FORGED– BART EHRMAN'S NEW SALVO— The Introduction

March 30, 2011 By Ben Witherington

Bart Ehrman’s new book, Forged (Harper, 2011, 307 pages) has hit the bookstalls and has been hovering in the 300s in the list of top sellers, eclipsed by another Harper book that came out at about the same juncture—- Rob Bell’s Love Wins which has been reviewed in detail already, chapter by chapter on this blog. Ehrman’s new book will receive the same sort of chapter by chapter analysis.

This book should not be confused with some of Bart’s previous efforts, in particular Misquoting Jesus, as Bart is not arguing in this book merely that are errors or mistakes in the Bible. No, in this book he takes the next step in arguing that there is deliberate fraud going on in the canon, deceitful practices undertaken to convince or bamboozle some audience into believing something, on the basis of the authority of some apostle or original disciple, who in fact did not write the book in question. In other words, Bart is taking on not merely the conservative view that the NT is written by those authors to whom it is attributed but also the widespread notion that pseudonymity was a regular and widely recognized literary practice in antiquity, and that no one was deceived, nor was there an intent to deceive by such a practice. This book is likely to addle scholars and lay people all across the spectrum of belief, including quite liberal ones who have for a long time argued that pseudonymity was an accepted practice in antiquity. To judge from the early reviews on Amazon, those who are looking for an excuse to call the early Christians liars and deceivers are delighted with this book.

I need to say from the outset and on first glance that there appears to be a rather large lacunae in the argument of this book, namely the failure to do this study after having studied in depth ancient scribal practices and the roles of scribes in producing ancient documents in ancient Israel. For example, I see no interaction whatsoever in this book with the landmark study of Karel Van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, in which it is demonstrated at length that scribes played a huge role in collecting, editing, and producing ancient documents, and that it was indeed a regular practice to name a scroll after either the originator of the tradition, or the first or a major contributor to the tradition, not after the scribe who actually produced the document, often decades or centuries after the tradition had first been formed.

This was neither a deceitful practice nor a blatant attempt at forgery, but rather a normal practice in a culture with a deep reverence for ancient traditions which in a largely illiterate society relied on scribes to be the conservators, copiers, preservers and presenters of the tradition, in written form. Inasmuch as the writers of the NT appear to have been almost entirely Jews or God-fearers deeply steeped not only in the OT but in Jewish ways of handling sacred traditions and sacred texts, it is rather surprising that this book does not spend more time actually examining such things. Perhaps in the scholarly monograph that is to follow this popular level book, this rather colossal oversight will be remedied.

I need to also say, that I am all for the search for truth about such things, and as Bart says in this Introduction, Evangelicals are rightly credited with being some of the most persistent truth hounds in the world. And I will add this. Bart is also right that there was plenty of forgery or production of pseudonymous documents, depending how you look at the matter going on in the Gnostic movement and other offshoots of Christianity. Bart is absolutely right about this, and right to stress it. And I agree that in various cases, there does indeed appear to be the intent to deceive the audience. You probably thought it unlikely that I would begin this review by agreeing with Bart on something other than the merits of Carolina basketball. You would be wrong.

Lastly, I want to say that having begun to read Bart’s latest salvo, I spent some time with my friend Richard Bauckham asking him what was the evidence, especially the internal evidence, from early Jewish and early Christian literature that pseudonymity was a received and accepted literary practice. We will say more about this as we go along, but Bauckham is quite clear there was such a literary practice that was not intended to be deceitful or an attempt at forgery in any sense. For example, he pointed me to a book like the Wisdom of Solomon which makes clear internally that it was not by Solomon at all, but stood in the tradition of his wisdom. I would add that there is as well evidence of this in Jewish apocalyptic materials. More about this later, but in the meantime, if one wants to read something I have said at length about such matters, one should read the Introduction to my Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians, Volume One. While there may not be a great wealth of things I agree with Bart Ehrman about, I do agree that it is helpful to question the acceptability of pseudepigraphical letters. On to the argument itself.

The Ehrman Project

January 19, 2011 By Guest Contributor

Several Evangelical scholars, including yours truly, have been asked to contribute to a critique of the various claims of Bart Ehrman in his more popular level books (e.g. Jesus Interrupted). There is now a website up and running which brings together all these resources. You will find it here—

http://ehrmanproject.com/

Creating the Canon. by Benjamin Laird

August 21, 2023 By Ben Witherington

Benjamin Laird is no stranger to dealing with complex issues vis a vis the composition and collection of NT, as his previous work on the collection of the Pauline letters shows. This 272 page study which is hot off the IVP press (July 11, 2023) certainly deserves close scrutiny and is to be applauded for its careful historical work involving a variety of difficult issues— who counts as an apostle and what does the phrase apostolic authority mean (and why does it matter), how were the NT documents composed in an age before printing presses, never mind computers, what does careful study of the origins of NT texts and textual criticism tell us, is it true that doctrinal controversies, or ecumenical councils significantly shaped the process of canon formation (or not), and much more. Laird is a reliable guide on a variety of these issues, and proceeds carefully through complicated matters. He is right that neither doctrinal controversies with Marcion, not ecumenical councils, nor the Emperor Constantine himself were decisive in deciding what should be seen as NT (or OT) Scripture. More important were the subcollections of books well before the fourth century, for example of the four Gospels (which were always the four canonical ones. There are no collections with for instance Matthew Mark, Luke and the Gospel of Thomas to judge from the manuscript witnesses), and probably the collection of Paul’s letters, which are indeed our earliest NT documents, was the earliest such subcollection already extant in some form by the time 2 Pet. 3 was written, which at the latest would be in the early second century. As Laird points out, the NT canon turns out to be a collection of these previously recognized subcollections, with the exception of Acts and Revelation.

The fourth century recognition of ‘these 27 books’ and no others’ in several regions of the church (by Athanasius in his Festal letter about 367, in the West by the Pope, and in North Africa all in the fourth century) was simply a culmination of a canonizing process that had been going on for a very long time and at no time were alternative Gospels (including Gnostic ones) or alternative Pauline letters seriously considered to be Scripture by the churches in the east or west. The church did not determine the canon, it recognized the inherent truth and authority in these ‘apostolic’ documents. Indeed, various documents like the Gospel of Peter, the letter to the Laodiceans touted by Marcion, or the Acts of Paul and Thecla were critiqued and rejected because they were pseudonymous.

