Text

The Letter and the Spirit

The evangelical scholar has no need to fear or to exclude the Holy Spirit when practicing textual criticism.

But when that one should come—the Spirit of Truth—he will guide you into all the truth. John 16:13

In the 19th and early 20th centuries most New Testament textual scholars freely acknowledged divine involvement when discussing not only the inspiration of the Greek New Testament but a divine providence that had preserved the biblical text throughout the centuries of manual transmission.¹

The Neglect of the Holy Spirit

More recently, however, such divine oversight has become a missing factor in the discipline of New Testament textual criticism: most current handbooks make no mention of God, inspiration, preservation, or the role of the Holy Spirit—even among works from professed evangelical believers. Metzger and most other contemporary textual critics make no mention in their textual studies of divine inspiration, the providential activity of God, or the role of the Holy Spirit in preserving the biblical text.

As David Parker notes, theological affirmation has become disconnected from the “science and art” of New Testament textual criticism: “Any theological a priori, which says this or that about the New Testament . . . is an arbitrary attempt to impose dogma on reality”²—even while theological handbooks freely discuss such matters.

Theological affirmation has become disconnected from the “science and art” of textual criticism.

Yet for the evangelical, John Skilton wrote in 1946 that “God’s Word has been preserved throughout the ages in an essentially and remarkably pure form”—a statement that parallels F. J. A. Hort’s comment in 1882 that “Variations are but secondary incidents of a fundamentally single and identical text.”³ Contemporary works nevertheless tend not to apply theological concepts directly to the matter of New Testament textual criticism, even if such tacitly undergird the text-critical field itself.

But why should any real separation necessarily exist between the respective concepts? Perhaps it is as James Borland suggests: “Young evangelical exegetes do not want to seem out of step with the assured results of modern textual criticism which accept questionable postulates.”⁴ One therefore has to wonder why there should be an apparent capitulation to a secular approach when endeavoring to determine the proper form and content of the New Testament text. In effect, a general “neutrality” tends to predominate among most contemporary textual critics, evangelical or otherwise.

Although theological misappropriations often appear in comments on New Testament textual criticism—particularly among the movements that effectively avoid scholarly interaction by restricting authenticity to a particular form of the text found in early printed Greek or English editions—this merely shows that the theological envelope must not be pushed too far. Even when the Holy Spirit is acknowledged in regard to textual preservation, the level of influence and the degree of precision that preservation entails remain matters for discussion. As even the former evangelical Bart Ehrman has noted, “The evidence must lead to the doctrine, not vice versa.”⁵

The Spirit’s Place

The simple recognition of what God has permitted to take place by the more natural means of transmission remains far superior to expecting or proclaiming a perpetual miracle throughout transmissional history. As F. H. A. Scrivener noted, “We may confidently pronounce beforehand, that such a fact could not have been reasonably anticipated, and is not at all agreeable to the general tenour of God’s dealings with us,” and that for Scripture we should “recognize the more fully its general integrity in the midst of partial variation.”⁶

While we should therefore recognize and grant guidance by “the Spirit of truth” in relation to “all the truth,” the fact remains that the precise wording of the New Testament text frequently diverges. Even in the quotation from John 16:13 cited at the head of this essay, the final clause of that segment (“he will guide you into all the truth”) has seven differing phrasings among the Greek manuscripts and two additional phrasings exclusive to the Old Latin and Vulgate, even while each variant provides an almost identical declaration. Combining the data from multiple editions, one finds the following among Greek and Old Latin/Vulgate manuscripts:⁷

ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν	E. G. H. K. Γ. Δ. Π. Ψ. 068. 0141. 0233. f¹³. 28 157. 180. 205. 597. 700. 892s. 1006. 1009. 1010. 1079. 1195. 1216. 1230. 1241. 1242. 1243. 1292. 1342. 1344. 1365. 1424. 1505. 1506. 1546. 1646. 2148. 2174. Byz. Lect. L-844. L-2211. f. q. r¹
ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς ἐν τῇ ἀληθείᾳ πάσῃ	ℵ¹. L. W. 1. 33. 565. 1071. 1582. al. b. [NA/UBS]
ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς εἰς τὴν ἀλήθειαν πᾶσαν	A. B. 054. pc. e. vg^st. Or
ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς ἐν τῇ ἀληθείᾳ	ℵ*
ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς ἐν τῇ ἀληθείᾳ πᾶσιν	579
ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς ἐν πάσῃ τῇ ἀληθείᾳ	Θ. ff²
ἐκεῖνος ὑμᾶς ὁδηγήσει ἐν τῇ ἀληθείᾳ πάσῃ	D. d
ἐκεῖνος ὑμᾶς ὁδηγήσει εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν	a
διηγήσεται ὑμῖν τὴν ἀληθείαν πᾶσαν	aur. c. (l). vg^{cl, ww}

Such a variety of reading in one short phrase informs us about both the role of the Holy Spirit in relation to textual preservation and the nature and task of New Testament textual criticism in general. Obviously, the preservational role of the Holy Spirit is neither absolute nor specifically miraculous, but occupies a passive and apparently minimalist role rather than an active or observable divine interference within the transmissional process.

Illustration by Peter Gurry. Images from Wikimedia Commons
Providence and Preservation
The different methods and modes of divine providence help us better understand God’s role in the Bible’s preservation.
Richard Brash

Avoiding Extremes

A proper evangelical position regarding the purpose and role of the Holy Spirit in relation to the providential preservation of the New Testament text therefore must stand firmly between two extremes:

At one extreme is an abandonment of scientific textual criticism, placing one’s trust instead in either questionable early printed editions that freeze and isolate the text in various “received” forms, or in the presumed text that underlies a particular (KJV) English translation.
At an opposing extreme is a capitulation to modern or postmodern secularism, emphasizing a prevailing doubt and uncertainty regarding the basic integrity and reliability of the text of Scripture, thus effectively excluding God and the Holy Spirit from any role whatever in relation to New Testament textual criticism.

By overemphasizing the role of the Holy Spirit, textual criticism as a discipline ceases to function for any actual purpose. By minimizing or eliminating his role, the text-critical field becomes indistinguishable from that underlying any other ancient work of antiquity. Either extreme creates a theological inconcinnity for the evangelical that fails to comport with acceptance of divine involvement in regard to the initial inspiration and preservation of the biblical text along with its establishment as canon so as to be an authoritative and God-breathed (θεόπνευστος) standard for church doctrine and practice.⁸

Giving Providence its Proper Place

A more excellent way should exist for the evangelical scholar that avoids both extremes: while divine inspiration by the Holy Spirit and the resultant, inerrancy, infallibility, and canonical status of the New Testament books should be affirmed, the evangelical scholar should also acknowledge the providential work of the Holy Spirit regarding the transmission and preservation of the text through human agency of various theological or even non-theological viewpoints. As David Dockery has noted: “At every point in the transmission, translation, preservation, and canonicity of the Bible we [evangelicals] see God’s providential hand at work.”⁹

At every point in the transmission, translation, preservation, and canonicity of the Bible we see God’s providential hand at work.

One therefore should accept theologically that the Holy Spirit continues to work in the background, with the ultimate goal of preserving his inspired and authoritative New Testament text in a form that guarantees its general reliability, even while various human scholars attempt to establish a more precise form of that text by eliminating, correcting, and repairing the errors and intentional variations that developed over the centuries.

