Non-Roman fonts used: SPIonic
Editor's note: Bart Ehrman delivered the Kenneth W. Clark lectures at Duke
Divinity School in 1997. This article, though slightly modified from the
oral presentation, preserves the original flavor of the lecture. See also
his first lecture.
Text and Tradition: The Role of New Testament Manuscripts in Early Christian
Studies
The Kenneth W. Clark Lectures
Duke Divinity School
1997
Lecture Two: Text and Transmission: The Historical Significance of the
"Altered" Text
Bart D. Ehrman
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Introduction
1. For most of its practitioners, the ultimate goal of textual criticism has
been to reconstruct the original text of the New Testament. This conception
of the field was exemplified in the work of Fenton John Anthony Hort,
arguably the most brilliant mind to apply himself to the task, who focused
his labors on a solitary objective: "to present exactly the original words
of the New Testament, so far as they can now be determined from surviving
documents." Hort construed this task in entirely negative terms: "nothing
more than the detection and rejection of error."
2. No historian or exegete would deny the desirability of this objective;
the words of an ancient author must be established before they can be
interpreted. This became clear, I hope, in my last lecture, as I showed how
the resolution of a textual problem can significantly affect exegesis, for
example, by highlighing Mark's portrayal of Jesus as an angry man, Luke's
portrayal of him as imperturbable, and the epistle to the Hebrews' portrayal
of him as forsaken.
3. Nonetheless, for textual scholars a century after Hort to continue being
obsessed exclusively with the "original" text is, in my judgment, completely
myopic. For the manuscript tradition of the New Testament provides us with
much more than remnants of the New Testament autographs; it also gives us
scribal changes of the text--changes that may be of significance in and of
themselves for what they can tell us about the theological and social
investments of the scribes who made them and, correspondingly, about the
theological and socio-historical contexts within which they worked. When
viewed in this way, variant readings are not merely chaff to be discarded en
route to the original text--as they were for Hort; they are instead valuable
evidence for the history of the early Christian movement.
4. The historian of early Christianity shares a fundamental problem with all
other historians of antiquity: our sources are frustratingly sparse.
Moreover, the sources that have survived tend to be the literary remains of
the cultured elite, which may or may not tell us what other, non-elites were
thinking or experiencing. Our New Testament manuscripts were themselves, of
course, produced by literate persons; but these anonymous scribes were not
necessarily, or even probably, literary, in the sense of being among the
most highly educated and cultured in their societies. If the changes that
these unnamed copyists made in their reproductions are studied with
sufficient care and with the right questions, they may provide a gold mine
of information about the thoughts and experiences of late antique Christians
who were not among the literary elite. Remarkably, this is a gold mine that
has rarely been tapped.
5. Let me begin to illustrate the potential of this kind of approach to our
textual tradition by picking up on the three variant readings that I
examined in my previous lecture. I will start with the ones found in Luke
and Hebrews, as these illustrate well the ways in which the theological
controversies of early Christianity made an impact on the scriptural texts
that were being used by various sides in the debates.
Theological Modifications of the Text
6. We saw last time that Luke 22:43-44, verses found in some manuscripts but
not others, present the familiar story of Jesus in agony before his arrest,
sweating great drops as if of blood, and being strengthened by an angel from
heaven. I showed that these verses did not originally belong to Luke's
Gospel but were inserted by a scribe or scribes in the second century. But
why were they inserted? Was it simply because scribes found the story
interesting or edifying? While this is, of course, possible, there may have
been something far more significant going on. In fact, there are reasons to
think that the verses were interpolated into the Gospel precisely because
they portray so well a human Jesus, one who agonizes over his coming fate to
the point of needing supernatural succor, an agony so deep as to cause him
to sweat great drops as if of blood.
7. In the second century, there were a number of Christians who maintained
that since Jesus was fully divine, he could not be human. Included in their
number were Marcion and members of several groups of Gnostics. Their
opponents called these "heretics" docetists, from the Greek word
doke/w (to seem or to appear), since these persons maintained
that Jesus only "seemed" or "appeared" to be human.
