Originals That
Matter
In this chapter we will examine the methods that scholars have devised
to identify the “original” form of the text (or at least the
“oldest attainable” form) and the form of the text that represents a
later scribal alteration. After laying out these methods, I will illustrate
how they can be used by focusing on three textual variants found in
our manuscript tradition of the New Testament. I have chosen these
three because each of them is critical for interpreting the book it is in;
what is more, none of these variant readings is reflected in most of our
modern English translations of the New Testament. That is to say, in
my judgment the translations available to most English readers are
based on the wrong text, and having the wrong text makes a real difference
for the interpretation of these books.
First, however, we should consider the methods scholars have developed
for making decisions about which textual readings are original
and which represent later changes made by scribes. As we will see,
establishing the earliest form of the text is not always a simple matter;
it can be a demanding exercise.
Modern Methods of Textual Criticism
The majority of textual critics today would call themselves rational
eclecticists when it comes to making decisions about the oldest form of
the text. This means that they “choose” (the root meaning of eclectic)
from among a variety of textual readings the one that best represents
the oldest form of the text, using a range of (rational) textual arguments.
These arguments are based on evidence that is usually classified
as either external or internal in nature.1
External Evidence
Arguments based on external evidence have to do with the surviving
manuscript support for one reading or another. Which manuscripts
attest the reading? Are those manuscripts reliable? Why are they reliable
or not reliable?
In thinking about the manuscripts supporting one textual variant
over another, one might be tempted simply to count noses, so to speak,
in order to see which variant reading is found in the most surviving
witnesses. Most scholars today, however, are not at all convinced that
the majority of manuscripts necessarily provide the best available text.
The reason for this is easy to explain by way of an illustration.
Suppose that after the original manuscript of a text was produced,
two copies were made of it, which we may call A and B. These two
copies, of course, will differ from each other in some ways—possibly
major and probably minor. Now suppose that A was copied by one
other scribe, but B was copied by fifty scribes. Then the original
manuscript, along with copies A and B, were lost, so that all that remains
in the textual tradition are the fifty-one second-generation
copies, one made from A and fifty made from B. If a reading found in
the fifty manuscripts (from B) differs from a reading found in the one
(from A), is the former necessarily more likely to be the original reading?
No, not at all—even though by counting noses, it is found in fifty
times as many witnesses. In fact, the ultimate difference in support for
that reading is not fifty manuscripts to one. It is a difference of one to
128 Misquoting Jesus
one (A against B). The mere question of numbers of manuscripts supporting
one reading over another, therefore, is not particularly germane
to the question of which reading in our surviving manuscripts
represents the original (or oldest) form of the text.2
Scholars are by and large convinced, therefore, that other considerations
are far more important in determining which reading is best
considered the oldest form of the text. One other consideration is the
age of the manuscripts that support a reading. It is far more likely that
the oldest form of the text will be found in the oldest surviving manuscripts—
on the premise that the text gets changed more frequently
with the passing of time. This is not to say that one can blindly follow
the oldest manuscripts in every instance, of course. This is for two reasons,
the one a matter of logic and the other a matter of history. In
terms of logic, suppose a manuscript of the fifth century has one reading,
but a manuscript of the eighth century has a different one. Is the
reading found in the fifth-century manuscript necessarily the older
form of the text? No, not necessarily. What if the fifth-century manuscript
had been produced from a copy of the fourth century, but the
eighth-century manuscript had been produced from one of the third
century? In that case, the eighth-century manuscript would preserve
the older reading.
The second, historical, reason that one cannot simply look at what
the oldest manuscript reads, with no other considerations, is that, as
we have seen, the earliest period of textual transmission was also the
least controlled. This is when nonprofessional scribes, for the most part,
were copying our texts—and making lots of mistakes in their copies.
And so, age does matter, but it cannot be an absolute criterion.
This is why most textual critics are rational eclecticists. They believe
that they have to look at a range of arguments for one reading or another,
not simply count the manuscripts or consider only the verifiably
oldest ones. Still, at the end of the day, if the majority of our earliest
manuscripts support one reading over another, surely that combination
of factors should be seen as carrying some weight in making a
textual decision.
Originals That Matter 129
Another feature of the external evidence is the geographical range
of manuscripts in support of one reading over another. Suppose a
reading is found in a number of manuscripts, but all these manuscripts
can be shown to have originated, say, in Rome, whereas a wide
range of other manuscripts from, say, Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor,
and Gaul all represent some other reading. In that case, the textual
critic might suspect that the one reading was a “local” variant (the
copies in Rome all having the same mistake) and that the other reading
is the one that is older and more likely to preserve the original
text.
Probably the most important external criterion that scholars follow
is this: for a reading to be considered “original,” it normally
should be found in the best manuscripts and the best groups of manuscripts.
