If two words were pronounced the same, then the scribe doing the copying might inadvertently use the wrong one in his copy, especially if it made perfectly good (but wrong) sense. This appears to be what hap
pened, for example, in Rev. 1:5, where the author prays to “the one who released us from our sins.” The word for “released” (LUSANTI) sounds exactly like the word for “washed” (LOUSANTI), and so it is no surprise that in a number of medieval manuscripts the author prays to the one “who washed us from our sins.”

Another example occurs in Paul's letter to the Romans, where Paul states that “since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God” (Rom. 5:1). Or is that what he said? The word for “we have peace,” a statement of fact, sounded exactly like the word “let us have peace,” an exhortation. And so in a large number of manuscripts, including some of our earliest, Paul doesn't rest assured that he and his followers have peace with God, he urges himself and others to seek peace. This is a passage for which textual scholars have difficulty deciding
which
reading is the correct one.
¹⁷

In other cases there is little ambiguity, because the textual change, while understandable, actually makes for nonsense instead of sense. This happens a lot, and often for some of the reasons we have been discussing. As an example, in John 5:39, Jesus tells his opponents to “search the scriptures…for they bear witness to me.” In one early manuscript, the final verb was changed to one that sounds similar but makes no sense in the context. In that manuscript Jesus says to “search the scriptures…for they are sinning against me”! A second example comes from the book of Revelation, where the prophet has a vision of the throne of God, around which there “was a rainbow that looked like an emerald” (1:3). In some of our earliest manuscripts there is a change, in which, odd as it might seem, we are told that around the throne “were priests that looked like an emerald”!

Of all the many thousands of accidental mistakes made in our manuscripts, probably the most bizarre is one that occurs in a minuscule manuscript of the four Gospels officially numbered 109, which was produced in the fourteenth century.
¹⁸
Its peculiar error occurs in Luke, chapter 3, in the account of Jesus's genealogy. The scribe was evidently copying a manuscript that gave the genealogy in two columns.
For some reason, he did not copy one column at a time, but copied
across
the two columns. As a result, the names of the genealogy are thrown out of whack, with most people being called the sons of the wrong father. Worse still, the second column of the text the scribe was copying did not have as many lines as the first, so that now, in the copy he made, the father of the human race (i.e., the last one mentioned) is not God but an Israelite named Phares; and God himself is said to be the son of a man named Aram!

Intentional Changes

In some respects, the changes we have been looking at are the easiest to spot and eliminate when trying to establish the earliest form of the text. Intentional changes tend to be a bit more difficult. Precisely because they were (evidently) made deliberately, these changes tend to make
sense.
And since they make sense, there will always be critics who argue that they make the
best
sense—that is, that they are original. This is not a dispute between scholars who think the text has been altered and those who think it has not. Everyone knows that the text has been changed; the only question is which reading represents the alteration and which represents the earliest attainable form of the text. Here scholars sometimes disagree.

In a remarkable number of instances—most of them, actually—scholars by and large agree. It is perhaps useful for us here to consider an array of the
kinds
of intentional changes one finds among our manuscripts, as these can show us the reasons scribes had for making alterations.

Sometimes scribes changed their texts because they thought the text contained a factual error. This appears to be the case at the very beginning of Mark, where the author introduces his Gospel by saying, “Just as is written in Isaiah the prophet, ‘Behold I am sending a messenger before your face…. Make straight his paths.'” The problem is that the beginning of the quotation is not from Isaiah at all but represents a combination of a passage from Exod. 23:20 and one from
Mal. 3:1. Scribes recognized that this was a difficulty and so changed the text, making it say, “Just as is written
in the prophets
….” Now there is no problem with a misattribution of the quotation. But there can be little doubt concerning what Mark originally wrote: the attribution to Isaiah is found in our earliest and best manuscripts.

