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Editor's note: Bart Ehrman delivered the Kenneth W. Clark lectures at Duke Divinity School in 1997. This article, though slightly modified from the oral presentation, preserves the original flavor of the lecture. See also his first lecture.
Text and Tradition: The Role of New Testament Manuscripts in Early Christian Studies
The Kenneth W. Clark Lectures
Duke Divinity School
1997
Lecture Two: Text and Transmission: The Historical Significance of the "Altered" Text
Bart D. Ehrman
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Introduction
1. For most of its practitioners, the ultimate goal of textual criticism has been to reconstruct the original text of the New Testament. This conception of the field was exemplified in the work of Fenton John Anthony Hort, arguably the most brilliant mind to apply himself to the task, who focused his labors on a solitary objective: "to present exactly the original words of the New Testament, so far as they can now be determined from surviving documents." Hort construed this task in entirely negative terms: "nothing more than the detection and rejection of error."
2. No historian or exegete would deny the desirability of this objective; the words of an ancient author must be established before they can be interpreted. This became clear, I hope, in my last lecture, as I showed how the resolution of a textual problem can significantly affect exegesis, for example, by highlighing Mark's portrayal of Jesus as an angry man, Luke's portrayal of him as imperturbable, and the epistle to the Hebrews' portrayal of him as forsaken.
3. Nonetheless, for textual scholars a century after Hort to continue being obsessed exclusively with the "original" text is, in my judgment, completely myopic. For the manuscript tradition of the New Testament provides us with much more than remnants of the New Testament autographs; it also gives us scribal changes of the text--changes that may be of significance in and of themselves for what they can tell us about the theological and social investments of the scribes who made them and, correspondingly, about the theological and socio-historical contexts within which they worked. When viewed in this way, variant readings are not merely chaff to be discarded en route to the original text--as they were for Hort; they are instead valuable evidence for the history of the early Christian movement.
4. The historian of early Christianity shares a fundamental problem with all other historians of antiquity: our sources are frustratingly sparse. Moreover, the sources that have survived tend to be the literary remains of the cultured elite, which may or may not tell us what other, non-elites were thinking or experiencing. Our New Testament manuscripts were themselves, of course, produced by literate persons; but these anonymous scribes were not necessarily, or even probably, literary, in the sense of being among the most highly educated and cultured in their societies. If the changes that these unnamed copyists made in their reproductions are studied with sufficient care and with the right questions, they may provide a gold mine of information about the thoughts and experiences of late antique Christians who were not among the literary elite. Remarkably, this is a gold mine that has rarely been tapped.
5. Let me begin to illustrate the potential of this kind of approach to our textual tradition by picking up on the three variant readings that I examined in my previous lecture. I will start with the ones found in Luke and Hebrews, as these illustrate well the ways in which the theological controversies of early Christianity made an impact on the scriptural texts that were being used by various sides in the debates.
Theological Modifications of the Text
6. We saw last time that Luke 22:43-44, verses found in some manuscripts but not others, present the familiar story of Jesus in agony before his arrest, sweating great drops as if of blood, and being strengthened by an angel from heaven. I showed that these verses did not originally belong to Luke's Gospel but were inserted by a scribe or scribes in the second century. But why were they inserted? Was it simply because scribes found the story interesting or edifying? While this is, of course, possible, there may have been something far more significant going on. In fact, there are reasons to think that the verses were interpolated into the Gospel precisely because they portray so well a human Jesus, one who agonizes over his coming fate to the point of needing supernatural succor, an agony so deep as to cause him to sweat great drops as if of blood.
7. In the second century, there were a number of Christians who maintained that since Jesus was fully divine, he could not be human. Included in their number were Marcion and members of several groups of Gnostics. Their opponents called these "heretics" docetists, from the Greek word doke/w (to seem or to appear), since these persons maintained that Jesus only "seemed" or "appeared" to be human.