8. This was a serious and heated controversy in the second century, as it
affected profoundly the church's entire understanding of the nature of
Christ. If the solution to that question seems obvious today, we should
surely reflect on the fact that one side eventually won the debate and then
wrote the history of the conflict. In any event, in view of this
controversy, it is worth observing how the verses in question were used in
the sources that first attest them. They occur three times in the writings
of anti-heretical, proto-orthodox church fathers of the second century:
Justin, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus. Remarkably, in all three cases they are
cited to the same end, to counter any notion Jesus was not a real flesh and
blood human being. Justin, for example, argues that Jesus' bloody sweat
shows "that the Father wished His Son really to undergo such sufferings for
our sakes, so that we "may not say that He, being the Son of God, did not
feel what was happening to Him and inflicted on Him" (Dial. 103). What is
interesting in this case is that we do not need to hypothesize the
usefulness of these verses for an anti-docetic polemic; we know that the
verses were put to precisely this use during the second-century and that
that is when the account came to be inserted into the third Gospel; scribes
who did so may well have been reflecting the anti-docetic concerns of their
own communities.
9. We might hypothesize a somewhat different motivation behind the
modification of Hebrews 2:9. If you recall, in that passage Jesus was said
to have died "apart from God." Early in the second century, however, scribes
began to change the word "apart" (xwri\s in Greek) to a word
similar in appearance xa/riti, "grace," so that now Jesus is said
to have died "by the grace" of God. Even though this change may have been
made by accident, it carries such a significantly different meaning that one
might suspect that scribes knew full well what they were doing when they
made it. On the one hand, one could probably argue that these anonymous
copyists simply couldn't understand what it might mean to say that Jesus
died "apart from God" and so changed it to say something that made better
sense; but, on the other hand, it may be that they knew full well what the
text meant and that they knew how some Christians were interpreting it. If
this is so, then the offending parties would not have been groups of
docetists, but, possibly, other kinds of Gnostics who had a different view
of Jesus.
10. For in fact, most Gnostics did not maintain that Jesus was fully God and
not human (the docetic view); they instead claimed that Jesus Christ was two
separate beings, one human (the man Jesus) and the other divine (the
heavenly Christ). As the heretic-fighter Irenaeus explains, these Gnostics
maintained that when Jesus was baptized, the Christ descended upon him as a
dove and entered into him, empowering him for his ministry. Then, at some
point prior to his death, the Christ, who could not suffer, departed from
him. That's why, according to some Gnostics, Jesus cried out on the cross,
"My God, my God, why have you left me behind?" For them, that's exactly what
had happened, when the divine Christ made his exit. For these gnostic
Christians, Jesus literally did die "apart from God."
11. We know that the scribal alteration of the text of Heb 2:9 occurred
precisely during the time that the controversy between proto-orthodox
Christians and Gnostics was raging. It is not at all implausible to think
that it was just this controversy then that led to the modification of this
text, that proto-orthodox scribes, who shared the christological views of
Irenaeus, modified the text so that Gnostics could not use it as a
scriptural warrant for saying that Jesus died "apart from God," since the
divine Christ had already left him.
12. This would not be the only verse that was altered out of anti-gnostic
concerns. Just to take one other similar example before moving on to other
kinds of scribal changes, we might consider the cry of dereliction that I've
just mentioned from Mark 15:34, where Jesus breaks the silence he has
maintained throughout the entire crucifixion scene by crying out, in
Aramaic: elwi elwi lema sabaxqani, a quotation of Ps 22:2, for
which the author supplies the Greek translation of the LXX, "My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?"
13. As I've already intimated, at stake in the Gnostic controversy was the
meaning of the Greek verb in this verse, e)gkate/lipes,
literally, "left behind." The proto-orthodox took it to mean "forsake" and
argued that because Christ had taken the sins of the world upon himself, he
felt forsaken by God; the Gnostics, on the other hand, understood the word
in its more literal sense, so that for them, Jesus was lamenting the
departure of the divine Christ: "My God, my God, why have you left me
behind?"
14. This is clearly the interpretation given by the gnostic Gospel of
Philip, which quotes the verse before explaining that "It was on the cross
that Jesus said these words, for it was there that he was divided." The
words appear to be construed similarly in their reformulation in the Gospel
of Peter, where on the cross Jesus cries out, "My power, O power, you have
left me."
15. Until recently, scholars have failed to recognize how this controversy
over the meaning of Jesus' last words in Mark relates to a famous textual
problem of the verse. For in some manuscripts, rather than crying out "My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" the dying Jesus cries "My God, my
God, why have you reviled me?"
