The Quest for Origins


Methods and Discoveries


As we have seen, long before Mill published his edition of the


Greek New Testament with its notation of thirty thousand


places of variation among the surviving witnesses, some (few) scholars


had recognized that there was a problem with the New Testament


text. Already in the second century, the pagan critic Celsus had argued


that Christians changed the text at will, as if drunk from a drinking


bout; his opponent Origen speaks of the “great” number of differences


among the manuscripts of the Gospels; more than a century later Pope


Damasus was so concerned about the varieties of Latin manuscripts


that he commissioned Jerome to produced a standardized translation;


and Jerome himself had to compare numerous copies of the text, both


Greek and Latin, to decide on the text that he thought was originally


penned by its authors.


The problem lay dormant, however, through the Middle Ages and


down to the seventeenth century, when Mill and others started to deal


with it seriously.1 While Mill was in the process of compiling the data


for his landmark edition of 1707, another scholar was also assiduously


working on the problem of the New Testament text; this scholar was


not English, however, but French, and he was not a Protestant but a


Catholic. Moreover, his view was precisely the one that many English


Protestants feared would result from a careful analysis of the New


Testament text, namely that the wide-ranging variations in the tradition


showed that Christian faith could not be based solely on scripture


(the Protestant Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura), since the text was


unstable and unreliable. Instead, according to this view, the Catholics


must be right that faith required the apostolic tradition preserved in


the (Catholic) church. The French author who pursued these thoughts


in a series of significant publications was Richard Simon (1638–1712).


Richard Simon


Although Simon was principally a Hebrew scholar, he worked on the


textual tradition of both the Old and the New Testaments. His magisterial


study, A Critical History of the Text of the New Testament, appeared


in 1689 while Mill was still laboring to uncover variants in the


textual tradition; Mill had access to this work and, in the opening discussion


of his 1707 edition, acknowledges its erudition and importance


for his own investigations even while disagreeing with its


theological conclusions.


Simon’s book is devoted not to uncovering every available variant


reading but to discussing textual differences in the tradition, in order


to show the uncertainty of the text in places and to argue, at times, for


the superiority of the Latin Bible, still held to be the authoritative text


by Catholic theologians. He is all too familiar with key textual problems.


He discusses at length, for example, a number of the ones we


have examined ourselves to this point: the woman taken in adultery,


the last twelve verses of Mark, and the Johannine Comma (which explicitly


affirms the doctrine of the Trinity). Throughout his discussion


102 Misquoting Jesus


he strives to show that it was Jerome who provided the church with a


text that could be used as the basis for theological reflection. As he


says in the preface to part 1 of his work:


St. Jerome has done the Church no small Service, in Correcting and


Reviewing the ancient Latin Copies, according to the strictest Rules


of Criticism. This we endeavor to demonstrate in this work, and that


the most ancient Greek Exemplars of the New Testament are not the


best, since they are suited to those Latin Copies, which St. Jerome


found so degenerous as to need an Alteration.2


This is at heart a clever argument, which we will meet again: the


oldest Greek manuscripts are unreliable because they are precisely


the degenerate copies that Jerome had to revise in order to establish the


superior text; surviving Greek copies produced before Jerome’s day,


even though they may be our earliest copies, are not to be trusted.


As clever as the argument is, it has never won widespread support


among textual critics. In effect, it is simply a declaration that our oldest


surviving manuscripts cannot be trusted, but the revision of those


manuscripts can. On what grounds, though, did Jerome revise his


text? On the grounds of earlier manuscripts. Even he trusted the earlier


record of the text. For us not to do likewise would be a giant step


backward—even given the diversity of the textual tradition in the early


centuries.


In any event, in pursuing his case, Simon argues that all manuscripts


embody textual alterations, but especially the Greek ones (here


we may have more polemic against “Greek schismatics” from the


“true” church).


There would not be at this day any Copy even of the New Testament,


either Greek, Latin, Syriack or Arabick, that might be truly called authentick,


because there is not one, in whatsoever Language it be written,


that is absolutely exempt from Additions. I might also avouch,


The Quest for Origins 103


that the Greek Transcribers have taken a very great liberty in writing


their Copies, as shall be proved in another place.3


Simon’s theological agenda for such observations is clear throughout


his long treatise. At one point he asks rhetorically:


Is it possible . . . that God hath given to his church Books to serve her


for a Rule, and that he hath at the same time permitted that the first


Originals of these Books should be lost ever since the beginning of the


Christian Religion?4


His answer, of course, is no. The scriptures do provide a foundation


for the faith, but it is not the books themselves that ultimately


matter (since they have, after all, been changed over time), but the interpretation


of these books, as found in the apostolic tradition handed


down through the (Catholic) church.