8. This was a serious and heated controversy in the second century, as it affected profoundly the church's entire understanding of the nature of Christ. If the solution to that question seems obvious today, we should surely reflect on the fact that one side eventually won the debate and then wrote the history of the conflict. In any event, in view of this controversy, it is worth observing how the verses in question were used in the sources that first attest them. They occur three times in the writings of anti-heretical, proto-orthodox church fathers of the second century: Justin, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus. Remarkably, in all three cases they are cited to the same end, to counter any notion Jesus was not a real flesh and blood human being. Justin, for example, argues that Jesus' bloody sweat shows "that the Father wished His Son really to undergo such sufferings for our sakes, so that we "may not say that He, being the Son of God, did not feel what was happening to Him and inflicted on Him" (Dial. 103). What is interesting in this case is that we do not need to hypothesize the usefulness of these verses for an anti-docetic polemic; we know that the verses were put to precisely this use during the second-century and that that is when the account came to be inserted into the third Gospel; scribes who did so may well have been reflecting the anti-docetic concerns of their own communities.
9. We might hypothesize a somewhat different motivation behind the modification of Hebrews 2:9. If you recall, in that passage Jesus was said to have died "apart from God." Early in the second century, however, scribes began to change the word "apart" (xwri\j in Greek) to a word similar in appearance xa/riti, "grace," so that now Jesus is said to have died "by the grace" of God. Even though this change may have been made by accident, it carries such a significantly different meaning that one might suspect that scribes knew full well what they were doing when they made it. On the one hand, one could probably argue that these anonymous copyists simply couldn't understand what it might mean to say that Jesus died "apart from God" and so changed it to say something that made better sense; but, on the other hand, it may be that they knew full well what the text meant and that they knew how some Christians were interpreting it. If this is so, then the offending parties would not have been groups of docetists, but, possibly, other kinds of Gnostics who had a different view of Jesus.
10. For in fact, most Gnostics did not maintain that Jesus was fully God and not human (the docetic view); they instead claimed that Jesus Christ was two separate beings, one human (the man Jesus) and the other divine (the heavenly Christ). As the heretic-fighter Irenaeus explains, these Gnostics maintained that when Jesus was baptized, the Christ descended upon him as a dove and entered into him, empowering him for his ministry. Then, at some point prior to his death, the Christ, who could not suffer, departed from him. That's why, according to some Gnostics, Jesus cried out on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you left me behind?" For them, that's exactly what had happened, when the divine Christ made his exit. For these gnostic Christians, Jesus literally did die "apart from God."
11. We know that the scribal alteration of the text of Heb 2:9 occurred precisely during the time that the controversy between proto-orthodox Christians and Gnostics was raging. It is not at all implausible to think that it was just this controversy then that led to the modification of this text, that proto-orthodox scribes, who shared the christological views of Irenaeus, modified the text so that Gnostics could not use it as a scriptural warrant for saying that Jesus died "apart from God," since the divine Christ had already left him.
12. This would not be the only verse that was altered out of anti-gnostic concerns. Just to take one other similar example before moving on to other kinds of scribal changes, we might consider the cry of dereliction that I've just mentioned from Mark 15:34, where Jesus breaks the silence he has maintained throughout the entire crucifixion scene by crying out, in Aramaic: elwi elwi lema sabaxqani, a quotation of Ps 22:2, for which the author supplies the Greek translation of the LXX, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
13. As I've already intimated, at stake in the Gnostic controversy was the meaning of the Greek verb in this verse, e)gkate/lipej, literally, "left behind." The proto-orthodox took it to mean "forsake" and argued that because Christ had taken the sins of the world upon himself, he felt forsaken by God; the Gnostics, on the other hand, understood the word in its more literal sense, so that for them, Jesus was lamenting the departure of the divine Christ: "My God, my God, why have you left me behind?"
14. This is clearly the interpretation given by the gnostic Gospel of Philip, which quotes the verse before explaining that "It was on the cross that Jesus said these words, for it was there that he was divided." The words appear to be construed similarly in their reformulation in the Gospel of Peter, where on the cross Jesus cries out, "My power, O power, you have left me."