16. The witnesses that support this reading indicate that it was in wide
circulation already in the second century. But it has proved very difficult
for scholars to imagine that it was the original reading of Mark, for lots
of reasons that I don't need to go into here. Assuming that Mark's Jesus
cried out "why have you forsaken me," why would some scribes have changed it
to "why have you reviled me"? Surely it's not unrelated to fact that
Gnostics were using the verse to support their separationist christology.
For them, Jesus' despair at being "left behind" by God demonstrated that the
Christ had separated from him and returned into the Pleroma, leaving him to
die alone. The change, then, may have been made to circumvent the "misuse"
of the text, and naturally suggested itself from the context. Just as Jesus
was reviled by his opponents, those for whom he died, so too he bore the
reproach of God himself, for whose sake he went to the cross in the first
place.
17. Variations such as this, that relate in one way or another to the early
christological controversies, have been studied at some length in recent
years. The same cannot be said about variants that relate to other kinds of
issues confronting Christian scribes of the second and third centuries.
There are a number of fruitful avenues of exploration, just begging for
intelligent attention. We can begin by looking at variants involving the
apologetic concerns of early Christianity.
Apologetically-Motivated Variants
18. To do so, we should return to the third variant that I considered in my
previous lecture, Mark 1:41, where Mark indicates that Jesus became angry
when approached by a leper who wanted to be healed. Scribes changed the text
so that Jesus was no longer said to become angry, but was moved by
compassion. This kind of change is also, roughly speaking, christological,
in that it pertains to the portrayal of Jesus. But it is hard to understand
the change in relation to any of the christological controversies known to
be raging during the time it was made, the second century. So perhaps we
should look for some other context within which to situate it.
19. Again, it's possible that scribes simply couldn't figure out why Jesus
would get angry at this poor fellow and so changed the text to make his
response more appropriate. But could something else have motivated the
change? To my knowledge, no one has considered the possibility that the
change was made in light of another kind of controversy second-century
Christians were embroiled in, this time not with "heretics," that is,
Christians who took different theological positions, but with pagan
opponents of Christianity.
20. In the second half of the second century, when this text appears to have
been altered, pagan critics started to take notice of the burgeoning
Christian movement and began to write vitriolic attacks on it, labeling it a
mindless superstition comprised of uneducated bumpkins, who followed the
teachings of a rural nobody who was executed for crimes against the state.
This was also the time when Christianity began to find real intellectuals
among its converts, who began to write scholarly defenses, or apologies, on
behalf of the faith.
21. None of the early pagan critics of Christianity was as thorough and
penetrating as the late-second century Celsus, and none of its defenders was
as brilliant as Celsus's posthumous opponent, Origen. In the five books of
his work, Against Celsus, Origen quotes at length from the attack of Celsus
on Christianity and defends the religion and its founder against the charges
leveled against it.
22. I do not wish to say that this particular verse, Mark 1:41, figured
prominently in Celsus' attack or in Origen's defense. But the issues
involved are perhaps of relevance. Celsus maintained that Jesus was not the
Son of God but was a poor, lower-class, uneducated peasant who did his
miracles through the power of magic. Origen, writing 70 years later, tried
to show that Jesus was not a purveyor of the magical arts but was the son of
God himself come to earth for the betterment of the human race. To mount his
defense, Origen establishes some common ground with Celsus: anyone who is a
true son of God will do what he does for the common good, to improve the lot
of humanity, to resolve suffering, and to work for moral reformation. Both
the goals of Jesus' miraculous deeds and the character of his person are at
stake here, as they evidently were for other pagan opponents and Christian
apologists.
23. In a context in which pagan critics are maligning the person of Jesus,
what might one think of a scribe who modifies the scriptural accounts that
describe his character? If we find a text in which Jesus, for no obvious
reason, becomes angry at someone in desperate need, and see that scribes
have changed it so that he reacts in a way more appropriate for the kindly
divine presence on earth, being moved by compassion instead of filled with
wrath, is it not possible that the alteration has been motivated precisely
by the pagan attacks on Jesus' character? At this stage I throw it out
merely as a suggestion; it is at least worth further investigation.
24. And other variants in our tradition may be worth considering in a
similar light. Take, for example, the well known description of Jesus in
Mark 6:3. In this passage, Jesus has returned to his hometown with his
disciples, and preaches in the synagogue with a brilliance that astounds his
hearers, who say, "What is the wisdom given to this one, and such powers
have come through his hands. Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and
brother of James, Joses, Juda, and Simon?"
