In both Classics as well as New Testament Studies, “textual criticism” is a tool for analyzing ancient texts through the lens of manuscripts, the data they present, and our accumulated knowledge of what often or rarely happened in the transmission of texts by scribes—given that they were all hand-copied and thus highly prone to distortion, both deliberate and erroneous. And this is not mechanically limited to, for example, variant readings we have in extant manuscripts. Because one thing textual critics across all fields have learned is that we actually don’t usually have access to such information; so most evidence will not survive in manuscripts, but only in their telltale effects on a text itself. This is not controversial in any other field than Bible studies; it’s just that in Bible studies, such knowledge is often uncomfortable or undesirable in application. “That might be a textual error for…” is a sentence often at once reacted to with guffaws and tut-tuts and mild outrage from apologists. And sometimes their skepticism is warranted. But often it is not; it is defensive rather than objectively rational.

This is itself a problem. Because even despite the large number of biblical manuscripts, relatively next to none derive from the first three centuries of their transmission (and those few almost entirely consist of mere scraps, a few paragraphs or even sentences at most), and none at all from the first century; and yet even those few from the second and third centuries exhibit every kind of transmission distortion we find across all ancient manuscripts in all fields—indeed, at an even greater pace and extent in some cases (on all these points and their significance, see my article Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts). That means it is mathematically inevitable that there will be probably dozens more of each kind of error preserved in the text but not in any manuscript of it that we have. There will be a dozen or more altered or interpolated verses; a dozen or more deliberate harmonizations; a dozen or more deletions; etc. Because we can observe the rate of those in subsequent centuries even just from the tiny sample of ancient manuscripts that survive—which entails the rate was the same or higher in their first century of transmission. And yet we will not see any evidence of this, because we have zero manuscripts from then.

Yes. That should worry apologists. As I have said on this point several times before, if even the Annals of Tacitus were instructions for building a rocket, I would not get on that rocket. That’s how much we should not trust the complete accuracy of even that work’s transmission. The Bible is worse. This is not something you should be basing your life on. But lo, the bane of Christian apologists can also be their boon. Because there are cases where sound textual criticism can plausibly fix other problems for them. Today I will survey some examples I’m acquainted with because they reflect positions I have changed on myself after an application of text-critical methods.

Was Mark a Bad Geographer?

Even I have repeated the claim that you’ll find often affirmed across expert studies of the text of Mark (e.g. see On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 470–74): that Matthew often had to correct Mark’s geographical errors. This was already exaggerated, as there are really only two clear cases in the extant text of Mark of an actual geographical “error” (as opposed to what could just be his being brief, or using different ways to refer to a place, or referring to places otherwise lost to history, and so on). The first (and most often mentioned) is the question of where Mark thinks the city of Sidon was (which could be based on Scripture rather than science: see a good article about this at Vridar for the whole skinny). Apologists will guffaw and spin entire “just so” stories to rescue Mark from errancy here. But the funny thing is that they armchair this with blarney they just make up, rather than going at it with a sound (rather than, say, specious or dubious) application of textual criticism.

We already know, for example, that the other supposed “mistake” of Mark incorrectly imagining that Gadara was anywhere near the Sea of Galilee (so that a herd of swine nearby could suddenly drown itself there) is in fact a textual error, not Mark’s. The earliest manuscripts of Mark don’t say “Gadara.” That came from later, corrupted manuscripts consulted when writing the King James Bible, launching the legend of the “Gadarene” swine into the English world. Whereas all the earliest manuscripts of Mark we have now say “Gerasa.” That also cannot be correct; but it is suspiciously similar to “Gergesa” (off by just one consonant and one commonplace vowel-shift), which is adjacent to that sea, and generally indeed where Mark imagines the event. (Meanwhile, manuscripts of Matthew are a garbled mess, some reading Gadara, others Gazara, others Garada; and of course yet others read Gerasa or Gergesa; as for Luke, Codex Sinaiticus reads “Gergesa,” while other early manuscripts say “Gerasa,” and again “Gadara” starts to appear a tad later.)