15. Until recently, scholars have failed to recognize how this controversy over the meaning of Jesus' last words in Mark relates to a famous textual problem of the verse. For in some manuscripts, rather than crying out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" the dying Jesus cries "My God, my God, why have you reviled me?"
16. The witnesses that support this reading indicate that it was in wide circulation already in the second century. But it has proved very difficult for scholars to imagine that it was the original reading of Mark, for lots of reasons that I don't need to go into here. Assuming that Mark's Jesus cried out "why have you forsaken me," why would some scribes have changed it to "why have you reviled me"? Surely it's not unrelated to fact that Gnostics were using the verse to support their separationist christology. For them, Jesus' despair at being "left behind" by God demonstrated that the Christ had separated from him and returned into the Pleroma, leaving him to die alone. The change, then, may have been made to circumvent the "misuse" of the text, and naturally suggested itself from the context. Just as Jesus was reviled by his opponents, those for whom he died, so too he bore the reproach of God himself, for whose sake he went to the cross in the first place.
17. Variations such as this, that relate in one way or another to the early christological controversies, have been studied at some length in recent years. The same cannot be said about variants that relate to other kinds of issues confronting Christian scribes of the second and third centuries. There are a number of fruitful avenues of exploration, just begging for intelligent attention. We can begin by looking at variants involving the apologetic concerns of early Christianity.
Apologetically-Motivated Variants
18. To do so, we should return to the third variant that I considered in my previous lecture, Mark 1:41, where Mark indicates that Jesus became angry when approached by a leper who wanted to be healed. Scribes changed the text so that Jesus was no longer said to become angry, but was moved by compassion. This kind of change is also, roughly speaking, christological, in that it pertains to the portrayal of Jesus. But it is hard to understand the change in relation to any of the christological controversies known to be raging during the time it was made, the second century. So perhaps we should look for some other context within which to situate it.
19. Again, it's possible that scribes simply couldn't figure out why Jesus would get angry at this poor fellow and so changed the text to make his response more appropriate. But could something else have motivated the change? To my knowledge, no one has considered the possibility that the change was made in light of another kind of controversy second-century Christians were embroiled in, this time not with "heretics," that is, Christians who took different theological positions, but with pagan opponents of Christianity.
20. In the second half of the second century, when this text appears to have been altered, pagan critics started to take notice of the burgeoning Christian movement and began to write vitriolic attacks on it, labeling it a mindless superstition comprised of uneducated bumpkins, who followed the teachings of a rural nobody who was executed for crimes against the state. This was also the time when Christianity began to find real intellectuals among its converts, who began to write scholarly defenses, or apologies, on behalf of the faith.
21. None of the early pagan critics of Christianity was as thorough and penetrating as the late-second century Celsus, and none of its defenders was as brilliant as Celsus's posthumous opponent, Origen. In the five books of his work, Against Celsus, Origen quotes at length from the attack of Celsus on Christianity and defends the religion and its founder against the charges leveled against it.
22. I do not wish to say that this particular verse, Mark 1:41, figured prominently in Celsus' attack or in Origen's defense. But the issues involved are perhaps of relevance. Celsus maintained that Jesus was not the Son of God but was a poor, lower-class, uneducated peasant who did his miracles through the power of magic. Origen, writing 70 years later, tried to show that Jesus was not a purveyor of the magical arts but was the son of God himself come to earth for the betterment of the human race. To mount his defense, Origen establishes some common ground with Celsus: anyone who is a true son of God will do what he does for the common good, to improve the lot of humanity, to resolve suffering, and to work for moral reformation. Both the goals of Jesus' miraculous deeds and the character of his person are at stake here, as they evidently were for other pagan opponents and Christian apologists.