This is a rather tricky assessment, but it works this way: some
manuscripts can be shown, on a variety of grounds, to be superior to
others. For example, whenever internal evidence (discussed below) is
virtually decisive for a reading, these manuscripts almost always have
that reading, whereas other manuscripts (usually, as it turns out, the
later manuscripts) have the alternative reading. The principle involved
here states that if some manuscripts are known to be superior
in readings when the oldest form is obvious, they are more likely to be
superior also in readings for which internal evidence is not as clear. In
a way, it is like having witnesses in a court of law or knowing friends
whose word you can trust. When you know that a person is prone to
lying, then you can never be sure that he or she is to be trusted; but if
you know that a person is completely reliable, then you can trust that
person even when he or she is telling you something you can’t otherwise
verify.
The same applies to groups of witnesses. We saw in chapter 4 that
Westcott and Hort developed Bengel’s idea that manuscripts could be
grouped into textual families. Some of these textual groupings, as it
turns out, are more to be trusted than others, in that they preserve the
oldest and best of our surviving witnesses and, when tested, are shown
130 Misquoting Jesus
to provide superior readings. In particular, most rational eclecticists
think that the so-called Alexandrian text (this includes Hort’s “Neutral”
text), originally associated with the careful copying practices of
the Christian scribes in Alexandria, Egypt, is the superior form of text
available, and in most cases provides us with the oldest or “original”
text, wherever there is variation. The “Byzantine” and “Western”
texts, on the other hand, are less likely to preserve the best readings,
when they are not also supported by Alexandrian manuscripts.
Internal Evidence
Textual critics who consider themselves rational eclecticists choose
from a range of readings based on a number of pieces of evidence. In
addition to the external evidence provided by the manuscripts, two
kinds of internal evidence are typically used. The first involves what
are called intrinsic probabilities—probabilities based on what the author
of the text was himself most likely to have written. We are able to
study, of course, the writing style, the vocabulary, and the theology of
an author. When two or more variant readings are preserved among
our manuscripts, and one of them uses words or stylistic features otherwise
not found in that author’s work, or if it represents a point of
view that is at variance with what the author otherwise embraces,
then it is unlikely that that is what the author wrote—especially if another
attested reading coincides perfectly well with the author’s writing
elsewhere.
The second kind of internal evidence is called transcriptional probability.
This asks, not which reading an author was likely to have
written, but which reading a scribe was likely to have created. Ultimately,
this kind of evidence goes back to Bengel’s idea that the “more
difficult” reading is more likely to be original. This is premised on the
idea that scribes are more likely to try to correct what they take to be
mistakes, to harmonize passages that they regard as contradictory,
and to bring the theology of a text more into line with their own theology.
Readings that might seem, on the surface, to contain a “mistake,”
Originals That Matter 131
or lack of harmony, or peculiar theology, are therefore more likely to
have been changed by a scribe than are “easier” readings. This criterion
is sometimes expressed as: The reading that best explains the existence
of the others is more likely to be original.3
I have been laying out the various external and internal forms of evidence
that textual critics consider, not because I expect everyone reading
these pages to master these principles and start applying them to
the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, but because it is important
to recognize that, when we try to decide what the original text
was, a range of considerations must be taken into account and a lot of
judgment calls have to be made. There are times when the various
pieces of evidence are at odds with one another, for example, when
the more difficult reading (transcriptional probabilities) is not well attested
in the early manuscripts (external evidence), or when the more
difficult reading does not coincide with the writing style of the author
otherwise (intrinsic probabilities).
In short, determining the original text is neither simple nor
straightforward! It requires a lot of thought and careful sifting of the
evidence, and different scholars invariably come to different conclusions—
not only about minor matters that have no bearing on the
meaning of a passage (such as the spelling of a word or a change of
word order in Greek that can’t even be replicated in English translation),
but also about matters of major importance, matters that affect
the interpretation of an entire book of the New Testament.
To illustrate the importance of some textual decisions, I turn now
to three textual variants of the latter sort, where the determination of
the original text has a significant bearing on how one understands the
message of some of the New Testament authors.4 As it turns out, in
each of these cases I think most English translators have chosen the
wrong reading and so present a translation not of the original text but
of the text that scribes created when they altered the original. The
first of these texts comes from Mark and has to do with Jesus’s becoming
angry when a poor leper pleads with him to be healed.
132 Misquoting Jesus
Mark and an Angry Jesus
The textual problem of Mark 1:41 occurs in the story of Jesus healing
a man with a skin disease.5 The surviving manuscripts preserve verse
41 in two different forms; both readings are shown here, in brackets.
39And he came preaching in their synagogues in all of Galilee and
casting out the demons. 40And a leper came to him beseeching him and
saying to him, “If you wish, you are able to cleanse me.” 41And [feeling
compassion (Greek: SPLANGNISTHEIS)/becoming angry
(Greek: ORGISTHEIS)], reaching out his hand, he touched him
and said, “I wish, be cleansed.” 42And immediately the leprosy went
out from him, and he was cleansed. 43And rebuking him severely, immediately
he cast him out; 44and said to him, “See that you say nothing
to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing
that which Moses commanded as a witness to them.” 45But when
he went out he began to preach many things and to spread the word, so
that he [ Jesus] was no longer able to enter publicly into a city.