25. This is the only passage in the New Testament that describes Jesus as a
carpenter. The word, in fact, may not actually signify what we think of as a
carpenter; it is true that in the second century author, Justin, Jesus was
said to have made yokes and gates (?), but the Greek word tektwn
can refer to a number of different occupations, including metal smiths and
stone masons. In any event, the term typically refers to a person who works
with the hands, a lower-class blue-collar worker; we possibly get a
comparable "feel" from our term "construction worker."
26. No where else is Jesus called a tektwn in the New Testament;
the other Synoptics independently change the passage; in Matthew the crowd
asks, "is this not the son of the tektwn," and in Luke, somewhat
similarly, "Is this not the son of Joseph." In both Gospels a particularly
acute irony is thereby created, since Matthew and Luke each explicitly
indicate that Jesus' mother was a virgin at his birth so that Joseph is not
his father; the crowd obviously doesn't really know the first thing about
him, despite their presumed familiarity, and the reader notes their
ignorance. The irony is not possible in Mark, however, which says not a word
about Jesus' virginal conception.
27. What is of particular interest for our purposes here is that this
description of Jesus as a tektwn in Mark has been changed by some
scribes, so that now, as in Matthew, Jesus is said to be the son of the
tektwn rather than the tektwn himself. Some scholars
have argued that this was in fact the original text in Mark, and that it got
changed by scribes who were afraid that it might be taken to indicate that
Jesus really was the son of Joseph, i.e., that he was not born of a virgin.
This seems unlikely to me for a variety of reasons; for one thing, it
doesn't explain why the explicit statements of Matthew and Luke, in which
the crowds do say precisely this, were not also changed (and a change in
those cases would have had the added benefit of resolving the apparent
contradiction of the claim that he was Joseph's son, when in fact he was
not).
28. For this, and other reasons, it looks like Mark probably did describe
Jesus as a tektwn. But why then did some copyists change it to
say that he was the son of the tektwn? It may may be that they
did so simply to bring Mark's Gospel into closer harmony with the more
commonly read Gospel of Matthew; but whenever a harmonistic change like this
has occurred, we are well served in asking whether there is anything in
particular that might have influenced a scribe to harmonize the texts,
especially if no explicit contradiction occurs between them.
29. In this case it is particularly worth noting that the pagan critic
Celsus does attack Jesus' character precisely because of his blue-collar
associations, making fun of the Christians' notion that a lowly day-laborer
(tektwn) could be the Son of God himself [Cels. 6.36]. It is hard
to tell whether Origen's reply to this charge is disingenuous, for he claims
that in fact Jesus is never called a tektwn in the Gospels.
Either Origen overlooked this passage (which is a bit hard to imagine, given
his exhaustive knowledge of the Gospels) or the manuscripts available to him
had themselves been changed. But why changed? Could it have been in order to
circumvent precisely the problem that Celsus raises, that it describes
Jesus, whom Christians acknowledge as the divine son of God, as a low-class
construction worker?
Other Examples
30. Other changes in the text of the New Testament may be closely related to
the apologetic concerns of second-century Christians, even though they have
never been examined in this vein. Throughout the Mediterranean world at this
time, for example, it was widely and naturally thought that anyone claiming
to be divine could foretell the future, and that those who made errors in
their predictions were, more or less obviously, somewhat wanting in their
divine skills. Could this kind of "common-sense" have motivated scribes
occasionally to modify passages that appear to compromise Jesus'
omniscience?
31. The most famous instance comes in Matthew 24:36, where Jesus explicitly
states that no one knows the day or the hour in which the end will come, not
even the angels of heaven nor the son, but the father alone. A significant
number of our manuscripts omit the phrase "not even the son." The reason is
not hard to postulate; if Jesus does not know the future, the Christian
claim that he is divine is more than a little compromised.
32. A less obvious example comes three chapters later in Matthew's
crucifixion scene. We're told in Matt 27:34 that while on the cross Jesus
was given wine to drink, mixed with gall, which he tasted. A large number of
manuscripts, though, indicate that it was not wine that he was given, but
vinegar. The change may have been made to conform the text more closely with
the prooftext that was used to explain the action, Psalm 69:22; but one
might wonder if something else is motivating the scribes as well. It is
interesting to note that at his last supper, in 26:29, after distributing
the cup of wine to his disciples, Jesus explicitly states that he will not
drink wine again until he does so in the kingdom of the father. Is the
change of 27:34 from wine to vinegar meant to safeguard that prediction?