23. In a context in which pagan critics are maligning the person of Jesus, what might one think of a scribe who modifies the scriptural accounts that describe his character? If we find a text in which Jesus, for no obvious reason, becomes angry at someone in desperate need, and see that scribes have changed it so that he reacts in a way more appropriate for the kindly divine presence on earth, being moved by compassion instead of filled with wrath, is it not possible that the alteration has been motivated precisely by the pagan attacks on Jesus' character? At this stage I throw it out merely as a suggestion; it is at least worth further investigation.
24. And other variants in our tradition may be worth considering in a similar light. Take,
Anti-Judaic Modifications
37. A Christian living in the second century would find him or herself almost automatically embroiled in a situation of conflict with non-Christian Jews, a conflict that involved different understandings of the role that Jesus played in the divine plan for the world and of the meaning of the Jewish Scriptures. I should point out that by no means was this conflict an even match; by around the year 100, the Christian church was still only a tiny fraction of the population of the Empire, unheard of by most of its other inhabitants, outnumbered by non-Christian Jews something like ten to one.
38. It was perhaps their threatened and defensive position that led Christians of the second century to use such vitriolic polemic in their discussions of their Jewish opponents. From the first half of the century, for example, we find the epistle of Barnabas claiming that Judaism is and always has been a false religion. The author argues that Israel had irrevocably broken God's covenant, smashed it to bits, as shown, quite literally, by the story of the giving of the Law in the Old Testament itself, for when Moses comes down from Mount Sinai he sees the children of Israel engaged in wild and lawless activities and smashes to smithereens the two tablets of stone containing the ten commandments. And the covenant never was restored. That is why, he maintains, Israel misunderstood all of its own laws subsequently given to Moses. For in fact, the laws of circumcision and kosher foods and all the rest were never meant to be taken literally, but were symbolic expressions of God's will, as has now been revealed in Christ.
39. Later in the second and third centuries we find other authors moving along a similar anti-Judaic path, authors like Justin in Rome who maintained that God commanded Jewish males to be circumcised not as a sign of his special favor, but in order to mark them off from the rest of the human race for special punishment; and authors like Tertullian and Origen, who claimed that Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans at God's own initiative, as a punishment upon the Jews for rejecting their own messiah. And we find the elegant if terrifying rhetoric of Melito of Sardis, whose Passover sermon provided an occasion to vent his own animosity towards the Jews.
Pay attention all families of the nations and observe! An extraordinary murder has taken place in the center of Jerusalem, in the city devoted to God's law, in the city of the Hebrews, in the city of the prophets, in the city thought of as just. And who has been murdered? And who is the murderer? I am ashamed to give the answer, but give it I must.... The one who hung the earth in space, is himself hanged; the one who fixed the heavens in place is himself impaled; the one who firmly fixed all things is himself firmly fixed to the tree. The Lord is insulted, God has been murdered, the King of Israel has been destroyed by the right hand of Israel (Paschal Homily, 94-96).
To my knowledge, this is the first instance in which a Christian author explicitly accuses the Jewish people of deicide in the death of Jesus.
40. How did the opposition to Jews and Judaism affect Christian scribes who were reproducing the texts of the New Testament? Many of the passages involved stood at the heart of the conflict, New Testament passages that detailed the Jewish involvement in the death of Jesus. Here I can do little more than cite a couple of instances.
41. As I pointed out in my first lecture, Mark's powerful portrayal of Jesus going to his death in silence is modified by Luke, where, as he is being nailed to the cross, Jesus utters the memorable prayer, "Father forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing." Interestingly enough, Jesus' prayer is not found in every manuscript of Luke's Gospel. Of the manuscripts that lack the verse some can be dated to about the year 200. In these witnesses, Jesus does not ask his father to forgive those who are doing this cruel thing to him.
42. The verse appears to be clearly Lukan, as it portrays Jesus calm and in control of his own destiny, concerned about the welfare and fate of others more than himself. At the same time, and perhaps yet more significantly, the verse contains a perspective that proved discomforting to early scribes. Many people today understand Jesus' prayer to be for those who were in the act of crucifying him, that is, the Roman soldiers. But throughout the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, written by the same author, those who are blamed for Jesus' crucifixion are consistently the Jewish people. Furthermore, and this is the really important point, we know from later writings of the church fathers that Jesus' prayer of forgiveness was typically understood to refer to the Jews who were to blame for his death.