Both observations led the third-century church father Origen to argue that Mark wrote “Gergesa,” on the basis that such scribal errors are common, the two words look similar, and Mark “could not” make a mistake. Obviously he could have (and Origen says he saw some manuscripts of Mark in the third century already had transformed Gerasa into “Gadara”). But Origen’s suggestion fits text-critical considerations: an error in transmission transforming Gergesa into Gerasa (just as would then transform Gerasa into Gadara) would involve a very typical kind of scribal mistake we find thousands of examples of across even biblical manuscripts, as well as all the manuscripts of ancient extant literature. This even could simply be a plausible transliteration from a local dialect, Gerasa essentially meaning Gergesa. But even supposing a scribal error: in each case, scribes just garbled the spelling.

Possibly, even, one scribe misspelled it, mucking it up, then a subsequent scribe, faced with an unidentifiable jumble, figured best they could that it was supposed to have read “Gadara,” a town they had at least heard of—and thus, error crept in. Or, faced with “Gerasa,” a scribe did not recognize this was a form of Gergesa, and sought to “correct” it with “Gadara,” perhaps knowing Gerasa was too famously located elsewhere, but not knowing (or maybe not caring) whether Gadara was any more plausibly situated. We have so many examples of this (later scribes trying to “fix” garbled or even undesirable text in works they were copying, replacing words with their own preference or conjecture) that it bears a reasonably high prior probability. And the evidence matches. The kind of mistake that would erroneously get Gerasa out of Gergesa was quite common, even more so than the also-common kind of error that would get Gadara out of Gerasa, as clearly occurred later on. And Gerasa makes no sense even as an error—it is farther from the sea than even Gadara, and was more famously located on a river.

As Origen puts it:

In the matter of proper names the Greek copies are often incorrect, and in the Gospels one might be misled by their authority. The transaction about the swine, which were driven down a steep place by the demons and drowned in the sea, is said to have taken place in the country of the Gerasenes. Now, Gerasa is a town of Arabia, and has near it neither sea nor lake. And the Evangelists would not have made a statement so obviously and demonstrably false; for they were men who informed themselves carefully of all matters connected with Judea. But in a few copies we have found, ‘into the country of the Gadarenes’; and, on this reading, it is to be stated that Gadara is a town of Judea, in the neighborhood of which are the well-known hot springs, and that there is no lake there with overhanging banks, nor any sea. But Gergesa, from which the name Gergesenes is taken, is an old town in the neighborhood of the lake now called Tiberias, and on the edge of it there is a steep place abutting on the lake, from which it is pointed out that the swine were cast down by the demons.

Origen, Commentary on John 6.24

And so the famed “Gadarene” swine are supposed to have actually been the “Gergesene” swine. This was probably not Mark’s mistake; it was the scribes’. Mark probably correctly wrote Gergesa (or Gerasa, as a form of Gergesa), even though no very early manuscripts preserve “Gergesa” as a reading. Later ones do, but that could indicate knowledge of commentaries like Origen’s calling for a correction, as we have literally occurring in Codex Sinaiticus, where “Gerasa” was corrected by a later scribe to, indeed, “Gergesa” (although in that same codex, the Gospel of Luke already has “Gergesa,” suggesting its author saw texts of Mark closer to the original). In other words, on these text-critical considerations, it is more likely Mark wrote the correct city down, and it just got distorted in transmission; first to Gerasa, then to Gadara. This is entirely reasonable to believe. It requires no desperate apologetics. (And that matters. See my discussion of the effect of not knowing these things on Atwill’s Cranked-up Jesus.)

So we can’t really convict Mark here. Harder to explain away (or seemingly so) is Mark’s alleged error regarding Tyre and Sidon. In Mark 7:31 most manuscripts of Mark say “Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon down to the Sea of Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis.” Matthew and Luke supposedly corrected this by just removing the confused itinerary and having Jesus go from “the region of Tyre and Sidon” to the Sea of Galilee (the correct direction), rather than taking the road north from Tyre to Sidon and as if by faerie magic ending up south, at the Sea of Galilee. It’s a fair point and often noted in the expert literature. And it’s often explained with implausible armchair apologetics (like “maybe Mark meant Jesus went north to tour Syria and then came back south!”). But there is a much simpler solution, offered by text-critical observations: that Mark didn’t write this. It’s a scribal error.

