Monday BCS (Bible as Christian Scripture) 2.3

2.3 The New Testament Text
At the beginning of the chapter, we suggested that it seemed somehow fitting that Christians would read the New Testament in the textual form that it seems to have taken in the fourth and fifth centuries. This is the form of the text that became the basis for the Christian lectionary and the text as it was read for over a millennium in the church. In the East, this was the so called "Byzantine" text, the text of the Eastern Church.

In the West, the Vulgate served as the biblical text of the Roman Catholic Church until Vatican 2. Significantly, while its translator, Jerome, was aware of textual issues with the Latin text most in use, he largely retained it. Thus while he could find few Greek manuscripts with the so called "longer ending" of Mark (16:9-20), he reproduced it in the Vulgate. While the Vulgate textual has even more variation even than the Greek, it often includes key passages now recognized to be later additions.

The "received text" or textus receptus of the English Protestant tradition largely agrees with the Byzantine text, except at a few points, such as 1 John 5:7 where its compiler, Erasmus, was pressured to follow a reading of many Vulgate manuscripts. Not until the late twentieth century did the bulk of Christians begin to use a vernacular biblical text oriented around the more likely original reading of the New Testament.

The so called "majority text"--the reading of most surviving New Testament manuscripts--has the best claim to be the text used by the majority of Christians who have lived. To be sure, we do not have all the manuscripts that have disintegrated over the years. But it is a safe conclusion that the "majority text" represents the overwhelming majority of manuscripts from the 400's to the invention of the printing press.

We should be clear here. We would not dispute the conclusion of the overwhelming majority of textual scholars. The rules of textual criticism collected and systematically presented by B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort are completely appropriate for determining the most likely original reading of a text insofar as the idea of an "original manuscript" makes sense. Choose the reading as original that best explains how the other variants might have arisen. The more difficult reading (lectio difficilior) is more likely original. The shorter reading (lectio brevior) is more likely the original. The so called "Alexandrian" textual tradition represented by fourth century manuscripts Codex Sinaiticus (א) and Codex Vaticanus (B), now supplemented by even earlier papyrus manuscripts like p46 (ca. AD200, Paul's writings), seems a fairly reliable textual tradition.

It seems reasonably established that Mark 16:9-20 was not in the early text of Mark, nor was Acts 8:37 in that of Acts. Romans 16:25-27 is not likely original, nor is the woman caught in adultery pericope of John 7:53-8:11. It is unimaginable that 1 John 5:7 in its extended version was original. We are not questioning the science of textual criticism, only the paradigm that assumes the early text is obviously the more Christian text.

For example, Acts 8:37 gives the content of the Ethiopian eunuch's confession of faith before Philip, "And he [Philip] said to him, 'If you believe from your whole heart, it is allowed.' And he [the eunuch] answered and said, 'I believe Jesus Christ to be the Son of God.'" Is this verse Christian? Certainly. Is it more Christian than the text without it? In the sense that 8:37 demonstrates that the eunuch confessed Jesus as king--rather than simply going through a baptism--it arguably is a clearer embodiment of Christian faith and practice. Indeed, when the phrase "Son of God" is read in the light of later Christian belief, the Ethiopian eunuch comes to sound as if he believes Jesus to be the second person of the Trinity.

The text of Acts with the verse is thus a fuller embodiment of Christian faith and arguably a slightly better text of Christian Scripture than the earliest text of Acts. Was Acts 8:37 in the earliest text of Acts? It is not at all likely. We can understand why someone would add the verse but not why a Christian copyist would take it out. The text without it is the shorter reading and, from the standpoint of the developing church, the more problematic. Both Sinaiticus and Vaticanus omit the verse, as does a papyrus manuscript from the 200's (p45).

But we are not asking the question of what reading was most likely original. We are asking which text serves best as Christian Scripture. Would it not be the text that best embodies Christian faith and practice? Why would it not be the text that the majority of Christians have used throughout the ages? Why would it be a text particular to Acts' time of origin, when it directly addressed a more limited time and place, as its original meaning did?

We do not mean to suggest that the earliest text is of no interest to Christians at all. It too was a moment in the flow of revelation and a prime candidate for catalyzing the church always reforming. But it seems less significant than the text used by most Christians throughout the ages, a text that the church came to use in worship not least because it was cleaner and more orthodox than earlier forms.

We thus find greater harmony between the four gospels in the majority tradition than the earliest forms of the gospels. This harmony is not of interest because historical harmonization is important. Indeed, the idea of historical harmonization is absurd from the standpoint of reading the New Testament with the eyes of the church. But the gospel tradition gives a more unified story embodying its faith in the common textual tradition.

The case of 1 John 5:7 is of particular interest, since it stands on the outskirts of the issue at hand. Erasmus did not include the bulk of this verse in the first two printed editions of his Greek New Testament. It is not found in the main text of any Greek manuscript prior to the 1500's. Of the over 5,000 known Greek manuscripts, only eight have it. It does not appear in any Vulgate manuscripts before about 800. Its earliest mention is in the 300's in a Latin author.

This verse reads, "three witnessing in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one." Is this a Christian statement? Absolutely! Does it more fully embody Christian faith that the more likely original, "there are three who witness"? Yes, given that the three in the original are "the Spirit and the water and the blood" (5:8). Is the later variant original? Not a chance. It is preposterous to think for one minute that this most Trinitarian verse in the entire Bible, if it had existed, would never be mentioned in the Trinitarian debates of the 300's. It is not original.

But it is Christian. Should it be in Scripture? This is a much more difficult question. While the verse is considered officially a part of the Roman Catholic version of the Vulgate, no one would consider it original today. And it was never a part of the Byzantine text. We cannot safely say, therefore, whether it belongs to the majority tradition of the church or not. Christians who wish to include it surely may do so, but those who wish not may not.

So as we mentioned earlier, the precise text of the Christian canon is really secondary to the Christian meaning of that text. Legends abound of the care with which copyists made copies of biblical manuscripts, but these legends really apply only to the Jewish Masoretes of the medieval period. All the evidence suggests that the pre-Christian copiers and translators of the Old Testament--including the New Testament authors--felt free to adjust the wording of the original as they saw fit. The early period of New Testament copying also seems to have been a time in which some exercised significant freedom in copying.

When did the biblical text take on a more fixed quality in both Jewish and Christian circles? This would seem to be the period after Constantine, when Christianity became a legal religion and attention turned toward standardization of belief, practice, and indeed of text. The period when Christian orthodoxy was established went hand in hand with the period when a common text was more or less established. To be sure, variation continued. But the most notorious variations by that time had reached the form they would have for the next millennium. It is hard to see how this text is not the more Christian text vis-a-vis the earliest text in the same way that the Trinitarian affirmations of Nicaea and Chalcedon are not fuller Christian affirmations than any Christological statement we find in the New Testament.