33. Or consider the alteration to Jesus' prediction to the high priest at
the Sanhedrin trial of Mark 14:62. When asked whether he is the Christ, the
Son of the Blessed, Jesus replies, "I am, and you will see the son of man
seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven."
Widely considered by modern scholars to embody or approximate an authentic
saying of Jesus, these words have proved discomforting for many Christians
since near the end of the first century. The son of man never did arrive on
the clouds of heaven. Why then did Jesus predict that the high priest would
himself see him come?
34. The answer may well be that Jesus actually thought that the high priest
would see it, i.e., that it would happen within his lifetime. But,
obviously, in the context of second-century apologetics, this could be taken
as a false prediction. No wonder that one of our earliest witnesses to Mark
modifies the verse by eliminating the offending words, so that now Jesus
simply says that the high priest will see the son of man seated at the right
hand of power with the clouds of heaven. No mention here, of an imminent
parousia.
35. Jesus omniscience is safeguarded in other ways in yet other passages. A
fairly obvious example occurs in Mark 2:26, in which Jesus wrongly claims
that Abiathar was the high priest when David entered into the temple with
his companions to eat the showbread. The incident is recorded in 1 Sam 21,
and it is quite clear that it was not Abiathar, but his father Ahimelech,
who was the high priest at the time. As one might expect, scribes have
modified the text to remove Jesus' mistake; the reference to Abiathar is
excised in several of our earlier manuscripts.
36. It is at least possible that these changes, and others like them, have
been influenced by the apologetic concerns of early Christians. How many
others are there? I have no idea and, I'm sorry to report, to my knowledge
neither does anyone else. No one has undertaken a systematic investigation
of the problem. But now we move on to another area of interest.
Anti-Judaic Modifications
37. A Christian living in the second century would find him or herself
almost automatically embroiled in a situation of conflict with non-Christian
Jews, a conflict that involved different understandings of the role that
Jesus played in the divine plan for the world and of the meaning of the
Jewish Scriptures. I should point out that by no means was this conflict an
even match; by around the year 100, the Christian church was still only a
tiny fraction of the population of the Empire, unheard of by most of its
other inhabitants, outnumbered by non-Christian Jews something like ten to
one.
38. It was perhaps their threatened and defensive position that led
Christians of the second century to use such vitriolic polemic in their
discussions of their Jewish opponents. From the first half of the century,
for example, we find the epistle of Barnabas claiming that Judaism is and
always has been a false religion. The author argues that Israel had
irrevocably broken God's covenant, smashed it to bits, as shown, quite
literally, by the story of the giving of the Law in the Old Testament
itself, for when Moses comes down from Mount Sinai he sees the children of
Israel engaged in wild and lawless activities and smashes to smithereens the
two tablets of stone containing the ten commandments. And the covenant never
was restored. That is why, he maintains, Israel misunderstood all of its own
laws subsequently given to Moses. For in fact, the laws of circumcision and
kosher foods and all the rest were never meant to be taken literally, but
were symbolic expressions of God's will, as has now been revealed in Christ.
39. Later in the second and third centuries we find other authors moving
along a similar anti-Judaic path, authors like Justin in Rome who maintained
that God commanded Jewish males to be circumcised not as a sign of his
special favor, but in order to mark them off from the rest of the human race
for special punishment; and authors like Tertullian and Origen, who claimed
that Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans at God's own initiative, as a
punishment upon the Jews for rejecting their own messiah. And we find the
elegant if terrifying rhetoric of Melito of Sardis, whose Passover sermon
provided an occasion to vent his own animosity towards the Jews.
Pay attention all families of the nations and observe! An
extraordinary murder has taken place in the center of Jerusalem,
in the city devoted to God's law, in the city of the Hebrews, in
the city of the prophets, in the city thought of as just. And who
has been murdered? And who is the murderer? I am ashamed to give
the answer, but give it I must.... The one who hung the earth in
space, is himself hanged; the one who fixed the heavens in place
is himself impaled; the one who firmly fixed all things is himself
firmly fixed to the tree. The Lord is insulted, God has been
murdered, the King of Israel has been destroyed by the right hand
of Israel (Paschal Homily, 94-96).