As John H. Skilton pertinently stated long ago,

We must look for such grounds for the acceptance or rejection of variant readings as God has provided and seek to glorify him by arriving at the truth in the manner which he has made available to us . . . . We may receive benefits from the working of the Holy Spirit in us, but we ought not to expect that the necessity for consecrated scientific investigation will be removed.¹⁰

Ultimately, the role of the Holy Spirit in New Testament textual criticism remains that promised in John 16:13—the Spirit is there to “lead” and “guide” (ὁδήγειν) the evangelical believer in a manner consistent with the Spirit’s guidance and leadership in all other areas of Christian faith and practice.¹¹ Such involvement by the Holy Spirit permeates and undergirds the labors of the evangelical Christian scholar, even when the various text-critical theories and practices might appear identical to those of various non-evangelical or even non-Christian scholars. As Skilton further explains,

The conservative scholar, [with his] . . . . reverence for the Scripture and his labors on the text will be used by God in the preservation and transmission of his Word . . . . In God’s providence men may glorify him by textual studies and may aid in the preservation of his Word in a form of exceptional purity.¹²

The evangelical scholar thus should seek wisdom from the Holy Spirit while making judgments on textual variants based on the available external and internal data. The evangelical thereby honors the Holy Spirit who not only has inspired the Holy Scriptures, but continues to guide the textual researcher “into all truth.”¹³

Evidence of Providence

Given that the Greek New Testament tends to maintain an approximately 94% identity of reading among all editions, regardless of theory, text-type, or favored manuscripts, such a strong textual base should cause the evangelical scholar seriously to consider the role of the Holy Spirit in regard to the establishment and preservation of his inspired text. Even among the circa 6% of variation that remains, the evangelical can affirm a general Spirit-based oversight, given that most variant readings either do not affect the meaning and interpretation of the text, or are readily resolved by reasonable principles of evaluation.

As Greg Bahnsen suggests, “By His providential control God . . . . provides for the essential accuracy of the Bible’s copying.”¹⁴ Such “providential control” requires no direct or miraculous intervention, but only capacities granted to well-prepared human agents, who themselves (knowingly or unknowingly) labor under the providential care and generally invisible influence of the Holy Spirit himself.

In particular, the primary establishment of the text does not depend upon one’s view of inerrancy or providential preservation, nor should text-critical decisions reflect an a priori choice on the basis of theological considerations that merely attempt to sidestep difficult interpretative problems. The actual data and legitimate text-critical principles cannot be bypassed or nullified for particular theological or pro-inerrantist gain, but remain applicable to the determination of the most likely New Testament autograph reading at any point. As the present writer noted on the ETC blog, inerrancy is not the “overriding master for establishing the text, but rather a hermeneutical servant when dealing with the interpretation of the text as previously established.”

Inerrancy is not the overriding master for establishing the text, but rather a hermeneutical servant.

Such a scenario for the evangelical merely recognizes the Bible and the New Testament in particular as primarily theological works that were canonically recognized as authoritative and intended for the doctrinal and practical instruction and guidance of those who have comprised God’s Church through the centuries. It is therefore quite reasonable that evangelicals should reflect upon the providential role of the Holy Spirit as they evaluate the existing manuscript, versional, and patristic data while endeavoring to establish the NT text in its most accurate form. For the evangelical, the benevolent providential guidance of the Holy Spirit in New Testament text-critical research overshadows the establishment of the NT text, in a manner not requiring direct miraculous intervention.

Cautions

Even so, a few cautions remain for the evangelical textual critic. These include the following:

An avoidance of dogmatic assertions that particular debatable readings must be precisely those that God has inspired.
Not granting an unnecessary capitulation to various subjective elements, whether evangelical or otherwise;

The evangelical scholar should cautiously oppose such potentially attractive alternatives and thereby avoid text-critical doublethink when dealing with textual alteration. Theology should derive from the text as established; one cannot simply shape the text to fit one’s theological presuppositions. Although theology remains a factor when interpreting the data within a particular presuppositional framework, if a person’s theological views distort an honorable and fair assessment of the evidence, the results will have been forced to fit the theology, regardless of data to the contrary. As Dan Wallace’s former student, Bill Brown, has observed: “Nothing ruins consistent textual criticism like a theological a priori.”

Since no textual critic—evangelical or otherwise—possesses the Urim and Thummim so as to make an absolute determination in regard to a plethora of variant units, the evangelical scholar should consider the resolution of textual variation as a matter based on constant prayer, having a confidence that the Holy Spirit will continue his underlying providential guidance, leading the believing textual critic to a goal transcending what might be weighed under various secular methodological approaches. As Brittany Melton pertinently stated in an Old Testament context: “Divine providential guidance can be perceived only in retrospect.”¹⁵

Conclusion

The evangelical practitioner of New Testament textual criticism has no need either to fear or exclude the Holy Spirit.

The evangelical practitioner of New Testament textual criticism has no need either to fear or exclude the Holy Spirit when engaging in the practice of the discipline.¹⁶ Although one should avoid the “theological argument” approach when attempting to establish the New Testament text, at the same time one must not abandon the evangelical theological perspective. The evangelical textual critic can thus affirm in one domain with David Sorenson that

God in his providence has allowed the preservation of his inspired words by human means in a manner such that the text thereby preserved remains wholly sufficient and authoritative regarding all matters necessary for salvation, doctrine, instruction, reproof, application, and a prophetic perspective, along with commands requisite for conduct and morality as such relates to his Church, comprised of those believing in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.¹⁷

And equally, though coming from a different perspective, the evangelical textual critic can affirm with Kenneth W. Clark:

The Bible is for us the word of God, our chief guide for the salvation of humanity . . . . We who are Christians perceive in it, above all other writings, man’s only hope of life. It is with this book that the textual critic deals. This is the book whose true text he seeks, and whose transmission from generation to generation he studies to understand.¹⁸

And so may it be.

The text of manuscript 579 reads πᾶσιν not πάσῃ at John 16:13. An earlier version of this article mistakenly listed it with both.

