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A Final Post (!) on Luke 3:22

I would like to thank all the readers who have indulged me on this rather heavy thread of posts on the text of Luke 3:22. I certainly do not mean to provide a steady diet of hard-hitting scholarship on the blog, and I know that for some of you, this thread has been rather boring and uninteresting. But I do think that every now and then, maybe a couple of times a year, it is good to peel back the layers and go at it at a deeper level of scholarship, if nothing else to show the world at large how this kind of thing gets done at a more serious level. My book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, from which these posts have come, is all at this level. If you’ve enjoyed the posts (I know a couple of people have!) you may want to check out the book. If you’ve found them rather tedious, then you should be pleased to know that I will go back to less in-depth posts starting with my [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:17:04-04:00August 14th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Luke 3:22 — More on What Luke Would Have Written

In yesterday’s post I started to discuss the “intrinsic probabilities” that can help us establish the text of Luke 3:22. This kind of probability looks to determine what an author himself (as opposed to a scribe copying his text) would have been likely to write. That is determined by considering his writing style, vocabulary, theological views, narrative interests and so on, and determining which of the available readings fits with these established patterns of usage better than the other(s). What I’’ll be arguing in this post, again, taken from The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, is that the reading found only in Codex Bezae coincides more closely with the view of Jesus’ baptism that can be found elsewhere in the two-volume work of Luke-Acts. The first paragraph below is the one that ended yesterday’s post, to provide some context for the following observations. ***************************************************************************************************************** More fruitful is an assessment of the other references to Jesus’ baptism throughout Luke’s work, “backward glances,” as it were, that provide clues concerning what happened at that point of the narrative. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:17:13-04:00August 13th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Luke 3:22 — What Luke Himself Would Have Written

In my previous post I began to look at the “internal” evidence that the voice at Jesus’ baptism in Luke’s Gospel said the words that are found among Greek manuscripts *only* in Codex Bezae of the early fifth century: “You are my son, today I have begotten you,” as opposed to the words found in all the other Greek manuscripts (the voice as recorded also in Mark): “You are my son, in you I am well-pleased.” If you’ll recall, there are two kinds of internal evidence that scholars consider: “transcriptional probabilities” (which reading would a scribe more likely have preferred and therefore created by changing the text) and “intrinsic probabilities (which reading would the author have been more likely to have written originally). The last post was on transcriptional probabilities showing that the reading in Codex Bezae is probably the older form of the text. Now in this blog and the next one (or two) I will discuss the “intrinsic probabilities,” which point in the same direction. All of these arguments are meant to work [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:17:20-04:00August 12th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

More Arguments over Luke 3:22

Yesterday I posted some comments that were designed to show why knowing the Patristic evidence is so valuable in establishing what the oldest form of the text of the NT was. My illustration was from Luke 3:22, where the voice from heaven says different things, depending on which witnesses you read. The fifth century manuscript Codex Bezae is the *only* Greek manuscript that has the reading “You are my son, Today I have begotten you.” The Greek manuscripts that were produced before Bezae, and all those produced afterwards, have a different reading, the one you will find in most Bible translations, “You are my beloved son, in you I am well pleased.” The point of my post was not to give conclusive evidence that the reading found in virtually all the manuscripts is the *wrong* one; it was to show that Patristic evidence is valuable because it shows that in the second and third Christian centuries, it was the *other* reading (the one that eventually came to be found in Codex Bezae) that was most [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:17:29-04:00August 11th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

Church Fathers and the Voice at Jesus’ Baptism

In my previous post I argued that the quotations of the New Testament in the writings of the later church fathers can help both to establish the earliest form of the text and to determine when and where the text came to be changed in the process of its transmission. I indicated that I might give an example of how that works, and that’s what this post is all about. I have taken a couple of paragraphs from my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture to illustrate the point. The passage I am discussing here is a very important one. It has to do with what the voice said from heaven at Jesus’ baptism, as recorded in the Gospel of Luke. In virtually all the Greek manuscripts of Luke – hundreds of them – the voice says “You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased.” But in one – count them, one – manuscript of the early fifth century the voice instead says “You are my beloved Son, Today I have begotten [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:17:40-04:00August 10th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