Laird is right, and agrees quite properly with Bart Ehrman that pseudonymous documents did involve an attempt to give authority to a post-apostolic document that it would not otherwise have by claiming it was written by an apostle. In short, it involved an attempt to deceive and was rightly rejected by the church fathers who were not naive about such things. Laird is also right that it was some of the books that actually made it into the canon– namely the anonymous Hebrews, 2-3 John, 2 Peter, and Revelation that were being debated by the early church and some had doubts about these books being apostolic in character. Laird’s historical judgments about these matters are careful and usually good and to be commended. I agree with him that we do not likely have any pseudonymous documents in the NT canon which we have today.

I do however have some concerns about this books, as follows. In the first place Luke himself tells us in Lk. 1.1-4 that the basis for his consultation and account of ‘the things that have happened among us’ is eyewitnesses and servants or ministers of the word’, and this is surely not limited to those whom Jesus designated as the Twelve, or even a larger group of apostles. Luke himself was neither an original eyewitness or servant of the Word, and so far as we know, he was someone associated with Paul, an apostle by a revelation from the Lord Jesus on Damascus Road. Not only not one of the original Twelve, but also not the new 12th member of the 12 according to Luke’s account in Acts 1 (despite what the Orthodox Church later said). Luke could only be called an ‘apostolic man’ by stretching the term beyond the way Luke himself uses it. He’s the one who uses the phrase the twelve apostles, and then in Acts 13-14 uses the broader sense of someone sent by a church (Antioch) on a mission, in this case Barnabas and Paul.

Paul himself, to judge from 1 Cor. 15 (and comparing 1 Cor. 9— ‘am I not an apostle, have I not seen the risen Lord’) had a rather broad view of what apostle meant— namely someone who saw the risen Lord, and was thereby commissioned to spread the Good Word, both men and women, and in fact Paul says that more than 500 people saw the risen Jesus, and that Jesus appeared particularly to his own brother James, who like Paul was not an original disciple of Jesus. Indeed John 7.5 says James did not believe in Jesus as a messianic figure before Easter, though he knew about his miracles. Now my point is this— the writers of the NT themselves saw eyewitnesses, original servants of the Word and yes apostles as those who passed on the Good News about Jesus, it was not just a matter of apostles, whatever one meant by that term. There were a lot of sent ones— both men and women who bore witness. What this tells us, when NT books were beginning to be collected and treated as sacred texts is that the criteria was not just were they apostolic in origin, but were they TRUE witnesses to what the original eyewitnesses (including apostles) and servants of the Word had preached and delivered to the converts. And this meant these documents had to have come from the first couple of generations of Christians within the first century A.D., either by eyewitnesses, or original preachers, or those who were their co-workers who lived at time like Luke when the eyewitnesses and original preachers could be consulted. In short, there was an inherent time limit to what could be considered to be based on the original eyewitness and apostolic testimony. And in fact, no document in the NT comes from later than that first century period with the possible exception of 2 Peter.

The second thing of note that I wish Laird had discussed is the fact that external evidence is secondary, such as later labels added to documents, and internal evidence of the NT documents themselves must be primary. The church fathers, God bless their hearts, sometimes mixed up the Johns, the James, and the Marys. Was the John who wrote Revelation really the same John as the one associated with the Fourth Gospel? If so he must have had a vocabulary transplant between the writing of the Gospel and the writing of the Revelation because terms like ‘laos’ and ‘ethnos’ get used differently in these two works.

It seems clear enough to me that the John which Polycarp knew is the same John that Papias knew, namely John the Elder, not John son of Zebedee (and so Irenaeus got this wrong as the pupil of Polycarp). About John Zebedee we now have a papyrus suggesting his early martyrdom (see my John’s Wisdom), like his brother James, something Jesus himself predicted for the Zebedee boys. And any fair analysis of the Fourth Gospel will show a total absence of special Zebedee stories where those brother were present to witness— the calling of the Zebedees from their nets, the raising of Jairus’ daughter, or the transfiguration, etc. and yet this very Gospel claims to give eyewitness testimony (see John 19-21). But by whom? To judge from the fact that this Gospel shares exactly one Galilean miracle story in common with the Synoptics (the feeding of the 5,000) instead focusing on miracles that happened in or around Jerusalem, or on a story from Cana not mentioned anywhere in the Synoptics, and tells no tales of exorcism and gives no parables of Jesus like we find in the Synoptics, the likelihood is that this Gospel is by a Judaean disciple of Jesus, not a Galilean one. In fact the Zebedees are not even mentioned in this Gospel until the appendix– John 21, the fishing expedition after Easter. The ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’ is identified not as John Zebedee, but as Eliezar aka Lazarus in John 11, and it is not an accident that the phrase ‘the beloved disciple’ does not even show up in the 4th Gospel until AFTER John 11. How then did this Gospel later get the label ‘the Gospel according to John’, bearing in mind that the ‘according to’ label was likely only trotted out when several Gospels were collected together. You don’t call a Gospel ‘according to John’ unless there is at least one other Gospel according to someone else?

This brings me to an important historical point I wished Laird had dealt with. The labels on ancient documents did not always mean the person named was the author, or sole author of the document. There were composite documents in antiquity, where the name appended to the document meant that the person was either: 1) the author of the document, or 2) the most famous or prominent source of the document, or 3) the final compiler of the document. 2 Peter is very clearly a composite document, the second chapter of which is based on Jude, the third chapter of which shows knowledge of a collection of Paul’s letters, and only the first chapter of which reads like something which the author of 1 Peter might have written, in terms of substance, vocabulary, and syntax. I’ve argued in a published article that there is a Petrine source in 2 Peter 1, telling a personal tale about seeing the Transfiguration. Peter is not the compiler of this document only the most famous and first source, and the compiler in this case which uses Petrine, Jude, and Pauline sources is not claiming any credit for the material. He’s not likely an apostle. For that matter, it looks like Silas actually was the scribe who wrote 1 Peter for Peter. It’s way better Greek than 2 Peter.

The same logic applies to Matthew’s Gospel. One can argue that Matthew, one of the Twelve is the source of the unique material in that Gospel, including Mt. 1-2 for instance, but it is also clear that when 95% of Mark’s Gospel shows up in Matthew’s with a 52% verbatim rate, one has to know there is a literary relationship between these two Gospels, and as the vast majority of Matthean scholars agree, the Matthean version of the common material is a smoothed out, edited version of the Markan material. If I have two students submitting term papers and 95% of one is in the other paper, I’m going to know there is a literary relationship between them for sure.