Notes

1
This article was originally presented in fuller form at the ETS 70th Annual Meeting, November 15–17, 2018 in Denver, Colorado.
2
D. C. Parker, “Textual Criticism and Theology,” ExT 118 (2007): 588.
3
John H. Skilton, “The Transmission of the Scriptures,” in Ned B. Stonehouse and Paul Wooley, eds., The Infallible Word: A Symposium by the Members of the Faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1967), 164; B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, The New Testament in the Original Greek, vol. 2: Introduction and Appendix (London: Macmillan, 1882), 564–565.
4
James A. Borland, “The Preservation of the New Testament Text: A Common-Sense Approach,” The Master’s Seminary Journal 10 (1999): 48.
5
Bart D. Ehrman, “New Testament Textual Criticism: Quest for Methodology” (MDiv Thesis, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1981), 48.
6
F. H. A. Scrivener, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament, 2 vols.; 4th ed. rev. by Edward Miller (London: George Bell and Sons, 1894), 1:2–3, 7.
7
Data is taken from SQE¹⁵, UBS^3–5 and NA^26–28. UBS^4–5 erroneously cites Θ for two different readings (the error not reproduced here).
8
As Michael Kruger has observed, “If God intended his people to have his Word, then it is reasonable to think that he providentially oversaw the entire process so that his Word was faithfully delivered.” Michael J. Kruger, “Do We Have a Trustworthy Text? Inerrancy and Canonicity, Preservation, and Textual Criticism,” in John MacArthur, ed., The Inerrant Word: Biblical, Historical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspectives (Wheaton: Crossway, 2016), 315.
9
David S. Dockery, The Doctrine of the Bible (Nashville: Convention Press, 1991), 100; emphasis added.
10
Skilton, “Transmission,” 170–171.
11
As J. L. Dagg noted, “We are able, in every case, to determine the correct reading, so far as is necessary for the establishment of our faith, or the direction of our practice in every important particular.” J. L. Dagg, A Manual of Theology (Harrisonburg VA: Gano, 1982 rep. ed. [1857]), 24–25.
12
Skilton, “Transmission,” 169, 194–195.
13
As Merrill Parvis noted: “The New Testament is the Church’s Book . . . . In the last analysis it is the tradition of the Church and not the vagaries of our own scholarship which must determine the contents of that Book.” Merrill M. Parvis, “The Goals of New Testament Textual Studies,” Studia Evangelica VI (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1973), 403.
14
Greg L. Bahnsen, “The Inerrancy of the Autographa,” in Norman Geisler, ed., Inerrancy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979), n.p. (electronic edition).
15
Brittany N, Melton, Where is God in the Megilloth? A Dialogue on the Ambiguity of Divine Presence and Absence, Oudtestamentische Studiën/Old Testament Studies 73 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 146.
16
Cf. Daniel B. Wallace and M. James Sawyer, eds., Who’s Afraid of the Holy Spirit? An Investigation into the Ministry of the Spirit of God Today (Dallas: Biblical Studies Press, 2005).
17
David H. Sorenson, Touch Not the Unclean Thing: The Text Issue and Separation (Duluth: Northstar Baptist Ministries, 2001). Note that Sorenson stands clearly within the TR/KJV-only camp.
18
Kenneth W. Clark, “The Manuscripts of the Greek New Testament,” in Merrill M. Parvis and Allen P. Wikgren, eds., New Testament Manuscript Studies: The Materials and the Making of a Critical Apparatus (Chicago: University Press, 1950), 1. Clark notably represents a far more liberal theological perspective.

Appreciating the Diverse Evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls

Taking the evidence of the Dead Sea Scroll seriously means putting the differences—and the similarities—in proper context.

Anthony Ferguson

The Dead Sea Scrolls have fascinated a broad audience of Bible scholars, lay Christians, and the general public for nearly a century. This discovery’s timing adds a level of intrigue since they were discovered in the tremulous days immediately after World War II in a place undergoing great transition. The recent announcement of Greek fragments of the Minor Prophets from Naḥal Ḥever and the thought that technology such as drones may yet yield more manuscripts further stokes our imagination and excitement about these caves in the Judean Desert. Few discoveries from the ancient world have captivated our imagination like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of these manuscripts, especially for those interested in the history of Old Testament text, not simply because of the timing and place of the discovery or because the future may still unlock more manuscripts for us, but because of four important characteristics of these manuscripts: 1) These manuscripts are the oldest biblical manuscripts we possess; 2) many of the biblical manuscripts were written in the Old Testament’s original languages; 3) many of these manuscripts align closely with the canonical Jewish text known as the Masoretic Text or MT, and 4) many others do not. Focusing on these four characteristics helps us better appreciate how important they are for the history of the Old Testament text.

The Age of the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest biblical manuscripts that we possess, dating from 250 BC to 115 AD.¹ Before this discovery, we possessed some Hebrew texts from this era and some from even earlier, but these were not biblical scrolls. We did possess numerous biblical manuscripts, but these dated to a much later time. The biblical manuscripts from Qumran have changed this reality. We now possess over two hundred biblical manuscripts from the Second Temple period (c. 500 BC–70 AD). The age of these manuscripts makes them especially important.

The Language of the Scrolls

Although some of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls are translations, the vast majority are written in Hebrew and Aramaic, the Old Testament’s original languages. When scholars approach the ancient translations like the Greek translation, popularly referred to as the Septuagint, the Targumim, the Old Latin and Vulgate, and Peshitta, scholars have to judge carefully about whether a difference between these texts is a genuine variant. That is, scholars first have to decide if this difference arose from the translator (i.e., translation technique or scribal error) or the difference was in the text he was translating. What makes the Dead Sea Scrolls so important is that translation technique is not an issue for most of them because they are not translations.

The value of this fact, however, can be overstated. These manuscripts have not passed into a new language, but many were still copied according to updated standards of spelling and grammar. Thus, some of the tendencies involved in translation technique must be accounted for when analyzing these manuscripts. Of course, the fact that these were mainly written in the original languages means fewer such factors need to be considered.

What the Scrolls tell us about the history of the Old Testament text

Many scholars and apologists have highlighted those Scrolls that preserve a high level of unity with the Masoretic Text which is largely behind our English bibles. The codex known as Codex Leningrad is the best-preserved manuscript preserving this textual tradition. This fact comes into focus, especially when one analyzes the manuscripts discovered in sites other than Qumran.

Qumran is only one site in the Judean Desert where Bedouin and scholars discovered manuscripts. Other locations include Masada, Wadi Murabba’at, Wadi Sdeir, Naḥal Ḥever, Naḥal Arugot, and Naḥal Ṣe’elim (wadi and naḥal both refer to streams). The manuscripts from these sites date from 50 BC to 115 AD and preserve the same tradition as preserved in codex Leningrad which was copied in 1008 AD. Unity among these manuscripts is, at times, remarkable, as illustrated by a Leviticus manuscript discovered at Masada dating from 30 BC to 30 AD. This Leviticus manuscript agrees with codex Leningrad even regarding peculiar spelling. This unity illustrates that this tradition was copied with precision since at least the turn of the era.²

Nearly half of the manuscripts discovered at Qumran also demonstrate this unity, although not to the degree as the manuscripts from the other sites. For example, 1QIsa^a has traditionally been cited as clear evidence of proof of the antiquity and high-quality of the Masoretic tradition, and this notion is correct. Yet, this manuscript preserves thousands of differences when compared to Leningrad, and these differences led Emanuel Tov, the world’s preeminent Scrolls scholar, to label it as “non-aligned,” meaning it does not agree closely with the text of the MT.

A portion of the Great Isaiah Scroll — A portion of the Great Isaiah scroll (1QIsa^a). Image credit.

We should note that the majority of these differences are minor; they often concern a different spelling practice.³ Of course, that is not to say there are not important variants preserved in this manuscript; instead, my point is that, overall, it preserves a text close to the one preserved in Leningrad. Another Isaiah scroll discovered at Qumran, known as 1QIsa^b, preserves an even higher degree of unity with Leningrad than 1QIsa^a. This manuscript, however, is less popular because it preserves less content.

To give us a bird’s eye view of the evidence from Qumran, we can observe how Emanuel Tov classifies these texts: he classifies 56 as MT-like, 57 as non-aligned, five as close to the Samaritan Pentateuch, and seven as close to the Septuagint.⁴

Overall, the Dead Sea Scrolls show that the Masoretic Text has been copied with precision for over a millennium and that a sizable amount of manuscripts reflect this text.

Overall, the Dead Sea Scrolls show that the Masoretic Text has been copied with precision for over a millennium.