To my knowledge, this is the first instance in which a Christian author
explicitly accuses the Jewish people of deicide in the death of Jesus.
40. How did the opposition to Jews and Judaism affect Christian scribes who
were reproducing the texts of the New Testament? Many of the passages
involved stood at the heart of the conflict, New Testament passages that
detailed the Jewish involvement in the death of Jesus. Here I can do little
more than cite a couple of instances.
41. As I pointed out in my first lecture, Mark's powerful portrayal of Jesus
going to his death in silence is modified by Luke, where, as he is being
nailed to the cross, Jesus utters the memorable prayer, "Father forgive
them, for they don't know what they're doing." Interestingly enough, Jesus'
prayer is not found in every manuscript of Luke's Gospel. Of the manuscripts
that lack the verse some can be dated to about the year 200. In these
witnesses, Jesus does not ask his father to forgive those who are doing this
cruel thing to him.
42. The verse appears to be clearly Lukan, as it portrays Jesus calm and in
control of his own destiny, concerned about the welfare and fate of others
more than himself. At the same time, and perhaps yet more significantly, the
verse contains a perspective that proved discomforting to early scribes.
Many people today understand Jesus' prayer to be for those who were in the
act of crucifying him, that is, the Roman soldiers. But throughout the
Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, written by the same author, those who
are blamed for Jesus' crucifixion are consistently the Jewish people.
Furthermore, and this is the really important point, we know from later
writings of the church fathers that Jesus' prayer of forgiveness was
typically understood to refer to the Jews who were to blame for his death.
43. This makes our textual situation very interesting. A verse that gives
every indication of having come from the hand of the author of the Gospel is
occasionally being deleted by scribes of the late second or early third
century. During this time the verse is being construed as Jesus' prayer that
God forgive the Jewish people. Moreover, it is precisely at this time that
anti-Judaic sentiment is rising to a kind of crescendo, when Jews are being
accused as Christ killers, as murderers of God, when Christians are claiming
that the destruction of the holy city Jerusalem was God's punishment of the
Jews for the death of Jesus. For many Christians, God had not forgiven Jews
for their rejection of Jesus. How then could Jesus have asked him to forgive
them; and why would he have done so? Some Christian scribes evidently solved
the problem of Jesus' prayer simply by excising it.
44. Other instances of this sort of scribal activity occur in modifications
that heighten Jewish culpability for Jesus' death. As but one example, in
the famous scene of Jesus' trial in Matthew's Gospel, we are told that
Pilate washed his hands before the crowds and proclaimed that he was
innocent of Jesus' blood. The crowds then replied, "His blood be on us and
our children." Pilate then had Jesus scourged and "delivered him up to be
crucified."
45. The passage has served as an incentive for anti-semitic sentiments and
activities over the years, since the Jewish crowds here are said not only to
have borne the responsibility for Jesus' death but also to have made their
succeeding generations accountable for it. Whether Matthew intended a kind
of anti-Judaic reading is much debated among exegetes. In any event, the
textual history of the passage is quite interesting in light of its
subsequent usage by anti-Jewish Christians. Whereas in the oldest available
form of the text, Pilate hands Jesus over to his Roman guard for
crucifixion, in some of our early manuscripts, after hearing the Jewish
crowd accept responsibility for Jesus' death, Pilate "delivered Jesus over
to them so that they might crucify him." In these manuscripts, the Jews are
fully responsible for Jesus' death.
46. Not only the guilt associated with Jesus' death, but also its salvific
effect came to be modified in the hands of early Christian scribes. As but
one quick example, we are told in the birth narrative of Matthew's Gospel
that the newborn savior was to be called Jesus, a name that comes from the
Hebrew word, Joshua, which means salvation, because he would "save his
people from their sins." Interestingly enough, at least one ancient scribe
appears to have had difficulty with this notion of Jews being saved and so
modified the angelic explication of Jesus' name. In this Syriac manuscript,
Jesus is said to "save the world," not his people, "from their sins."
47. Other examples of such possibly anti-Judaic alterations of the text
could be multiplied. How many such instances are there? Again, it's
impossible to say; no one has rigorously pursued the question.