And this brings me back to the Fourth Gospel. Who exactly is the ‘we’ in John 21 who says ‘and we know that the Beloved Disciple’s testimony is true? My answer would be John, John the elder, who may well be the same person as John of Patmos, returned from exile, and the one who compiled the eyewitness testimony of the Beloved Disciple for all posterity.

In short the fact that later church fathers like Tertullian said that these NT documents were written by apostles or ‘apostolic men’ applying the term in probably a narrower sense than the term is used in the NT itself, is o.k. as far as it goes, but it doesn’t place the emphasis where Luke does— on the original eyewitnesses. But notice that John 21 and for that matter 1 John 1 places the emphasis on eyewitnesses– a person who heard and saw these things, or at least some of them. John of Patmos does not claim to be an apostle or one of the Twelve. He claims to be a visionary, and he was. John called the elder who wrote 2-3 John doesn’t claim to be an apostle. He claims to be an elder— and he was.

And this brings me to one further point. Benjamin Laird is quite right that these matters are complex. And it is important to note that for something to count as Scripture, according to 2 Tim. 3.16, it must be God-breathed. That is, the document must be inspired by God, through whatever human vessel God uses to convey his truth. It is interesting however that the phrase Word of God in Acts and in Paul never refers to a text. It refers to the oral preaching of the Gospel by the servants of the Word which changed lives, and notice that Paul says in 1 Thess. 2.13, that what his audience heard was not merely the words of an apostle, but ‘as it actually is– the Word of God’ which is the change agent. Laird needed to say considerably more about how inspiration from God, not merely apostolic involvement in some documents is what ultimately gave these documents authority. They still have authority today because they tell the truth about God, about salvation history, about other theological and ethical matters, as 2 Tim. 3.16 suggests. Without question the apostles wrote some things that didn’t make it into the canon of the NT. We know this from reading 1-2 Corinthians which mentions other letters Paul, or say Colossians, which mentions a letter to the Laodiceans. Why in God’s providence don’t we have these documents in the canon? My answer would be probably because even apostles can get some things wrong, or say some things that God didn’t want preserved in his Holy Word. At the end of the day, it’s not primarily because the documents in the NT were apostolic that they ended up in the canon, though that is not unimportant. What mattered most was that they were by the eyewitnesses or those who consulted the eyewitnesses or the original preachers of the Word of God, and most importantly— that oral testimony was the Word of God which became the written down Word of God because it was the truth, and nothing but the truth. See my new book Sola Scriptura. coming out from Baylor Press in October.

Five View on the New Testament Canon– A Review and Critique

January 7, 2023 By Ben Witherington

Five Views on the New Testament Canon, eds. S.E. Porter and B.P. Laird, (Grand Rapids, Kregel, 2022), 288 pages, $24.99.

In recent years there have been a slew of books with four or five views on some topic important to students of the Bible. This is another one, and interestingly it involves Protestants Catholics, and Orthodox scholars sharing and comparing their views on the complex manner of NT canon formation. Three of the views are by Protestants, or at least by people well conversant with the Protestant views on such matters (and two are labeled some sort of Evangelical, the other representing liberal Protestantism). Doubtless this is because the folks putting this together know that the main audience for such books by Kregel are Protestants, and chiefly Evangelicals. But it is very helpful that both a Catholic and an Orthodox scholar are allowed to weigh in on the matter, and critique the other presenters as well.

No book can be all things to all people, and this is a good book remarkably free of unnecessary and unhelpful polemics. It involves respectful dialogue, but if you are looking for a deep discussion of what counts as truth, what counts as the Word of God, what we should think about the relation of history to theology, and particularly what we should think about the inspiration of Biblical texts, there is not a surfeit of discussion on those relevant topics, though there is some. For instance, there is little or no discussion about how sacred texts worked and were viewed in an overwhelmingly oral environment in early Judaism or the Greco-Roman world. There is no real discussion about whether inspiration somehow produces truthful discussions about history, theology and ethics in the NT. There is also next to no discussion about the relationship between the closing of the canon of the OT and the canon of the NT even though all the quotations of the OT in the NT with one possible exception (Jude quoting 1 Enoch, but he does not quote it as ‘Scripture’ but as a true prophetic utterance) all come from the 39 books of the OT that all Christians and also Jews recognize as Scripture. This suggests that the OT canon was de facto closed by the time the NT documents were written, and provided Scriptural resources for the composers of NT documents, all of whom or almost all of whom were Jews. What we do get in this volume is elongated discussions and debates about whether the church authorized and canonized the NT books, or merely recognized them as authoritative on the basis of certain criteria— apostolicity (in some sense), catholicity, widespread use etc. What about the criteria of veracity of content?

There are many positive things to say about this volume, and here are some of the things: 1) it makes very clear that all the participants recognize that the NT is (and I would add, should be) these 27 books plus nothing. Other early Christian literature is valuable but not canonical, not NT Scriptures. 2) Protestants Catholics, and the Orthodox have more disagreements about what the OT canon includes than the NT canon. Only Protestants are in agreement with Jews about the extent of the OT canon; 3) the term kanon itself refers in the first instance to a measuring rod, and came to refer to canonical limits of the NT, something that no sort of definitive statement was made about before the 4^th century. And as Prof. Boxall says, the real watershed moment for Catholics was at the Council of Trent (on which see below). 4) Note the helpful definition of apostolicity by Prof. Boxall on p. 143: “Apostolicity is understood rather as the preservation of the original apostolic response to the Christ event, first conveyed through the preached Gospel, and preserved both orally in the ongoing transmission of the apostolic tradition, and in written form in the writings now recognized as canonical. The authority of the NT writings lies in their preservation of the authoritative testimony from ‘the closing period of foundational revelation.’” Note the reference to revelation. The NT is not viewed as mere human words about God, but as revelation. What should have been also said in this statement is that the authoritative testimony is a true testimony. Its authority doesn’t primarily lie in which human being said it, but in what was said when the truth was revealed. 5) Prof. Boxall rightly stresses that at the heart of all these texts is a person— Jesus Christ, a living person, indeed the risen Lord, not merely a collection of texts. But does this mean that the teaching of Jesus is somehow more inspired than say the teaching of Paul? The early church fathers do not in the main seem to think so. Here, I’m thinking particularly of people like John Chrysostom.