On occasion the “error” that a scribe attempted to correct was not factual, but interpretive. A well-known example comes in Matt. 24:36, where Jesus is predicting the end of the age and says that “concerning that day and hour, no one knows—not the angels in heaven, nor even the Son, but only the Father.” Scribes found this passage difficult: the Son of God, Jesus himself, does not know when the end will come? How could that be? Isn't he all-knowing? To resolve the problem, some scribes simply modified the text by taking out the words “nor even the Son.” Now the angels may be ignorant, but the Son of God isn't.
¹⁹

In other cases scribes changed a text not because they thought that it contained a mistake but because they wanted to circumvent a misunderstanding of it. An example is Matt. 17:12–13, in which Jesus identifies John the Baptist as Elijah, the prophet to come at the end of time:

The potential problem is that, as it reads, the text
could
be interpreted to mean not that John the Baptist was Elijah, but that he was the Son of Man. Scribes knew full well this was not the case, and so some of them switched the text around, making the statement “his disciples realized that he was speaking to them about John the Baptist” occur
before
the statement about the Son of Man.

Sometimes scribes changed their text for more patently theological reasons, to make sure that the text could not be used by “heretics”
or to ensure that it said what it was already supposed (by the scribes) to mean. There are numerous instances of this kind of change, which we will consider at greater length in a later chapter. For now I will simply point out a couple of brief examples.

In the second century there were Christians who firmly believed that the salvation brought by Christ was a completely new thing, superior to anything the world had ever seen and certainly superior to the religion of Judaism from which Christianity had emerged. Some Christians went so far as to insist that Judaism, the old religion of the Jews, had been completely circumvented by the appearance of Christ. For some scribes of this persuasion, the parable that Jesus tells of new wine and old wineskins may have seemed problematic.

How could Jesus indicate that the old is better than the new? Isn't the salvation he brings superior to anything Judaism (or any other religion) had to offer? Scribes who found the saying puzzling simply eliminated the last sentence, so that now Jesus says nothing about the old being better than the new.

Sometimes scribes altered their text to ensure that a favorite doctrine was duly emphasized. We find this, for example, in the account of Jesus's genealogy in Matthew's Gospel, which starts with the father of the Jews, Abraham, and traces Jesus's line from father to son all the way down to “Jacob, who was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, from whom was born Jesus, who is called the Christ” (Matt. 1:16). As it stands, the genealogy already treats Jesus as an exceptional case in that he is not said to be the “son” of Joseph. For some scribes, however, that was not enough, and so they changed the text to read “Jacob, who was the father of Joseph, to whom being betrothed the virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus, who is called the Christ.” Now Joseph is not even called Mary's husband, but only her betrothed, and she is
clearly stated to be a virgin—an important point for many early scribes!

On occasion scribes modified their texts not because of theology but for liturgical reasons. As the ascetic tradition strengthened in early Christianity, it is not surprising to find this having an impact on scribal changes to the text. For example, in Mark 9, when Jesus casts out a demon that his disciples had been unable to budge, he tells them, “This kind comes out only by prayer” (Mark 9:29). Later scribes made the appropriate addition, in view of their own practices, so that now Jesus indicates that “This kind comes out only by prayer and fasting.”

One of the best-known liturgical changes to the text is found in Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer. The prayer is also found in Matthew, of course, and it is that longer, Matthean form that was, and is, most familiar to Christians.
²⁰
By comparison, Luke's version sounds hopelessly truncated.

Scribes resolved the problem of Luke's shortened version by adding the petitions known from the parallel passage in Matt. 6:9–13, so that now, as in Matthew, the prayer reads:

This scribal tendency to “harmonize” passages in the Gospels is ubiquitous. Whenever the same story is told in different Gospels, one scribe or another is likely to have made sure that the accounts are perfectly in harmony, eliminating differences by strokes of their pens.

Sometimes scribes were influenced not by parallel passages but by oral traditions then in circulation about Jesus and the stories told about him. We have already seen this in a big way in the case of the
woman taken in adultery and the last twelve verses of Mark. In smaller cases as well, we can see how oral traditions affected the written texts of the Gospels. One outstanding example is the memorable story in John 5 of Jesus healing an invalid by the pool of Bethzatha. We are told at the beginning of the story that a number of people—invalids, blind, lame, and paralyzed—lay beside this pool, and that Jesus singled out one man, who had been there for thirty-eight years, for healing. When he asks the man if he would like to be healed, the man replies that there is no one who can place him in the pool, so that “when the water is troubled” someone always beats him into it.