Most English translations render the beginning of verse 41 so as to
emphasize Jesus’s love for this poor outcast leper: “feeling compassion”
(or the word could be translated “moved with pity”) for him. In doing
so, these translations are following the Greek text found in most of
our manuscripts. It is certainly easy to see why compassion might be
called for in the situation. We don’t know the precise nature of the
man’s disease—many commentators prefer to think of it as a scaly
skin disorder rather than the kind of rotting flesh that we commonly
associate with leprosy. In any event, he may well have fallen under the
injunctions of the Torah that forbade “lepers” of any sort to live normal
lives; they were to be isolated, cut off from the public, considered
unclean (Leviticus 13–14). Moved with pity for such a one, Jesus
reaches out a tender hand, touches his diseased flesh, and heals him.
The simple pathos and unproblematic emotion of the scene may
well account for translators and interpreters, as a rule, not considering
the alternative text found in some of our manuscripts. For the
Originals That Matter 133
wording of one of our oldest witnesses, called Codex Bezae, which is
supported by three Latin manuscripts, is at first puzzling and
wrenching. Here, rather than saying that Jesus felt compassion for the
man, the text indicates that he became angry. In Greek it is a difference
between the words SPLANGNISTHEIS and ORGISTHEIS.
Because of its attestation in both Greek and Latin witnesses, this other
reading is generally conceded by textual specialists to go back at least
to the second century. Is it possible, though, that this is what Mark
himself wrote?
As we have already seen, we are never completely safe in saying
that when the vast majority of manuscripts have one reading and only
a couple have another, the majority are right. Sometimes a few manuscripts
appear to be right even when all the others disagree. In part,
this is because the vast majority of our manuscripts were produced
hundreds and hundreds of years after the originals, and they themselves
were copied not from the originals but from other, much later
copies. Once a change made its way into the manuscript tradition, it
could be perpetuated until it became more commonly transmitted
than the original wording. In this case, both readings we are considering
appear to be very ancient. Which one is original?
If Christian readers today were given the choice between these
two readings, no doubt almost everyone would choose the one more
commonly attested in our manuscripts: Jesus felt pity for this man,
and so he healed him. The other reading is hard to figure out: what
would it mean to say that Jesus felt angry? Isn’t this in itself sufficient
ground for assuming that Mark must have written that Jesus felt
compassion?
On the contrary, the fact that one of the readings makes such good
sense and is easy to understand is precisely what makes some scholars
suspect that it is wrong. For, as we have seen, scribes also would have
preferred the text to be nonproblematic and simple to understand.
The question to be asked is this: which is more likely, that a scribe
copying this text would change it to say that Jesus became wrathful
instead of compassionate, or to say that Jesus became compassionate
134 Misquoting Jesus
instead of wrathful? Which reading better explains the existence of
the other? When seen from this perspective, the latter is obviously more
likely. The reading that indicates Jesus became angry is the “more difficult”
reading and therefore more likely to be “original.”
There is even better evidence than this speculative question of
which reading the scribes were more likely to invent. As it turns out,
we don’t have any Greek manuscripts of Mark that contain this passage
until the end of the fourth century, nearly three hundred years
after the book was produced. But we do have two authors who copied
this story within twenty years of its first production.
Scholars have long recognized that Mark was the first Gospel to be
written, and that both Matthew and Luke used Mark’s account as a
source for their own stories about Jesus.6 It is possible, then, to examine
Matthew and Luke to see how they changed Mark, wherever they
tell the same story but in a (more or less) different way. When we do
this, we find that Matthew and Luke have both taken over this story
from Mark, their common source. It is striking that Matthew and
Luke are almost word for word the same as Mark in the leper’s request
and in Jesus’s response in verses 40–41. Which word, then, do
they use to describe Jesus’s reaction? Does he become compassionate
or angry? Oddly enough, Matthew and Luke both omit the word altogether.
If the text of Mark available to Matthew and Luke had described
Jesus as feeling compassion, why would each of them have omitted
the word? Both Matthew and Luke describe Jesus as compassionate
elsewhere, and whenever Mark has a story in which Jesus’s compassion
is explicitly mentioned, one or the other of them retains this description
in his own account.7
What about the other option? What if both Matthew and Luke
read in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus became angry? Would they have been
inclined to eliminate that emotion? There are, in fact, other occasions
on which Jesus becomes angry in Mark. In each instance, Matthew
and Luke have modified the accounts. In Mark 3:5 Jesus looks around
“with anger” at those in the synagogue who are watching to see if he
Originals That Matter 135
will heal the man with the withered hand. Luke has the verse almost
the same as Mark, but he removes the reference to Jesus’s anger.
Matthew completely rewrites this section of the story and says nothing
of Jesus’s wrath. Similarly, in Mark 10:14 Jesus is aggravated at his
disciples (a different Greek word is used) for not allowing people to
bring their children to be blessed. Both Matthew and Luke have the
story, often verbally the same, but both delete the reference to Jesus’s
anger (Matt. 19:14; Luke 18:16).
