Intermediate

B. H. Streeter’s Four Gospels at One Hundred

How does the Oxford don’s influential argument for ‘local texts’ of the Gospels hold up after 100 years?

This year, 2024, marks an important centennial for the study of the New Testament text. In 1924, the Oxford scholar Burnett Hillman Streeter published his important book, The Four Gospels: A Study in Origins. Concerning this book Bishop Stephen Neill wrote,

In 1924 Streeter published a large book of over 600 pages, called The Four Gospels: A Study in Origins, a comprehensive gathering together of the results of the scientific study of The Gospels up till that time. That this is a great book, will not, I think, be doubted by anyone who has ever used it.¹

A theory of Gospel origins

In this book Streeter laid out what became the primary theory of Synoptic Gospel origins: The four-source hypothesis. The four sources were (1) the Gospel of Mark; (2) a source of material common to Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark—referred to as Q, from the German Quelle (“source”); (3) M, which was material unique to Matthew; and (4) L, containing material only in Luke. Although there have been alternate views, such as Matthean priority, in the century since Streeter published this book, most scholars have followed some form of Streeter’s four-source hypothesis.

In the course of his treatment of Gospel origins, Streeter advanced several theories which have not fared well.

In the course of his treatment of Gospel origins, Streeter advanced several theories which have not fared well among scholars. One was the proposal of a document prior to our Gospel of Luke, which he called “Proto-Luke.” Another was the proposal of a Caesarean textual group or text type, based on several recent manuscript discoveries. Both of these proposals were subjected to careful analysis and have been largely abandoned. A third proposal, positing “local texts” of the great ecclesiastical jurisdictions or sees in the second century, has also been largely ignored by scholars. This brief review will focus on Streeter’s “local texts” in light of recent discoveries and refined research methods.

A theory of local texts of the Gospels

Streeter advanced a theory of “local texts” which developed in the great sees of the church in the second century. The five sees that developed their distinctive local texts, according to Streeter, were

Alexandria
Antioch
Caesarea
Italy and Gaul
Carthage

For each of these local texts Streeter gave as the primary witness one of the major manuscripts known to him in 1924. Thus for Alexandria he presented Codex Vaticanus (B), for Italy and Gaul Codex Bezae (D), for Carthage the Latin manuscript k, etc. Streeter also explored an “Ephesian text” for the period of the late second century. But that text was not included in his summary chart because no major manuscript could be found to represent that text.

Streeter’s chart summarizing his local texts and their witnesses. Source

What Streeter did not have when he wrote The Four Gospels in 1924 is the wealth of New Testament papyri which we now possess (some 141 at latest count). Several of these are assigned to the second century, the era of the great sees of which Streeter wrote. Although some of these papyri are fragmentary, there are several larger papyri such as P46 (Pauline Epistles) P66 (John) and P75 (Luke and John). These three papyri, dated to around the year 200 have been very important for textual criticism in considering the early text of the New Testament. But it is important to be clear about how secure their dating is.² It also must be remembered that, although the early papyri were all found in Egypt, it does not follow that any one of them originated there.³

What follows is a comparison of two churches in the late second century, and a proposal about their “local texts,” based on recent research on these two churches.

A tale of two churches

Alexandria

Egypt was “behindhand in welcoming Christianity,” Streeter wrote in the book. That cryptic remark has been confirmed by subsequent study of the subject. In his landmark work entitled Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt, Colin Roberts wrote,

The obscurity that veils the early history of the Church in Egypt and that does not lift until the beginning of the third century constitutes a conspicuous challenge to the historian of primitive Christianity.⁴

More recently, noted papyrologist Roger Bagnall has pointed out that the evidence for Christianity in Egypt is non-existent in the documentary papyri until the beginning of the third century AD.⁵

The obscurity of the church in second century Egypt is best explained by the observation that the early Christian community there was largely Jewish. We know that the Jewish community in Egypt did not fare well under the Romans. Especially the Jewish revolt from AD 115–117 led to much death and destruction and had long lasting effects.⁶

But toward the end of the second century the fortunes of the church in Egypt began to change. The founding of the Alexandrian Catechetical school under Pantaenus and Clement, and the long episcopate of Demetrius (AD 192–232) transformed a small and struggling church into the leading intellectual center of the third century church. Now it was a church capable of producing carefully copied texts, and faithfully preserving the New Testament.

Ephesus

The church in Ephesus had almost the opposite career. With regard to this church and its local text, we may begin by quoting the important observations made by Paul Treblico. In his significant study, he writes that Ephesus was

the capital of the province of Asia and the leading city of Asia Minor, where the church grew very rapidly. There is no doubting the importance of the Church in Asia Minor in the first two centuries. Paul spent a considerable period of time in Asia Minor, and Luke devotes a significant amount of Acts to Paul’s travels in this region. That the early Church grew very quickly in Asia Minor is shown by the number of centers in which, according to our evidence, the early church became established by the end of the second century… In the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem following the first Jewish revolt of AD 66–73 Anatolia had become perhaps the most important geographical center of Christianity in the ancient world.

The remains of the library at ancient Ephesus. Source

But before the end of the second century, things began to change, and Ephesus would lose its prominence. Perhaps the most important factor was the the debate over the date of Easter known as the Quartodeciman controversy. The long standing tradition in Asia was to celebrate Easter on the fourteenth Nisan, the day of the Passover, whatever day of the week it fell. The church of Rome saw the matter differently and believed that Easter must always be celebrated on a Sunday.

For a long time, the churches agreed to disagree and respect each other’s tradition. But when the tolerant and pastoral Eleutherus, Bishop of Rome, died in AD 189, he was replaced by Victor, a north African who insisted that all churches celebrate the great feast on a Sunday. Polycrates, the Bishop of Ephesus, wrote to Victor pleading for toleration. Victor replied by insisting on the Roman way and excommunicating Ephesus and the Asian churches. From AD 190 onward, Asia in general, and Ephesus in particular, seems to have lost its premier position. We do not find in the third-century Asian church the strong cast of leaders such as one finds in the second century: Papias of Hierapolis, Polycarp of Smyrna, Melito of Sardis, Apollinaris of Hierapolis, Polycrates of Ephesus, and others.

To his credit, Streeter knew that such an important local church in Asia, with its great see at Ephesus, must have had its own distinctive local text. He therefore sets out to discover “the text of Ephesus” on the basis of the available evidence. His conclusion was that the evidence was far too scanty to draw any definite conclusions. Further he remarked that text of Ephesus would have succumbed at an early date to the standard text found in the two dominant patriarchates, Antioch and Constantinople so that it “was swamped at an early date and has left no trace on the manuscript tradition.”

This comparative study of two second-century churches presents us with an anomaly. In Egypt, we find several early and carefully copied New Testament papyri, but we also find the profile of a small and struggling church hardly capable of producing strict and careful manuscripts. On the other hand, the church in Asia/Ephesus was well developed with strong leadership but has left us no trace of its local text. What do we make of this tale of two churches?

A home for a homeless text

In 1881, B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort published their influential edition of the Greek New Testament. This critical edition dominated the landscape in New Testament studies for decades thereafter. A distinctive feature of Hort’s rationale in the introduction to their New Testament is his proposal of the “neutral text.” This was the text of Codex Vaticanus (B) and Codex Sinaiticus (א) where they agree. Concerning Hort’s “neutral text” Streeter wrote, “Hort declined to recognize any connection of B א with Alexandria … and assigned it to no definite locality.”

Hort’s neutral text was homeless and needed a home.

Hort’s neutral text was homeless and needed a home. Most scholars of the text in the generations following the publication of the Westcott-Hort text assigned that text to Alexandria, and Streeter followed suit. It remains exactly there in twenty-first-century presentations of how the New Testament text developed.⁷

However, in light of the history sketched briefly above, it seems unlikely that the “neutral text” began its life in Alexandria.⁸ The chief city of Asia, with its strong church of the second century, provides an appropriate home for the “neutral text.” Toward the end of the century, when the church of Ephesus began to struggle and the church in Alexandria was gaining strength, that text migrated to the place that was to become the intellectual capital of the whole church from the third century. The neutral text was given new life in its new home.

So, what is the final analysis of Streeter’s important work a century later? Streeter was Dean Ireland’s Professor of Biblical Exegesis in Oxford, where he did most of his work. It’s a place Matthew Arnold famously called “the home of lost causes.” And while this may sometimes be the case, for the reasons stated above, a fresh pursuit of the local texts of the great sees in the second century, far from being a lost cause, may turn out to be a very promising and fruitful exercise. Perhaps the century after Streeter will finally answer the question.

A larger version of this paper may be found in Filologia Neotestamentaria, 37 (2024): 65–74 which is online here.

Notes

1
Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861–1986, New Edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 132.
2
See Brent Nongbri, God’s library: The Archeology of the early Christian Manuscripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). For challenges to traditional dating of early papyri.
3
Eldon Jay Epp, Perspectives in New Testament Textual Criticism: Collected Essays, 1962–2004 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 408, 419.
4
Colin H. Roberts, Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt: The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy for 1977 (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1. So also Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 99 who writes, “The origins of the church in Egypt are enveloped in deep obscurity.”
5
Roger S. Bagnall, Early Christian Books in Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8.
6
For an account of the Jewish revolt and its aftermath see Victor A. Techerikover and Alexander Fuks, Corpus Papyrorum Judicarum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), vol. 2, 225–60. And recently, Noah Hacham, Tal Ilan (eds.). Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum Volume 5: The Early Roman Period (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg; Jerusalem: Magnes Hebrew University Press, 2022).
7
Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 312–313.
8
I have recently argued that the “Alexandrian text” did not originate there but came originally from Ephesus. See Peter R. Rodgers, “The Origins of the Alexandrian Text of the New Testament,” Filologia Neotestamentaria, XXXV (2022), 61–65.