The Scrolls that don’t agree with the Masoretic Text

Tov, and many other scholars, have pointed out that half of the Hebrew manuscripts discovered at Qumran preserve textual diversity never before seen in Hebrew biblical manuscripts. This is true, strictly speaking. However, when one analyzes the nature of the variants preserved in these manuscripts, one can see that most of these differences result from common scribal tendencies such as interpretation, harmonization, updating, and normalizing a text’s grammar.

Moreover, many of these manuscripts can be adequately described as scribal innovations. For example, 4QGen^k, in my opinion, tends to normalize the grammar found in the Masoretic Text, and thus, can be understood as a normalized manuscript; 4QPs^x is likely a writing exercise; 4QDeutⁿ is an excerpted text; and 4QQoh^a is an updated text. Therefore, although half of the manuscripts preserve a level of textual diversity, this diversity is often minor.

Some manuscripts that Tov and others label as non-aligned are more challenging to explain. Tov identifies seven of these manuscripts with an exclamation mark in appendix 8 of his book Scribal Practices. Remember that Tov classifies 56 Scrolls as MT-like, 57 as non-aligned, five as close to the Samaritan Pentateuch, and seven as close to the Septuagint.⁵

However, only seven of these 57 manuscripts are identified with an exclamation mark. This confirms, in my mind, that the other 50 non-aligned texts are non-aligned only in minor details.⁶ Space prohibits a description of these manuscripts, but suffice it to say that the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls do contain a level of textual diversity. Most of this diversity, though, is relatively minor, and, although some of it is more extensive, none of it calls into question the trustworthiness of the Old Testament as God’s word.

Illustration by Peter Gurry. Image from 123rf.com
Two Reasons There Are Variants in Our Copies of the Bible
For historical and theological reasons, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Bible’s manuscripts have differences.
Peter J. Gurry

Making sense of all the evidence

Scholars have long understood scribes as approaching their task of copying the Old Testament from two general perspectives: some scribes came to their text with a desire to reproduce it precisely, while others approached their task with the desire to resignify it. Moreover, some scribes took their biblical text and used it to make a new document that was not understood as biblical. An example of this would be a liturgical text. This new document was not understood as “biblical” but contained only an excerpt of the Bible.

We make these types of changes today. For example, some translations are incredibly literal, while others tend to be more dynamic. Both approaches seek to communicate the word of God to a people far removed from the original audience. Similarly, when the Bible is used in liturgical contexts, we make all types of changes to it.

I am the pastor of a local church. When I stand before God’s people with God’s word, it is not uncommon for me to change it. For example, I might stop mid-verse and explain something briefly to the church; I might repeat a word for emphasis; I might even substitute a word for clarity. An example of this last category may be me replacing a pronoun, like “he,” with the proper noun, “Moses.” In my mind, the textual diversity preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls parallels the practices of many pastors.

We should certainly take the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls seriously while being confident that the word of the Lord is trustworthy and true.

Notes

1
See TCHB³, 99.
2
See TCHB³, 29–31.
3
Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Qumran, Septuagint: Collected Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 303).
4
N. David and A. Lange, eds., Qumran and the Bible: Studying the Jewish and Christian Scriptures in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 49–50).
5
N. David and A. Lange, eds., Qumran and the Bible: Studying the Jewish and Christian Scriptures in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 49–50).
6
For more on this topic, you can see my doctoral dissertation.

Two Reasons There Are Variants in Our Copies of the Bible

For historical and theological reasons, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Bible’s manuscripts have differences.

Peter J. Gurry

To err is human; to forgive, divine” is surely the most famous line of the English poet Alexander Pope. Written when he was only 23, the first line presents a truism that explains why our English Bibles have notes about differences in our copies of the Bible.

We can take an example from the venerable King James Bible. At James 2:18, the text says, “shew me thy faith without thy works” but the margin records that “some copies read, by thy works.”¹ These same types of textual notes were found before the King James and, of course, they have been used by all major translations since.

But why do we have variants at all? There are essentially two answers to this question. The first answer is historical and tends to be one that Bible translators need to think the most about. The second is theological and tends to be one that regular Bible readers are most interested in.

Historical

The historical reason for variants goes back to Pope’s quote. Humans make mistakes. And, until the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, all copies of the Bible had to be made by human hands.

Copying by hand is hard. It takes not just hand-eye coordination but something more like hand-eye-mind-finger-pen-ink-and-parchment coordination. And the Bible is a BIG book. In the original languages, it consists of about 300,000 words in the Old Testament and 140,000 in the New Testament. New Testament scribes were sometimes paid by the line and one early copy of Paul’s letters required 1,000 lines just for Romans. With so much to copy, it’s no wonder scribes made mistakes.

We might be tempted to think that the printing press eliminated human error in Bible production. But it didn’t. The “Wicked Bible,” for example, is a printing of the King James Bible from 1631 where a typesetter’s error changed the sixth commandment to “thou shalt commit adultery.” (The result did not go over well with the powers-that-be.) The arrival of the printing press did mean, however, that, for the first time, you could have hundreds of copies that all preserved the same mistakes at exactly the same place on the page. In this way, mistakes were easier to contain.

Two things are important to know about the mistakes that scribes made. The first is that the majority were accidental—a slip of the pen, a confusion of letters, an accidental omission—things like that. Not all were, of course. Some differences show clear signs of deliberation. Certainly, in the case of larger differences like the longer ending of Mark or the additions to the book of Esther, we are dealing with something much different than a slip of the pen. But many mistakes are ordinary and easy enough to find and fix.

The second thing to know is that the copying of the Bible was not a long process of introducing more and more errors so that by the end we couldn’t hope to get back to the original. In other words, it was not like the telephone game we played as kids. The reason is that scribes not only made mistakes, they also corrected them. They knew firsthand that copying was hard, and they could check their own work and even the work of their predecessors. This is why some of our most important Bible manuscripts—especially on the New Testament side of things—often have corrections.

Near the start of Romans 4, the original scribe of Codex Vaticanus (4th c.) accidentally wrote verses 4b–5a twice because of the repetition of words. A later scribe caught the problem and fixed it by not re-inking the duplicated text. (Image: Vat.gr.1209, f. 1448)

They didn’t always get it right, of course. Sometimes a scribe’s “fix” made the problem worse. One scribe using Codex Vaticanus certainly thought so. The exasperated note he left at Hebrews 1:3 reads, “You untrained and unskilled man—leave the old reading, don’t change it!”² But, overall, scribes worked hard to do a faithful job with the task at hand—even if they didn’t always succeed.

So, the first reason we have differences in our manuscripts is because copying by hand is hard.

Theological

This historical answer is simple enough. It’s also true of all works published before the printing press, not just the Bible. But Christians often wonder if the Bible shouldn’t be different. After all, if God violated Alexander Pope’s famous principle with the Bible’s authors (so they didn’t err) why didn’t he do it with the scribes who copied them (so that they too didn’t err)?

The answer can’t be because he wasn’t able to. Surely God could have if he had wanted to. (Although we should admit that keeping thousands of copyists from error over thousands of years would be an even more impressive miracle than keeping the authors from them.)

The simple answer is that we have errors in our manuscripts because God never promised to keep them out. The Bible teaches that its authors were inspired (e.g., 2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:21); it nowhere teaches that scribes who copied them were. This is actually right in line with God’s normal way of working. He usually seems to follow up his extraordinary acts (what we call miracles) with his ordinary ones (what we call providence).