43. This makes our textual situation very interesting. A verse that gives every indication of having come from the hand of the author of the Gospel is occasionally being deleted by scribes of the late second or early third century. During this time the verse is being construed as Jesus' prayer that God forgive the Jewish people. Moreover, it is precisely at this time that anti-Judaic sentiment is rising to a kind of crescendo, when Jews are being accused as Christ killers, as murderers of God, when Christians are claiming that the destruction of the holy city Jerusalem was God's punishment of the Jews for the death of Jesus. For many Christians, God had not forgiven Jews for their rejection of Jesus. How then could Jesus have asked him to forgive them; and why would he have done so? Some Christian scribes evidently solved the problem of Jesus' prayer simply by excising it.
44. Other instances of this sort of scribal activity occur in modifications that heighten Jewish culpability for Jesus' death. As but one example, in the famous scene of Jesus' trial in Matthew's Gospel, we are told that Pilate washed his hands before the crowds and proclaimed that he was innocent of Jesus' blood. The crowds then replied, "His blood be on us and our children." Pilate then had Jesus scourged and "delivered him up to be crucified."
45. The passage has served as an incentive for anti-semitic sentiments and activities over the years, since the Jewish crowds here are said not only to have borne the responsibility for Jesus' death but also to have made their succeeding generations accountable for it. Whether Matthew intended a kind of anti-Judaic reading is much debated among exegetes. In any event, the textual history of the passage is quite interesting in light of its subsequent usage by anti-Jewish Christians. Whereas in the oldest available form of the text, Pilate hands Jesus over to his Roman guard for crucifixion, in some of our early manuscripts, after hearing the Jewish crowd accept responsibility for Jesus' death, Pilate "delivered Jesus over to them so that they might crucify him." In these manuscripts, the Jews are fully responsible for Jesus' death.
46. Not only the guilt associated with Jesus' death, but also its salvific effect came to be modified in the hands of early Christian scribes. As but one quick example, we are told in the birth narrative of Matthew's Gospel that the newborn savior was to be called Jesus, a name that comes from the Hebrew word, Joshua, which means salvation, because he would "save his people from their sins." Interestingly enough, at least one ancient scribe appears to have had difficulty with this notion of Jews being saved and so modified the angelic explication of Jesus' name. In this Syriac manuscript, Jesus is said to "save the world," not his people, "from their sins."
47. Other examples of such possibly anti-Judaic alterations of the text could be multiplied. How many such instances are there? Again, it's impossible to say; no one has rigorously pursued the question.
(the lecture continued to discuss the role of women and the effort to disguise this. anyone interested in it can cut a block of text here and paste into your browser.)
© TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, 2000.
Manuscript varients betray deliberate altertion of NT
by peacefulpete 31 Replies latest watchtower bible
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peacefulpete
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frankiespeakin
Pete,
This is a very interesting lecture.
Can you please give us a link to the site?
Thanks for posting it.
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hooberus
Apologetically-Motivated Variants
18. To do so, we should return to the third variant that I considered in my previous lecture, Mark 1:41, where Mark indicates that Jesus became angry when approached by a leper who wanted to be healed. Scribes changed the text so that Jesus was no longer said to become angry, but was moved by compassion. This kind of change is also, roughly speaking, christological, in that it pertains to the portrayal of Jesus. But it is hard to understand the change in relation to any of the christological controversies known to be raging during the time it was made, the second century. So perhaps we should look for some other context within which to situate it.The textual evidence strongly supports "And moved with pity, he stretched out [his] hand" as being probably original. The phrase "and being angry" seems to be later with much less manuscript support. The only reason why some bible versions use it is probably because of the "more-difficult reading rule" concept which I think starts with an anti-biblical bias. Anyway, the claim that "scribes changed the text so that Jesus was no longer said to become angry" is poorly supported by external evidence.