In sum, Matthew and Luke have no qualms about describing
Jesus as compassionate, but they never describe him as angry. Whenever
one of their sources (Mark) did so, they both independently
rewrote the term out of their stories. Thus, whereas it is difficult to
understand why they would have removed “feeling compassion”
from the account of Jesus’s healing of the leper, it is altogether easy to
see why they might have wanted to remove “feeling anger.” Combined
with the circumstance that the latter term is attested in a very
ancient stream of our manuscript tradition and that scribes would
have been unlikely to create it out of the much more readily comprehensible
“feeling compassion,” it is becoming increasingly evident
that Mark, in fact, described Jesus as angry when approached by the
leper to be healed.
One other point must be emphasized before we move on. I have
indicated that whereas Matthew and Luke have difficulty ascribing
anger to Jesus, Mark has no problem doing so. Even in the story
under consideration, apart from the textual problem of verse 41, Jesus
does not treat this poor leper with kid gloves. After he heals him, he
“severely rebukes him” and “throws him out.” These are literal renderings
of the Greek words, which are usually softened in translation.
They are harsh terms, used elsewhere in Mark always in contexts of
violent conflict and aggression (e.g., when Jesus casts out demons). It
is difficult to see why Jesus would harshly upbraid this person and
cast him out if he feels compassion for him; but if he is angry, perhaps
it makes better sense.
At what, though, would Jesus be angry? This is where the rela-
136 Misquoting Jesus
tionship of text and interpretation becomes critical. Some scholars
who have preferred the text that indicates that Jesus “became angry”
in this passage have come up with highly improbable interpretations.
Their goal in doing so appears to be to exonerate the emotion by making
Jesus look compassionate even though they realize that the text
says he became angry.8 One commentator, for example, argues that
Jesus is angry with the state of the world that is full of disease; in other
words, he loves the sick but hates the sickness. There is no textual
basis for the interpretation, but it does have the virtue of making Jesus
look good. Another interpreter argues that Jesus is angry because this
leprous person had been alienated from society, overlooking the facts
that the text says nothing about the man being an outsider and that,
and even if it assumes he was, it would not have been the fault of
Jesus’s society but of the Law of God (specifically the book of Leviticus).
Another argues that, in fact, that is what Jesus was angry about,
that the Law of Moses forces this kind of alienation. This interpretation
ignores the fact that at the conclusion of the passage (v. 44) Jesus
affirms the Law of Moses and urges the former leper to observe it.
All these interpretations have in common the desire to exonerate
Jesus’s anger and the decision to bypass the text in order to do so.
Should we opt to do otherwise, what might we conclude? It seems to
me that there are two options, one that focuses on the immediate literary
context of the passage and the other, on its broader context.
First, in terms of the more immediate context, how is one struck
by the portrayal of Jesus in the opening part of Mark’s Gospel? Bracketing
for a moment our own preconceptions of who Jesus was and
simply reading this particular text, we have to admit that Jesus does
not come off as the meek-and-mild, soft-featured, good shepherd of
the stain-glassed window. Mark begins his Gospel by portraying Jesus
as a physically and charismatically powerful authority figure who is
not to be messed with. He is introduced by a wild-man prophet in the
wilderness; he is cast out from society to do battle in the wilderness
with Satan and the wild beasts; he returns to call for urgent repentance
in the face of the imminent coming of God’s judgment; he rips
Originals That Matter 137
his followers away from their families; he overwhelms his audiences
with his authority; he rebukes and overpowers demonic forces that
can completely subdue mere mortals; he refuses to accede to popular
demand, ignoring people who plead for an audience with him. The
only story in this opening chapter of Mark that hints at personal compassion
is the healing of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, sick in bed. But
even that compassionate interpretation may be open to question.
Some wry observers have noted that after Jesus dispels her fever, she
rises to serve them, presumably bringing them their evening meal.
Is it possible that Jesus is being portrayed in the opening scenes of
Mark’s Gospel as a powerful figure with a strong will and an agenda
of his own, a charismatic authority who doesn’t like to be disturbed?
It would certainly make sense of his response to the healed leper,
whom he harshly rebukes and then casts out.
There is another explanation, though. As I’ve indicated, Jesus
does get angry elsewhere in Mark’s Gospel. The next time it happens
is in chapter 3, which involves, strikingly, another healing story. Here
Jesus is explicitly said to be angry at Pharisees, who think that he has
no authority to heal the man with the crippled hand on the Sabbath.
In some ways, an even closer parallel comes in a story in which
Jesus’s anger is not explicitly mentioned but is nonetheless evident. In
Mark 9, when Jesus comes down from the Mount of Transfiguration
with Peter, James, and John, he finds a crowd around his disciples and
a desperate man in their midst. The man’s son is possessed by a
demon, and he explains the situation to Jesus and then appeals to him:
“If you are able, have pity on us and help us.” Jesus fires back an angry
response, “If you are able? Everything is possible to the one who believes.”
The man grows even more desperate and pleads, “I believe,
help my unbelief.” Jesus then casts out the demon.