Variants Involving the Oppression of Women
48. Over the course of the past twenty years or so, feminist historians have
offered a number of compelling reconstructions of the history of early
Christianity. In contrast, the historical narratives produced by white men
have typically downplayed the role of women in the church, or more commonly,
simply ignored their role altogether. It is certainly understandable how
those trained in the standard European models of historiography may have
overlooked the evidence for women's actual, if not recorded, prominence in
the early years of the Christian movement. The ancient records were
themselves written almost entirely by men who no less than we were driven by
ideological concerns in preserving descriptions of how things happened and
at whose hands. By all counts, women are seriously under-represented in
these ancient records.
49. And yet there are firm indications that women were quite active in the
early Christian movement, that they were instrumental in its early
development as a religion, that they probably comprised the majority of
Christians in the early centuries, that at the outset they were widely
granted positions of status and authority equal to that of men, and that
only with the passing of time and the expansion of the movement did their
voices come to be silenced. The evidence of the early prominence of women
from the New Testament, especially the writings of Paul (e.g., Rom 16), is
familiar to most of my audience, or at least easily accessible, and so I
won't recount it for you now. Perhaps I should emphasize, though, that
women's continuing prominence in some of the churches associated with Paul
is attested in a number of places, such as the second-century apocryphal
tales like the Acts of Thecla, in gnostic groups that claimed allegiance to
Paul and that were known to have women as their leaders and spokespersons,
and in such sectarian groups as that associated with the prophet Montanus
and his two women colleagues Prisca and Maximillia--women who had evidently
forsaken their marriages in order to live ascetic lives, insisting that the
end of the age was near.
50. As is well known, not everyone in the early Christian movement was
pleased with the important roles women played in the churches or the
ideology that allowed them to do so. On the contrary, a good deal of the
history of Christianity, including its early history, involved a movement to
oppress women and to take away their voices, a movement spearheaded by those
who believed that women should be in complete submission to men. The
movement is already in evidence in the pseudonymous letters of Timothy and
Titus that made it into the New Tesament, letters allegedly written by Paul
to male leaders of two of his churches, urging them to tend to the problems
of their communities, including the problem of women, who were to be brought
under subjection. Christian women were to be silent and submissive and
sexually active with their spouses; those who wanted to enjoy the benefits
of salvation were to recognize the superiority of their husbands, to keep
quiet, and to produce babies (1 Tim 2:11-13).
51. How did the debates over the status of women affect the scribes who
reproduced our texts? The first place to turn is a familiar passage that
continues to play a prominent role in modern Christian debates over women in
the church, 1 Cor. 14:35-36. Indeed, this is another passage commonly
thought to show Paul's true misogynist colors, for here Paul appears to urge
a view that is anything but egalitarian:
Let the women be silent in the churches For they are not permitted
to speak but must be subordinate, just as the law says. But if
they wish to learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home.
For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.
52. I'm sorry to say, especially for my fellow neutestamentlers, that I
really have nothing new to say about this much worked over passage, except
that the discussion over whether Paul actually wrote it ought to be situated
in the context I've just sketched of the early Christian oppression of
women, rather than left in vacuous isolation as is more commonly done.
53. For those of you not as familiar with the problem, let me summarize the
issues briefly. There are good reasons for thinking that a scribe inserted
this passage into 1 Corinthians after it had already left Paul's hand and
been in circulation for a time.
54. The evidence is not as compelling as some of the other cases we have
examined, for the passage is found in all of our manuscripts of 1
Corinthians. Nonetheless, some of our Latin manuscripts situate these verses
in a different location, placing them at the end of the chapter, after v.
40. One way to explain this kind of transposition is to assume that the
passage originated as a marginal note that scribes later incorporated into
the text itself, some scribes inserting it in one place and others in
another. And indeed, there are strong arguments for thinking that this is
exactly what happened in the present instance, for the verses appear
intrusive in their immediate literary context and completely at odds with
what Paul says about women elsewhere--including within 1 Corinthians itself.
55. In terms of the immediate context, this entire chapter addresses the
issue of prophecy in the church. This is the topic of discussion up to v.
33, immediately before these verses, and the topic beginning again with vv.
36-37, immediately afterwards. The verses in question, however, go off on a
different tangent, making them look intrusive.
56. Moreover, what the verses actually say stands in tension with Paul's own
views--not only Gal 3:28, where he maintains that in Christ there is neither
male nor female, but more puzzling still, even within the letter of 1
Corinthians itself. The present passage insists that women be silent, that
they not be allowed to speak in church. But just three chapters earlier Paul
endorsed the practice of women praying and prophecying in church, activities
always done aloud in antiquity. How could he affirm the right of women to
speak in chapter eleven and then deny them that right in chapter 14?