Something has to be said about the false notion that shows up in places in this volume that the writers of the NT had no clue they were speaking or writing God’s Word, but rather that idea was a clearly ex post facto judgment. Just for a moment let’s talk about probably the earliest contributor to the NT— the apostle Paul. Consider for a minute what’s in perhaps our earliest NT document—1 Thessalonians 2.13— “And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word, but as it actually is, the Word of God, which is indeed at work in you who believe.” Paul of course is talking about hearing the Good News about Jesus which he calls ‘the Word of God’, and he quite clearly says it was properly received as not merely the words of human beings, but THE WORD OF GOD. In fact, he says that it is actually the Word of God, the change agent at work in those who believe. In fact, the phrase ‘logos tou theou’ throughout the NT, when it does not refer to Christ himself (e.g. in John 1) refers to the oral proclamation of the Good News and the truth about Christ. This is true where this phrase occurs in Acts and also in Hebrews where that word of God is said to pierce to the depths of a person’s being and changes that person. Paul, and others believed they were inspired to proclaim God’s Word that told the truth about Jesus (see my The Living Word of God, on this and on the issue of whether the canon misfired or not!). It’s not enough to talk about canon consciousness. We need to discuss Word of God consciousness spoken of above, Scripture consciousness (see 2 Pet.3—- “He writes the same way in all his letters….which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures”), and yes canon consciousness. Both Word of God and Scripture consciousness already existed and was applied to what is now the content of the NT, including the earliest Pauline content, long before the canon or canon consciousness appeared in early church history. The failure to deal with the historical situation of genuine Christians before there was a canon of Scripture and yet for whom various of these texts were soul nourishing and coming from God through human writers is a significant failure in some forms of canonical criticism.

Now we can debate what the relationship of this oral proclamation is to written words, but when we actually look closely at a text like 1 Cor. 7, Paul stacks up his own pronouncements alongside of Jesus’ in regard to divorce, and thinks they have the same authority for his audience as Jesus’s words. And if there was any doubt about that he tells them that he too, like Jesus, has the Spirit of God inspiring his words. I do not personally doubt Paul believed his written words were viewed by him as just as authoritative as his proclaimed words. Indeed, his letters contain what he would have proclaimed orally to various congregations had he been present there. They are oral and rhetorical discourses. Put another way, they are the preaching of God’s Word in written form.

And are we really to suppose that when we read in regard to the OT Scripture that it is God-breathed that somehow the writer thought that the content of the writers of the NT about Jesus as the Savior of the world were somehow less authoritative or truth-telling than the God-breathed OT? The answer is surely no. They did not. They believed God’s inspiration applied not just to speaking but also to writing, just as was the case with the OT prophets like a Jeremiah. The authority of what was said was determined by the truth of the content itself as inspired by God. A secondary thing that gave authority to what was said is who it came from—- from eyewitnesses (cf. Lk. 1.1-4), from apostles, and from the co-workers of both apostles and eyewitnesses. And since that, broadly speaking, became the criteria used to determine what books should be consider inspired NT texts in due course, then automatically any documents created after the apostolic period of whatever sort were ruled out as canonical Scriptures of the NT.

Of course, it is true that various Christian writers of the 2^nd through 4^th century were not always clear on the criteria for what counted as their new Scriptures, but happily various parts of the church recognized these 27 documents as their NT in the fourth century. No canon lists or codexes included any Gnostic documents, or the Gospel of Thomas, or the Acts of Paul and Thecla, or other second century documents though there was some debate about the Gospel of Peter and the Shepherd of Hermas early on and occasionally such a document showed up in a codex, but it may be debated whether we should view codexes as canon lists. More likely they are approved Christian reading lists.[1] And even the Gospel of Peter, when read by a church authority was disapproved for reading in church.

One of the lacuna of this volume is any detailed discussion of the importance of text criticism, of establishing the earliest Greek text of the NT as best we can. Thankful the editors of the volume in their conclusions have a brief discussion of the matter and offer a helpful listing of volumes where we can track down the canon lists and other helpful resources. This is good, but contrast this with statements about the Council of Trent that Prof. Boxall rightly draws our attention to. There is a huge problem with the Council of Trent’s pronouncement about the 27 books of the NT because they added the phrase ‘in all its parts”, which includes the long ending of Mark, John. 7.53-8.11 and the additions to Luke’s passion narrative.[2]

This is problematic on several counts: 1) text determines canon in regard to this matter. By this I mean that no clearly later additions to the text in the second or later centuries should be considered the original inspired text of NT Scripture. This is just a basic principle of text criticism widely recognized today, and is rightly the basis of the revisions of NT translations in the last century; 2) of course when the Council of Trent made its decision in 1546, Latin was still the official language of the Scripture and liturgy of the Catholic Church, and proper text criticism didn’t truly exist, even to the point of not giving priority to the original language texts of Scripture. Latin was in any case the original language of no NT text.[3]

When one considers the intertwined nature of history, theology, and ethics in the NT, and especially in the Gospels and Acts the question that has to be raised is this— If the text is making both a historical and a theological claim, how should this be viewed? Can a text be both theologically true and historically false? My answer to that question is no, if the theology in question is grounded in and dependent on some historical occurrence. So, for example, as Paul makes clear in regard to the resurrection of Christ in 1 Cor. 15— if Christ is not raised then his death atoned for nothing and we are still in our sins. History and theology are intertwined because early Christianity is a religion grounded in, and based on some historical claims, especially about Jesus. It would have been good if one of the writers of these chapters was an ancient historian who had actually written a book on NT History.

The NT is full of theologizing which needs to be interpreted, and it does not require a later ‘theological or canonical reading’ of the text to make it theologically important or significant. Later theological readings of the text are fine, if they comport with or are a reasonable exposition or amplification of the theology in the Scriptural text itself. The fact that the original texts of the NT are words on target for those first audiences does not mean they could not be words on target for other and later audiences as well. But the important point is that what the text meant in its original setting is still today what the text means— hence the need for good detailed contextual exegesis. It may have a different significance or application today, but what it doesn’t have is a different meaning. Meaning is in the configuration of the words in the Greek text, not in the eyes of the beholder, even though it is true we are all active and even creative readers of the text. What must be guarded against in such readings is reading something into the text which does not comport with the actual meaning of the text. In other words, the sin of anachronism needs to be avoided.