What is striking in these stories is that Jesus’s evident anger erupts
when someone doubts his willingness, ability, or divine authority to
heal. Maybe this is what is involved in the story of the leper as well. As
in the story of Mark 9, someone approaches Jesus gingerly to ask: “If
you are willing you are able to heal me.” Jesus becomes angry. Of
138 Misquoting Jesus
course he’s willing, just as he is able and authorized. He heals the man
and, still somewhat miffed, rebukes him sharply and throws him out.
There’s a completely different feel to the story, given this way of
construing it, a construal based on the text as Mark appears to have
written it. Mark, in places, portrays an angry Jesus.9
Luke and an Imperturbable Jesus
Unlike Mark, the Gospel of Luke never explicitly states that Jesus becomes
angry. In fact, here Jesus never appears to become disturbed at
all, in any way. Rather than an angry Jesus, Luke portrays an imperturbable
Jesus. There is only one passage in this Gospel in which Jesus
appears to lose his composure. And that, interestingly enough, is in a
passage whose authenticity is hotly debated among textual scholars.10
The passage occurs in the context of Jesus’s prayer on the Mount of
Olives just before he is betrayed and arrested (Luke 22:39–46). After
enjoining his disciples to “pray, lest you enter into temptation,” Jesus
leaves them, bows to his knees, and prays, “Father, if it be your will,
remove this cup from me. Except not my will, but yours be done.” In a
large number of manuscripts the prayer is followed by the account,
found nowhere else among our Gospels, of Jesus’s heightened agony
and so-called bloody sweat: “And an angel from heaven appeared to
him, strengthening him. And being in agony he began to pray yet
more fervently, and his sweat became like drops of blood falling to the
ground” (vv. 43–44). The scene closes with Jesus rising from prayer
and returning to his disciples to find them asleep. He then repeats his
initial injunction for them to “pray, lest you enter into temptation.”
Immediately Judas arrives with the crowds, and Jesus is arrested.
One of the intriguing features of the debate about this passage is
the balance of arguments back and forth over whether the disputed
verses (vv. 43–44) were written by Luke or were instead inserted by a
later scribe. The manuscripts that are known to be earliest and that
are generally conceded to be the best (the “Alexandrian” text) do not,
Originals That Matter 139
as a rule, include the verses. So perhaps they are a later, scribal addition.
On the other hand, the verses are found in several other early
witnesses and are, on the whole, widely distributed throughout the
entire manuscript tradition. So were they added by scribes who wanted
them in or deleted by scribes who wanted them out? It is difficult to
say on the basis of the manuscripts themselves.
Some scholars have proposed that we consider other features of
the verses to help us decide. One scholar, for example, has claimed
that the vocabulary and style of the verses are very much like what is
found in Luke otherwise (this is an argument based on “intrinsic
probabilities”): for example, appearances of angels are common in
Luke, and several words and phrases found in the passage occur in
other places in Luke but nowhere else in the New Testament (such as
the verb for “strengthen”). The argument hasn’t proved convincing to
everyone, however, since most of these “characteristically Lukan”
ideas, constructions, and phrases are either formulated in uncharacteristically
Lukan ways (e.g., angels never appear elsewhere in Luke
without speaking) or are common in Jewish and Christian texts outside
the New Testament. Moreover, there is an inordinately high concentration
of unusual words and phrases in these verses: for example,
three of the key words (agony, sweat, and drops) occur nowhere else in
Luke, nor are they found in Acts (the second volume that the same
author wrote). At the end of the day, it’s difficult to decide about these
verses on the basis of their vocabulary and style.
Another argument scholars have used has to do with the literary
structure of the passage. In a nutshell, the passage appears to be deliberately
structured as what scholars have called a chiasmus. When a
passage is chiastically structured, the first statement of the passage
corresponds to the last one; the second statement corresponds to the
second to last; the third to the third to last, and so on. In other words,
this is an intentional design; its purpose is to focus attention on the
center of the passage as its key. And so here:
Jesus (a) tells his disciples to “pray lest you enter into temptation”
(v. 40). He then ( b) leaves them (v. 41a) and (c) kneels to pray (v. 41b).
140 Misquoting Jesus
The center of the passage is (d) Jesus’s prayer itself, a prayer bracketed
by his two requests that God’s will be done (v. 42). Jesus then ( c) rises
from prayer (v. 45a), (b) returns to his disciples (v. 45b), and (a) finding
them asleep, once again addresses them in the same words, telling
them to “pray lest you enter into temptation” (vv. 45c–46).
The mere presence of this clear literary structure is not really the
point. The point is how the chiasmus contributes to the meaning of
the passage. The story begins and ends with the injunction to the disciples
to pray so as to avoid entering into temptation. Prayer has long
been recognized as an important theme in the Gospel of Luke (more
so than in the other Gospels); here it comes into special prominence.