http://bible.ovc.edu/tc/lay04mrk.htm
Mark 1:41:
TEXT: "And moved with pity, he stretched out [his] hand"
EVIDENCE: S A B C K L W Delta Theta Pi 090 f1 f13 28 33 565 700 892 1010 1241 Byz Lect most lat vg syr cop
TRANSLATIONS: KJV ASV RSV NASV NIV NEBn TEV
RANK: DNOTES: "And being angry, he stretched out [his] hand"
EVIDENCE: D four lat
TRANSLATIONS: NEB TEVnNOTES: "And he stretched out [his] hand"
EVIDENCE: one lat
TRANSLATIONS: NEBn -
hooberus
9. We might hypothesize a somewhat different motivation behind the modification of Hebrews 2:9. If you recall, in that passage Jesus was said to have died "apart from God." Early in the second century, however, scribes began to change the word "apart" (xwri\j in Greek) to a word similar in appearance xa/riti, "grace," so that now Jesus is said to have died "by the grace" of God. Even though this change may have been made by accident, it carries such a significantly different meaning that one might suspect that scribes knew full well what they were doing when they made it. On the one hand, one could probably argue that these anonymous copyists simply couldn't understand what it might mean to say that Jesus died "apart from God" and so changed it to say something that made better sense; but, on the other hand, it may be that they knew full well what the text meant and that they knew how some Christians were interpreting it. If this is so, then the offending parties would not have been groups of docetists, but, possibly, other kinds of Gnostics who had a different view of Jesus.
The textual evidence strongly supports "so that by the grace of God he might taste death"
as being probably original. The phrase "without God" seems to be later with much less manuscript support. The claim that "scribes began to change the word "apart" (xwri\j in Greek) to a word similar in appearance xa/riti, "grace," " is poorly supported by external evidence.http://bible.ovc.edu/tc/lay24heb.htm
Hebrews 2:9: TEXT: "so that by the grace of God he might taste death"
EVIDENCE: p S A B C D K P Psi 33 81 104 614 630 1241 1881 2495 Byz Lect lat most vg most syr(p) syr(h,pal) cop
TRANSLATIONS: KJV ASV RSV NASV NIV NEB TEV
RANK: BNOTES: "so that without God he might taste death"
EVIDENCE: 0121b 424 1739* one vg some syr(p)
TRANSLATIONS: NEBn -
hooberus
Some of the other variants (such as Luke 22:43-44) are an issue between the older readings not containing the phrases verses the majority readings wich do contain the phrases. In situations such as these the traditional inclusion of the phrases are certainly defensible.
http://bible.ovc.edu/tc/lay08luk.htm
Luke 22:43-44:
TEXT: include verses 43 and 44: "·And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. ·And being in agony he started praying more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground."
EVIDENCE: S* D K L X Delta Theta Pi Psi 0171 f1 565 700 892 1010 1241 Byz most lat vg syr(c,p,h,pal) some cop(north) (with asterisks)
TRANSLATIONS: KJV ASV RSV1 RSV2n NASV NIV NEB TEV
RANK: CNOTES: omit verses 43 and 44
EVIDENCE: p p S A B T W some Lect one lat syr(s) most cop
TRANSLATIONS: ASVn RSV1n RSV2 NASVn NIVn NEBn TEVnOTHER: include verses 43 and 44 after Matthew 26:39 instead of here
EVIDENCE: f13 some Lect (also the first part of verse 45) -
hooberus
http://bible.ovc.edu/tc/lay05mrk.htm
Mark 15:34:
TEXT: "why have you forsaken me?"
EVIDENCE: S A B C K L P X Delta Theta Pi Psi 059 0112 f1 f13 28 33 565 700 892 1010 1241 Byz Lect most lat vg syr(s,p) cop
TRANSLATIONS: KJV ASV RSV NASV NIV NEB TEV
RANK: BNOTES: "why have you reproached me?"