Luke’s First Edition

In my previous post, ostensibly on the genealogy of Luke, I pointed out that there are good reasons for thinking that the Gospel originally was published – in a kind of “first edition” – without what are now the first two chapters, so that the very beginning was what is now 3:1 (this is many centuries, of course, before anyone started using chapters and verses.) If that’s the case, Luke was originally a Gospel like Mark’s that did not have a birth and infancy narratives. These were added later, in a second edition (either by the same author or by someone else). If that’s the case then the Gospel began with John the Baptist and his baptism of Jesus, followed by the genealogy which makes better sense here, at the beginning, than it does in the third chapter once the first two are added. But is there any hard evidence that a first edition began without the first two chapters? One of the reasons it is so hard to say is because we simply don’t [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:06:49-04:00December 23rd, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Luke’s Genealogy

In my previous posts I have already said a number of things about the genealogy in Luke – possibly most of the important things: it differs from Matthew’s in numerous ways, many of them irreconcilable; even though it too is a genealogy of Joseph, rather than Jesus, it traces Joseph’s line through a (completely) different set of ancestors back to Nathan, son of David, rather than to Solomon Son of David; it is not, however a genealogy of Mary, but is explicitly said to be Joseph’s; it is not clear why a genealogy of Joseph is given, since the whole point of a genealogy is bloodlines, and Jesus is not in the bloodline; Unlike Matthew it begins with Joseph and works backward from there (that is not a discrepancy, of course, just a different way of doing it); And unlike Matthew it does not stop with Abraham but goes all the way back to Adam – as in Adam and Eve. And it goes in fact a step further, indicating that Adam was “the son [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:06:58-04:00December 22nd, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

Genealogies of Matthew and Luke

One of the differences between the stories of Matthew and Luke in their infancy narratives is in their genealogies of Jesus (which for Luke, oddly enough, does not actually occur in his infancy narrative!). I know that genealogies are among the least favorite reading for many students of the Bible, and one may be a bit dismayed in starting to read the New Testament, with the very opening of the very first book, Matthew, to find a genealogy! But I tell my students to suck it up: this one is only sixteen verses long. If they want a REAL genealogy, they should go to the book of 1 Chronicles in the Hebrew Bible: NINE chapters (count them, nine) of genealogies. When I was in college I took a correspondence course on the Bible and for the course we had to memorize verses as part of the assignment. I think the designers of the course had in mind verses like John 1:1; 1:14; 3:16; Romans 3:23 and so on. For my verses I chose some out [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:08:36-04:00December 17th, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

The Infancy Narratives Compared

In two previous posts I’ve detailed what happens in Luke’s version of Jesus’ birth and then in Matthew’s. I will assume those two previous posts in the comments that I want to make in this one. The problem people have with reading these two accounts, usually, is the problem they have reading the Gospels (and the Bible as a whole) generally. Or at least this has been my experience. It’s the problem of assuming that one account is basically saying the same thing as some other account. People do that with the Bible all the time. With the New Testament, people tend to read Matthew as if he’s saying the same thing as Mark; John as if it’s the same thing as Luke; Paul’s letters as if, at heart, they’re the same thing as James; Revelation as if it’s the same thing as John. And on and on and on. One of the most important tasks I have as an undergraduate teacher of the New Testament is to get students to see that each of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:08:51-04:00December 13th, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

Luke’s Version of Jesus’ Birth

Now that I’ve had several preliminary posts about the accounts of Jesus’ birth, I can get into some of the details from the surviving texts. As I’ve indicated, it is only Matthew and Luke that tell the tales of the infancy narrative, and the annual “Christmas Pageant” that so many of us grew up seeing is in fact a conflation of the two accounts, making one mega-account out of two that are so different up and down the line. And so, the Annunciation to Mary is in Luke, the dream of Joseph in Matthew; the shepherds are in Luke, the wise men in Matthew; the trip to Bethlehem is in Luke, the Flight to Egypt is in Matthew, and so forth and so on. You can compare them yourself, up and down the line, and see the differences. In this post I want to focus on Luke’s account. Then I will look at Matthew’s. And then I will compare the two in a couple of key points in order to show that the differences between [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:09:19-04:00December 8th, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

Does Luke Combat a Docetic Christology?