For at the very center of the passage is Jesus’s own prayer, a prayer
that expresses his desire, bracketed by his greater desire that the Father’s
will be done (vv. 41c–42). As the center of the chiastic structure,
this prayer supplies the passage’s point of focus and, correspondingly,
the key to its interpretation. This is a lesson on the importance of
prayer in the face of temptation. The disciples, despite Jesus’s repeated
request to them to pray, fall asleep instead. Immediately the
crowd comes to arrest Jesus. And what happens? The disciples, who
have failed to pray, do “enter into temptation”; they flee the scene,
leaving Jesus to face his fate alone. What about Jesus, the one who has
prayed before the coming of his trial? When the crowd arrives, he
calmly submits to his Father’s will, yielding himself up to the martyrdom
that has been prepared for him.
Luke’s Passion narrative, as has long been recognized, is a story of
Jesus’s martyrdom, a martyrdom that functions, as do many others, to
set an example to the faithful of how to remain firm in the face of death.
Luke’s martyrology shows that only prayer can prepare one to die.
What happens, though, when the disputed verses (vv. 43–44) are
injected into the passage? On the literary level, the chiasmus that focuses
the passage on Jesus’s prayer is absolutely destroyed. Now the
center of the passage, and hence its focus, shifts to Jesus’s agony, an
agony so terrible as to require a supernatural comforter for strength to
bear it. It is significant that in this longer version of the story, Jesus’s
Originals That Matter 141
prayer does not produce the calm assurance that he exudes throughout
the rest of the account; indeed, it is only after he prays “yet more
fervently” that his sweat takes on the appearance of great drops of
blood falling to the ground. My point is not simply that a nice literary
structure has been lost, but that the entire focus of attention shifts to
Jesus in deep and heartrending agony and in need of miraculous intervention.
This in itself may not seem like an insurmountable problem, until
one realizes that nowhere else in Luke’s Gospel is Jesus portrayed in
this way. Quite the contrary, Luke has gone to great lengths to counter
precisely the view of Jesus that these verses embrace. Rather than entering
his passion with fear and trembling, in anguish over his coming
fate, the Jesus of Luke goes to his death calm and in control, confident
of his Father’s will until the very end. It is a striking fact, of particular
relevance to our textual problem, that Luke could produce this image
of Jesus only by eliminating traditions that contradicted it from his
sources (e.g., the Gospel according to Mark). Only the longer text of
Luke 22:43–44 stands out as anomalous.
A simple comparison with Mark’s version of the story at hand is
instructive in this regard (understanding that Mark was Luke’s source—
which he changed to create his own distinctive emphases). For Luke
has completely omitted Mark’s statement that Jesus “began to be distressed
and agitated” (Mark 14:33), as well as Jesus’s own comment to
his disciples, “My soul is deeply troubled, even unto death” (Mark
14:34). Rather than falling to the ground in anguish (Mark 14:35),
Luke’s Jesus bows to his knees (Luke 22:41). In Luke, Jesus does not
ask that the hour might pass from him (cf. Mark 14:35); and rather
than praying three times for the cup to be removed (Mark 14:36, 39,
41), he asks only once (Luke 22:42), prefacing his prayer, only in Luke,
with the important condition, “If it be your will.” And so, while
Luke’s source, the Gospel of Mark, portrays Jesus in anguish as he
prays in the garden, Luke has completely remodeled the scene to
show Jesus at peace in the face of death. The only exception is the account
of Jesus’s “bloody sweat,” an account absent from our earliest
142 Misquoting Jesus
and best witnesses. Why would Luke have gone to such lengths to
eliminate Mark’s portrayal of an anguished Jesus if in fact Jesus’s anguish
were the point of his story?
It is clear that Luke does not share Mark’s understanding that
Jesus was in anguish, bordering on despair. Nowhere is this more evident
than in their subsequent accounts of Jesus’s crucifixion. Mark
portrays Jesus as silent on his path to Golgotha. His disciples have
fled; even the faithful women look on only “from a distance.” All those
present deride him—passers-by, Jewish leaders, and both robbers.
Mark’s Jesus has been beaten, mocked, deserted, and forsaken, not
just by his followers but finally by God himself. His only words in the
entire proceeding come at the very end, when he cries aloud, “Eloi,
Eloi, lema sabachthani” (My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?). He then utters a loud cry and dies.
This portrayal, again, stands in sharp contrast to what we find in
Luke. In Luke’s account, Jesus is far from silent, and when he speaks,
he shows that he is still in control, trustful of God his Father, confident
of his fate, concerned for the fate of others. En route to his crucifixion,
according to Luke, when Jesus sees a group of women bewailing
his misfortune, he tells them not to weep for him, but for themselves
and their children, because of the disaster that is soon to befall them
(23:27–31). While being nailed to the cross, rather than being silent, he
prays to God, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they
are doing” (23:34). On the cross, in the throes of his passion, Jesus engages
in an intelligent conversation with one of the robbers crucified
beside him, assuring him that they will be together that day in paradise
(23:43). Most telling of all, rather than uttering his pathetic cry of
dereliction at the end, Luke’s Jesus, in full confidence of his standing
before God, commends his soul to his loving Father: “Father, into
your hands I commend my spirit” (24:46).
