The Text of the New Testament

The establishment of a canon, even had it been immediately accepted by all, would not have eliminated the problem of textual transmission. Remember that the printing press was not created until the late 15th century. Until then, every document ever passed from one person to another, from letters to lists to lawas to stories, was handwritten. If it was not the author's original manuscript, it was a handwritten copy -- and as time went on and the author's original disintegrated or was lost, the handwritten copies were made from other handwritten copies. Each time the text was copied, human error figured in. Today, we have several hundred of the handwritten copies of the New Testament documents -- some dating to the early 100s C.E., and more and more from each ensuing century. No two copies of any New Testament work are exactly the same. Sometimes a word was changed by the use of one different letter. Sometimes one sentence was altered in one gospel to make it match a statement in one of the other gospels. Sometimes words were accidentally skipped as the eye moved from the original to the copy in progress and back. Sometimes a phrase was repeated when the copier's eye shifted back to the original one line too high. And sometimes the story is just plain changed. The differneces are myriad.

And that applies to the period after the books had come to be seen as scripture. Before that, we have no manuscripts to compare. But the Secret Gospel of Mark presents us with an almost unbelievable window into that time. Clement of Alexandria, one of the key figures of the Christianity between the New Testament time period and the Council of Nicea (325 C.E.) wrote a letter in response to a man named Theodore, in which he answers Theodore's questions about the text of the Gospel of Mark. Apparently, some who disagreed with Theodore had quoted Mark as proof of their position -- but the lines they quoted were nowhere in Theodore's own copy of the Gospel of Mark. His opponents told him that the lines they quoted were in Mark's original gospel, but certain people since had removed them from the text.

Clement's response to Theodore is a blatant admission that the opponents told the truth. Lines were indeed removed, said Clement, because the opponents were using them to prove their point. He lays upon Theodore the obligation never to admit this to anyone, even under threat. But he proceeds to quote an example of what was removed.

And they came into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, "son of David, have mercy on me". But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered , went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus thaught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.

The Critical New Testament

None of this was noted during nearly 1100 years after Nicea. But in the very early 1500s, Erasmus of Rotterdam published a Greek New Testament, and forever changed Christianity. Although the documents had all been written in Greek, western Christianity had not needed a Greek text since the 400s when Jerome translated the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament into Latin, the language of the everyday people of the Roman Empire. The Vulgate, as it was called, became the norm in the west until the 1500s when movements in Germany, Bohemia, England and elsewhere sought again to put the Bible into the everyday language of the people, which had long since ceased to be Latin. Joined with this idea was an increasing sense that something was lost with every translation, and the emerging Renaissance scholarship began studying the original languages so as to remove the middleman, so to speak. Erasmus' New Testament would meet both those interests.

Erasmus sought the oldest copies of the Greek New Testament documents he could find in order to put his NT together. Unfortunately, the oldest manuscripts he could find were just a couple of centuries old -- Erasmus had no idea that "out there"somewhere were manuscripts far older. Several of the manuscripts he located were damaged or incomplete. He compared various copies of a particular book, and filled in the gaps of one copy with the pieces from another. In this way he almost had 100% of the text. But not quite. In a couple of places, he just did not have the underlying Greek text for a line that he could see full well in his Vulgate, so Erasmus translated the Latin translation back into Greek in those spots, and finished off his Greek New Testament. This text later came to be known as Textus Receptus, since it was the latest part of the tradition. The Textus Receptus would be used (and continues to be used) as the basis for the translation authorized by King James in England a century later.

In the last 250 years, many other manuscripts have been discovered, including Vaticanus (found in the archives at the Vatican) and Sinaiticus (found in the storage room of a monastery on Mt. Sinai) -- both of which may have been among the 50 complete Greek bibles that the emperor Constantine ordered made and distributed throughout the empire in 325 C.E. The Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament has, through 27 editions, incorporated all the known manuscropts, and striven to make judgments about whether this copy or that copy is the most likely to reflect the original in a particular interest. Ironically, the Nestle-Aland NT does not match any of the hundreds of manuscripts exactly. Whether it matches the originals will never be known.

There are some shocking surprises here. The last verses of Mark (16:9-20), for instance, are in the Erasmus text and therefore in the KJV. But when the earlier manuscripts were found, they were not part of the gospel. The same is true for the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 7:53-8:11 -- the story with the great line, "Let the one without sin cast the first stone" was not originally in the Gospel of John. There are many, many such discoveries.

Continue to New Testament Transmission Errors or The New Testament in English

 

by Thomas P. Shoemaker (copyright 2003).