QUESTION: There are some scholars who believe that the resurrection story found in Luke's gospel is an antidocetic narrative ( Gerd Ludemann and Charles Talbert, for instance). According to these scholars when the risen Jesus performs acts designed to show his disciples that he has an actual body of flesh and isn't some phantom or demon, the story is designed to refute the heresy of docetism that existed during the time that Luke wrote his gospel. I have never seen convincing evidence for this. What is your take on this? Do you agree with these scholars? If so, why? If not, what is your opinion? RESPONSE: Yeah, this is a tough one. I think I need to provide some background for some of the people reading the blog. The term “Docetism” comes from the Greek word dokeo which means “to seem” or “to appear.” The term came to be used in reference to certain Christians and Christian groups who maintained that Jesus was not a real flesh and blood being, but that he only “seemed” [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:21:23-04:00September 24th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Biblical Scholarship, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus’ Death in Mark and Luke

It is one thing to be able to establish the emphases of both Mark and Luke in their accounts of Jesus going to his death. (See my previous post). It is harder, and more speculative, to establish why they chose to portray Jesus in these ways. But there are some good, plausible views of the matter. I’ll start with Mark. In Mark Jesus appears to be in shock, is silent the entire time, seems not to understand why this is happening to him, up to the end, when he cries out asking God why he has forsaken him. And then he dies, never having received an answer. What is most striking is that even though Mark’s Jesus may not know why, when it comes to the time, he has to suffer like this, the reader does (and so, of course, does Mark). The moment that Jesus dies, two things happen: the curtain in the temple is ripped in half and the centurion confesses that he is the son of God. The curtain was the barrier [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:24:02-04:00September 10th, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

Jesus Going to His Death in Luke

In previous posts I have given some of the reasons for thinking that Luke did not write the account of Jesus “sweating blood” in his prayer before his arrest. A lot more could obviously be said, but anyone who wants more can just look up the discussion in my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. For the purposes of the blog, two BIG questions remain: why does Luke change Mark’s portrayal of Jesus going to his death so that now he is so clearly calm and collected? And why did later scribes change Luke’s portrayal by adding the two verses in question? I’ll answer the first question in this post and the next, the second in a third post in a couple of days. The first thing to stress is that Luke’s emphasis can be found not only in this passage but in others as well, as a redactional comparison with Mark shows (i.e., seeing what Luke has edited – or “redacted” -- in Mark’s version, by what he has added, omitted, and changed) FOR [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:24:09-04:00September 9th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

More on The Bloody Sweat

I mentioned that I first got interested in the textual problem of Luke 22:43-44 (“the bloody sweat”) when I was taking a graduate seminar at Princeton Theological Seminary, my first year in the doctoral program. The seminar was devoted (the entire semester) to the Greek exegesis of Luke. My fellow student, Mark Plunkett, presented a seminar paper in which he dealt with the passage. He was not at all interested in the textual question of whether vv. 43-44 were original. He was assuming that there were not, but it had nothing to do with his presentation. In his presentation he argued that there was a clear structure to the passage of Jesus’ prayer before being arrested (in Luke’s source this takes place in the Garden of Gethsemane, but Luke doesn’t say so) and he made a convincing argument (to my mind). And then I realized that the structural argument was relevant to the textual problem of whether the verses were original or not. While we moved on to other things in the seminar that afternoon, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:24:24-04:00September 6th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Problems with the NRSV (Part 5)

My problems with the NRSV continued - Part 5! Trust me, I eventually get back to the question of my relationship with Bruce Metzger. I keep getting sidetracked, but the tracks on the side are interesting. At least I *think* they are!! In my last post, I pointed out that the famous passage of the so-called “bloody sweat” in Luke 22:43-44 is thought by some scholars not to have been original to the Gospel of Luke. I count myself in that number. Problems with the NRSV - The Bloody Sweat One of my very first scholarly articles was devoted to the question. I wrote it when I was a first-year graduate student – or rather, co-wrote it, with a friend of mine who was in the Ph.D. program at Princeton Seminary with me. A fellow named Mark Plunkett did a study of the passage of Jesus’ prayer before his arrest and realized something about the structure of the passage. In turn, I realized that if he was right, the two verses about the bloody sweat [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-05T08:46:25-04:00September 5th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Problems with the NRSV (Part 4)

My problems with the NRSV - Part 4 of a 5 Part series. I will give just one other textual disagreement that I have with the translators of the NRSV. By “textual” disagreement I mean a disagreement over what the original Greek text of a passage was that should have been translated. For this second example, I’ll stick with Luke, and again with the Passion narrative. Luke & the NRSV The full passage of Jesus’ prayer in the garden in Luke 24:39-46 reads as follows in the NRSV: FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!! 39 He came out and went, as was his custom, to the mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. 40 When he reached the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-04T19:47:21-04:00September 4th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|