Although the Scriptures are a sure Rule on which our Faith is


founded, yet this Rule is not altogether sufficient of itself; it is necessary


to know, besides this, what are the Apostolical Traditions; and


we cannot learn them but from the Apostolical Churches, who


have preserved the true Sense of Scriptures.5


Simon’s anti-Protestant conclusions become even clearer in some


of his other writings. For example, in a work dealing with the “principal


commentators on the New Testament,” he is forthright in stating:


The great changes that have taken place in the manuscripts of the


Bible . . . since the first originals were lost, completely destroy the


principle of the Protestants . . . , who only consult these same manuscripts


of the Bible in the form they are today. If the truth of religion


had not lived on in the Church, it would not be safe to look for it now


in books that have been subjected to so many changes and that in so


many matters were dependent on the will of the copyists.6


This kind of intellectually rigorous attack on the Protestant understanding


of scripture was taken quite seriously in the halls of acad-


104 Misquoting Jesus


eme. Once Mill’s edition appeared in 1707, Protestant biblical scholars


were driven by the nature of their materials to reconsider and defend


their understanding of the faith. They could not, of course, simply do


away with the notion of sola scriptura. For them, the words of the


Bible continued to convey the authority of the Word of God. But how


does one deal with the circumstance that in many instances we don’t


know what those words were? One solution was to develop methods


of textual criticism that would enable modern scholars to reconstruct


the original words, so that the foundation of faith might once again


prove to be secure. It was this theological agenda that lay behind


much of the effort, principally in England and Germany, to devise


competent and reliable methods of reconstructing the original words


of the New Testament from the numerous, error-ridden copies of it


that happened to survive.


Richard Bentley


As we have seen, Richard Bentley, the classical scholar and Master of


Trinity College, Cambridge, turned his renowned intellect to the


problems of the New Testament textual tradition in response to


the negative reactions elicited by the publication of Mill’s Greek New


Testament with its massive collection of textual variation among the


manuscripts.7 Bentley’s response to the deist Collins, A Reply to a Treatise


of Free-Thinking, proved to be very popular and went through


eight editions. His overarching view was that thirty thousand variations


in the Greek New Testament were not too many to expect from


a textual tradition endowed with such a wealth of materials, and that


Mill could scarcely be faulted for undermining the truth of the Christian


religion when he had not invented these places of variation but


simply observed them.


Eventually Bentley himself became interested in working on the


New Testament textual tradition, and once he turned his mind to it, he


concluded that he could in fact make significant progress in establishing


The Quest for Origins 105


the original text in the majority of places where textual variation existed.


In a 1716 letter to a patron, Archbishop Wake, he stated the


premise of a proposed new edition of the Greek Testament: he would


be able, by careful analysis, to restore the text of the New Testament


to its state at the time of the Council of Nicea (early fourth century),


which would have been the form of the text promulgated in the preceding


centuries by the great textual scholar of antiquity, Origen,


many centuries before the vast majority of textual variations (Bentley


believed) had come to corrupt the tradition.


Bentley was never one given over to false modesty. As he claims in


this letter:


I find I am able (what some thought impossible) to give an edition of


the Greek Testament exactly as it was in the best exemplars at the time


of the Council of Nice; so that there shall not be twenty words, nor


even particles, difference . . . so that that book which, by the present


management, is thought the most uncertain, shall have a testimony of


certainty above all other books whatever, and an end be put at once to


all Various Lections [ i.e., variant readings] now and hereafter.8


Bentley’s method of proceeding was rather straightforward. He


had decided to collate (i.e., to compare in detail) the text of the most


important Greek manuscript of the New Testament in England, the


early-fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, with the oldest available copies


of the Latin Vulgate. What he found was a wide range of remarkable


coincidences of readings, in which these manuscripts agreed time and


again with each other but against the bulk of Greek manuscripts transcribed


in the Middle Ages. The agreements extended even to such


matters as word order, where the various manuscripts differed. Bentley


was convinced, then, that he could edit both the Latin Vulgate and


the Greek New Testament to arrive at the most ancient forms of these


texts, so that there would be scarcely any doubt concerning their earliest


reading. Mill’s thirty thousand places of variation would thereby


become a near irrelevancy to those invested in the authority of the


text. The logic behind the method was simple: if, in fact, Jerome used


106 Misquoting Jesus


the best Greek manuscripts available for editing his text, then by comparing


the oldest manuscripts of the Vulgate (to ascertain Jerome’s


original text) with the oldest manuscripts of the Greek New Testament


(to ascertain which were the ones used by Jerome), one could determine


what the best texts of Jerome’s day had looked like—and skip


over more than a thousand years of textual transmission in which the


text came to be repeatedly changed. Moreover, since Jerome’s text would


have been that of his predecessor Origen, one could rest assured that this


was the very best text available in the earliest centuries of Christianity.