Dating Ancient Manuscripts with Help from Modern Software

Dating Greek manuscripts by handwriting can be precarious, but a new method may put the results on firmer ground.

Pat Sanders

Paleographers perform an important initial step in the textual criticism of the Bible, from studying the development of ancient Greek handwriting to determining the date and provenance of undated manuscripts. One maxim of textual criticism is that, all things being equal, the earliest readings are preferred. However, ancient literary manuscripts often were not dated by their scribes, so how are we to determine the date of undated biblical manuscripts?

Traditional dating methods

Aside from using modern scientific methods that may damage a manuscript, sometimes there are clues that we can use to determine a date. For example:

Some manuscripts have a colophon. This is a note appended to the end of the manuscript by a scribe. It may provide a date and other information, yet sometimes colophons have been forged, even in antiquity, to make a manuscript appear older.
The archeological context may produce a relative date for dating some manuscripts.
Sometimes a documentary manuscript like a deed or will was reused, usually by writing on the opposite side of the document that is dated, which also produces a relative date.
Some manuscripts have none of these “helps” for dating. In that case, paleographers traditionally date a manuscript by its writing style. This is the most common method.

In this last procedure, paleographers classify the handwriting of dated manuscripts into various handwriting styles, which have been ordered chronologically by century. Then, to determine a date for an undated manuscript, they compare the script of the undated manuscript to these chronologically ordered styles.

Paleography is often considered more of an art than a science.

Having begun in the eighteenth century, the field of paleography is relatively young, and yet a surprising number of issues have developed with this methodology. For example, the definitions of the various handwriting styles can lack clarity, since the same adjectives, like upright and round, are used to describe multiple styles. Furthermore, scribes employed multiple styles during the same time period, so a clear linear progression from one style to the other does not always occur. These two issues alone can make a comparison of parallel writing styles difficult, so scholars spend many years developing their expertise. Thus, paleography is often considered more of an art than a science.

Traces of subjectivity

Over the years, some manuscripts have been wrongly dated. Ernest Colwell highlighted one case: “There is in Leningrad one folio of a Greek Gospel for which [Caspar Rene] Gregory accepted the date AD 1247. Yet he assigned the manuscript on Mount Sinai from which it was taken to the fourteenth century.”¹ Pasquale Orsini confirmed the difficulty in dating manuscripts using the examples of P.Kellis Lit. II 97 and the Codex Tchacos, for which paleographic dating contradicts the scientific data, and even the historical and archaeological contexts relating to these manuscripts.² In a recent example, Georgi Parpulov redated the important New Testament manuscript GA 35 from the eleventh century to the fourteenth century. This manuscript is considered a prime representative of the Byzantine text and so was the base text for The Gospel According to John in the Byzantine Tradition published in 2007.

A picture of the John Rylands John fragment or Gregory-Aland P52 — Papyrus 52 (2nd c.) on display at the John Rylands Library. Source

Perhaps problems, such as these, stem from the subjective nature of the methodology traditionally employed. Brent Nongbri has highlighted several issues with the use of handwriting styles, such as circularity and potential bias toward early manuscripts. In his study of manuscript P75, Nongbri cautioned against dating papyri too early. He was concerned that most parallels chosen for dating P75 were themselves paleographically dated, and therefore, they were not independent witnesses for a second-century date for P75.³

In another case, according to Nongbri, leading scholars use the widely accepted, second-century dating of manuscript P52 in assessing the date of the Gospel of John, yet Nongbri maintained that P52 has the same attributes as third-century papyri, which should broaden the acceptable date range for this manuscript.⁴ Not all have accepted Nongbri’s results, but his work is a reminder that paleographically dating manuscripts has been subject to controversy and debate among scholars regarding the accuracy actually obtained by this process.

Using computational modeling

The need for a more objective approach is apparent. Models are key to discovering patterns, testing predictions, communicating explanations from the known to the unknown, and ultimately, gaining objectivity. Furthermore, employing a graphical modeling and analysis tool, like decision tree ensembling, allows a user to see the results of an analysis easily. Another benefit of a decision tree model is that it is appropriate to use when a series of decisions need to be made to determine an answer, which corresponds nicely to the procedure for dating a manuscript. Therefore, the purpose of my research is to determine whether computational modeling may be used to provide a more objective basis for dating ancient Greek manuscripts.

The research for this project proceeded in three broad steps. First, a group, or domain, of similar manuscripts was chosen, which included Greek minuscule literary manuscripts for the initial project. In other words, manuscripts selected to be modeled had to be written in the Greek language in the minuscule hand, which is a script having lower-case letters that are sometimes connected. Furthermore, the contents of the manuscripts had to be literary in nature rather than the every-day type of documents known as documentary. In addition, only internally dated manuscripts were used, rather than manuscripts dated paleographically to a century or range of centuries. These manuscripts were chosen from the collections at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the Cambridge University Library, the BNF in Paris, and the University of Michigan’s Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library. Additional manuscripts for the model were selected from the online collection at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

Second, the structure of the model had to be devised and the manuscripts analyzed against it. To devise the model, secondary literature on paleography at the Tyndale House Library in Cambridge was reviewed to accumulate a list of over 100 attributes of Greek minuscule literary manuscripts. These attributes are “omnitextual,” meaning they are not only about the shapes of letters and ligatures, but also include codicological and orthographical attributes, such as the material of the manuscript and the shapes of breathing marks.

In order to work with the attributes programmatically, the attributes are also discrete, or granular, rather than a combination of various characteristics like handwriting styles would be. The chosen dated manuscripts were compared against this list of attributes to record evidence for the existence of these attributes in each century in which the manuscripts were written. Thus, the corresponding attributes were noted for each dated manuscript in order to build a model of the Greek minuscule literary domain. This procedure is called training the model.

Third, a second set of dated Greek minuscule literary manuscripts was selected in order to test, or validate, the accuracy of the model, which has been named Omnitext™. In blind tests, these manuscripts were compared to the model and computations made for each century in which a corresponding attribute was found. This procedure is called ensembling.

Greek letter — Each script attribute gets a “vote” for each century in which it is used.

Attribute	9th c.	10th	11th	12th	13th	14th	15th	16th	17th
	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
					✔	✔	✔	✔	✔

For example, if a matching attribute from a manuscript appeared in the model throughout the minuscule period, from the ninth through the seventeenth centuries, every century receives a point, also called a vote. However, if the next matching attribute only appeared in the model from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries, then only those centuries receive a vote. In this example, the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries rise in importance, and the ninth through twelfth centuries fall in importance. The matching of corresponding attributes continues for approximately 100 attributes, and the plausible date further narrows.

When all attributes have been examined, the votes for each century are aggregated to produce a secure date based on the evidence in the model. The century with the most votes is the predicted “winner.” If there is a tie, a date-range between the centuries is predicted. For each test, the model predicted the correct date, either to the century or to a range of centuries including the correct date. The test results indicate that a decision tree model using ensembling can provide a more objective means to determine a secure date range for those manuscripts that are undated.

The future

From Omnitext, which is software with a patent pending with international license based on this methodology, three reports may be obtained about the manuscript examined. First, and most importantly, is the date prediction. Second is a report of the most impactful attributes for dating the manuscript, in other words, the attributes that helped narrow the date range. Third is a report of the dated manuscript in the model that most closely matches the undated manuscript that was compared to the model, based on their corresponding attributes. Thus, Omnitext is providing evidence for paleographical decisions and, in this way, commending the field as more of a science than an art.

Omnitext is providing evidence for paleographical decisions and, in this way, commending the field as more of a science than an art.

Recently, Omnitext has been integrated with the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research at the University of Münster. The goal is to include other researchers in the paleographical analyses of manuscripts by comparing manuscripts to the model. This procedure is called a correlation.

Recently, a graduate student has tested the process and students at Birmingham Theological Seminary, Samford University, and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary are making Omnitext correlations. If you would like a demonstration of the process or want to analyze a manuscript against the Omnitext model (or have your students do so), please see Omnitext.org and contact Dr. Pat Sanders. With the development of this new tool, a more secure and objective date range based on evidence may be obtained in dating Greek minuscule manuscripts.

Notes

1
Ernest C. Colwell, Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament, ed. Bruce M. Metzger, NTTS 9 (Leiden: Brill, 1969), 125.
2
Pasquale Orsini, Studies on Greek and Coptic Majuscule Scripts and Books, vol. 15 of Studies in Manuscript Cultures, eds. Michael Friedrich, Harunaga Issacson, and Jorg B. Quenzer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), xiii–xiv.
3
Brent Nongbri, “Reconsidering the Place of Papyrus Bodmer XIV–XV (P75) in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament,” JBL 135 (2016): 408.
4
Brent Nongbri, “The Use and Abuse of P52: Papyrological Pitfalls in the Dating of the Fourth Gospel,” HTR 98 (2005): 23–32.

The First Parallel Bible

Origen’s six-columned Old Testament, produced in the second century, was a monumental achievement in the Bible’s history.

John D. Meade

Last month, the papers from the Text & Canon Institute’s first academic colloquium were published as The Forerunners and Heirs of Origen’s Hexapla. Thanks to our supporters, the book is available open access. This article is written to introduce Origen’s work and to celebrate this milestone.

Sound Bible study often requires careful comparison of different translations. After strewing different translations over a desk and reading each one individually, one wishes for a more organized tool to ease comparison.

Parallel Bibles like this one remain popular with serious Bible readers. Image source

One could consult a volume like the NIV, KJV, NASB, Amplified, Parallel Bible for such a purpose. With each version in its own column to be read from top to bottom and the verses arranged in parallel fashion, one can simply compare the different translations. The bible software user can create their own parallel bible by opening and arranging windows however preferred. With so many translations, a vast amount of knowledge must be collected and organized so that it works for the user.