In the first couple of chapters by Evangelical scholars, the chapter by D. Lockett is far less problematic than the one by D. Nienhuis. The latter follows the sort of canonical approach to the Scriptures we find in the work of Robert Wall and others. While I have no problem with the notion that the NT once assembled in a particular order took on further significance, provided further insights, led to new applications of the NT, there is however a big problem with seeing this as the point at which we find the definitive meaning of the text or the point at which it became Scripture for the church. It had already been Scripture read in church for generations before then. A text without a context is just a pretext for whatever you want it to mean and the original contexts of each of the NT documents is the first century audiences to whom it was sent.

It was the Word of God for those earliest Christians first, before there ever was a collection of Gospels, or Paul’s letters or the Catholic epistles, and since it is the same texts with the same words which later became part of the NT canon its meaning did not suddenly show up in the fourth century A.D., nor for that matter its original significance. The sort of canonical criticism suggested in Nienhuis is largely a-historical or to some degree anti-historical in approach (or later 4^th century historical in approach). It somehow mistakes liberal and radical historical criticism of the NT as either the only sort of critical historical study there is of these texts, or suggests we must simply accept the notion that there are pseudepigrapha (see p. 90) in the NT canon, a suggestion many and perhaps most conservative Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox scholars would rightly reject. As Richard Bauckham and others have made clear, there was a serious problem with pseudepigrapha when it came to the truth claims within a document. As Bart Ehrman demonstrated at length— such documents are forgeries, and there is clear evidence from the second century and later that church leaders rejected such documents as not to be read in church, much less later included in a NT canon.[2] The Pastoral Epistles, for example, were not viewed as such by the early church.

Underlying all the discussions in this volume is the issue of the relationship of Scripture to later church tradition, with various authors suggesting that these are two streams of Christian teaching worth studying and learning from, which is of course true, with some suggesting that the tradition outside the NT canon is in various ways as authoritative as the tradition inside the NT canon. I prefer the statement of my old Princeton Teacher, Bruce Metzger that the church recognized what the Holy Spirit had guided the church to see as its NT Scripture, it did not determine the canon. As such the canon of the NT was to be seen as the norm of all norms which can be supplemented by, amplified by, explained by other traditions, but can’t be supplanted by, corrected by later traditions. Only the NT documents are revelation from God, not the later traditions that can supplement and explain such revelation.[4]

Prof. Parsenios says that the Orthodox tradition never felt it necessary to make a definitive statement about the limits of the NT canon, unlike the Council of Trent. This is perhaps in part because the Protestant movement was born in Europe out of Roman Catholicism, not out of the Orthodox tradition, and the Council of Trent was of course part of the attempt by the Catholic church to counter the Protestant Reformation. Happily, this volume helpfully proves we don’t need to be anathematizing each other anymore. Rather, we can have respectful dialogue, even with significant disagreements and can actually work towards understanding canonical matters better together as brothers and sisters in Christ.

It is the measure of a good book like this one that it teases the mind into activity thought as C.H. Dodd used to say about Jesus’ parables, and produces vigorous and hopefully helpful responses. I highly recommend this book for that very reason, however much I may disagree with this or that point of the five main contributing writers.

[1] On the issue of the Muratorian fragment being a second century canon list, see not only the article by J. Verheyden listed in the Five Views book in a note on p.47, but also my deconstruction of the later date theory by Hahneman in my, What’s in the Word? (Baylor U. Press, 2009).

[2]. See Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God, (Oxford, 2012).

[3] The council went on for many years, starting in 1545.

[4] See my lengthy discussion of this issue in Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians, Vol. One. (IV Press, 2014).

Jesus in Context– The Dialogue Part Thirteen

June 20, 2022 By Ben Witherington

Q. One of the things that recurs in your study is the fact that differences in the Gospel accounts, and in this case particularly in the passion and resurrection narratives rather than being a weakness, are actually a historical strength, because they bear witness to the fact that there were a variety of traditions, oral and written, not just one tradition that was copied by the other evangelists. Certainly, the unique stories in Matthew and Luke about the crucifixion and its aftermath did not come to them from Mark. And sometimes modern scholars are guilty of a surprising amount of anachronism— assuming that ancient histories or biographies would be written according to modern standards for such works. I’ve debated Bart Ehrman on this matter and kept saying to him you are treating the Gospels as if they were 4 photographs but actually they are more like four interpretive paintings— say like the famous multiple paintings of Rouen cathedral by the great Impressionist Monet. No one is comparing those paintings and asking— why is there a yellow dot at this precise spot here whereas in the next painting it is a red dot? But then too, as you do, we have to take into account the editorial work of each Evangelist. In ancient works like these Gospels there was a certain amount of freedom and flexibility in how the historical tale would be told, with different details and different emphases. In other words, the differences between the Gospel accounts are often deliberate, reflecting the writers’ emphases. In the end, Jesus was such a complex and important historical that we should be thankful we have 4 portraits instead of one, which look at the Christ event from differing perspectives. No one portrait could have done him justice. To me the fact that Matthew takes over some 95% of Mark with a 52% verbatim rate and yet manages to also give us much unique material not found in Mark is very telling—- yes, he is following a tradition, but no, he is not confined to his Mark source– even in the common material he feels free to add and subtract to make his points. Now I mention all of this because I think the big problem with many many modern assessments of the Gospels is that they are done by modern persons, including modern historians, and they bring their own gestalt to the reading of the material, complete with their assumptions, sometimes with their agnosticism or bias against things they would call primitive beliefs in the supernatural. Would you agree with this overall assessment?

A. I agree with you – again. I would underline what you say about Matthew not being confined to his Markan source. Modern scholars fail to reckon adequately with the importance and strength of oral traditions of Jesus in the first century after Jesus. We live in a book- and writing- culture – or at least we did until the advent of very modern media – but in the time of Jesus the ‘default setting’ was passing things on orally from person to person. Education was like that in the time of Jesus (and indeed until the last century): rote learning was the norm, and typically remarkably effective and accurate. The first Christians ‘passed on’ the stories and sayings of Jesus (see 1 Cor 11:23 and 15:3). And so, although I agree with most scholars that Matthew and Luke probably knew Mark, their prior source of information about Jesus will have been the stories of the Lord as recounted in church. And so although their portraits of Jesus often reflect their differing perspectives and priorities, their differences are often just differing selections from the received oral tradition. They are four independent witnesses, and we know that a variety of eyewitnesses to an event, for example in court, will often give us different but complementary angles.