And so, Bentley draws what for him was the ineluctable conclusion:


By taking two thousand errors out of the Pope’s Vulgate, and as many


out of the Protestant Pope Stephens’ [ i.e., the edition of Stephanus—


the T.R.] I can set out an edition of each in columns, without using


any book under nine hundred years old, that shall so exactly agree


word for word, and, what at first amazed me, order for order, that no


two tallies nor two indentures can agree better.9


Spending further time in collating manuscripts, and in examining


the collations made by others, only increased Bentley’s confidence in


his ability to do the job, to do it right, and to do it once and for all. In


1720 he published a pamphlet entitled Proposals for Printing designed


to bring in support for his project by acquiring a number of financial


subscribers. In it he lays out his proposed method of reconstructing


the text and argues for its incomparable accuracy.


The author believes that he has retrieved (except in very few places)


the true exemplar of Origen. . . . And he is sure, that the Greek and


Latin MSS., by their mutual assistance, do so settle the original text to


the smallest nicety, as cannot be performed now in any Classic author


whatever: and that out of a labyrinth of thirty thousand various readings,


that crowd the pages of our present best editions, all put upon


equal credit to the offence of many good persons; this clue so leads and


extricates us, that there will scarce be two hundred out of so many


thousands that can deserve the least consideration.10


The Quest for Origins 107


Paring down the significant variants from Mill’s thirty thousand


to a mere two hundred is obviously a major advance. Not everyone,


however, was sure that Bentley could produce the goods. In an anonymous


tractate written in response to the Proposals (this was an age of


controversialists and pamphleteers), which discussed the pamphlet


paragraph by paragraph, Bentley was attacked for his program and


was said, by his anonymous opponent, to have “neither talents nor


materials proper for the work he had undertaken.”11


Bentley took this, as one can imagine, as a slur on his (selfacknowledged)


great talents and responded in kind. Unfortunately,


he mistook the identity of his opponent, who was actually a Cambridge


scholar named Conyers Middleton, for another, John Colbatch,


and wrote a vitriolic reply, naming Colbatch and, as was the style in


those days, calling him names. Such controversial pamphlets are a


marvel to behold in our own day of subtle polemics; there was nothing


subtle about personal grievance in those days. Bentley remarks


that “We need go no further than this paragraph for a specimen of the


greatest malice and impudence, that any scribbler out of the dark


committed to paper.”12 And throughout his reply he provides a smattering


of rather graphic terms of abuse, calling Colbatch (who in fact


had nothing to do with the pamphlet in question) a cabbage-head, insect,


worm, maggot, vermin, gnawing rat, snarling dog, ignorant


thief, and mountebank.13 Ah, those were the days.


Once Bentley was alerted to the real identity of his opponent, he


was naturally a bit embarrassed about barking up the wrong tree, but


he continued his self-defense, and both sides had more than one volley


left in the exchange. These defenses hampered the work itself, of


course, as did other factors, including Bentley’s onerous obligations as


an administrator of his college at Cambridge, his other writing projects,


and certain disheartening setbacks, which included his failure to


obtain an exemption on import duties for the paper he wanted to use


for the edition. In the end, his proposals for printing the Greek New


Testament, with the text not of late corrupted Greek manuscripts


108 Misquoting Jesus


(like those lying behind the Textus Receptus) but of the earliest possible


attainable text, came to naught. After his death, his nephew was


forced to return the sums that had been collected by subscription,


bringing closure to the entire affair.


Johann Albrecht Bengel


From France (Simon) to England (Mill, Bentley), and now to Germany,


textual problems of the New Testament were occupying the


leading biblical scholars of the day in major areas of European Christendom.


Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752) was a pious Lutheran


pastor and professor who early in his life became deeply disturbed by


the presence of such a large array of textual variants in the manuscript


tradition of the New Testament, and was particularly thrown off as a


twenty-year-old by the publication of Mill’s edition and its thirty


thousand places of variation. These were seen as a major challenge to


Bengel’s faith, rooted as it was in the very words of scripture. If these


words were not certain, what of the faith based on them?


Bengel spent much of his academic career working on this problem,


and as we will see, he made significant headway in finding solutions


to it. First, though, we need to look briefly at Bengel’s approach


to the Bible.14


Bengel’s religious commitments permeated his life and thought.