The history of parallel bibles shows a human impulse for ordering textual knowledge. The late Renaissance Polyglots (multi-language Bibles) were products of this tendency. Biblical scholars produced monumental editions in international cooperation in Alcalá, Spain (Complutensian Polyglot; 1522); Antwerp, Belgium (The Antwerp Polyglot; 1572); Paris, France (The Paris Polyglot; 1645); and London, England (The London Polyglot; 1658). The culmination of these great Polyglots, Brian Walton’s London Polyglot, contained biblical texts in nine languages assembled in parallel: Hebrew, Samaritan, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Ethiopic, Syriac, Arabic, and Persian. But where did this idea to produce such Bibles come from?¹

There were Medieval precursors to these massive tomes, but even these appear to owe their inspiration to the work of a classically Greek trained catechetical instructor from Alexandria, Egypt named Origen.

Who is Origen?

Origen is best known today as a philosopher or theologian. But both his followers and detractors note that he was trained thoroughly in grammar or philology and devoted himself to this discipline. Origen did not just know his parts of speech. Rather, training in philology meant that he was a diorthōtēs (διορθωτής) or a corrector of copies of ancient books as well as an exegete of those same texts. Thus, he collected many copies of the scriptures and even evaluated whether they belonged to the accurate, old, or majority copies. Likewise, he collected the various translations of the Scriptures and evaluated their “expressiveness” and clarity or whether a version was enslaved to the Hebrew idiom.

As Origen studied the copies of the books of the Old Testament, he described his work in terms of classical Greek philology:

I found that the discord (between the copies) could be healed, if God grants, by using the rest of the editions as a criterion. For by making a judgment, based on the rest of the editions, concerning ambiguous texts in the Seventy [= the Septuagint] due to the discord between the copies, I kept the accord among them. I marked with an obelos some passages not in the Hebrew because I was not reckless to remove any of them. And I added some passages with asteriskoi in order that it might be clear that I added passages not in the Seventy from the rest of the editions agreeing with the Hebrew. (Origen, Commentary on Matthew 15.14)

Elsewhere, Origen says the Greeks called the critical signs asterisk (※) and obelus (—) referring to the tradition of the Alexandrian grammarians who had accomplished similar textual work on the copies of Homer’s Iliad (Origen, Epistle to Africanus 7). Thus, Origen as a philologist created scholarly editions of the biblical books. Furthermore, just as the Alexandrian grammarians produced commentaries on their texts, in various places in his sermons and commentaries Origen also recorded variants or differences between copies and translations and offered his readers solutions. Perhaps Origen, but more probably his followers, began to use the margins of manuscripts to record valuable comments known as scholia on the texts.

Codex Marchalianus, showing the scholia in left margin for Aquila, Theodotian, and Symmachus. Vat.gr.2125 f. 184

Thus, although Origen is most known for his theological and philosophical work, he was first and foremost a philologist and textual critic. He, therefore, left copies of his critical editions for his followers to consult and use in the library at Caesarea. Eusebius, the fourth-century Church historian, informs his readers that Origen left behind copies of his Hexapla (HECK-suh-pluh) “six-fold” or “six-column” Bible and another edition which was later called the Tetrapla (te-TRUH-pluh) or “four-fold” edition.

What was the Hexapla?

Since a few church fathers described the Hexapla in some detail (Eusebius, Epiphanius, Jerome, Rufinus), Origen must have compiled (not authored) such a magnificent and complex text requiring his followers to explain and interpret it. The six-column work in Hebrew and Greek probably had no exact precedent, even though other bilingual (Greek and Latin), literary, multi-column texts probably existed around Origen’s time.

Interestingly, Origen nowhere calls his massive textual construct “the Hexapla.” The term comes from Eusebius. In the first mention of this text, Eusebius says, “Having collected all of these (editions), he divided them into sections, and placed them opposite each other, with the Hebrew text itself. He thus left us the copies of the so-called Hexapla.” Other church fathers describe the work similarly, and there are a few fragmentary manuscript remains of the Hexapla, mostly Psalms, which do afford some evidence to aid the reconstruction of the columnar layout of the Hexapla: (1) Hebrew, (2) Hebrew in Greek transcription, (3) Aquila, (4) Symmachus, (5) Septuagint, (6) Theodotion.

A copy of Origen’s Hexapla in multiple columns in the undertext of a palimpsest in the Cairo Geniza. Cambridge Taylor-Schechter 12.182

This six-column text of the Old Testament would have granted Origen and his followers access to the Hebrew and to the most significant Greek translations of the day. A user of this text could read vertically any one version from top to bottom or all six versions from left to right across the entire spread of a folio in the codex.

The Hexapla was a textual tour de force giving its reader immediate access to the similarities and differences between the Greek and the Hebrew.

The Hexapla was a textual tour de force giving its reader immediate access to the similarities and differences between the Greek and the Hebrew. If one of those texts was shorter or longer (like in the case of the Book of Job), a reader of the Hexapla would be able to observe the additions and omissions plainly. Furthermore, at disputed places like Isaiah 7:14, the reader of the Hexapla would immediately grasp two different translations of the Hebrew: (1) the Septuagint’s “behold the virgin (parthenos)” and (2) the Jewish Revisers’ “behold the young woman (neanis),” a difference still reflected in Bible translations today.

Origen’s textual scholarship gave the church a real advance in knowledge of the biblical text in its several versions so that the reader of the Hexapla would know the similarities and differences between the church’s version and the Jewish versions used in the synagogue. But he probably had other reasons for producing this synopsis.

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

What was the Hexapla for?

Origen probably had many reasons for compiling the Hexapla. These include apologetics, textual criticism, exegesis, or perhaps even to learn the Hebrew language. A massive text like this cannot be reduced to any one purpose. But one significant reason for the Hexapla seems clear: it was a preliminary tool for a corrected text or diorthōsis. Origen used it to prepare a later, more accessible and economic critical text of the Old Testament with signs. This text was later called the Tetrapla, and it is probably the text that Origen described in his Matthew Commentary quoted above. This text contained only one column of text, but it would still give readers immediate access to the differences between the Hebrew and the Greek versions. A manuscript dated to soon after Origen’s death (P. Grenf. 1.5; 250–350 AD) containing a fragmentary text of Ezekiel 5:12–6:3 with asterisks furnishes the earliest material evidence for Origen’s second edition. This edition, or one based on it, must have circulated quite early, and it was still available to the Syriac Bishop, Paul of Tella, who translated it into Syriac in 616 AD (a text known as the “Syro-Hexapla”).

If Origen’s Septuagint version lacked text that was contained in the Hebrew, he would add Greek text from one of the Three Jewish revisers (normally Theodotion) to bring the Septuagint into alignment with the Hebrew. These additional words or lines were marked with an asterisk (※). The ending of Job 42:16–17 illustrates the point. The original Greek translation of Job did not contain the text about Job’s death (“and Job saw his sons … and Job died old and full of days.”) found in the Hebrew. As the later manuscript below shows, Origen added those three lines from the Greek revision of Theodotion and marked them with asterisks so the reader would know the Hebrew was longer and the Greek had been augmented.

Asterisks in the left margin of Tyrnavos 25 (Rahlfs 788). Author’s image

Similarly, if the Hebrew lacked a word or verse that the Septuagint contained, Origen would not remove the Greek text, but would mark it with an obelus or a lance (— or ÷) to make the Hebrew omission known to Christian readers. Thus, the quantitative differences that would have been visually obvious in the columnar Hexapla would now be observed in a text that contained the critical signs. In this way, no text from either language was lost for the careful reader.

Furthermore, this Tetrapla or “four-fold” version contained exegetically and textually significant readings or scholia from the three Jewish revisers: Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. This was important for the scholar who did not have access to these works independently, but now could access the more significant and interesting readings through the margins of Origen’s critical text. In this way, Origen and his followers could diffuse textual knowledge not only about the Hebrew text vis-à-vis the Greek but now also information about how contemporary Jews interpreted the Hebrew text in Greek, exegetical information that Christian interpreters also used and incorporated into their own commentaries.

The Hexapla, therefore, functioned as a necessary and preliminary tool for Origen’s later critical edition. Origen’s followers innovated and enhanced his critical edition, and they promulgated it in the early part of the fourth century.

The continuing importance of the Hexapla

Origen’s philological work remains a reminder that early Christians adopted and innovated scholarly methods of their day for serious study of the biblical text. Part of the early Christian DNA, so to speak, was serious study of the manuscript copies of the Scriptures. This fact in itself justifies researching Origen’s textual work today and is a reminder that Christians should continue in this tradition of serious study of the biblical text.

Origen’s Hexapla and later Tetrapla are important witnesses to the text of the Old Testament.

The papers from the TCI’s first colloquium were published in July and are available open access.

Besides this, Origen’s Hexapla and later Tetrapla are important witnesses to the text of the Old Testament, giving us valuable knowledge of the state of the Hebrew text in Caesarea in the second and third centuries AD. There are precious few remains of Hebrew manuscripts from this period, but the remains of Origen’s textual work, even in Greek dress, provide us access to what form the Hebrew text had from this period. The Hexapla’s value on this point cannot be overstated.

Finally, the independent versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion are entirely lost to history. Almost all access to these works depends on the marginal readings that come from the Tetrapla or similar texts that were ultimately excerpted and quoted from the Hexapla. As such, retrieving and reconstructing Origen’s textual work gives us access to Jewish Greek exegesis of the Hebrew text from the 1st–2nd centuries AD. The readings of the Three give us significant textual information for reconstructing the text histories of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Greek translations.

The first parallel Bible in history witnesses to our desire to order textual knowledge. Although the methods for such organization change over time, the desire to know the Scriptures through intense study of their copies continues. Origen and his followers stand at the headwaters of this stream in which Christians still work today. As then, the goal today is to heal the discord between copies.