Q. I love the way you end the book, especially with the quote from Speth. The great danger of the technological revolution is the assumption that science and technology can fix everything and cure all our ills. I was struck by how the quote from Speth which refers to selfishness, greed and the like mirrors Jesus’ own words that the real uncleanness comes out of the human heart— war, adultery, murder, narcissism and the like. And we are now seeing all of that in real time on TV day after day in Ukraine. What would Jesus say and do in our situation? How would you answer that question as we conclude our dialogue.

A. I have no doubt that he would weep over the events in Ukraine, as he wept over Jerusalem, and that he would weep over the sins of Russia, Ukraine and the Western world that have contributed to the modern situation. He would at the same time promise that the Son of man will come in final victory, and in the meantime he would encourage us to ‘keep awake’ spiritually and in prayer. Scholars tend with monotonous regularity to translate the Greek word gregorein as ‘to watch’. But in modern English ‘watch’ no longer means ‘stay awake’: Jesus’ injunction is a reminder that it is all too easy to fall asleep spiritually – in face of the great dangers that we face as human societies . Jesus stayed awake and went to the cross, for us as Christians believe; the disciples fell asleep and failed Jesus. Jesus’ call to stay awake – he warned of wars, plagues, famines and false prophets – continues to be urgent and relevant. So does his promise of his coming and the hope that it represents.

N.T. Wright’s Galatians– Part Thirty Two

August 7, 2021 By Ben Witherington

Q. I entirely agree with you that we already see incipient Trinitarian thinking about Father, Son, and Spirit all under the heading of God, in Gal. 4. I like to say that we have already in our earliest NT books the raw materials of a doctrine of the Trinity, which granted, needs some later unpacking, but that M. Hengel was right that the earliest Christology which we find in Paul is the highest or some of the highest, so the notion that there was an upward evolutionary spiral of thinking from viewing Jesus as mostly human with divine power to being the second person of the Trinity is simply wrong. This is of course what B. Ehrman is arguing in his How Jesus became God book. But alas, it falls afoul of the first great theologian of the NT era. What I find mystifying is why some Christian theologians embrace such a false reading of the data. Have you any clues as to why they do so?

A. It’s a mystery to me too. But part of it is the long shadow of von Harnack from over 100 years ago, arguing that the Fathers muddled up the ‘simple’ message of Jesus with their Greek philosophy. And I prefer not to think of the NT’s threefold view of God as ‘incipient’ anything, but to see the later formulation of ‘Trinity’ as ‘abstraction’ from the rich narrative which the NT tells. After all, as Henry Chadwick pointed out (and he knew the Fathers like few others in the last century), if all one had were Nicaea and Chalcedon one would never imagine that the person to whom those creeds refer was the Jesus of Nazareth we meet as a vivid, rich, friendly, challenging figure in the gospels. Insofar as the dogma loses that, it loses something irreparable. I think this is partly because although theologians have always insisted that Jesus was ‘truly human’ as well as ‘truly divine’ they have not normally explored what that ‘humanness’ actually meant in the Bible-soaked world of the day. Jesus’ ‘humanness’ becomes just a postulate to be affirmed, not a rich reality to be explored. That’s why the protests of Daniel Kirk and James McGrath have at least something going for them, in that they do see there’s something important to be said there which much Christology has omitted – even though of course I think JM and DK are way off beam overall.

The New Wright-Bird Intro– Part Three

February 21, 2020 By Ben Witherington

There are many positive things that can be said about this Introduction to the NT. It is beautifully produced and carefully proof-read. It has excellent quality pictures and good bibliographies. It gives us the analysis of two mature scholars on top of their discipline. It is written in an appealing and inviting way. One of the best features of the volume is that it tries to do justice not just to the theology of the NT, or just to the literature in the NT, but also to the historical foundations of it all. It is rare to find a NT Introduction that tries to tackle all three of those in one volume. Not only so, but it deals with many thorny issues like text criticism, the formation of the canon, the issue of pseudepigrapha and much more. In general, the authors take a rather traditional approach to all these matters. This is a very different Intro compared for example to Bart Ehrman’s bestselling textbooks on the same subject.

Readers familiar with the work of Wright, will recognize some of his distinctive themes about exile, about Christ and his people being the fulfillment of God’s OT promises and prophecies to Israel, about the old covenant being renewed in the new one, about ‘the faithfulness of Christ’ being the correct interpretation of ‘pistis Christou’ about works of the law having in the main to do with the boundary rites Paul says are obsolete or already fulfilled in Christ— circumcision, food laws, sabbath keeping and so on. And the overall gestalt of the interpretation of these matters as well as of things like justification, the relationship of the two testaments, and the like turned out to be a Reformed take on various things, albeit a very different one than say John Piper’s or Wayne Grudem’s, particularly when it comes to things like women and their roles in the church, or say the imputed righteousness of Christ.

I am happy to give this Introduction a positive endorsement as a very good one, particularly if one takes into account the level of audience it assumes. Not all Introductions target the same audience. This one is for a more advanced Christian audience and will be especially useful as a reference tool for pastors, seminary students, doctoral students in Biblical studies, and educated laypersons. This is not an Introduction for beginning students of the NT. It is too vast and too detailed for that. But as a nice summation of Wright’s views on a whole host of subjects involving history, literature, and theology, it is top drawer, as the British would say. And it is nice as well to see Michael Bird’s various contributions to this volume and its videos as well. Well done chaps, inherit the royalties.

Why you Shouldn’t Adopt Adoption Christology

February 28, 2019 By Ben Witherington

Here’s another good post by Larry Hurtado
Christological Non-Starters: Part 1, “Adoption as Divine Son”
by larryhurtado

Having spent now some forty years exploring and attempting to understand how earliest Christians understood and reverenced Jesus, it is sometimes almost amusing to see proposals presented confidently that actually have scant basis in the earliest evidence. In this and a couple of ensuing postings I’ll mention a few (and, no doubt, make proponents a bit angry, but “them’s the breaks”).

One claim is that Paul and/or other early believers saw Jesus as God’s “adopted Son,” the putative adoption posited as his baptism or resurrection. Certainly, there are reports of individuals and groups from the late second century AD and later about such ideas. These include the figure associated with a Valentinian gnostic position, a Theodotus, extracts of his thought cited and commented on my Clement of Alexandria.[1] But, if I may, where exactly do we find an “adoption” of Jesus by God stated in Paul, or in other earlier texts?