One can get a sense of the seriousness with which he approached his


faith from the title of the inaugural lecture he delivered when appointed


a junior tutor at the new theological seminary in Denkendorf:


“De certissima ad veram eruditonem perveniendi ratione per studium


pietatis” (The diligent pursuit of piety is the surest method of attaining


sound learning).


Bengel was a classically trained, extremely careful interpreter of


the biblical text. He is possibly best known as a biblical commentator:


he wrote extensive notes on every book of the New Testament,


The Quest for Origins 109


exploring grammatical, historical, and interpretive issues at length, in


expositions that were clear and compelling—and still worth reading


today. At the heart of this work of exegesis was a trust in the words of


scripture. This trust went so far that it took Bengel in directions that


today might seem a shade bizarre. Thinking that all the words of


scripture were inspired—including the words of the prophets and the


book of Revelation—Bengel became convinced that God’s great involvement


with human affairs was nearing a climax, and that biblical


prophecy indicated that his own generation was living near the end of


days. He, in fact, believed he knew when the end would come: it


would be about a century in the future, in 1836.


Bengel was not taken aback by verses such as Matt. 24:36, which


says that “of that day and hour no one knows, not the angels in


heaven, nor even the Son, but the Father only.” Careful interpreter


that he was, Bengel points out that here Jesus speaks in the present


tense: in his own day Jesus could say “no one knows,” but that doesn’t


mean that at a later time no one would know. By studying the biblical


prophecies, in fact, later Christians could come to know. The papacy


was the Antichrist, the freemasons may have represented the false


“prophet” of Revelation, and the end was but a century away (he was


writing in the 1730s).


The Great Tribulation, which the primitive church looked for from


the future Antichrist, is not arrived, but is very near; for the predictions


of the Apocalypse, from the tenth to the fourteenth chapter, have


been fulfilling for many centuries; and the principal point stands


clearer and clearer in view, that within another hundred years, the


great expected change of things may take place. . . . Still, let the remainder


stand, especially the great termination which I anticipate


for 1836.15


Clearly, the predictors of doom in our own age—the Hal Lindseys


(author of The Late Great Planet Earth) and the Tim LaHaye (coauthor


of the Left Behind series)—have had their predecessors, just as


they will have their successors, world without end.


110 Misquoting Jesus


For our purposes here, Bengel’s quirky interpretations of prophecy


matter because they were rooted in knowing the precise words of


scripture. If the number of the Antichrist were not 666 but, say, 616,


that would have a profound effect. Since the words matter, it matters


that we have the words. And so Bengel spent a good deal of his research


time exploring the many thousands of variant readings available in


our manuscripts, and in his attempt to get beyond the alterations of


later scribes back to the texts of the original authors, he came up with


several breakthroughs in methodology.


The first is a criterion he devised that more or less summed up his


approach to establishing the original text whenever the wording was


in doubt. Scholars before him, such Simon and Bentley, had tried to


devise criteria of evaluation for variant readings. Some others, whom


we have not discussed here, devised long lists of criteria that might


prove helpful. After intense study of the matter (Bengel studied everything


intensely), Bengel found that he could summarize the vast majority


of proposed criteria in a simple four-word phrase: “Proclivi


scriptioni praestat ardua”—the more difficult reading is preferable to the


easier one. The logic is this: when scribes changed their texts, they


were more likely to try to improve them. If they saw what they took


to be a mistake, they corrected it; if they saw two accounts of the same


story told differently, they harmonized them; if they encountered a


text that stood at odds with their own theological opinions, they altered


it. In every instance, to know what the oldest (or even “original”)


text said, preference should be given not to the reading that has


corrected the mistake, harmonized the account, or improved its theology,


but to just the opposite one, the reading that is “harder” to explain.


In every case, the more difficult reading is to be preferred.16


The other breakthrough that Bengel made involves not so much


the mass of readings we have at our disposal as the mass of documents


that contain them. He noticed that documents that are copied from


one another naturally bear the closest resemblance to the exemplars


from which they were copied and to other copies made from the same


exemplars. Certain manuscripts are more like some other manuscripts


The Quest for Origins 111


than others are. All the surviving documents, then, can be arranged in


a kind of genealogical relationship, in which there are groups of documents


that are more closely related to one another than they are to


other documents. This is useful to know, because in theory one could


set up a kind of family tree and trace the lineage of documents back to


their source. It is a bit like finding a mutual ancestor between you and


a person in another state with the same last name.


Later, we will see more fully how grouping witnesses into families


developed into a more formal methodological principle for helping


the textual critic establish the original text. For now, it is enough to


note that it was Bengel who first had the idea. In 1734 he published his


great edition of the Greek New Testament, which printed for the most


part the Textus Receptus but indicated places in which he thought he


had uncovered superior readings to the text.