Take the feeding of the 5,000. Jesus miraculously feeds thousands of people from just five loaves and a few fish. That’s extraordinary. But we can be confident that the way that this miraculous food was ingested and then digested was anything but miraculous. Likewise, Mary’s conception of Jesus was certainly extraordinary; her actual pregnancy and delivery of the baby were presumably ordinary. In the same way, we shouldn’t be surprised that God’s extraordinary work of inspiring the Scriptures was followed by the ordinary process of copying it—variants and all.³

What about when Jesus says, in Matthew 5:18, that “not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished”? Isn’t that a promise that the text would be perfectly preserved even down to the letterstroke? From the context, the answer is clearly no. We know the metaphor is about Scripture’s full authority and not about copying because the next thing he says is a rebuke, not to scribes, but to anyone who “relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same” (Matt. 5:19; cf. Luke 16:17). The authority of Scripture is certainly one reason why Christians care about differences in the manuscripts, but that doesn’t mean the differences invalidate Scripture’s authority.

The authority of Scripture is certainly one reason why Christians care about differences in the manuscripts, but that doesn’t mean the differences invalidate Scripture’s authority.

One reason they don’t is because, despite our use of the term “error” when talking about scribes, we should not confuse scribal error with theological error. It is rare that scribal error results in something approaching a theological error. In James 2:18, for example, the difference in the KJV text and the KJV margin affects how James makes his point about faith and works but it doesn’t change his point that faith without works is dead. As Christians, we certainly care about Scripture even in the details, but we would be wrong to conclude that because there are variants in some details, the Scriptures have no authority as a result.

In fact, because scribes did such a faithful job overall; because they left us so many manuscripts; and because we have careful principles for identifying scribal mistakes, our confidence in the text as we have it is remarkably high. That’s why the differences in modern English translations are far more often due to differences in translation philosophy than they are to textual differences. Many important variants can be found in the notes of our modern Bibles—just like they were in the King James Bible.

Conclusion

In the end, we have two reasons why there are differences in the manuscripts of the Bible, one historical and one theological. The historical reason is the same as for all other ancient literature: copying by hand is hard and scribes made mistakes. The theological reason is because God never promised to keep scribes completely free from error. We should not commit God to promises he never made.

In the end, we can be extremely thankful for the countless unnamed scribes who did their work—not always perfectly—but, overall, faithfully. We can also be thankful for God’s ordinary providence at work in their copying so that we can have confidence in God’s enduring word.

Notes

1
Thanks to the discovery and study of older manuscripts than were available in 1611, most translations today print “without works” with enough confidence not to give a note. For more textual notes in the KJV, see here.
2
ἀμαθέστατε καὶ κακέ, ἂφες τὸν παλαιόν, μὴ μεταποίει. The note is found on folio 1512.
3
This point comes from C.S. Lewis who writes, “Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.” Miracles (New York: HarperCollins, 1974), 95; emphasis added.

The Bible Jesus Read

The Bible of Jesus’ day was not too different from the list of English translations available on your phone’s Bible app.

John D. Meade

Have you ever wondered if the Bible you take down from your shelf, or pull up on BibleGateway.com, is the same as the Scriptures Jesus would have read? We tend to think of what Christians term the Old Testament as the Bible of the Jewish people, but are the 39 books of today’s Protestant Old Testament synonymous with what Jesus would have considered Scripture?

And what would Jesus’ Bible-reading experience have been like? We’re used to having a wide choice of English Bible translations, so if we want to explore multiple interpretations of a given passage there are plenty of different editions to compare. What different versions of Scripture would have been available for Jesus to read?

Looking at the first-century evidence, a mixed picture emerges. Jesus’ “Bible” (if we can call it that) may not have had an absolutely fixed list of books in the way that a modern English Bible does. However, the concept of multiple translations was already in evidence by the time of Jesus. He would have been familiar with a popular Greek translation of Hebrew Scripture commonly known as the Septuagint, which had already been around for a long time, as well as other Greek and even some Aramaic translations.

We could say that Jesus’ Scriptures were like a modern Christian bookshop with its plethora of English translations, each for different purposes.

While it is difficult to compare Jesus’ Bible with any one English version of our own day, we could say that Jesus’ Scriptures in their different Hebrew forms and Greek translations were perhaps like a modern Christian bookshop with its plethora of English translations, each for different purposes.

What Books Were in Jesus’ Bible?

The ancient Near East had many writings and scriptures, but we don’t have a surviving list of Bible books, or a table of contents naming the works of the Hebrew Scriptures from before the time of Jesus. We can look at this period only as through a glass dimly, with few clues. However, a good place to look for what clues there are is at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. All the books that the Essenes—the Jewish sect which probably produced the scrolls—wrote commentaries on and cited as Scripture (with the words “it is written”) eventually became part of the Jewish canon. (There is one exception to this rule, a citation of a work known as Jubilees, which was very popular at Qumran if the many manuscript remains are any indication.)

Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher who died in about AD 40, cited as Scripture the books from Genesis to Deuteronomy (the Pentateuch) as well as other texts that we would recognize from our modern Old Testaments, but he did not provide us with anything like a list of books. The closest statement to this effect from around the time of Jesus comes from the Jewish historian Josephus, who died in around AD 100. Although he doesn’t name the books, he tells us that Jews have only 22 books that are rightly trusted: five books of Moses, 13 books of prophets, and four remaining books of hymns and instructions for life.

Although researchers debate the identity of some of these books, Josephus describes a closed canon and claims it had been so for some time (you can read this in his book Against Apion 1.37–42). His 22 books reflect early numbering where several individual books now in the English Old Testament are counted as one. For example, at the time of Jesus, the twelve Minor Prophets were thought of as one book or scroll.

However, perhaps the best witness to the books that Jesus would have considered Scripture is the New Testament, which cites and quotes the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament), many books of the former and latter Prophets, Job, Psalms and Proverbs. The New Testament authors do not cite as Scripture books outside of the Jewish canon but neither do they cite every book of the Jewish canon. By the second century, when early Christians began to list their books, they included only the books of the Jewish Scriptures.

Along with the great majority of Jews, Jesus would have had a more or less closed set of Scriptures that mirrors our own.

So we can see from this that Josephus was probably right in saying that by the time of his writing every Jew had long considered the 22 books to be divinely inspired. The evidence indicates that some Jews held as Scripture the texts eventually named and listed in the second century, but not all Jews agreed on the status of every book. Along with the great majority of Jews, Jesus would have had a more or less closed set of Scriptures that mirrors our own. It would have included the core books—the Torah, the prophets, the Psalter—but it’s difficult to say what he would have thought about the books at the edges of the canon (such as Esther, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes).

What Versions Did Jesus Read?

By Jesus’ day, the Hebrew Scriptures would have long been completed, and ancient scribes would have already copied them seemingly countless times. In the first century they would have been translated into Greek, and those early Greek translations would have been in the process of revision. We know for certain that the Scriptures were in at least three languages in the Judaea of Jesus’ day. The Dead Sea Scrolls reflect this reality with their Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek manuscript remains. Jesus and his Apostles, therefore, lived in a time when the textual situation was quite complex.