EVIDENCE: D three lat syr(h)
TRANSLATIONS: NEBn -
JCanon
Very interesting. Some recent speculation regarding the search for the "Holy Grail" as interprted by the Priori of Sion ala Brown in "The Da Vinci Code" suggests that the grail was Mary Magdalene and that the grail was connected to the cup given to John at the Last Supper, his "beloved" who was construed to be Mary Magdalene, the wife of Jesus who later bore children. Thus the "chalice" was really representative of the blood line of Jesus. The chalice was said to at one time contain the blood of Jesus gathered from him at his execution etc.
But from a super-spiritual point of view (anointed JIOR), those connected with the secret society that would be associated with the Messiah at the second coming (i.e. the woman who flees from Satan to "her place in the wilderness prepared by God") find this an interesting note, since the fundamental reference beyond the camouflage is looking for the bloodline of Jesus as connected to John. John was the cousin of Jesus and his beloved, but since he had the same lineage of Jesus, he also carried the "holy grail" the "sang-real" or royal bloodline of King David. The folklore associated with the grail though, allegedly buried with Mary Magdalene or hidden someplace are trunkloads of documents taken from the temple at one time by the Templars!! Now that becomes another interesting factor. And that's where we enter into the gospel issue.
The last verses of John discuss whether or not Jesus would keep John alive until he returned or if he were to die as Jesus had prophesied to Peter. Jesus told Peter how he would eventually die and then Peter asked about John and Jesus said if he wanted him to live until he arrived then that was his choice. Of course, John did not deny this or state specifically that he would be chosen to survive until the Lord returned or not. Thus the super-spiritual doctrine about this is that, indeed, there was to be a group of those who knew Jesus who would, in fact, never die. This would include John, of course, who having the royal blood of the line of Jesus, became the "holy grail". The idea that John would never die and live in secret thus became the quest for the Holy Grail, that is, a quest to try and find John. Only not just John apparently, but the volume of ancient documents he would have been chosen to take care of!
When you think about it...why not? Why wouldn't some secretive faction of the Christ's cultic followers have in mind to preserve in their private libraries critical ancient and ORIGINAL materials. Some of those including the actual records of the royal line of Jesus and the other, original copies of the ancient scriptures and the NT. Only thing is that with this theory, since the primary contributors to the NT were both to be survivors (Paul put himself in the "those surviving until the Lord's presence"--1 Thess 4:15), they were in a position to preserve, monitor and manipulate the Bible and the NT over time until it became well-established.
But ultimately, there is a belief, with so much concern over what was the "original" text and the significance of this and that variation, is that possibly some secret cultic followers of Christ have some of the original documents which have been preserved and hidden, obviously, at one point, to dispell errant speculation about the original gospels and what they say.
That having been said, then likely the current NT, variations noted, is likely pretty much what was intended by the NT Bible writers, as well as the OT. Sure some Bible translations take some liberties including the NWT with inserting things or interpreting things, but we have enough of the originals to see a huge consistency throughout the text. And I would think if anything MAJOR showed up, at some point some critical reference to a more original text would "surface" to dispell this.
So referencing the general context of this lecture, it is lacking in understanding the entire possible background of the NT history, presuming that "scribes" were always in control of the text, when in fact, perhaps some persons of greater Christian "authority" (i.e. like John and Paul themselves) were always around throughout the years watching over things. Considering that, I think they did an incredible job of keeping the NT on track! Ultimately, though, likely they considered it important to preserve some of the original writings which one day might surface and dispell all the speculation.
On the other hand, maybe these sacred writings are available to some within the secret cult and that has influenced some Bible translations or commentary on some textual issues. Further, it could have been Paul or John themselves while supervising the text of the gospels over the years who made the additions/expansions. My experience generally, in that regard, though, is that what is often seen as a contradiction or revision is really not that but an expansion.