Johann J. Wettstein


One of the most controversial figures in the ranks of biblical scholarship


in the eighteenth century was J. J. Wettstein (1693–1754). At a


young age Wettstein became enthralled with the question of the text


of the New Testament and its manifold variations, and pursued the


subject in his early studies. The day after his twentieth birthday, on


March 17, 1713, he presented a thesis at the University of Basel on


“The Variety of Readings in the Text of the New Testament.” Among


other things, the Protestant Wettstein argued that variant readings


“can have no weakening effect on the trustworthiness or integrity of


the Scriptures.” The reason: God has “bestowed this book once and


for all on the world as an instrument for the perfection of human


character. It contains all that is necessary to salvation both for belief


and conduct.” Thus, variant readings may affect minor points in


scripture, but the basic message remains intact no matter which readings


one notices.17


112 Misquoting Jesus


In 1715Wettstein went to England (as part of a literary tour) and


was given full access to the Codex Alexandrinus, which we have already


heard about in relation to Bentley. One portion of the manuscript


particularly caught Wettstein’s attention: it was one of those


tiny matters with enormous implications. It involved the text of a key


passage in the book of 1 Timothy.


The passage in question, 1 Tim. 3:16, had long been used by advocates


of orthodox theology to support the view that the New Testament


itself calls Jesus God. For the text, in most manuscripts, refers to


Christ as “God made manifest in the flesh, and justified in the Spirit.”


As I pointed out in chapter 3, most manuscripts abbreviate sacred names


(the so-called nomina sacra), and that is the case here as well, where the


Greek word God () is abbreviated in two letters, theta and


sigma (), with a line drawn over the top to indicate that it is an abbreviation.


What Wettstein noticed in examining Codex Alexandrinus


was that the line over the top had been drawn in a different ink


from the surrounding words, and so appeared to be from a later hand


(i.e., written by a later scribe). Moreover, the horizontal line in the


middle of the first letter, , was not actually a part of the letter but


was a line that had bled through from the other side of the old vellum.


In other words, rather than being the abbreviation (theta–sigma) for


“God” (), the word was actually an omicron and a sigma (), a


different word altogether, which simply means “who.” The original


reading of the manuscript thus did not speak of Christ as “God made


manifest in the flesh” but of Christ “who was made manifest in the


flesh.” According to the ancient testimony of the Codex Alexandrinus,


Christ is no longer explicitly called God in this passage.


As Wettstein continued his investigations, he found other passages


typically used to affirm the doctrine of the divinity of Christ that in


fact represented textual problems; when these problems are resolved


on text-critical grounds, in most instances references to Jesus’s divinity


are taken away. This happens, for example, when the famous Johannine


Comma (1 John 5:7–8) is removed from the text. And it happens in a


The Quest for Origins 113


passage in Acts 20:28, which in many manuscripts speaks of “the Church


of God, which he obtained by his own blood.” Here again, Jesus appears


to be spoken of as God. But in Codex Alexandrinus and some


other manuscripts, the text instead speaks of “the Church of the


Lord, which he obtained by his own blood.” Now Jesus is called


the Lord, but he is not explicitly identified as God.


Alerted to such difficulties, Wettstein began thinking seriously


about his own theological convictions, and became attuned to the


problem that the New Testament rarely, if ever, actually calls Jesus


God. And he began to be annoyed with his fellow pastors and teachers


in his home city of Basel, who would sometimes confuse language


about God and Christ—for example, when talking of the Son of God


as if he were the Father, or addressing God the Father in prayer and


speaking of “your sacred wounds.” Wettstein thought that more precision


was needed when speaking about the Father and the Son, since


they were not the same.


Wettstein’s emphasis on such matters started raising suspicions


among his colleagues, suspicions that were confirmed for them when,


in 1730, Wettstein published a discussion of the problems of the


Greek New Testament in anticipation of a new edition that he was


preparing. Included among the specimen passages in his discussion


were some of these disputed texts that had been used by theologians to


establish the biblical basis for the doctrine of the divinity of Christ.


For Wettstein, these texts in fact had been altered precisely in order to


incorporate that perspective: the original texts could not be used in


support of it.


This raised quite a furor among Wettstein’s colleagues, many of


whom became his opponents. They insisted to the Basel city council


that Wettstein not be allowed to publish his Greek New Testament,


which they labeled “useless, uncalled for, and even dangerous work”;


and they maintained that “Deacon Wettstein is preaching what is unorthodox,


is making statements in his lectures opposed to the teaching


of the Reformed Church, and has in hand the printing of a Greek


New Testament in which some dangerous innovations very suspect of


114 Misquoting Jesus


Socinianism [a doctrine that denied the divinity of Christ] will appear.”