Hebrew Manuscripts

The textual history of the Hebrew Bible on the whole shows remarkable care and preservation—but not uniformity. The Hebrew text that became the source for the Medieval manuscripts on which our modern Old Testaments are based—known as the Masoretic Text—was the dominant but not the exclusive form before and after the time of Jesus. Other textual forms existed at the time of Jesus, since some scribes copied that dominant text in freer and more creative ways for different purposes.

For example, by the time of Jesus, there was a revision of the Hebrew Torah now known as the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP). In John 4:20, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well and they discuss the difference between Jewish religion and Samaritan religion. She tells Jesus, “Our fathers worshipped on this mountain [Mount. Gerizim]” indicating that she must have been familiar with Samaritan scriptures that located the altar for worship on Mount Gerizim (SP Exod. 20:17). Likewise, she knew that the Jewish Scriptures located the place of worship on Mount Zion in Jerusalem (for example Ps. 132:13).

Greek Translations

In about 280 BC, around the time that the Samaritan Pentateuch was being produced, Jews in Alexandria were engaged in an innovative Greek translation of the Hebrew Torah, commonly called the Septuagint. After the translation of the Torah the Jews had rendered the rest of their Scriptures into Greek by around 100 BC, with some books such as Esther and Ecclesiastes being translated slightly later. Copies of these translations probably made their way to Qumran in the first century BC as we have evidence of Greek manuscript remains of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy there.

Illustration by Jordan Daniel Singer
The Legacy of the First Revised Bible Translations
The modern impulse to get the Bible right in translation has its roots in the Jews who revised the Septuagint.
John D. Meade

Then the picture becomes more complex, because also in the first century BC some Jews began a tradition of revising older Greek translations to reflect better their interpretation of the Hebrew and to ensure their translations better accorded with the carefully copied Masoretic Text, which was by then the dominant version. A significant scroll of the Minor Prophets was found at Naḥal Ḥever, a cave in the Judaean desert, which exhibits characteristics of revision. Members of this movement for revision, called the kaige tradition, revisited previously existing translations and also produced some new ones, such as Ecclesiastes.

What this shows us is that Jews before and around the time of Jesus and the Apostles were revising the older Greek translations and thus creating a complex of Greek versions that are quoted in the books of the New Testament.

In this context, some quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament reflect both the Hebrew Masoretic Text and the Septuagint (for example Ps. 32:1–2 in Rom. 4:7–8). In other places, the New Testament reflects the Septuagint and not the Hebrew (for example Isa. 1:9 in Rom. 9:29). However the New Testament authors clearly did not consider themselves bound to follow any specific translation, and at times either offer their own translation of the Hebrew (for example Hos. 11:1 in Matt. 2:15) or quote a revision of the Septuagint (Isa. 25:8 in 1 Cor. 15:54).

What Did Jesus’ Bible Look Like?

Jesus’ “Bible” probably mirrored the Jewish Scriptures, with some dispute over books such as Esther. The question of whether he and his followers read the text in Hebrew or Greek (Luke 4:17–19) is not straightforward. What does seem clear from the evidence is that, alongside the Septuagint, various translations of the dominant Hebrew text as well as revisions of older Greek translations would have been available.

Jesus’ Scriptures probably resembled a Christian bookshop or the list of English translations available on a Bible app.

Jesus’ Scriptures in their various texts and translations probably resembled a Christian bookshop or the list of English translations available on a Bible app. The Jews had a central, carefully copied Hebrew text that had been adapted in Hebrew manuscripts for different audiences and purposes, and they also had Greek translators conveying its meaning.

Jesus’ experience of reading the Scriptures, while perhaps very different from our own in terms of the technology and language, would have had much in common. Opening up a scroll, he would see a text faithfully passed through careful traditions and scribes, not so different from the Bibles in our hands today.

This article was originally published in I nk magazine.

What Pastors Should Know about Developments in Textual Criticism

An introduction to new editions, methods, and digital tools for studying the Greek New Testament

Peter J. Gurry

Pastors are busy. They are expected to maintain competence in a wide range of skills from preaching to counseling, balancing the budget to carefully parsing the doctrine of the Trinity. It can be a lot to keep up with.

In this article, I want to help busy pastors with a short introduction to recent developments in New Testament textual criticism. We’ll tackle this in three headings, looking at new editions, new methods, and new digital tools. But first, a word about why textual criticism matters.

Textual criticism is that discipline that tries to recover the original wording of a work whose original documents have now been lost. Since no original document survives for the New Testament and since the existing copies disagree with one another, textual criticism is needed for all twenty-seven books. Since we cannot study, teach, and apply the Bible if we don’t know what it says, textual criticism—whether we know it or not—plays a foundational role in pastoral ministry.

So, what’s new in textual criticism?

New Editions

First, there are several new editions of the Greek New Testament that have come out in recent years. The most recent is known as the Tyndale House Greek New Testament (THGNT). The result of over a decade of work, it was produced by a group of scholars at Tyndale House library in Cambridge, England, a premier study center for Biblical studies. The main hallmark of this edition is the editors’ documentary or manuscript-first approach. In practice, this means they have tried to follow the earliest manuscripts not only for the text but also for deciding paragraphing, spelling, and even accenting. In presentation, they have taken a minimalist approach with no text-critical symbols, no headings, and even no hyphens! The result is a text that is ideal for immersive reading and for challenging commonly-held assumptions about where to break the text.

Two other important recent editions are the Nestle-Aland Novum Testament Graece 28th edition and the UBS Greek New Testament 5th edition. These two editions have long established themselves as the scholarly standard and they remain so for serious exegetical work on the New Testament. They share the same text between them but differ mainly in how much information they provide in the apparatus. The most important difference between these newest editions of the Nestle-Aland and the UBS is in the method used to establish the main text.

In the Catholic Letters (James, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John, Jude), the editors used a new computer-assisted method to help understand how manuscript texts are related and to help make their decisions more consistent. That method is known as the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method or CBGM—a mouthful for sure, but an important development in New Testament textual criticism nonetheless. As a result of applying the CBGM, the NA28 and UBS5 text changed in thirty-three places in the Catholic Letters with more changes on the way for Acts in future editions.

A pastor with an older edition of the NA or UBS who is preaching on one of these Catholic Letters may want to update to the new edition in order to be aware of where these changes are. Alternatively, buying the new Tyndale House Greek New Testament might be a great way to approach a familiar book in Greek in a new way.

A New Method

The CBGM has been in development since the early 1980s, but its results have been widely available only in the last five years. While not known for being simple, it essentially harnesses the power of the computer and the vast increase in our knowledge of New Testament manuscripts to help scholars make better, more consistent textual decisions. The method works by using the overall relationship between texts to resolve particular textual problems.

For example, if the computer shows us that two distantly-related texts share the same variant reading, this might indicate that the reading was created independently by the scribes of those texts. This, in turn, could suggest that the reading is less likely to be original. Beyond that, the CBGM can even help us tell the larger story of how the New Testament text has been copied over centuries. And that too can help us determine or confirm the text.

A diagram like this helps scholars use the overall relationship of texts to relate individual variants.

The method has now been applied thoroughly to the Catholic Letters and most recently to Acts and Mark. The data are available online. This resulted in thirty-three changes in Mark, fifty-two in Acts, and thirty-three in the Catholic Letters. Most of these don’t affect English translation let alone theology. But a small handful are significant.