Notes

1
For this history, see Alastair Hamilton, “In Search of the Most Perfect Text: The Early Modern Printed Polyglot Bibles from Alcalá (1510–1520) to Brian Walton (1654–1658),” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible: Volume 3: From 1450 to 1750, ed. Euan Cameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 138–156.

The Bestselling Reference Bible That Remade American Evangelicalism

By combining familiar and original material, the Scofield Reference Bible ushered in a theological sea change.

Daniel G. Hummel

It is a useful fact for trivia night that Oxford University Press, one of the world’s most prestigious academic publishers, has a bestselling book of all time that it doesn’t often celebrate. That bestseller is the Scofield Reference Bible, edited by C. I. Scofield, first published in 1909, updated in 1917, and revised in 1967. In its first few decades, the SRB sold more than two million copies and, by one estimate, has sold more than ten million copies in its lifetime. It still sells in various formats in dozens of languages.

These sales have influenced an entire religious subculture in the English-speaking world. Journalist Amy Frykholm’s recollection is shared by millions of Americans: “In my mind’s eye I see my grandmother’s Scofield Reference Bible, a text from which she read every day of her life, a text that told her of the coming of the rapture” (4). Indeed, the SRB’s widespread adoption by lay evangelicals since 1909 has made it something of a driver of U.S. evangelical and fundamentalist culture writ large.

The SRB popularized the teaching of an any-moment “rapture” event (even as Scofield’s notes only employed the term once without defining it) and unobtrusively introduced readers to key teachings of dispensationalism, the theological tradition known for advancing biblical literalism, a strong Church-Israel distinction, and a sequence of distinct dispensations of God’s relationship with humanity that will end with a pretribulational rapture and a premillennial return of Jesus.

How original was Scofield?

Recent accounts of the SRB acknowledge the Bible’s importance in the history of evangelicalism. To reference the most recent, historian Donald Akenson concludes that it “became deeply embedded in American culture” (435). Other scholars agree, which is why the SRB has such a prominent place in the history of annotated Bibles.¹

But a deeper question allows us to explore afresh some fundamental aspects of the SRB, including its origin, importance, and legacy: exactly how original (or not) was it? Historians, not to mention theologians and other informed observers inside and outside of the dispensationalist tradition, do not agree. Within religious circles, where historic creeds are important reference points, “originality” is a loaded term. And in non-religious scholarly circles, continuity is hotly debated. Assessing the SRB’s originality and continuity can supply a new appreciation for how it changed the world and why it has remained relevant more than a century after its publication.

The story of the SRB’s originality (or not) should be assessed at three levels:

How much did it reflect American Protestant assumptions in the early twentieth century?
How much did it reflect the teachings of what I call the Moody Movement, or the proto-dispensationalist movement, of which Scofield was a leader?
How much of it was idiosyncratic to Scofield himself?

A photo of C. I. Scofield — C. I. Scofield (1843–1921)

Most studies of the SRB begin with the man who produced it, Cyrus Scofield. Much has been made of Scofield, whose biographical details have been debated. Especially for his opponents, they have also been used as fodder to dismiss his writings.

My contention is that the figure of Scofield matters less than asking how much of what ultimately made its way into the SRB was original (and in what way) and how much was continuous with previous teachings in the American Protestant circles Scofield inhabited. The explanation for the SRB’s stunning sales and cultural success lies, in part, in the fact that answers to all of three of these questions are multifaceted and complex.

The early twentieth-century context

Historian Brendan Pietsch is correct when he writes that one key aspect to the success of the SRB was that “in its basic theology it reflected the beliefs and impulses of nonspecific American Protestantism, particularly among the laity” (178). In other words, it succeeded because it fit right in. On everything from the importance of conversion and evangelization to the Christian life to the essential reliability of the Biblical text, Scofield sounded like a “nonspecific” early-twentieth century Protestant. Moreover, he did so while presenting his findings as modern, “based on ‘a new and vast exegetical and expository literature,’” as he wrote in his Bible’s preface.

In other words, the SRB was successful precisely because on many topics it did not question received views and presented those received views as justifiable in a modern intellectual climate. This includes views that are rejected today but were commonplace in the early twentieth century, including the “gap theory” interpretation of Genesis 1 and the racist assumption of a “curse of Ham” (see Scofield’s note for Gen. 9:1).

Scofield divided Genesis 1:1–3 into three sections, allowing for a presentation of the “gap” theory of an undisclosed but vast amount of time between each verse. As note two explains, “The first creative act refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geologic ages.” Google Books

Neither of these views fell outside the American Protestant mainstream of the time and Scofield was merely one proponent of both. Had they been more fringe, or had Scofield presented novel views on historic teachings in too particular a manner, the SRB’s appeal would have shrunk and its status would have become isolated as a “Scofieldian” production rather than a broadly evangelical one.

We can see this in action by comparing Scofield’s work to a contemporaneous Bible which represented some of the same unique theological teachings that influenced him. Scofield’s work was indebted, in part, to the teachings of John Nelson Darby, the influential leader of the Exclusive Brethren movement and the prodigious writer and articulator of such doctrines as the any-moment rapture. While the two men never met, we know that Scofield was familiar with Darby’s writing and the Exclusive Brethren movement. Scofield cites Brethren in the SRB acknowledgements and Brethren helped to fund and bring it to publication. Yet, as historian Crawford Gribben has recently argued, Scofield did not regard himself as beholden to Darby’s ideas. The notes presented Darby’s teachings in a “radically revised, simplified, and contracted form”² intended to apply to American evangelical rather than British Exclusive Brethren concerns.

The title to the “Jefferson Bible.” Illustration by Josh Koch.
The Jefferson Bible and the Faith of an American Founder
Thomas Jefferson’s cut-and-paste version of the Gospels reveals important facets of the famous founder’s faith and the Bible’s role in American history.
Thomas S. Kidd

But Scofield was not the only biblical annotator working to adapt Darby’s teachings. Another person influenced by Darby was Fredrick W. Grant, perhaps the most prominent U.S.-based Exclusive Brethren at the turn of the century. Grant had produced his own seven-volume Numerical Bible from 1888–1905 that we can see as a similar project to Scofield’s. Grant’s work included expository notes, but the nature of these notes was different from Scofield’s. Grant combined intricate numerology and typology, a novel way to number verses, and Exclusive Brethren teachings about ecclesiology and pneumatology more aligned with Darby that made his Numerical Bible a robust offering, but one destined for a niche market. Grant’s work is notable today mostly because, according to one of the first chroniclers of the SRB, Scofield kept Grant’s work by his side constantly as a reference.

The role of the ‘Moody Movement’

Unlike Grant’s Bible, the SRB was not so novel as to become niche. What it did do was offer a distinctively conservative presentation of Biblical teachings that aligned with Exclusive Brethren emphases and the growing premillennial convictions of conservative evangelicalism in the United States. And it did all this in an emerging fundamentalist-modernist polarization of American Protestantism. This conservative evangelicalism was, as historian Michael Hamilton has defined it, essentially the outgrowth of Dwight Moody’s era-defining revivals, missions work, and institution-building.

The “Moody Movement” incubated the first Bible institutes, the first wave of nondenominational global missions agencies, and was powered by the robust Bible and prophecy conference circuits such as the famed Niagara Bible Conference (1875–1897). Scofield himself was at one time the pastor of Moody’s own church in Massachusetts, helped found the Central American Mission, and founded the Philadelphia School of the Bible (now Cairn University).

D. L. Moody speaking to a group at Northfield Camp in Massachusetts. Wikimedia Commons

The Moody Movement was more distinctive than “nonspecific American Protestantism” on a number of fronts, each of which made it into Scofield’s notes. The Moody Movement was generally premillennialist in eschatology (breaking with the dominant postmillennial Protestant consensus a generation before), was committed to Keswick or “Higher Life” teachings (breaking with both confessionally Reformed sanctification and Wesleyan perfectionism), rejected Darwinian evolution (Scofield’s note for Gen. 1:26 declared, “Man was created, not evolved”) and young earth creationism (Scofield preferred to interpret the “days” of Gen. 1 as “a [longer] period of time marked off by a beginning and an ending”).

Moody and Scofield represented a thoroughly interdenominational movement, focused on parachurch activity.

Moreover, Moody and Scofield represented a thoroughly interdenominational movement, focused on parachurch activity, with a default to congregationalism in church polity and structure allowing for the mixing of such disparate denominational members in the movement as Exclusive Brethren, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Stone-Campbellites, and some early Pentecostals.

These movement-level distinctives are what helped demarcate the SRB reading public and friendly churches from American Protestantism as a whole. Landing when it did in 1909 and, especially, with the revised 1917 edition, this meant that the SRB’s legacy would both be limited (to the more conservative wing of the emerging fundamentalist-modernist polarization), but would also permeate that fundamentalist wing and disproportionately shape the baseline interpretations of verses and passages for those within the fundamentalist fold.

Scofield’s committee of “consulting editors” was another testament to this specific strand of Protestantism to which he belonged. It was made up of Moody Movement leaders representing key institutions (Moody Bible Institute, Toronto Bible Training School—now Tyndale University) and luminaries (Arthur T. Pierson, Arno C. Gaebelein—the latter of which assisted Scofield on writing most of the prophecy-related notes), among others.

The front plate of the *Scofield Reference Bible*’s 1917 edition provides a detailed description of the resources Scofield is adding to the Biblical text as well as a list of the consulting editors, significant as much for what the list signals as for exactly how instrumental these individuals were to the substance of the SRB. Google Books

The extent to which these consulting editors—excepting Gaebelein—directly aided Scofield in the substantial creation of the SRB is limited. More important to Scofield was establishing that he was indebted to, as his preface made clear, “the valuable suggestions and co-operation” of such an esteemed group of Moody Movement leaders whose names essentially vouched for the high quality of the final product.

