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.