18 Called to account for his views before the university senate, he


was found to have “rationalistic” views that denied the plenary inspiration


of scripture and the existence of the devil and demons, and that


focused attention on scriptural obscurities.


He was removed from the Christian diaconate and compelled to


leave Basel; and so he set up residence in Amsterdam, where he continued


his work. He later claimed that all the controversy had forced


a delay of twenty years in the publication of his edition of the Greek


New Testament (1751–52).


Even so, this was a magnificent edition, still of value to scholars


today, more than 250 years later. In it Wettstein does print the Textus


Receptus, but he also amasses a mind-boggling array of Greek, Roman,


and Jewish texts that parallel statements found in the New Testament


and can help illuminate their meaning. He also cites a large number


of textual variants, adducing as evidence some twenty-five majuscule


manuscripts and some 250 minuscules (nearly three times the number


available to Mill), arranging them in a clear fashion by referring to


each majuscule with a different capital letter and using arabic numerals


to denote the minuscule manuscripts—a system of reference that


became standard for centuries and is still, in essence, widely used


today.


Despite the enormous value of Wettstein’s edition, the textual theory


lying behind it is usually seen as completely retrograde. Wettstein


ignored the advances in method made by Bentley (for whom he had


once worked, collating manuscripts) and Bengel (whom he considered


an enemy) and maintained that the ancient Greek manuscripts


of the New Testament could not be trusted because, in his view, they


had all been altered in conformity with the Latin witnesses. There is


no evidence of this having happened, however, and the end result of


using it as a major criterion of evaluation is that when one is deciding


on a textual variant, the best procedure purportedly is not to see what


the oldest witnesses say (these, according to the theory, are farthest removed


from the originals!), but to see what the more recent ones (the


The Quest for Origins 115


Greek manuscripts of the Middle Ages) say. No leading scholar of the


text subscribes to this bizarre theory.


Karl Lachmann


After Wettstein there were a number of textual scholars who made


greater or lesser contributions to the methodology for determining


the oldest form of the biblical text in the face of an increasing number


of manuscripts (as these were being discovered) that attest variation,


scholars such as J. Semler and J. J. Griesbach. In some ways, though,


the major breakthrough in the field did not come for another eighty


years, with the inauspicious-looking but revolutionary publication of


a comparatively thin edition of the Greek New Testament by the German


philologist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851).19


Early on in his work, Lachmann decided that the textual evidence


was simply not adequate to determine what the original authors wrote.


The earliest manuscripts that he had access to were those of the fourth


or fifth centuries—hundreds of years after the originals had been produced.


Who could predict the vicissitudes of transmission that had occurred


between the penning of the autographs and the production of


the earliest surviving witnesses some centuries later? Lachmann therefore


set for himself a simpler task. The Textus Receptus, he knew, was


based on the manuscript tradition of the twelfth century. He could


improve upon that—by eight hundred years—by producing an edition


of the New Testament as it would have appeared at about the end


of the fourth century. The surviving manuscripts in Greek, along with


the manuscripts of Jerome’s Vulgate and the quotations of the text in


such writers as Irenaeus, Origen, and Cyprian, would at the very least


allow that. And so that is what he did. Relying on a handful of early


majuscule manuscripts plus the oldest Latin manuscripts and the patristic


quotations of the text, he chose not simply to edit the Textus Receptus


wherever necessary (the tack followed by his predecessors who


116 Misquoting Jesus


were dissatisfied with the T.R.), but to abandon the T.R. completely


and to establish the text anew, on his own principles.


Thus, in 1831 he produced a new version of the text, not based on


the T.R. This was the first time anyone had dared to do so. It had


taken more than three hundred years, but finally the world was given


an edition of the Greek New Testament that was based exclusively on


ancient evidence.


Lachmann’s aim of producing a text as it would have been known


in the late fourth century was not always understood, and even when


understood it was not always appreciated. Many readers thought that


Lachmann was claiming to present the “original” text and objected


that in doing so he had, on principle, avoided almost all the evidence


(the later textual tradition, which contains an abundance of manuscripts).


Others noted the similarity of his approach to that of Bentley,


who also had the idea of comparing the earliest Greek and Latin


manuscripts to determine the text of the fourth century (which Bentley


took, however, to be the text known to Origen in the early third


century); as a result, Lachmann was sometimes called Bentley’s Ape.


In reality, though, Lachmann had broken through the unhelpful custom


established among printers and scholars alike of giving favored


status to the T.R., a status it surely did not deserve, since it was printed


and reprinted not because anyone felt that it rested on a secure textual


basis but only because its text was both customary and familiar.