Take for instance Jesus being "reviled" vs being "abandoned" is not an issue. The JIOR would consider that BOTH were true. After all, God says he "disciplines the ones he loves". Certainly the pain Jesus went through was part of his discipline. Didn't he have to die to prove he loved God? Wasn't that painful? At the same time, it was necessary for him to do this on his own, without God holding his hand and promising "just close your eyes and in a second I'll see you on the other side, like magic!" No, this is something he would have to do on his own. Thus when Jesus said "Why have you forsaken me" you have to understand it in the context of the Heavens being open to Jesus as was stated when he was baptized (i.e. "the heavens opened"). Think of it as a bright light from above, the presence of God's light and warmth. But at that last moment, the Heaven's closed up and Jesus was alone thus he felt "abandoned by God" in this very intimate way, this personal way; it didn't mean that God had left him for good or that Jesus needed anything from God and he wasn't there.
Now I know some can't go along on this "spiritual journey" believing that Paul and John and others (at least some members of the specific 12 tribes of Israel who had to be chosen to survive to our day to fulfill the prophecy of the 12 tribes participating in the heavenly kingdom), even though the Bible specifically says so, but I wanted to give the perspective of those who believe this as far as the text issues go. So if you know there are PROBABLY some original manuscripts around in private libraries that are just there waiting to surface perhaps, one is not that worried about what was the "original" writing or not. Beyond that, one presumes with Paul and John ultimately supervising the Bible and its development that what we have is the "essential" and "acceptable" version of it, with anything far beyond the original would have been exposed by them by now. In the meantime, the true search for the "Holy Grail" is the ominous search for John and those original documents which they know are someplace, but where?
I've seen the Apostle Paul in person; never John and never any original documents, so I suppose it's a REALLY BIG SECRET for John's protection. Part of the Grail Legend expoused by Dan Brown in "The Da Vinci Code" dealt with the idea that at one point these original documents (in this case evidence of Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene, which was the twist on this) would be exposed and that's what the plot is about. Opposing factions wanting to control the documents to either destroy them or expose them. So it's a REAL thing to the secret societies though they camouflage what it's really about. Bottom line they probably found out John was still alive after hundreds of years and was maintaining these documents and then made it their quest to find him. Also interesting that Russell used not specifically Freemasonry symbols on the publications, but symbolisms of older secret societies such as the "Knights Templar" (cross and crown) and the winged disk from Egypt in the context of pyramidology. These are symbolisms connected more with "British Israelism" (i.e. Europeans trying to prove they are descendants of Abraham through the lost "10 tribes", etc.) and thus another focussed preoccupation on bloodlines and lineage, thus getting ones hands on those original documents could open or close opportunities out there for some who want to aspire to greatness beyond their heritage.
Thanks for the article!
JC
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heathen
The bible has been altered by just about everyone who ever tried to translate it . Any one who tries to read the original king james version can see plainly that the ancient hebrews did not use shakespearian english, it seems that in trying to translate they often ignore the importance for a word for word interpretation and succumb to various ideas that support personal oppinions rather than the actual meaning of the writings .
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frankiespeakin
Heathen,
I think only the most naive (JWs and Fundies) would try to insist the Bible had not been altered over the centuries.
I particularly enjoy reading essays that offer some common sense observations as this one Pete has copied. I really do appreciate the insights of these scholars, it is refreshing to no longer be trapped by dogmatism of the JW.
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Narkissos
Excellent article. I look forward to reading the rest.
My main reservation is on Luke 23:34. Even rather conservative Bruce M. Metzger comments: "The absence of these words from such early and diverse manuscripts as P75 B D* W Th it/a.d syr/s cop/sa.bo/mss is most impressive and can scarcely be explained as a deliberate excision by copyists who, considering the fall of Jerusalem to be proof that God had not forgiven the Jews, could not allow it to appear that the prayer of Jesus had remained unanswered." More generally, I suspect that Ehrman's treatment of the antijudaic texts in Luke is heavily influenced by modern "politically correct" thinking. Luke-Acts as a whole is highly antijudaic, not from a Gnostic-Marcionite standpoint but from the Great Church perspective.