Alongside the SRB’s interpretive commitments, the book helped to popularize new Bible reading techniques and technologies that had been gaining legitimacy in the preceding decades. Beyond extensive help notes at the bottom of the page intended for lay readers, Scofield introduced newly titled section headings that could play a significant interpretive role, as in the aforementioned case of the “gap” theory of Genesis 1:1–3 or the various headings declaring a new dispensation (see, for example, headings preceding Gen. 8:20–22 or Exod. 19:8).

Moreover, he offered an elaborate chain system of verses that ran down a central column of each page that created thousands of analog “hyperlinks” across the entire Biblical text, producing new associations, systematizations, and meanings for key terms including Israel, salvation, and antichrist. Scofield’s chain system, as Donald Akenson documents, emerged alongside similar systems such as that developed by Frank C. Thompson (in his Thompson Chain Reference Bible, first published in 1908).

Alongside the hundreds of notes, Scofield developed an extensive system of subject references. These created a vast internal architecture of biblical meaning and resemble something like an analog “hyperlink” system for establishing systematic meanings of words and passages. This instruction page was inserted more than a dozen times in the Bible, preceding each grouping of books (Pentateuch, Historical Books, Poetical Books, etc.). Google Books

Both Scofield and Thompson were indebted to the Biblical indexes and concordances developed in the previous thirty years by Augustus Strong and Robert Young which gained immediate widespread adoption by lay Christians. Scofield embedded each of these technologies in his own reference Bible to create, as he wrote in the 1917 introduction, a one-stop Biblical interpretive resource for “the plain people of God in their homes.”

Scofield’s unique contribution

Finally, there is Scofield himself. Born in 1843 in Michigan, he was living with relatives in Tennessee when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Scofield enlisted for a one-year term in the Confederate Army where he served at Antietam in September 1862. But, when he was conscripted, he prosecuted his own discharge on terms of bad health and being underage when he had enlisted. He spent the rest of the war in St. Louis and married into a wealthy Catholic family in 1866. His story is a rough one from this point: he was appointed a U.S. attorney, dismissed for corruption, became an alcoholic, and fled his home, separating permanently from his wife and two daughters.

In the midst he converted to Christianity and became a disciple of one of St. Louis’s most prominent pastors, James Brookes, who also happened to be one of the most significant adopters and promoters of Exclusive Brethren teachings in the U.S. Scofield was a quick learner and became a successful popularizer and co-organizer with Brooks, Moody, and many other prominent evangelicals of the era. Scofield had a gifted mind, learned and synthesized vast amounts of information, and worked tirelessly, amid significant health challenges, to complete his work.

He was also a socially conservative Christian who regarded theological and social truth as intertwined. Scofield spent much of his pastoring career in Dallas, Texas and by all accounts accepted the Jim Crow system of racial segregation then in force. Scofield preferred clear, distinct, and hierarchal categories and relations between concepts—between law and grace, periods of time, between goodness and sin, and between groups of people.

He was skeptical of social reform movements of all kinds and pessimistic about the prospect of international peace, socialism, ecumenism, or capitalism as solutions to sin and injustice. We might see socialism and capitalism on separate ends of an economic spectrum, but for Scofield both pointed toward a concerning consolidation of power and authority in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

We might see socialism and capitalism on separate ends of an economic spectrum, but for Scofield both pointed toward a concerning consolidation of power.

Consolidation was both politically and prophetically significant—it presaged more difficulty for Christians and the fulfillment of worsening conditions on earth before the return of Jesus. Scofield’s views permeated his notes in ways obvious and implicit, whether it was an imposition of law-grace distinctions across all parts of the Bible, or his endorsement of the curse of Ham mentioned above.

Scofield came into funding and opportunity for the SRB through his involvement with Exclusive Brethren businessmen and prophecy conference circuits in the 1890s and early 1900s. By 1902 he had secured some support from benefactors to quit his pastoral duties and dedicate all of his time to the production of his Bible. He spent the years 1905–1908 largely in Europe where he met Henry Frowde, the famous publisher of Oxford University Press who was also at work developing a new North American branch for the press. Scofield and Frowde came to an agreement in April of 1909 that landed the SRB in hands of readers on both sides of the Atlantic (though with a much larger built-in audience in the United States).

Taking all three dimensions together, the SRB could not be what it became without a mix of continuity and originality relative to American Protestantism in 1909: the Moody movement as the dominant buying market for the Bible and the specific efforts of Scofield himself (and those he surrounded himself with).

Akenson declares that the SRB was “a successful rewriting of the scriptures… a new Bible,” (427) which seems too strong a claim given the significant lines of continuity Scofield advanced from both Exclusive Brethren and American Protestant circles. Historians R. Todd Mangum and Marc Sweetnam, on the other hand, conclude that Scofield’s theology “is characterized by (1) social conservatism; (2) irenic evangelicalism, and (3) distinctive dispensationalism” (133). This gets closer to the analysis presented here, though it was not just the theological but social, cultural, and publishing context that shaped these commitments.

Perhaps the most iconic product of early dispensationalism was its detailed charts, many of which illustrated prophetic timelines. The most recognizable were those by American Baptist pastor Clarence Larkin (1850–1924). Image source

Assessing the legacy

We can assess the legacy of the SRB in the subsequent century using the same levels of analysis as we have used so far. For Scofield himself, the SRB made him a singular name in the Moody Movement and, though he died in 1921 before the fundamentalist movement had fully cohered, he was a household name there, as well. In the circles of fundamentalism where it took hold, the book had a unique shaping power on lay and pulpit Biblical interpretations—theologically, culturally, and devotionally. As the historian Paul Boyer observed, Scofield was “a towering figure” and his Bible “more than any other single work solidified the premillennial movement” (97).

Yet on the flip side, Scofield himself became a lightning rod in other sectors of fundamentalism. Perhaps most significantly, the coiner of the term “dispensationalism” was a disaffected fan of Scofield named Philip Mauro, who came to reject proto-dispensationalist theology in part because of reading the SRB. While Scofield’s notes on eschatology did not align with Mauro’s views, other facets of the SRB were even more alarming to him. Picking up the Bible for the first time, Mauro could not make it past the notes for Genesis 1 which allowed for a nonliteral reading of “days” of creation. In an out-of-print book from 1919 titled A Kingdom Which Cannot Be Shaken he wrote, “I found to my surprise and disappointment that these notes made room for, and indeed rather favored, the absurd notion that the ‘days’ of Genesis 1 were long periods—ages—of time” (10–11).

A passionate advocate of a six-day reading of the creation account, Mauro could not brook difference on this issue. His depiction of Scofield and his notes as “modern” and “clever” were not meant as compliments. As later twentieth century doggerel from dispensationalist opponents attests, Scofield remained polarizing. A satire based on the famous hymn “On Christ the Solid Rock” runs like this: “My hope is built on nothing less / Than Scofield’s notes and Moody Press / I dare not trust this Thompson’s chain / But wholly lean on Scofield’s fame.”

“My hope is built on nothing less
Than Scofield’s notes and Moody Press.”

The fundamentalist reaction to Scofield bleeds into movement-level analysis of the SRB’s legacy. In theological terms, the SRB cemented the ascendance, for most of the century after its publication, of futurist, pre-tribulational premillennialism as the dominant eschatological position among a large swath of fundamentalism and post-World War II evangelicalism (and relevant still today). Scofield had been part of a resurgent premillennial movement in the late 19th century that then splintered over debates on the nature and timing of end-times events, leading, among other things, to the ending of the famous Niagara Bible Conference in 1897.

The *New Scofield Reference Bible*, published in 1967, was the culmination of more than a decade of scholarly collaboration. The editorial committee made thousands of changes to the 1917 edition, including revisions away from key Scofieldian emphases such as typologies. The committee also added notes that included tacitly endorsing Zionism (see note for Gen. 12:3) that reflected changing world events since 1917.

The SRB appeared at an opportune time to assure that Scofield’s views prevailed and became more permanently embedded in the Moody Movement and, later, in large parts of the Billy Graham-oriented evangelicalism. For his part, Scofield articulated his own end-times position into his notes and did not acknowledge other views. The scholarship of later evangelical premillennialists such as George Ladd, Carl Henry, and James Montgomery Boice—among many others later in the 20th century—had to contend with the SRB’s massive reach and success in shaping the premillennial movement.

Finally, how significant was the SRB’s broader national reach in the United States and beyond? We can say without a doubt it has contributed to dispensationalism being, as one historian described it, “perhaps the most resilient popular theological movement in American history” (246). The SRB’s continuing popularity is a testament to its impermeability to being dismissed, especially in communities where it has already gained authority.

Yet a truly national and international legacy is harder to discern. Its influence on global missions and successive generations of Christianity in the Global South is evident, but not yet assessed systematically by scholars. In terms of the United States, Akenson concludes his study of the SRB by describing it as “the ur-text, the script and scripture, of twentieth-century American white Christian nationalism” (436). This would be remarkable if true.

Scofield and today’s ‘Christian Nationalism’

Yet as alluring as it might be to draw a straight line from Scofield to Trump, such claims to the SRB’s significance should be resisted. We can too easily commit the violation that anthropologist Susan Harding warned about the “internally ‘orientalized’” (390) othering of American fundamentalism, assuming static and largely unchanging influences in the twentieth century that do not account for, in the case of the SRB and Christian nationalism, an intervening century of dynamic development, reforms, splits, and reassessments of theology including the SRB.

The SRB resides theologically and ideologically distant from much of what is commonly referred to as “Christian nationalism” today. It would certainly have been news to Scofield, as well as to contributing editors James Gray (president of Moody Bible Institute) and Arno C. Gaebelein, all of whom received critiques from other Protestants for not being nationalistic enough during World War I (1914–1918). Those charges, lobbed by modernist critics of premillennialism such as Shirley Jackson Case, who equated premillennialism with political quietism, the Moody Movement’s relationship to American power and war was complex in the 1910s.