57. It could well be that he didn't deny them that right, but that a later
author did so, a scribe who penned a marginal note in his manuscript of this
letter, whose comments were later made part of the text itself. The note is
remarkably close in tenor to the comments preserved pseudonymously in Paul's
name by the author of the Pastoral epistles. It may well, then, represent a
scribal attempt to understand Paul in light of the oppressive views
advocated by the proto-orthodox Christians of a later generation.
58. Other passages of the New Testament are affected by this same tendency,
although rarely in so striking a fashion. Here I might mention Rom 16:7,
which identifies the woman Junia as one of the apostles: "Greet Andronicus
and Junia, my relatives and fellow prisoners, who are eminent among the
apostles." English Bible translators have gone out of their way to perform a
sex change on Junia, by transforming her name into a masculine name that
didn't exist in ancient Greek, Junias. These modern scholars may find solace
in the precedent set by two of our earliest scribes, who by adding an
article to the text allow it to be read differently: "Greet Andronicus and
Junia, my relatives; and also greet my fellow prisoners who are eminent
among the apostles."
59. Two other quick examples from the book of Acts. In chapter 17, Paul is
said to have converted several socially prominent women to the faith. One
ancient copy of the passage, however, preserves a modification that
celebrates the people who really count: now rather than calling these
converts "women of prominence" they are unambiguously labeled "wives of
prominent men." A similar tendency is at work in the regular scribal
tendency to transpose the names of two of the noteworthy companions of Paul,
Priscilla and her husband Aquila, so that the husband's name, in these
modified manuscripts of the book of Acts, appears in its appropriately prior
position.
Conclusion
60. There are other kinds of scribal modifications that we could look at
along similar lines, if we chose--e.g., changes that reflect theological
issues other than christology or alterations that appear to be related to
the ascetic practices emerging in the early Christian movement. Like scribal
changes related to apologetic, anti-Jewish, and anti-women views that were
sweeping through many of the Christian churches of the second century, these
kinds of modifications have been left virtually untouched by textual
scholars.
61. My time is running rather short, however, and rather than pursue these
lines of inquiry here, I would like to conclude by reflecting for a moment
on a somewhat broader issue. I have been trying to make a couple of basic
points in these two lectures; one of my major theses, though, has remained
more or less hidden as a kind of subtext for them both. In my conclusion I
would like to raise it to the level of consciousness. To some extent I've
wanted these lectures to show that even though it's not generally perceived
this way, the study of the NT manuscripts can be both interesting and
important for early Christian studies more generally.
62. I say that it's not generally perceived this way, and that's perhaps a
bit of an understatement. Most people, even most NT scholars, typically
consider textual criticism to be an arcane subdiscipline of little interest
to anyone residing outside the rare and occasionally endangered species of
textual critics themselves. A lot of the fault for this perception lies with
my colleagues in the field, who in fact are among the worst you'll find
anywhere at explaining why it is that what they do matters for anything, for
example, for exegesis or historical reconstruction, let alone for the study
of NT theology, the history of doctrine, or the social world of early
Christianity.
63. No wonder that most of today's NT scholars, by their own admission, are
not capable of rendering independent judgments concerning textual variants
preserved in the tradition (I except my NT colleagues here, by the way; and
they will for the most part agree, I think, with my opinion on this point).
It strikes me as a pity that most doctoral candidates in New Testament are
not trained even to use the apparatus of the standard Greek text, the
Nestle-Aland 27th ed., that most divinity school students are not taught the
fundamental problems of the textual tradition that they are expected to
teach or preach, and that most of the laypersons in the churches to which
the graduates of divinity school go are left completely unaware of the
problems of the texts of the books that they themselves revere as Scripture.
64. In any event, I hope I've made a case for the fundamental importance of
this kind of knowledge, and for why its continued neglect is not in anyone's
best interest. It shouldn't be left to a small coterie of specialists.
Significant issues surrounding NT exegesis, the development of early
Christian theology, and the social history of the early church are
intricately connected with decisions concerning the texts of the books that
came to be considered by Christians as sacred scripture. The oldest form of
the text must be established before it can be interpreted, and the later
alterations of this text reveal significant moments in the use of these
texts during the theological and social conflicts of the first three or four
centuries of the Christian church.
© TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, 2000.