One attempted answer is that it happened at Jesus’ baptism, as related in the Synoptic Gospels. Proof is alleged in the divine voice: “You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” But the first thing to ask is this scene one of adoption or an acclamation? As widely recognized, the statement in the baptism scene draws upon (and may allude to) Psalm 2:7, “You are my son; today I have begotten you.” It’s commonly thought that the Psalm originated to celebrate the installation of the Judean king, at whose coronation he was “begotten.” This divine “begetting” has sometimes been taken as a metaphorical statement that the kind as adopted by God, but this has been challenged more recently.[2] But, whatever the case, if the Synoptic writers wanted to make it clear that at his baptism Jesus was likewise supposedly adopted as “son”, why didn’t they just include the full Psalm statement? Instead, the baptism scenes all simply affirm Jesus’ divine sonship, without any reference to “today I have begotten you,” which looks more like an acclamation and commissioning of Jesus as royal Messiah, not an adoption.[3]

Certainly, the terminology of adoption was readily at hand. Verbal forms, from huiotheteō or huiopoieō, and noun forms such as huiothesia, for example. Indeed, Paul does use this last term, but only to refer to the action by which God makes believers “sons” (Galatians 4:5; Romans 8:15). That is, Paul uses adoption terminology in what theologians term “soteriological” statements (concerning the salvation of believers), but not in “christological statements” (concerning the work or status of Jesus). So, if early figures such as Paul wished to affirm Jesus’ adoption as divine son, why didn’t they say so, equally explicitly, in the terminology readily available to do so?

And that brings us to Romans 1:3-4, the Pauline text to which appeal is sometime made. But, here again, it bears noting that the text says nothing about adoption. It portrays Jesus as born from “the seed of David,” and “declared/affirmed [horisthentos] the son of God in power” at his resurrection (presented here as the first to experience the general resurrection “of the dead”). The term, horisthentos, is a form of a verb used variously to refer to separating or designating something or someone (for some special use or significance), but never for adoption. Further, the emphasis in the statement appears to be that as of Jesus’ resurrection he is thereafter the son of God “in power,” which likely refers to the well-known belief that Jesus’ resurrection involved at his exaltation to function as God’s plenipotentiary.

It is sometimes claimed, however, that the belief in Jesus as adopted divine Son was initial and early, but was then superseded by belief in his “pre-existence,” such as is reflected already in Paul’s letters, written ca. 50 AD and thereafter. Anything is possible, of course. But this supersession would have to have been very early, and any “adoption-christology” rather short-lived. For, by common scholarly consent, Paul underwent his “revelation of God’s Son” within a couple of years at most after Jesus’ crucifixion. And, moreover, by common scholarly judgement he was initiated into a Jesus-movement that already held the basic christological convictions that are reflected in his letters (e.g., that Jesus had been glorified and given a status second only to God, and that in some manner he was already “there” from, and the agent of, creation). Indeed, I suspect that he was reacting against such convictions in his previous opposition to the Jesus-movement. So, in any case, if there was an early adoption-christology, it would have been very short-lived, and, it appears, it left scant explicit trace or impact. It would have been an abortive non-starter. So, certainly as far as Paul knew (and he did get around quite a lot!), whether in Jerusalem or his own assemblies, Jesus was reverenced similarly as designated “Lord”, not as adopted Son.

To be sure, the powerful ignition factors in the explosive development of early Jesus-devotion included particularly the experiences of the risen and exalted Jesus. In that sense, Ehrman is correct to refer to an early “exaltation” view of Jesus, as having been given a new place of unique status “at the right hand” of God. But, by all indications, the view that Jesus was exalted to a new status/role by God (e.g., Philippians 2:9-11) went fully hand-in-hand with beliefs that Jesus was God’s “Son” by right all along, so to speak, with no adoption involved. To appeal to an ancient practice for rough comparison, when an ancient king elevated a son to the position of co-regent and successor, this wasn’t an adoption. It was the conferral of a new status, to be sure, but the person didn’t thereby become a son. He was already a son, who was designated with a new explicit role, and obedience to the reigning king required that this designated son be acknowledged and honoured by the king’s loyal subjects also. Just so, earliest Jesus-followers stressed that God had exalted his Son, given him divine glory and “the name above all names,” and now required him to be reverenced appropriately.[4]

[1] R. P. Casey (ed.), The Excerpta Ex Theodoto of Clement of Alexandria, Studies & Documents, 1 (London: Christophers, 1934). Esp. 33.1.

[2] See, e.g., Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins, King and Messiah As Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), esp. 19-24.

[3] See, e.g., Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 150, who proposes that the divine voice “appoints” Jesus as Messiah.

[4] For a more detailed critique of “adoption Christology” proposals, see Michael Bird, Jesus the Eternal Son: Answering Adoptionist Christology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017). For more on the historical importance of the place of Jesus in earliest devotional practices, Larry W. Hurtado, Honoring the Son: Jesus in Earliest Christian Devotional Practice (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018).

Notable Variants in Codex W on the Ending of Mark’s Gospel

January 22, 2019 By Ben Witherington

Here’s another helpful post by Larry Hurtado…..

In earlier postings I’ve noted that major variants continue to appear, and in some cases “succeed” in gaining widespread acceptance in the subsequent manuscript tradition as late as the fifth century and thereafter. There are also examples of interesting variants that first appear in the extant Greek manuscripts that late, but didn’t “succeed”. Having done my PhD thesis on the text of the Gospel of Mark in Coldex W (the Freer Gospel codex), I’ll cite a few interesting variants in this manuscript as examples.[1]

I’ll begin with a variant that is more well known, the so-called “Freer Logion.” This variant appears only in Codex W among extant Greek manuscripts after what we know as Mark 16:14 (in the “long ending” variant). Here is an English translation:

And they excused themselves, saying, “This age of lawlessness and unbelief is under Satan, who does not allow the truth and power of God to prevail over the unclean things of the spirits [or, does not allow what lies under the unclean spirits to understand the truth and power of God.] Therefore reveal your justice now”— thus they spoke to Christ. And Christ replied to them, “The term of years of Satan’s power has been fulfilled, but other terrible things draw near. And for those who have sinned I was delivered over to death, that they may return to the truth and sin no more, in order that they may inherit the spiritual and incorruptible glory of justice which is in heaven.”[2]

A version of this variant is attested as known to Jerome in some Greek manuscripts in the fourth century.[3] But Codex W is the only extant example. Metzger opined that the logion was probably first added to the text of the “long ending” of Mark by a “scribe” sometime in the second or third century “to soften the severe condemnation of the Eleven in 16.14.”[4] The ascription of the motive for the variant seems cogent, but, as with other “intentional” variants, we should more plausibly ascribe the Freer Logion to some unknown reader/user of a copy of the Gospel of Mark.[5] But my main point is that, whatever its point of origin, this variant didn’t “succeed” in being accepted into the manuscript tradition of Mark beyond Codex W.