It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of these changes
that Luke made in his source (Mark) for understanding our textual
problem. At no point in Luke’s Passion narrative does Jesus lose control;
never is he in deep and debilitating anguish over his fate. He is in
Originals That Matter 143
charge of his own destiny, knowing what he must do and what will
happen to him once he does it. This is a man who is at peace with himself
and tranquil in the face of death.
What, then, shall we say about our disputed verses? These are the
only verses in the entire Gospel of Luke that undermine this clear
portrayal. Only here does Jesus agonize over his coming fate; only
here does he appear out of control, unable to bear the burden of his
destiny. Why would Luke have totally eliminated all remnants of
Jesus’s agony elsewhere if he meant to emphasize it in yet stronger
terms here? Why remove compatible material from his source, both
before and after the verses in question? It appears that the account of
Jesus’s “bloody sweat,” not found in our earliest and best manuscripts,
is not original to Luke but is a scribal addition to the Gospel.11
Hebrews and a Forsaken Jesus
Luke’s portrayal of Jesus stands in contrast not only to that of Mark,
but also to that of other New Testament authors, including the unknown
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who appears to presuppose
knowledge of passion traditions in which Jesus was terrified in
the face of death and died with no divine succor or support, as can be
seen in the resolution of one of the most interesting textual problems
of the New Testament.12
The problem occurs in a context that describes the eventual subjugation
of all things to Jesus, the Son of Man. Again, I have placed in
brackets the textual variants in question.
For when [God] subjects to him all things, he leaves nothing that is
not subjected to him. But we do not yet see all things subjected to him.
But we do see Jesus, who, having been made for a little while lower
than the angels, was crowned with glory and honor on account of his
suffering of death, so that [ by the grace of God/apart from God] he
might taste death for everyone. (Heb. 2:8–9 )
144 Misquoting Jesus
Although almost all the surviving manuscripts state that Jesus
died for all people “by the grace of God” (CHARITI THEOU), a couple
of others state, instead, that he died “apart from God” (CH
–
ORIS
THEOU). There are good reasons for thinking that the latter, however,
was the original reading of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
I don’t need to go into the intricacies of the manuscript support for
the reading “apart from God” except to say that even though it occurs
in only two documents of the tenth century, one of these (Ms. 1739) is
known to have been produced from a copy that was at least as ancient
as our earliest manuscripts. Of yet greater interest, the early-thirdcentury
scholar Origen tells us that this was the reading of the majority
of manuscripts of his own day. Other evidence also suggests its
early popularity: it was found in manuscripts known to Ambrose and
Jerome in the Latin West, and it is quoted by a range of church writers
down to the eleventh century. And so, despite the fact that it is not
widely attested among our surviving manuscripts, the reading was at
one time supported by strong external evidence.
When one turns from external to internal evidence, there can be
no doubt concerning the superiority of this poorly attested variant.
We have already seen that scribes were far more likely to make a
reading that was hard to understand easier, rather than make an
easy reading harder. This variant provides a textbook case of the phenomenon.
Christians in the early centuries commonly regarded
Jesus’s death as the supreme manifestation of God’s grace. To say,
though, that Jesus died “apart from God” could be taken to mean any
number of things, most of them unpalatable. Since scribes must have
created one of these readings out of the other, there is little question
concerning which of the two is more likely the corruption.
But was the alteration deliberate? Advocates of the more commonly
attested text (“grace of God”) have naturally had to claim that the
change was not made on purpose (otherwise their favored text would
almost certainly be the modification). By virtue of necessity, then, they
have devised alternative scenarios to explain the accidental origin of
the more difficult reading. Most commonly, it is simply supposed that
Originals That Matter 145
because the words in question are similar in appearance (XARITI/
XWRIS), a scribe inadvertently mistook the word grace for the preposition
apart from.
This view, however, seems a shade unlikely. Is a negligent or absentminded
scribe likely to have changed his text by writing a word
used less frequently in the New Testament (“apart from”) or one used
more frequently (“grace,” four times as common)? Is he likely to have
created a phrase that occurs nowhere else in the New Testament
(“apart from God”) or one that occurs more than twenty times (“by
the grace of God”)? Is he likely to have produced a statement, even by
accident, that is bizarre and troubling or one that is familiar and easy?
Surely, it’s the latter: readers typically mistake unusual words for
common ones and simplify what is complex, especially when their
minds have partially strayed. Thus, even a theory of carelessness supports
the less-attested reading (“apart from God”) as original.
The most popular theory among those who think that the phrase
apart from God is not original is that the reading was created as a marginal
note: a scribe read in Heb. 2:8 that “all things” are to be subjected
to the lordship of Christ, and immediately thought of 1 Cor. 15:27:
“For all things will be subjected under his [Christ’s] feet.” But when
it says that “all things will be subjected,” it is clear that it means all
things except for the one who subjected them [ i.e., God himself is
not among the things subjected to Christ at the end].