The most important change, in my opinion, is found at 2 Peter 3:10 where the NA28 and UBS5 now read that in the day of the Lord, “the earth and all that is in it will not be found.” The inclusion of the word “not” where before there was none is obviously important. More significant still, this reading has no known Greek manuscript support, raising serious questions about its validity. Notably, this change has already affected the CSB translation and may well affect the recently announced revision of the NRSV.

The advent of the CBGM allows us to quantify scribes’ fidelity like never before.

Just as important for a pastor, however, is the evidence the CBGM provides for how well the New Testament text was copied overall. To be sure, there are many variants in our New Testament manuscripts—perhaps as many as half a million. Most of these are trivial or easily resolved and, when considered in light of how many times our New Testament books were copied, what stands out most is how faithfully scribes did their work. The advent of the CBGM allows us to quantify this fidelity like never before.

In the Catholic Letters, for example, there are two manuscripts that agree at 99.1 percent of all places where there is variation in the 123 manuscripts used by the CBGM. They only differ in a total of twenty-seven out of 2,859 places where they were compared. That is quite remarkable. The average textual agreement between all pairs of witnesses reaches 87.6 percent. That too is impressive. Similar numbers occur in Acts.

Book cover for A New Approach to Textual Criticism — Dr. Gurry’s book provides a complete introduction to the CBGM

These new data expose just how absurd some popular claims about the Bible really are. Take, for example, the Newsweek cover story from a few years ago that went so far as to say that you and I have never even read the Bible because “at best, we’ve all read a bad translation—a translation of translations of translations of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on, hundreds of times.” The implication that the Bible can’t be trusted is hard to miss.

In fact, most of us have been reading substantially the same Greek New Testament for two thousand years thanks to careful scribes. And rather than being an impediment to faith, modern textual criticism actually supports it. Even Marcus Borg, a New Testament scholar who is far from being an Evangelical Christian, has written that “with only a few minor exceptions, we can be confident that the Gospels and the New Testament as a whole reliably report what was originally written.”

Yes, verbiage will change in certain places as a result of further research, and tricky textual problems do remain. But because of the overall fidelity of scribes over 1500 years combined with the herculean efforts of textual scholars, we can be confident that the text we have in our Greek editions and in our English translations is more than enough to ground our faith in the New Testament’s witness to Jesus Christ. The advent of cutting-edge methods like the CBGM have made that more apparent than ever before.

New Digital Tools

Having surveyed new editions of the Greek New Testament and a new method of practicing textual criticism, let’s consider a final area of development: new resources. Many of these new digital tools are due to the hard work of various organizations and the ability of the internet to connect and share information. Let me introduce three to you.

Images

The first resource is digital images. In the last decade, there has been an explosion of manuscript images made available, often for free, online. The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) is one major organization that has been hard at work to digitize manuscripts all over the world. Whenever possible, they put these images online for free at csntm.org. The search feature is especially useful as it allows you to search by keyword or verse and to sort results by a range of manuscript feature.

The manuscript viewer at CSNTM allows for incredible resolution, here showing the start of Hebrews in P46

If you were teaching on one of the Gospels, why not introduce your congregation to P45, one of the earliest copies of the four Gospels and Acts? Or maybe you are teaching on Ephesians and want to show a Sunday school class the missing words “in Ephesus” in P46, one of the earliest manuscripts of Paul’s letters (note that the book is still titled “To the Ephesians”). Or, share the beautiful artwork in GA 808, a rare complete copy of the New Testament from the 13th–14th century.

Along with CSNTM, many of the world’s great libraries are busy digitizing their manuscripts and putting them online. Without leaving home, you can now explore Codex Vaticanus (03) held at the Vatican, or the palimpsest Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (04) at the French Bibliothèque nationale, Codex Bezae (05) of the British Library, or see the famous Codex Sinaiticus (01) all in one place, something physically impossible because the manuscript itself is split and housed at four separate institutions. All this is just the tip of the digital iceberg.

Virtual Manuscript Room

Although looking at incredible manuscripts online is thrilling, tracking them down can be tricky unless you know what to look for. That brings me to the second resource I want to mention called the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room or NT.VMR.

The NT.VMR keeps the official catalogue of NT manuscripts

If I can brag for a minute, the NT.VMR was largely designed and is still developed by a Phoenix Seminary graduate named Troy Griffitts. Troy has been instrumental in developing this resource which has become indispensable to academic text-critical work.

At the NT.VMR, you can see the official list of New Testament manuscripts, view images of many of them, consult scholarly transcripts of manuscripts, study the history of scholarly conjectures about the New Testament text, discuss these with other people, and so much more. It is a rich resource and it keeps getting more valuable.

Free Online Editions

The final resources I want to mention takes us back to the new editions of the Greek New Testament mentioned earlier. Ideally, you will want to have a print copy of one of those editions because each comes with valuable detail in the apparatus or in the margins. But if all you need is the text itself for reading or study, all of these are now freely available online.

STEP Bible is online software that allows work in the original languages

For the Tyndale House edition, one can find the text at esv.org/gnt or at stepbible.org, complete with additional vocabulary and parsing help. The NA28/UBS5 text is also online though without the extra helps. These free, digital editions can be helpful for when you’re away from your study or if you want to copy and paste the text into your study notes for things like diagramming, color-coding, etc.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can say two things about advances in New Testament textual criticism. First, the Bibles that we have in our hands now—whether English or Greek—are founded on a solid double foundation of overall good transmission and excellent scholarly study of that history. Because of that, we should not hesitate to preach and teach from these editions even as they alert us to some places that remain difficult. Second, the study of our New Testament text and how it was transmitted to us is advancing in new and promising ways. The new editions, new method, and new resources mentioned in this series give us access to the history of God’s word in ways impossible to imagine even a generation ago.

In the words of B. F. Westcott in the 19th century, “It cannot be a matter of indifference to know how the New Testament … has come down to us; to look at the Manuscripts from which our fathers drew words of life, to trace the stirring history of the version through which the teaching of Apostles has been made accessible to men of other tongues.” Let us be eager to study the remarkable history of God’s book and to share it with God’s people.

This article was originally published at the Phoenix Seminary blog and is also available in Polish.

Recovering the Resurrection in Isaiah 53: Textual Criticism and Easter

The Bible’s textual integrity is better appreciated by patient study than by sensational discoveries

John D. Meade

In the past few weeks and months, ancient biblical texts have made their way into major news outlets. Recently, National Geographic revealed that all of the newly discovered “Dead Sea Scrolls” in the Museum of the Bible’s collection are forgeries. On the New Testament side, there was much made of a sensational “First-Century Mark Fragment” which was sold to Hobby Lobby that was later shown not to be from the first century, although it will remain an important fragment and witness of Mark. The Museum of the Bible has acknowledged the forgeries of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Indeed, these events of recent months have provided fodder for some to question who owns the Bible. In all of the sensationalism about the “finding” of new Dead Sea Scrolls and first-century gospel fragments and the subsequent overturning of these “discoveries,” some may wonder whether we have the enduring Word and the truth of the Gospel contained therein.

In fact, we do, but not because of sensational discoveries. The Bible’s authentic textual history won’t be confirmed by sensational discoveries. It will be confirmed by patient study and analysis of the evidence we possess and by responsible discoveries of provenanced artifacts, like the well-known Dead Sea Scrolls.