A far less well-known variant in the text of Mark in Codex W appears at Mark 1:3. Whereas the best-attested text in vv. 2-3 is a slightly variant quotation of Exodus 23:20 and Isaiah 40:3, in Codex W the quotation of Isaiah includes the whole of 40:3-8. Again, Codex W is the only witness in the Greek manuscript tradition for this variant. And again I think it likely that the variant arose in the course of someone reading the text and adding the words of Isaiah 40:4-8, perhaps originally as a marginal note. In any case, this is another variant of significant size that just didn’t “succeed”.

I cite now a third instance of a variant apparently unique to Codex W. This one is much smaller, but I judge it clearly intentional. I’ll have to set the scene in Mark where the variant appears. In Mark 3:21, the best attested text refers to Jesus’ “associates/friends” or (more likely here) his “relatives” (Greek: οι παρ’ αυτου) setting out to take Jesus in hand for they (or others?) judged him to have lost his senses (Greek: ελεγον γαρ οτι εξεστη).[6] In Codex W (and also Codex Bezae), however, those who sought to take Jesus in hand in v. 21 are “those around him, the scribes and the others” (Greek: ακουσαντες [οτε ακουσαν Codex D] περι αυτου οι γραμματεις και οι λοιποι). Note that this shared variant involved “correcting” the preposition, changing παρα to περι, and disambiguating the text further by specifying “those around him” as “scribes and the others.” The effect (and the purpose) of this variant was clearly to avoid (“correct”) the idea that Jesus’ family could have regarded him as needing to be seized.

But in Codex W there is a further, and apparently distinctive, variant.[7] In place of the report that some were saying Jesus had lost his senses (εξεστη), Codex W has “they were saying ‘he has made them his adherents’.”[8] This actually involved another minor change of two words. Instead of εξεστη (“he is beside himself”), Codex W has εξηρτηνται αυτου, which means something like “they have become his adherents.” The effect (and the purpose) was to avoid the suggestion that Jesus was thought by some to have become somewhat unhinged. It seems to me likely that an early reader of the passage, troubled by what the more familiar wording says, and thinking that it must be some mistake, sought to put things right. Note that this involved replacing εξεστη (exestē) with a word that has a slight phonetic similarity, εξηρτηνται (exērtēntai).

It’s pretty obvious that both of the variants in Codex W (the one shared with Codex Bezae and the one unique to Codex W) were motivated by a pious desire to avoid what seemed to some readers an embarrassing passage that could reflect badly either on Jesus’ family or Jesus himself.[9] So it’s all the more interesting that neither one “succeeded” in getting adopted into the subsequent textual tradition. Instead, the potentially “embarrassing” text was preferred! In short, if the variants in Codex Bezae and Codex W are examples of an attempt at what Ehrman colourfully termed “orthodox corruption” of Mark, the attempts failed, and what is likely the originating form of the text was preferred and preserved.

These interesting variants in Codex W illustrate both the creation of variants, likely by devout readers seeking to amplify (as in the variant in Mark 1:3) and/or to correct the text (as in the “Freer Logion” and the variants in Mark 3:21), and also that such attempts didn’t by any means always “succeed” in the subsequent manuscript tradition. As I’ve emphasized repeatedly, the forces that generated such variants and that made for either their subsequent adoption or rejection deserve more attention.

[1] A lightly revised version of my 1973 PhD thesis was published later: Larry W. Hurtado, Text-Critical Methodology and the Pre-Caesarean Text: Codex W in the Gospel of Mark (“Studies and Documents,” 43; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981).

[2] Translation from Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Edition (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), 104. The Greek text (adapted slightly from the Nestle-Aland 28th edition apparatus): κακεινοι απελογουντο λεγοντες οτι ο αιων ουτος της ανοµιας και της απιστιας υπο τον σαταναν εστιν ο µη εων τα υπο των πνευµατων ακαθαρτα την αληθειαν του θεου καταλαβεσθαι δυναµιν. δια τουτο αποκαλυψον σου την δικαιοσυην ηδη εκεινοι ελεγον τω χριστω και ο χριστος εκεινοις προσελεγεν οτι πεπληρωται ο ορος των ετων της εξουσιας τον σατανα αλλα εγγιζει αλλα δεινα. και υπερ ων εγω αµαρτησαντων παρεδοθην εις θανατον ινα υποστρεψωσιν εις την αληθειαν και µηκετι αµαρτησωσιν ινα την εν τω ουρανω πνευµατικην και αφθαρτον της δικαιοσυνης δοξαν κληπονοµησωσιν.

[3] Jerome, Dialogues Against the Pelagians 2.15.

[4] Metzger, Textual Commentary, 104.

[5] In my own earlier work, such as my 1981 study, I unthinkingly echoed the ascription of such intentional changes to “scribes”. I have come to see, however, that we should grasp and distinguish the processes of copying and reading/using texts more carefully. Basically, copyists copied; and “intentional” changes tended to be produced by users/readers who took the time to study and puzzle over the text. As Zachary Cole has shown in his study of how the copyist of Codex W handled the designation of numbers, he rather mechanically reproduced his exemplar: Zachary J. Cole, “Evalutating Scribal Freedom and Fidelity: Number-Writing Techniques in Codex Washingtonianus (W 032),” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 52 (2015): 225-38.

[6] Those mention here are likely the family members who re-appear slightly later in Mark 3:31-35, which explains Jesus’ response in vv. 33-35.

[7] I discussed this variant in Hurtado, Text-Critical Methodology, 77, and I also make reference to a couple of earlier discussions.

[8] Codex Bezae has εξεσταται αυτους (“he has maddened them”) instead of εξεστη.

[9] There are actually a number of other variant readings in the manuscript tradition that show that various readers found Mark 3:21 a troubling text.