According to this theory, the scribe copying Hebrews 2 wanted it
to be clear here as well that when the text indicates that everything
is to be subjected to Christ, this does not include God the Father. To
protect the text from misconstrual, the scribe then inserted an explanatory
note in the margin of Heb. 2:8 (as a kind of cross-reference
to 1 Cor. 15:27), pointing out that nothing is left unsubjected to Christ,
“except for God.” This note was subsequently transferred by a later,
inattentive, scribe into the text of the next verse, Heb. 2:9, where he
thought it belonged.
146 Misquoting Jesus
Despite the popularity of the solution, it is probably too clever by
half, and requires too many dubious steps to work. There is no manuscript
that attests both readings in the text (i.e., the correction in the
margin or text of verse 8, where it would belong, and the original text
of verse 9). Moreover, if a scribe thought that the note was a marginal
correction, why did he find it in the margin next to verse 8 rather than
verse 9? Finally, if the scribe who created the note had done so in reference
to 1 Corinthians, would he not have written “except for God”
(EKTOS THEOU—the phrase that actually occurs in the 1 Corinthians
passage) rather than “apart from God” (CH
–O
RIS THEOU—a
phrase not found in 1 Corinthians)?
In sum, it is extremely difficult to account for the phrase apart from
God if the phrase by the grace of God was the original reading of Heb.
2:9. At the same time, whereas a scribe could scarcely be expected to
have said that Christ died “apart from God,” there is every reason to
think that this is precisely what the author of Hebrews said. For this
less-attested reading is also more consistent with the theology of Hebrews
(“intrinsic probabilities”). Never in this entire Epistle does the
word grace (CHARIS) refer to Jesus’s death or to the benefits of salvation
that accrue as a result of it. Instead, it is consistently connected
with the gift of salvation that is yet to be bestowed upon the believer
by the goodness of God (see especially Heb. 4:16; also 10:29; 12:15;
13:25). To be sure, Christians historically have been more influenced
by other New Testament authors, notably Paul, who saw Jesus’s sacrifice
on the cross as the supreme manifestation of the grace of God. But
Hebrews does not use the term in this way, even though scribes who
thought that this author was Paul may not have realized that.
On the other hand, the statement that Jesus died “apart from
God”—enigmatic when taken in isolation—makes compelling sense
in its broader literary context in the book of Hebrews. Whereas this
author never refers to Jesus’s death as a manifestation of divine
“grace,” he repeatedly emphasizes that Jesus died a fully human, shameful
death, totally removed from the realm whence he came, the realm
Originals That Matter 147
of God; his sacrifice, as a result, was accepted as the perfect expiation
for sin. Moreover, God did not intervene in Jesus’s passion and did
nothing to minimize his pain. Thus, for example, Heb. 5:7 speaks of
Jesus, in the face of death, beseeching God with loud cries and tears.
In 12:2 he is said to endure the “shame” of his death, not because God
sustained him, but because he hoped for vindication. Throughout this
Epistle, Jesus is said to experience human pain and death, like other
human beings “in every respect.” His was not an agony attenuated by
special dispensation.
Yet more significant, this is a major theme of the immediate context
of Heb. 2:9, which emphasizes that Christ lowered himself below
the angels to share fully in blood and flesh, experience human sufferings,
and die a human death. To be sure, his death is known to bring
salvation, but the passage says not a word about God’s grace as manifest
in Christ’s work of atonement. It focuses instead on Christology,
on Christ’s condescension into the transitory realm of suffering and
death. It is as a full human being that Jesus experiences his passion,
apart from any succor that might have been his as an exalted being.
The work he began at his condescension he completes in his death, a
death that had to be “apart from God.”
How is it that the reading “apart from God,” which can scarcely
be explained as a scribal alteration, conforms to the linguistic preferences,
style, and theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews, while the alternative
reading “by the grace of God,” which would have caused
scribes no difficulties at all, stands at odds both with what Hebrews
says about the death of Christ and with the way it says it? Heb. 2:9 appears
originally to have said that Jesus died “apart from God,” forsaken,
much as he is portrayed in the Passion narrative of Mark’s Gospel.
Conclusion
In each of the three cases we have considered, there is an important
textual variant that plays a significant role in how the passage in ques-
148 Misquoting Jesus
tion is interpreted. It is obviously important to know whether Jesus
was said to feel compassion or anger in Mark 1:41; whether he was
calm and collected or in deep distress in Luke 22:43–44; and whether
he was said to die by God’s grace or “apart from God” in Heb. 2:9. We
could easily look at other passages as well, to get the sense of how important
it is to know the words of an author if we want to interpret his
message.
But there is far more to the textual tradition of the New Testament
than merely establishing what its authors actually wrote. There
is also the question of why these words came to be changed, and how
these changes affect the meanings of their writings. This question of
the modification of scripture in the early Christian church will be the
subject of the next two chapters, as I try to show how scribes who
were not altogether satisfied with what the New Testament books
said modified their words to make them more clearly support orthodox
Christianity and more vigorously oppose heretics, women, Jews,
and pagans.
Originals That Matter 149