Lobegott Friedrich Constantine


von Tischendorf


While scholars like Bentley, Bengel, and Lachmann were refining the


methodologies that were to be used in examining the variant readings


of New Testament manuscripts, new discoveries were regularly being


made in old libraries and monasteries, both East and West. The


nineteenth-century scholar who was most assiduous in discovering


The Quest for Origins 117


biblical manuscripts and publishing their texts had the interesting


name Lobegott Friedrich Constantine von Tischendorf (1815–1874).


He was called Lobegott (German for “Praise God”) because before he


was born, his mother had seen a blind man and succumbed to the superstitious


belief that this would cause her child to be born blind.


When he was born completely healthy, she dedicated him to God by


giving him this unusual first name.


Tischendorf was an inordinately ardent scholar who saw his work


on the text of the New Testament as a sacred, divinely ordained task.


As he once wrote his fiancée, while still in his early twenties: “I am


confronted with a sacred task, the struggle to regain the original form


of the New Testament.”20 This sacred task he sought to fulfill by locating


every manuscript tucked away in every library and monastery


that he could find. He made several trips around Europe and into the


“East” (meaning what we would call the Middle East), finding, transcribing,


and publishing manuscripts wherever he went. One of his


earliest and best-known successes involved a manuscript that was already


known but that no one had been able to read. This is the Codex


Ephraemi Rescriptus, housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.


The codex was originally a fifth-century Greek manuscript of the New


Testament, but it had been erased in the twelfth century so that its vellum


pages could be reused to record some sermons by the Syriac church


father Ephraim. Since the pages had not been erased thoroughly,


some of the underwriting could still be seen, although not clearly enough


to decipher most of the words—even though several fine scholars had


done their best. By Tischendorf’s time, however, chemical reagents


had been discovered that could help bring out the underwriting. Applying


these reagents carefully, and plodding his way slowly through


the text, Tischendorf could make out its words, and so produced the


first successful transcription of this early text, gaining for himself


something of a reputation among those who cared about such things.


Some such people were induced to provide financial support for


Tischendorf ’s journeys to other lands in Europe and the Middle East


118 Misquoting Jesus


to locate manuscripts. By all counts, his most famous discovery involves


one of the truly great manuscripts of the Bible still available,


Codex Sinaiticus. The tale of its discovery is the stuff of legend, although


we have the account direct from Tischendorf’s own hand.


Tischendorf had made a journey to Egypt in 1844, when not yet


thirty years of age, arriving on camelback eventually at the wilderness


monastery of Saint Catherine. What happened there on May 24, 1844,


is still best described in his own words:


It was at the foot of Mount Sinai, in the Convent of St Catherine, that


I discovered the pearl of all my researches. In visiting the monastery in


the month of May 1844, I perceived in the middle of the great hall a


large and wide basket full of old parchments; and the librarian who


was a man of information told me that two heaps of papers like these,


mouldered by time, had been already committed to the flames. What


was my surprise to find amid this heap of papers a considerable number


of sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek, which seemed to


me to be one of the most ancient that I had ever seen. The authorities


of the monastery allowed me to possess myself of a third of these parchments,


or about forty three sheets, all the more readily as they were


designated for the fire. But I could not get them to yield up possession


of the remainder. The too lively satisfaction which I had displayed had


aroused their suspicions as to the value of the manuscript. I transcribed


a page of the text of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and enjoined on the monks to


take religious care of all such remains which might fall their way.21


Tischendorf attempted to retrieve the rest of this precious manuscript


but could not persuade the monks to part with it. Some nine


years later he made a return trip and could find no trace of it. Then in


1859 he set out once again, now under the patronage of Czar Alexander


II of Russia, who had an interest in all things Christian, especially


Christian antiquity. This time Tischendorf found no trace of the


manuscript until the last day of his visit. Invited into the room of the


convent’s steward, he discussed with him the Septuagint (the Greek


The Quest for Origins 119


Old Testament), and the steward told him, “I too have read a Septuagint.”