It was not until the 1940s—World War II and the start of the Cold War—that evangelicalism developed a more thorough nationalism, and still decades later that the more familiar politicized dispensationalism of Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye shaped evangelical activism at the grassroots. By the 1980s we are a long way from the SRB’s original context and, indeed, a long way from its direct (though certainly there was indirect) influence on these developments.

Today’s leading advocates of Christian nationalism tend to represent the theological tradition, not of Scofield and the SRB, but of his critics (confessionally Reformed and Pentecostal postmillennialists).

Today’s leading advocates of Christian nationalism represent the theological tradition, not of Scofield and the SRB, but of his critics.

Conclusion

In the end, the Scofield Reference Bible remains significant as ushering in a theological sea change among lay evangelicals in the early twentieth century—and not because everything Scofield introduced was new. The layering of familiar and original, the addition of distinctive teachings alongside lines of continuity, created a text that indeed has shaped far more of American Protestantism than Scofield could have imagined.

An earlier version of this article said Scofield’s notes did not use the term “rapture,” but it was used once at Rev. 19:9 (without definition).

Notes

1
Other recent accounts that agree with Akenson: R. Todd Mangum and Mark Sweetnam declare that the SRB “permeates evangelical culture and thought” (The Scofield Bible: Its History and Impact on the Evangelical Church (Colorado Springs, CO: Paternoster, 2012), 3–4), while Brendan Pietsch’s study of early twentieth century dispensationalism hazards the judgment that the SRB is “perhaps the most influential annotated Bible in the twentieth century” (Dispensational Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 174). A recent biography of John Nelson Darby by Crawford Gribben states that it “circulated in the tens of millions to define the movement of ‘fundamentalism’” (J. N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), 6).
2
Gribben, J. N. Darby, 116.

Bible Translations Are for People

Accuracy is often thought to be the main criterion for good translation, but acceptability is just as important.

Drew Maust

On the more lighthearted side of the internet one finds the meme, “Americans will use anything except the metric system.” The earliest recorded illustration of this assertion is a sign which describes deer as the height of a bicycle and weighing as much as 800 hamburgers. As an American who has lived abroad for many years, I find this funny because it’s true. I readily admit my own inability to stop thinking in terms of (American) football fields.

A matter of taste

Why doesn’t the U.S. adopt the metric system? One may argue that it’s objectively better owing to its simplicity, consistency, precision, ease of learning, and worldwide adoption. Despite all this, we the American people are reluctant to adopt what may be perceived as a “foreign” system for fear of loss of identity or for financial reasons. Admittedly, it’s easier to keep using the system we’ve always used. So, for all the benefits of the metric system, it has yet to find wide acceptance among the average one-and-half-bicycle-tall American.

This situation stands in contrast to academic and scientific circles where the metric system has long been the accepted standard. We are then left waiting for the metric system to trickle down, if ever.

Here we find an analogy for the reception of the Bible. Advances in biblical studies are often slow to trickle down from the ivory tower to the page in the pew. Sacred texts like the Bible are notoriously resistant to change. People do not like when the Bible as they know it changes. As a result, translators sometimes avoid risk in favor of continuity with the past (tradition). In this, they are accountable to a variety of stakeholders, including a larger target audience and external partners like a publisher. Translators generally do not have total freedom to insist on what is arguably an objectively better translation, or one more precise, consistent, simpler, or representative of the latest scholarly thinking.

This interplay reveals that Bible translation is complex. It involves taste and could be likened to culinary art. Translation is both a human process and a tradition-laden, culturally mediated product intended for human consumption. To better appreciate this, let’s consider the example of “leprosy.”

The case of leprosy

“I once had leprosy” was not the comment I was expecting from the Cameroonian translator whose translation of the Gospel of Luke I was helping to check. You what now?! “Yes, many years ago I contracted leprosy… but I received treatment and was cured.”

In the Bible, we find multiple references to an unwelcome condition called tsaraat in Hebrew and lepra (or lepros) in Greek, traditionally translated “leprosy” (e.g., Lev. 13:2; Matt. 8:1–3). For decades, however, translators and biblical scholars have been itching to point out that the “leprosy” of the Bible is not what we today call leprosy or, more precisely, Hansen’s disease (see especially Hulse 1975). For example, under the entry for tsaraat, Cline’s Dictionary of Classical Hebrew emphatically states “not leprosy,” after providing the definition, “skin disease, with scaling as one of its symptoms.”

The reference work A Guide to Bible Translation cites “leprosy” as “perhaps the most significant case” of anachronism in Bible translation. As a result, some contemporary English Bibles now translate tsaraat as a “serious” (CSB) or “defiling” (NRSVue) “disease” where it refers, for example, to a skin condition in Leviticus. The NKJV and NASB, by contrast, are somewhat unique in continuing to use “leprosy” (or “leprous”), thereby favoring continuity with a centuries long legacy even if they may supply footnotes on occasion for clarification.

In the New Testament, the translation of lepra is slightly more complicated than we can explore in significant detail here. Nevertheless, it may be an exception that proves the point about continuity. Consider the recent NRSVue at Matthew 8:2 which leads the way towards healing potential mistranslation with its rendering “[person] with a skin disease,” thereby breaking with the “leprous” legacy of the KJV and its family of revisions the ASV, RSV, and NRSV.

Here, as is often the case in Bible translation, biblical studies was overruled by popular opinion (and pocketbooks).

On the other hand, most New Testament translations have been much slower to touch this issue. While a solo New Testament translation like Scot McKnight’s Second Testament (ST) can venture “a scaly-skin man,” those done by committee, like the CSB, are less willing to cleanse their translation (“a man with leprosy”), preferring instead to inform the careful reader via a footnote (“Gk lepros; a term for various skin diseases”). The CSB’s predecessor, the HCSB, had in fact experimented with “skin disease” in both the Old Testament and New Testament, but the CSB dutifully returned to “leprosy” in the New Testament in favor of more traditional language. Here, as is often the case in Bible translation, biblical studies was overruled by popular opinion (and pocketbooks).

Preferring ‘leprosy’ in Africa

When I’ve checked translation drafts of the Bible into African languages, all teams except one have preferred to translate tsaraat and lepra with traditional local terms for “leprosy.” Despite lengthy conversations about lexicons, anachronism, and accuracy, only one team decided to adopt a more general rendering like “skin disease,” and that was just for the Old Testament.

The reasons for this are many. First, there is personal experience (not unlike the appeal to bicycles and hamburgers): “We know this disease. Either we’ve had it, or we know someone who’s had it. We have a name for it, and it connects better than something generic and weak,” a translator might explain. It is worth noting as well that while leprosy is found the world over, those affected by it have not experienced the same level of stigmatization and ostracization everywhere. Contexts influenced by Islamic culture, for example, have been known to show greater tolerance towards those with the disease. Second, a traditional rendering maintains continuity with the millennia long tradition of “leprosy” which started with the Septuagint and passed to numerous national languages through the Vulgate. Third, in New Testament translation, it can sound ridiculous recommending against translating with “leprosy” when the Greek word is lepra; the cognate form betrays us even if the first-century meaning was more general. Lastly, it’s worth remembering that traditional local equivalents for medical conditions may be equally general in meaning as far as they may reflect a similarly pre-scientific understanding of observable conditions.

The counterpoint about anachronism was not well received by one team, taken instead as an assault on the Bible. In a way, it is an assault on the Bible—the Bible as some have always known it, that is. The charge of anachronism puts into question sacred texts as fixed and never changing. And so, we start to see why Bible translations have not fully healed themselves of “leprosy.”

Acceptability

Though it sometimes surprises ordinary Bible readers, this polyphony of perspectives demonstrates that Bible translation is never as simple as transferring a Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek lexeme from a lexicon to a lectionary. Translation helps series like the UBS Handbook and SIL’s Translator’s Notes recognize that more is at stake than simply finding the best, most technically accurate rendering.

Accuracy is but one part of this creative process we call translation; another is finding a translation that works, one that is acceptable to the translating community as a whole and meets agreed upon goals. Commenting on Leviticus 13, for example, the UBS Handbook notes that “in some modern versions… the word ‘leprosy’ is still used because the alternative is considered ‘too heavy’ or ‘too awkward.’” Reading this, we may wonder “too heavy, too awkward” for whom? For people. Too heavy for people to process (“malignant skin disease” [NEB]); too awkward for people to read (“scaly-skin man” [ST]). The criteria of heaviness and awkwardness are decidedly human-ward qualities.

“Leprosy” in J. B. Phillips’s *New Testament in Modern English*, rev. ed. (1972)

In her classic textbook for Bible translators, SIL senior translation consultant Katy Barnwell identifies the four qualities of a “good translation” as accuracy, clarity, naturalness, and acceptability.¹ From decades of experience, Barnwell wisely acknowledges that “a translation that for some reason is not accepted by the intended audience will not achieve its purpose, even though it is accurate, clear, and natural.”

This criterion of acceptability is enshrined in the Guidelines for Interconfessional Cooperation in Translating the Bible (1968; 1987) which states that “translations will be carried out in close cooperation, with the aim that the new text will be acceptable to, and be used by all Christians and Christian communities who speak the language into which the translation is being made.”

Similarly, the Forum of Bible Agencies International’s Basic Principles and Procedures for Bible Translation urges translators “to test the translation as extensively as possible in the receptor community to ensure that it communicates accurately, clearly and naturally, keeping in mind the sensitivities and experience of the receptor audience.”

UBS translation consultant Carl Gross even goes so far as to suggest that:

“acceptability” is a predominant criterion of translation… although it is seldom, if ever, acknowledged as such. In those instances where an accurate, clear, or natural rendering is deemed not to be acceptable to the receptor audience, this fourth principle comes to the fore and generally, if not always, carries the day.

