This post will be about a couple of intriguing textual variants in our manuscripts of the New Testament, including the use of a four-letter word (literally) in 1 John.  To set the stage, let me remind you that in my previous post I discussed an early Christian understanding of Christ that I called “separationist,” because it divided Jesus Christ into two: the man Jesus (who was completely human) and the divine Christ (who was completely divine).  According to most proponents of this view, the man Jesus was temporarily indwelt by the divine being, Christ, enabling him to perform his miracles and deliver his teachings; but prior to Jesus’ death, the Christ abandoned him, forcing him to face his crucifixion alone.

This separationist Christology was most commonly advocated by groups of Christians that scholars have called “Gnostic.”  As you may know, te term Gnosticism comes from the Greek word for knowledge, “gnosis.”  It is applied to a wide range of groups of early Christians who stressed the importance of secret knowledge for salvation.  According to most of these groups, the material world we live in was not the creation of the one true God.  It came about as a result of a disaster in the divine realm, in which one of the (many) divine beings was for some mysterious reason excluded from the heavenly places; as a result of her fall from divinity the material world came to be created by a lesser deity, who captured her and imprisoned her in human bodies here on earth.  Some humans thus have a spark of the divine within them, and they need to learn the truth of who they are, where they came from, how they got here, and how they can return.  Learning this truth will lead to their salvation.

This truth consists of secret teachings, mysterious “knowledge” (gnosis), which can only be imparted by a divine being from the heavenly realm.  For Christian Gnostics, Christ is this divine revealer of the truths of salvation; in many Gnostic systems, the Christ came into the man Jesus at his baptism, empowered him for his ministry, and then at the end left him to die on the cross.  That is why Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  For these Gnostics, the Christ literally had forsaken Jesus (or “left him behind”).  But after his death, he raised Jesus from the dead as a reward for his faithfulness, and continued through him to teach his disciples the secret truths that can lead to salvation.

Proto-orthodox Christians found this teaching offensive on just about every level.  For them, the material world is not an evil place that resulted from a cosmic disaster, but is the good creation of the one true God.  For them salvation comes by faith in Christ’s death and resurrection, not by learning the secret gnosis that can illuminate the truth of the human condition. And most important for our purposes here, for them, Jesus Christ is not two beings, but one being, both divine and human, at one and the same time.

The controversies over separationist Christologies played some role in the transmission of the texts that were to become the New Testament.  I talk about these some in my book Misquoting Jesus (HarperOne, 2005) and at great length in my academic study, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 1994).

One intriguing example of the phenomenon occurs almost precisely where one might expect to find it, in a Gospel account of Jesus’ crucifixion.  As I’ve pointed out on the blog before, in Mark’s Gospel Jesus is silent throughout the entire proceeding of his crucifixion.  The soldiers crucify him, the passers-by and Jewish leaders mock him, as do the two criminals who are crucified with him; and he says not a word – until the very end, when death is near, and Jesus cries out the words taken from Psalm 22: “‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani,’ which translated means ‘My God, my God, Why have you forsaken me?’” (Mark 15:34).

It is interesting to note that according to the proto-orthodox writer Irenaeus, Mark was the Gospel of choice for those “who separated Jesus from the Christ” – that is, for Gnostics who embraced a separationist Christology.  We have solid evidence to suggest that some Gnostics took this last saying of Jesus literally, to indicate that it was at this point that the divine Christ departed from Jesus (since divinity cannot experience mortality and death).  The evidence comes from Gnostic documents that reflect on the significance of this moment in Jesus’ life.  Thus, for example, the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, which some have suspected as having a separationist Christology, quotes the words in a slightly different form, “My power, O power, you have left me!”  Even more striking is the Gnostic text known as the Gospel of Philip, where the verse is quoted and then given a separationist interpretation:

‘My God, my God, why O Lord have you forsaken me’?  For it was on the cross that he said these words, for it was there that he was divided.

Proto-orthodox Christians knew of both of these Gospels and their interpretations of this climactic moment of Jesus’ crucifixion.  And so it is perhaps no great surprise that the text of Mark’s Gospel was changed by some scribes in a way that would have circumvented this Gnostic explanation.  In one Greek manuscript and several Latin witnesses, Jesus is said not to call out the traditional “cry of dereliction” from Psalm 22, but instead to cry out “My God, my God, why have you mocked me?”

This change of the text makes for an interesting reading – and one particularly suited to its literary context.  For as I’ve already indicated, nearly everyone else in the story has mocked Jesus to this point – the Jewish leaders, the passersby, and both robbers.  And now, with this variant reading, even God himself is said to have mocked Jesus.  In despair, Jesus then utters a loud cry and dies.  This is a powerful scene, filled with pathos.

But the reading is nonetheless not original, as shown by the circumstance that it is lacking in nearly all our oldest and best witnesses (including those of the Alexandrian text) and by the fact that it does not correspond to the Aramaic words Jesus actually utters (lema sabachthani – which mean, “why have you forsaken me,” not “why have you mocked me.”).  Why then did scribes alter the text?  Given its usefulness for those arguing in favor of a separationist Christology, there can be little question why.  Proto-orthodox scribes were concerned that the text not be used against them by their Gnostic opponents.  And so they made an important, and contextually suitable change, so that now rather than abandoning Jesus, God is said to have mocked him.

A second variant of this kind is the one this short thread has been leading up to, a change of wording found in some textual witnesses to in 1 John.  In the oldest form of the text of 4:2-3, we are told

By this you know the Spirit of God.  Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.  This is the spirit of the anti-Christ.

As I’ve pointed out, the author appears to be arguing that only those who acknowledge that Jesus really came in the flesh (as opposed, say, to the docetists) belong to God.  Those who don’t acknowledge this are opposed to Christ (anti-Christs).  But this is where the interesting textual variant comes in:  instead of referring to the one “who does not confess Jesus,” several witnesses refer instead to the one “who looses Jesus.” “Looses” Jesus?  What does that mean, and why did this textual variant make its way into some manuscripts?

To start with, I should stress that it is not in very many manuscripts.  In fact, among Greek manuscripts it occurs only in the margin of one tenth-century manuscript (ms 1739).  But this, as it turns out, is a remarkable manuscript: it appears to have been copied from a manuscript of the fourth century, and its marginal notes indicate the names of church fathers who had different readings in places of the text.  In this particular instance, the marginal note indicates that the reading “looses Jesus” was known to several late second- and early third-century church fathers, Irenaeus, Clement, and Origen.  Moreover, it appears in the Latin Vulgate.  Among other things, this shows that the variant was popular during the time in which proto-orthodox Christians were debating with Gnostics over matters of Christology.

Still the variant probably cannot be accepted as the “original” text, given its sparse attestation – it’s not found in any of our earliest and best manuscripts (in fact, not in any Greek manuscript except this one marginal note), for example.  But why would it have been created by a Christian scribe?  It appears to have been created precisely in order to provide a “biblical” attack on separationist Christologies, in which Jesus and Christ are divided from one another into separate entities, or as this variant would have it, in which Jesus is “loosed” from the Christ.  Anyone who supports such a view, the textual variant indicates, is not from God, but is in fact the anti-Christ.

Like a number of other extremely interesting textual variants, this one appears to have been generated in the context of the Christological disputes of the second and third centuries.  If you want a full discussion of the variant and its attendant issues, you’ll find it in Orthodox Corruption, pp. 146-58.