Around Christmas and Easter, it seems almost commonplace to read or hear something that casts doubt on the reliability of the Bible. For Easter, therefore, I want to focus on three textual problems in Isaiah 52:13–53:12 or what is called Isaiah’s “Fourth Servant Song” (the other three are 42:1–4, 49:1–6, and 50:4–9) to show that this text teaches and predicts the vicarious death, burial, and resurrection of the Servant, three key pillars to the gospel of Christ and the Christian’s own justification (Rom. 4:24–25). In three places, textual critics, commentators, and some translations chose different readings than the ones in our received text, i.e. the Masoretic Text, which is the base text of our Old Testament English translations. Let’s look at each in turn for edification from a very significant and familiar passage, even if at times we have to dig deeper to recover its original readings.

Does the Servant Die? Or How to Read Isaiah 53:8?

At end of Isaiah 53:8, our major English translations have: “for the transgression of my people he was punished” (NIV) or “stricken for the transgression of my people” (ESV). In each case, the translation has not actually rendered the base text (“a strike was to them” נֶגַע לָמוֹ nega’ lamô) but has actually rendered a noun as a verb and omitted an equivalent for the prepositional phrase with a plural pronoun “to them.”

Many commentators find this reading too difficult and our translations have glossed over the difficulties in the actual text. But one need not despair. Many textual critics and commentators have discerned that the original text has been preserved in the Septuagint or the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, since that version has “to death” (εἰς θάνατον), which probably translated a Hebrew text having “to death” (לַמָּוֶת lammaweth). There is only one letter (ת) difference between this reading and the received text, and it is probable that the Greek translation suggests a different and more original Hebrew text yielding the meaning: “He was cut off from the land of the living, because of the transgression of my people he was stricken to death.”

Thus, the prophecy of Isaiah 53:8 originally predicted that the Servant would be stricken to death. He would die vicariously for his people’s transgressions, and the New Testament authors appear to have read accordingly the Song in relation to Jesus Christ’s work on the cross. In 1 Corinthians 15:3, Paul notes that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. There is no Old Testament passage that details this substitutionary death more than Isaiah 53.

Where was the Servant Buried? Or How to Read Isaiah 53:9?

In Isaiah 53:9, several of our English translations have: “And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death” (ESV; cf. NIV). But the NRSV along with several others has: “They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich.” The received text has “in his deaths” (בְּמֹתָיו b^əmōthayw), which the later Greek, Syriac, and Latin versions all simplified to “in his death,” and some of our modern English translations followed suit. But the text is better preserved in 1QIsa^a (the Great Isaiah Scroll) which has the reading “his hill” or “his tomb” (בומתו bômtô from בֹּ֫מֶת bōmeth).

Therefore, with most commentators and translations, Isaiah 53:9 predicted that the Servant’s body would be laid in a tomb. It was no minor detail to the gospel writers to record that Jesus’ body be buried in a tomb, and Matthew even highlights that Joseph of Arimathea was a rich man (cf. Matt 27:57ff).

Does the Servant Rise? Or How to Read Isaiah 53:11?

In Isaiah 53:11, a few of our English translations have the following text with a footnote: “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied.” The footnote to the reading in the ESV says, “Masoretic Text; Dead Sea Scroll he shall see light.” The ESV translates the received text “he will see” (יִרְאֶה yir’eh). But most English translations read against the received text and with three Dead Sea Scrolls (1QIsa^a 1QIsa^b 4QIsa^d) and the Hebrew text of the Greek translator, all of which preserve the word “light” for what the Servant sees (“he will see light” יראה אור yir’eh ’ôr). Most textual critics and English translators have adopted the reading found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, and therefore, have something like: “After his anguish, he will see light and be satisfied” (CSB). The received text probably omitted accidentally the word “light” because the word “will see” in Hebrew is similar to it and the omission can be explained as accidental.

The metaphor “to see light” refers to having life. In Job 3:16, Job asks why he was not hidden like a miscarried child or like infants who did not see light. In Job 33:28, 30, Elihu envisions God as the one who redeems one’s soul from the pit and one’s life then can see light. In Isaiah 53, the servant died vicariously and was buried in a tomb. In Isaiah 53:11, “seeing light” refers to the resurrection of the Servant from the dead because of his work. He will see light and be satisfied in his knowledge, that is, his obedience in covenant relationship with the Lord. As a result, the Lord’s righteous Servant will now justify the many. The resurrection shows the vindication of the servant and becomes the ground for the justification of the many.

This logic appears to be Paul’s own in Romans 4:24–25 where he interprets Christ’s death for our transgressions and his resurrection for our justification.

Conclusions

The gospel of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection was clearly predicted and anticipated in Isaiah 53. But the received text has obscured these details with copyist errors and theological changes. In 53:8, the received text’s “to them” resulted accidentally from a lost letter which the Greek translator suggests should be restored as “to death”; in 53:9, the received text appears to have pluralized the servant’s “deaths” for some theological reason; and in 53:11, the received text has dropped “light” thus obscuring the servant’s seeing “light” or his resurrection. In each case, the original wording has been preserved clearly in other textual witnesses and these readings appears to be confirmed by the apostles’ reading of the Scriptures. For Easter, here are three applications from textual criticism:

1. Let’s commit to patient study and research of the Bible’s text and wording.

In and around Easter, let’s not be swept away by sensational news stories and documentaries confirming and denying the Bible’s reliability and trustworthiness.

2. Let’s commit to reading and learning more about the different readings of our favorite passages.

For many, this means reading your translation’s footnotes in the margins of your version. Let’s not fear variant readings, even when they occur in significant passages like Isaiah 53. In some cases, like the ones above, the “variant readings” are actually the original ones. And furthermore, delving into these readings often causes us to think about the interpretation of a given passage in a different but helpful light.

3. Lastly, it’s Easter and a time to remember that Christ died, was buried, and was raised according to the Scriptures.

Isaiah 53 remains the chief Old Testament passage that predicts these events of the Servant of the Lord. In this season, may we continue to reflect on the suffering of the Servant for us and our sins even as we look to his resurrection as his vindication for suffering righteously and our justification.

This article was originally published at Southern Equip.

Topics

Levels

Text

The Neglect of the Holy Spirit

The Spirit’s Place

Related

Avoiding Extremes

Giving Providence its Proper Place

Evidence of Providence

Cautions

Get new articles and updates in your inbox.

Conclusion

Notes

The Age of the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Language of the Scrolls

What the Scrolls tell us about the history of the Old Testament text

The Scrolls that don’t agree with the Masoretic Text

Related

Making sense of all the evidence

Notes

Historical

Theological

Conclusion

Notes

What Books Were in Jesus’ Bible?

What Versions Did Jesus Read?

Hebrew Manuscripts

Greek Translations

Related

What Did Jesus’ Bible Look Like?

New Editions

A New Method

New Digital Tools

Images

Virtual Manuscript Room

Free Online Editions

Conclusion

Does the Servant Die? Or How to Read Isaiah 53:8?

Where was the Servant Buried? Or How to Read Isaiah 53:9?

Does the Servant Rise? Or How to Read Isaiah 53:11?

Conclusions

1. Let’s commit to patient study and research of the Bible’s text and wording.

2. Let’s commit to reading and learning more about the different readings of our favorite passages.

3. Lastly, it’s Easter and a time to remember that Christ died, was buried, and was raised according to the Scriptures.

Footer

Articles

Research

Events

About

Support