So, we find in Bible translation a need for considerations beyond technical accuracy. The interconnected qualities of a “good” translation are regularly in tension; it is for translators to seek creative balance and compensate for inevitable translation loss. Where acceptability increases, accuracy may decrease and vice versa. This reveals the complex, Janus-faced nature of translation, being both source-oriented and target-oriented. On the target-oriented side, acceptability, naturalness, and clarity look to people while the criterion of accuracy looks to the source.

The interconnected qualities of a “good” translation are regularly in tension.

In other words, that which is acceptable, natural, and clear is largely determined in relation to the end user, the target audience. By contrast, accuracy, once defined by translation stakeholders, is largely gauged in relation to source material. Taken together, this means that even a translation with intentional misprints, such as the edition of the King James Bible prepared for King Charles’ coronation, can on occasion be considered more acceptable than one in which typos are corrected.

The ‘turn’ in translation

The 1960s represent a “turn” in the history of Bible translation on these issues as emerging translation studies gave rise to more target-oriented approaches. Historically, theologians and biblical scholars (as well as the earliest Bible translators) have been for the most part source-oriented, focused on the source text and on bringing the reader to the world of the Bible (what is sometimes referred to as a foreignizing approach). This approach prioritizes perceived accuracy but becomes myopic if it ignores the human participants in the process and fails to recognize their impact on and use of translations.

Today, we find in Barnwell that three out of four qualities of a “good translation” are target-oriented (clear, natural, and acceptable) while only one is source-oriented (accuracy). Yes, all translations represent a delicate balancing act and blend of these factors, but, in the end, translation is for humans not for translation’s sake. The goal is obviously not to produce the most technically accurate translation that no one uses! Translation scholar Gideon Toury therefore suggests that translations exist on a continuum running from “adequate” (adopting the linguistic and cultural norms of the source text) to “acceptable” (adopting the norms of the target text), but they cannot be wholly either or neither; there’s always a blend.

The four qualities outlined above are fundamentally subjective even if mixed with elements of objectivity (e.g., the quality of a recording in an audio Bible). Unsurprisingly, translation scholars continue to debate the qualities of a “good” translation as well as how to assess quality in translation. For example, some have suggested replacing the criteria of clear, accurate, natural, and acceptable with the criteria of trustworthy, appropriate, understandable, and appealing. Here “appropriate” supersedes “acceptable” to include the idea of “fit for purpose.”²

Regardless of terminology, we recognize the importance of laying out one’s criteria of evaluation and identifying implicit cultural values and expectations. Additionally, because the criteria of a “good” translation are still hotly debated, we may rightfully concede that there is no such thing as the “best” translation. Which artwork is best? What is the best meal? All translations can be evaluated by any number of criteria before being improved upon. Quality is a continuum. As a guide, we may aim for a consensus view in dialogue with relevant stakeholders.

Detail at Luke 1 from the earliest datable copy of the complete Bible in English (14th c.). Egerton MS 618 (f. 35v)
Five Decisions Every Bible Translator Must Make
Knowing the hard decisions Bible translators face inspires gratitude for our Bibles and encourages us to read them.
Peter J. Gurry

People win

Writing in 1960 on the question of “leprosy” in Bible translation, the medical doctor K. Gramberg expressed in alternate terms this tension in how to define a “good” translation:

What should count more, [the translator’s] responsibility as philologist and theologian, or Christian compassion for those who are shunned by society? Or does he agree with the linguist who wrote to me and said: “Even though this is a medical and social question of the greatest importance, the linguistic and theological factors cannot be neglected.” Is this entirely true? Is it absolutely impossible to rank Christian compassion above linguistic, historical, or theological motives for the sake of the happiness of so many tragic folk?

For some, like Gramberg’s linguist, maintaining “leprosy” in translation is preferable because it is perceived to be more accurate, which in this case may simply mean that it is a translation that maintains continuity with the past. For others, like Dr. Gramberg, “leprosy” is unacceptable, not only because of anachronism (accuracy), but because of its contribution in some contexts to the stigmatization of those affected by Hansen’s disease today.

For certain translators, as shown earlier, maintaining “leprosy” is acceptable because of its potential to connect with the target audience. This is in addition to a preference for continuity. By comparison, one doctor lauded the publication of the New English Bible (NEB) in 1970 as “an historic event” in part for the way it broke with the traditional “leprosy” rendering of the KJV and RSV in Leviticus, offering instead, “malignant skin-disease.”

Some others have suggested that the best way to handle tsaraat in translation is not to translate at all, but to transliterate, thereby forcing tsaraat into the target language.³ This approach has been tried and, in the case of Malay, has been found wanting for reasons of acceptability:

The old Malay versions rendered tsara’ath by kusta = leprosy. The 1939 version changed over to transliteration. But even pastors trained by that version’s translator have not accepted the change. They preferred kusta which did have a meaning to “tsaraath disease” which had none, and which they therefore had to explain again and again, usually by equating it with… kusta. So the means defeated the end!

What this comes down to is the difficulty of deciding, like in the case of the Korean translation of “leprosy,” “whether the Bible would take the initiative and lead the language of its users, or adopt the language widely used by the greater number of people.” Guess who most often wins? People! Because translation is for people.

Limits to acceptability

Are there limits to acceptability? Yes. Various stakeholders determine these limits. As a translation consultant who checks and approves translations of the Bible, to whom am I accountable? Personally, my loyalties are multiple: to God above all; my conscience; the biblical authors and scribes; churches who support my ministry; organizations with which I’m affiliated; the historical legacy of preceding Bible translators and translations; contemporary translators and translations; translating communities; and the global Church.

Ultimately, I am helping to prepare a meal that is not primarily intended for me. It needs to be acceptable while also conforming to best practices concerning quality, just like a commercial kitchen must meet certain base standards but is welcome to serve any food that is acceptable to customers. It is not for the customer alone to decide how or what they eat; the government and its regulatory bodies are designed to prevent customers from eating foods that are unhealthy or harmful.

Translation, like cooking, is an art with multiple correct or acceptable end products, depending on multiple factors including the customer, the occasion, and the purpose. Indeed, both the kitchen and the consumer have a role to play in the food that is prepared. Bible translation is not so different.

Consider again the multiple and diverse stakeholders participating in conversations about quality in Bible translation. When it comes to translating tsaraat and lepra, they can include doctors, scholars, stylists, farmers, grandmothers, people affected by Hansen’s disease, etc. These stakeholders can easily be forgotten in debates over Bible translation philosophy.

I am grateful for organizations and platforms that raise awareness about these issues since we all have a role to play in ongoing discussions about Bible translation and quality. As co-heirs of Scripture, we must value each other’s perspective, showing flexibility in matters of charity, and listening well to clearly articulated matters of conscience.

Bible translation, like cooking, is complex; it is art mingled with science.

Bible translation, like cooking, is complex; it is art mingled with science. Let us be mindful of meals we will not eat, for translation decisions, like food choices, do in fact involve the “happiness of human beings” as one author poignantly noted on the subject of leprosy in the Bible.

Conclusion

Today, the Christian Scriptures continue on their trajectory towards accessibility for all people. The diversity and multiplicity of biblical texts and the versions they’ve inspired bear witness to the importance of the criterion of acceptability. Translation is for people. Bible translation exists because untranslated biblical texts are unacceptable to Bible consumers whose language repertoire does not include Hebrew and Greek or whose preferred mode of communication is oral or signed.

My late grandmother would not have accepted a single leaf of Codex Leningrad or Codex Vaticanus as her daily Bible; but she was right at home in the branches of her beloved KJV, a translation whose legacy continues to contribute to the happiness of human beings, anachronisms and all.

Notes

1
Katharine Barnwell, Bible Translation: An Introductory Course in Translation Principles, 4th ed. (Dallas, TX: SIL International, 2020), 36.
2
Sebastian Floor and Bryan Harmelink, “Multimodality in Bible Translation: Could It Contribute to Quality Assurance?” in Quality in Translation: A Multi-Threaded Fabric, ed. Stephen Watters and Reinier de Blois (Dallas: SIL International, 2023), 162–164.
3
Oliver W. Hasselblad and Olaf K. Skinsnes, “The Fullness of Time Has Come-Now Also for Leprosy” Notes on Translation 47 (1973): 12–15.

Putting the New Papyrus of Jesus’ Sayings in Context

While exciting and important, much about a recently published, headline-grabbing fragment is not unique.

Ian N. Mills

Late last year, the Egyptian Exploration Society grabbed headlines when it announced the publication of a new cache of ancient papyri from Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. The 87th volume of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri contained several pieces of interest to scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity.

Among the newly published fragments were a vaguely “gnostic” speech attributed to Jesus (P.Oxy. 5576), part of an apocryphal dialogue between Jesus and Mary Magdalene (P.Oxy. 5577), and the remains of several otherwise unknown ancient biographies. The only item to generate headlines, however, was a small papyrus containing a portion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. This fragment was no mere copy of Matthew’s Gospel. The papyrus now known to scholars as P.Oxy. 5575 is a combination of traditions about Jesus otherwise found in Matthew, Luke, and the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas.

The fragment’s significance

It’s this combination of diverse gospel materials that caught the attention of the wider-public. Upon the publication of P.Oxy. 5575, Michael Holmes, one of the fragment’s editors, explained its significance in this way:

What makes this a big deal? This is the first known occurrence of the weaving together of material similar to Luke and Matthew, on the one hand, and material similar to—and otherwise known only from—the Gospel of Thomas, on the other. In this significant respect, 5575 is unique among all known papyri.