He proceeded to pull from the corner of his room a volume


wrapped in a red cloth. Tischendorf continues:


I unrolled the cover, and discovered, to my great surprise, not only


those very fragments which, fifteen years before, I had taken out of the


basket, but also other parts of the Old Testament, the New Testament


complete, and in addition, the Epistle of Barnabas and a part of the


Pastor of Hermas. Full of joy, which this time I had the self-command


to conceal from the steward and the rest of the community, I asked, as


if in a careless way, for permission to take the manuscript into my


sleeping chamber to look over it more at leisure.22


Tischendorf immediately recognized the manuscript for what it


was—the earliest surviving witness to the text of the New Testament:


“the most precious Biblical treasure in existence—a document whose


age and importance exceeded that of all the manuscripts which I had


ever examined.” After complicated and prolonged negotiations, in


which Tischendorf not so subtly reminded the monks of his patron,


the Czar of Russia, who would be overwhelmed with the gift of such


a rare manuscript and would no doubt reciprocate by bestowing certain


financial benefactions on the monastery, Tischendorf eventually


was allowed to take the manuscript back to Leipzig, where at the expense


of the Czar he prepared a lavish four-volume edition of it that


appeared in 1862 on the one-thousandth anniversary of the founding


of the Russian empire.23


After the Russian revolution, the new government, needing money


and not being interested in manuscripts of the Bible, sold Codex


Sinaiticus to the British Museum for £100,000; it is now part of the


permanent collection of the British Library, prominently displayed in


the British Library’s manuscript room.


This was, of course, just one of Tischendorf’s many contributions


to the field of textual studies.24 Altogether he published twenty-two


editions of early Christian texts, along with eight separate editions of


120 Misquoting Jesus


the Greek New Testament, the eighth of which continues to this day


to be a treasure trove of information concerning the attestation of Greek


and versional evidence for this or that variant reading. His productivity


as a scholar can be gauged by the bibliographical essay written on


his behalf by a scholar named Caspar René Gregory: the list of Tischendorf’s


publications takes up eleven solid pages.25


Brooke Foss Westcott and


Fenton John Anthony Hort


More than anyone else from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,


it is to two Cambridge scholars, Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901)


and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828–1892), that modern textual critics


owe a debt of gratitude for developing methods of analysis that help


us deal with the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. Since


their famous work of 1881, The New Testament in the Original Greek,


these have been the names that all scholars have had to contend


with—in affirming their basic insights, or in tinkering with the details


of their claims, or in setting up alternative approaches in view of


Westcott and Hort’s well-defined and compelling system of analysis.


The strength of the analysis owes more than a little to the genius of


Hort in particular.


Westcott and Hort’s publication appeared in two volumes, one of


which was an actual edition of the New Testament based on their


twenty-eight years of joint labor in deciding which was the original


text wherever variations appeared in the tradition; the other was an


exposition of the critical principles they had followed in producing


their work. The latter was written by Hort and represents an inordinately


closely reasoned and compelling survey of the materials and


methods available to scholars wanting to undertake the tasks of textual


criticism. The writing is dense; not a word is wasted. The logic is


compelling; not an angle has been overlooked. This is a great book,


The Quest for Origins 121


which in many ways is the classic in the field. I do not allow my graduate


students to go through their studies without mastering it.


In some ways, the problems of the text of the New Testament absorbed


the interests of Westcott and Hort for most of their publishing


lives. Already as a twenty-three-year-old, Hort, who had been trained


in the classics and was not at first aware of the textual situation of the


New Testament, wrote in a letter to his friend John Ellerton:


I had no idea till the last few weeks of the importance of texts, having


read so little Greek Testament, and dragged on with the villainous


Textus Receptus. . . . So many alterations on good MS [manuscript]


authority made things clear not in a vulgar, notional way, but by giving


a deeper and fuller meaning. . . . Think of that vile Textus Receptus


leaning entirely on late MSS [manuscripts]; it is a blessing there


are such early ones.26


Only a couple of years later, Westcott and Hort had decided to edit


a new edition of the New Testament. In another letter to Ellerton on


April 19, 1853, Hort relates:


I have not seen anybody that I know except Westcott, whom . . . I visited


for a few hours. One result of our talk I may as well tell you. He


and I are going to edit a Greek text of the N.T. some two or three years


hence, if possible. Lachmann and Tischendorf will supply rich materials,


but not nearly enough. . . . Our object is to supply clergymen generally,


schools, etc., with a portable Greek Testament, which shall not


be disfigured with Byzantine [ i.e., medieval] corruptions.27


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:


122 Misquoting Jesus


The work has to be done, and never can be done satisfactorily . . .


without vast labour, a fact of which hardly anybody in Europe


except ourselves seems conscious. For a great mass of the readings,


if we separate them in thought from the rest, the labour is wholly disproportionate.


But believing it to be absolutely impossible to draw a


line between important and unimportant readings, I should hesitate


to say the entire labour is disproportionate to the worth of fixing the


entire text to the utmost extent now practicable. It would, I think,


be utterly unpardonable for us to give up our task.29


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


The Quest for Origins 123


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


124 Misquoting Jesus


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.