“With a sharp enough scalpel,” it’s been said, “everything is unique.” And, certainly, no other fragment is exactly like P.Oxy. 5575. In a technical sense, Holmes is correct: There are no other papyri with precisely this combination of gospel parallels. But, in almost every other respect, this fragment is not unique at all. It seems to me that Holmes’s answer might leave readers with a misleading impression about the state of the evidence for other works that, like P.Oxy. 5575, combine traditions about Jesus without respect for canonical/non-canonical boundaries.

There are no other papyri with precisely this combination of gospel parallels. But, in almost every other respect, this fragment is not unique at all.

My goal here is neither to minimize the importance of this new piece of early Christian literature nor to exaggerate the evidence for similar works but, rather, to help the reader understand P.Oxy. 5575 by setting it into a larger comparative context. This new fragment of Jesus’ preaching is one of many early Christian compositions to bring together material about Jesus found in multiple gospels, including gospels beyond the canonical four.

Works that combine canonical material

The first set of helpful analogies are early fragments that combine some or all the canonical Gospels. Perhaps the best-known example is the Dura Fragment (P. Dura 10), a third century parchment from Dura Europos on the border of Roman Syria. The Dura Fragment contains only fifteen legible lines, written on one side of a parchment roll. These lines describe the women at Jesus’ crucifixion and introduce Joseph of Arimathea.

But the Dura Fragment doesn’t correspond to any known gospel. Rather, it carefully interweaves wording from the four canonical Gospels to produce a unique version of the story. For instance, one line reads “…there came a person (Matt. 27:57), being a councilor (Luke 23:50), from Erinmathea (sic), a city of Judea (Luke 23:51), his name was Joseph (Matt. 27:57), good and righteous (Luke 23:50), being a disciple of Jesus in secret because of his fear of the Jews (John 19:38) and he was expecting the kingdom of God (Luke 23:51).”

Almost every word of the Dura Fragment can be traced back to one of the canonical Gospels, but the result is an intricately interwoven tapestry of the four.

Similarly, the so-called “Fayyum Fragment” (P. Vienna G. 2325) combines elements from Matthew and Mark to produce a unique version of Jesus’ prediction of Peter’s denial. The Matthean phrasing, “I will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered” (Matt. 26:31) is followed by the distinctively Markan phrasing, “Before a cock twice crows…” (Mark 14:27). Like P.Oxy. 5575, the wording of the Fayyum Fragment does not match any of the canonical Gospels exactly, but the parallels with multiple gospels are undeniable.

As the Dura Fragment and the Fayyum Fragment make clear, P.Oxy. 5575 is one of many early Christian works that re-combined and re-arranged traditions about Jesus.

Works that combine canonical and non-canonical material

These two examples are combinations of gospels now-considered canonical, whereas P.Oxy. 5575 combines the synoptics with material found in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas. In this respect, the Greek fragments of Thomas found at Oxyrhynchus provide a better analogy for the newly discovered gospel fragment. The only complete manuscript of Thomas contains 114 sayings of Jesus in Coptic. About two-thirds of these sayings appear to be drawn from the canonical Gospels.

For dozens of additional sayings, however, there are no canonical parallels. Probably, the compiler of Thomas composed some of these non-canonical sayings from scratch, but parallels between Thomas’s non-canonical sayings and other early Christian sources suggest that the compiler drew on additional non-canonical gospels in composing the Gospel of Thomas. P.Oxy. 654, for instance, contains a saying of Jesus (GThom 2) that Clement of Alexandria says belonged to the non-canonical Gospel of the Hebrews (Stromateis 2.9.45; 5.14.96).

Gospel of the Hebrews	Thomas 2 (Greek; P.Oxy. 654)	Thomas 2 (Coptic)
The one who seeks will not stop until he finds. And when he finds, he will be amazed. And when he is amazed, he will reign. And when he reigns, he will rest.	Let the one who seeks not stop [seeking until] he finds. And when he finds, [he will be amazed. And] when he is amazed he will reign. And [when he reigns over everything] he will rest.	Let the one who seeks not stop seeking until he finds. And when he finds, he will be troubled. And when he is troubled, he will be amazed and will become king over everything.

Probably the compiler of Thomas drew this saying of Jesus from the non-canonical Gospel of the Hebrews. And in P.Oxy. 654, this saying sits alongside Thomas 3, a version of the saying found at Luke 17:20–25. Side-by-side, this fragment preserves a combination of canonical and non-canonical gospel material. In this respect, P.Oxy. 654 is a close parallel to what we find in P.Oxy. 5575.

Other good analogies include P.Oxy. 4009 and the Egerton Gospel (BL Egerton Papyrus 2). The former is a fragmentary papyrus containing parallels to Matthew 10:16, Luke 7:36–50, and a non-canonical conversation between Jesus and Peter cited by the preacher of Second Clement. The Egerton Gospel, likewise, weaves together sayings of Jesus found in John 5 and 10, several synoptic stories, and a story about Jesus sowing seeds on the banks of the Jordan that has no canonical parallel. We do not know what ancient readers called these gospels, but fragmentary remains provide additional evidence of early Christians combining canonical and non-canonical materials about Jesus.

Further examples

If we look beyond the papyri, there is more evidence for the combination of canonical and non-canonical Jesus traditions. The Epistle of the Apostles, for instance, is an early second century, theologically-orthodox composition. It contains a summary of Jesus’ nativity, life, death, and resurrection. Most of this gospel-summary corresponds to one or more of the canonical lives of Jesus. However, the author also includes a scene of Jesus as a school boy, found only in the non-canonical Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The result is a gospel-like narrative that, again, weaves together strands from both canonical and non-canonical books.

In the second half of the second century, a Christian teacher named Tatian composed his own gospel by interweaving stories from earlier gospels. Later Christians called Tatian’s composition “The Diatessaron,” which translates to “the [gospel] through the four [gospels].” Although Tatian himself seems to have revised the content and wording of his sources, almost every line of the Diatessaron can be attributed to one of the four now-canonical gospels. There are, however, a few important exceptions, most notably a passage attributed to Tatian’s Diatessaron as found in the fourth-century Commentary on the Gospel by Ephrem.

Ephrem, Comm. 14.24	Thomas 30 (Greek; P.Oxy 1)	Thomas 30 (Coptic)
…when he said, Where there is one, I [am there], lest all those who are solitary be sad. Where there is one, I [am there].¹	Jesus says, Where there are three, they are godless And where there is one-alone, I say I am with him.	Jesus says, Where there are three gods, they are gods. Where there are two or one, I am with him.

This saying of Jesus, not found in any manuscript of any canonical gospel, appears in the Gospel of Thomas. Like P.Oxy. 5575, therefore, either Tatian or one of Tatian’s sources must have combined canonical Jesus traditions with a saying otherwise known to us only from a non-canonical gospel.

There are, additionally, a few pieces of non-canonical material found in more-or-less complete manuscripts of the canonical Gospels. The copy of Matthew in Codex Sinaiticus, for instance, contains a version of Jesus’ “consider the lily” speech in Matthew 6:28 that says the lilies neither “card nor spin nor work,” precise phrasing otherwise only known from the Gospel of Thomas.

Portraits of the four evangelists from GA 773 (10th c.)
Why Are There Four Gospels in the Bible?
Despite tales of conspiracy, there are good historical and theological reasons why the Church recognized four—and only four—Gospels.
C. E. Hill

Likewise, the famous story of the “Woman Caught in Adultery,” according to Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wasserman’s study, was known from the non-canonical Gospel of the Hebrews. At some point in the second or third centuries, readers inserted this story into manuscripts of the canonical John. Of course, P.Oxy. 5575 seems to reflect a more thoroughly interwoven combination of diverse gospel traditions than what is found in anything preserved in the complete manuscripts from the fourth century. But these traces of gospel combinations show that some early readers were happy to bring together the words of Jesus as found in canonical and non-canonical gospels.

Conclusion

P.Oxy. 5575 is one of several pieces of early Christian literature that shows how some ancient readers collected and combined Jesus material otherwise found in canonical and non-canonical gospels.

All the analogies to P.Oxy. 5575 that we’ve considered above make up only a tiny fraction of our documentary evidence for early Christian gospel literature. The vast majority of Christian literary papyri are either readily identifiable with specific works (e.g., P.Oxy. 4) or clearly distinct from any known work (e.g., P.Oxy. 840). And the practice of harmonizing the text of the canonical Gospels is surprisingly uncommon in the papyri.

Still, P.Oxy. 5575 is one of several pieces of early Christian literature that shows how some ancient readers collected and combined Jesus material otherwise found in canonical and non-canonical gospels. In particular, this fragment is intriguing new evidence that some early Christians continued to re-write and re-arrange stories about Jesus in the same way that the authors of Matthew and Luke used earlier gospels. As I hope to have shown, P.Oxy. 5575 is not the only evidence for this practice. But it is important new evidence for this aspect of early Christian book culture.

Notes

1
Translation from Carmel McCarthy, Saint Ephrem’s Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron : An English Translation of Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Topics

Levels

Intermediate

A theory of Gospel origins

A theory of local texts of the Gospels

A tale of two churches

Alexandria

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Ephesus

A home for a homeless text

Notes

Traditional dating methods

Traces of subjectivity

Using computational modeling

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The future

Notes

Who is Origen?

What was the Hexapla?

Related

What was the Hexapla for?

The continuing importance of the Hexapla

Notes

How original was Scofield?

The early twentieth-century context

Related

The role of the ‘Moody Movement’

Scofield’s unique contribution

Assessing the legacy

Scofield and today’s ‘Christian Nationalism’

Conclusion

Notes

A matter of taste

The case of leprosy

Preferring ‘leprosy’ in Africa

Acceptability

The ‘turn’ in translation

Related

People win

Limits to acceptability

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Conclusion

Notes

The fragment’s significance

Works that combine canonical material

Works that combine canonical and non-canonical material

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Further examples

Related

Conclusion

Notes

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