Mark has Jesus depart Gennesaret (6:53) and go “to the vicinity of Tyre” (7:24). But honest bibles will tell you: “many early manuscripts” say here “Tyre and Sidon.” This was a common moniker for the whole region, as we have at the corresponding point in Matthew 15:21, “Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon.” Matthew tends to abbreviate Mark in places like this, with smoother literary transitions, whereas Mark tends to be a tad more prolix and repetitive. For example, Mark is exactly the kind of author who would write “Tyre and Sidon” twice (Matthew replaces the second with just a generic “he left there”). And if Mark originally wrote not that Jesus went to Tyre but “to the vicinity Tyre and Sidon,” as early manuscripts attest and logic suggests, then Jesus won’t have gone “from” Tyre “to” Sidon, but “from the vicinity of Tyre and Sidon” to Galilee (and thence the Decapolis), exactly as Luke and Matthew describe.

It thus matters that those earlier manuscripts of Mark don’t just say he went to the vicinity of Tyre “and Sidon” in verse 24, but some of those go on in verse 31 to replace “he went from the vicinity of Tyre through Sidon” with “he went from the vicinity of Tyre and Sidon.” One could explain this as a scribe correcting Mark. But it is more probable this is what Mark wrote and the mistake of distorting “and Sidon” into “through Sidon” was a scribal error. Again, this is a very common kind of error, and could suggest a sequence of events: that one scribe misspelled or garbled “and Sidon” (suggested also by the fact that the verb “went” also gets relocated in the sentence in these variants, so some confusion has occurred in transmission), and a subsequent scribe, trying to make sense of the jumble, guessed that it originally said “through” Sidon, a confusion of a kai for a dia, one three-letter conjunction for one three-letter preposition. And so an error was born.

I now think this is the more probable history of this text. Given the particular manuscript evidence we have here, and what we know from other textual corruptions across all ancient manuscripts, it is more probable that Mark wrote that Jesus went “to” and then “from” the “region of Tyre and Sidon,” and that he never recorded any impossible trek to Galilee “through” Sidon, traveling simultaneously north and south. This follows from sound text-critical data and information. It thus requires no implausible armchair excuse. (Though it does require admitting scribal errors are commonplace in the Bible. Which for some apologists might be a bridge too far.)

And in case you were wondering: does rescuing Mark as a geographer argue for the authenticity of what he reports? No. Everyone educated enough to compose stories in Greek then not only had a basic schooled grounding in geography, but knew how to consult reference books in geography, and would have had abundant access to them. All the more so if they were even from the region they describe, or had informants who were. On all that, particularly regarding geography, see my discussion in respect to Luke-Acts in How We Know Acts Is a Fake History.

Did Q Contain a Crucifixion Narrative?

We can’t answer this question, really. I mean, assuming there even was a Q source (I’m pretty sure there wasn’t). But let’s assume there was. Simply because Matthew and Luke didn’t copy any material in common from Q does not entail Q lacked that (or even other) material. It may have contained material Matthew used but Luke did not, or vice versa (and thus what scholars try to pass off as an M or L source is really just…Q; although, IMO, it’s really just them making their own shit up). Or it may have contained material neither liked and thus neither used. It could even have contained material used by Mark and then repeated in Matthew or Luke, maybe even in forms more original to Q than Mark’s version (since the belief that Mark did not use Q, or indeed isn’t just an abbreviation of it, or even that Q did not use Mark, is entirely based on circular logic and thus entirely invalid). But let’s pretend none of that somehow matters and that all we want to know is, “Is there evidence of non-Markan Q-material in the crucifixion narratives shared by Luke and Matthew?”

I have in the past argued in the affirmative. For instance, in On the Historicity of Jesus (p. 471):

For example, Mk 14.65a reads, ‘and some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to buffet him, and to say to him, “Prophesy!”’, which Mt. 26.67-68 expanded to ‘then did they spit in his face and buffet him: and some smote him with the palms of their hands, saying, “Prophesy unto us, Christ! Who is he that struck thee?”’ Luke 22.63-64 essentially combines Mark with Matthew, repeating the concluding text of Matthew verbatim: ‘and the men that held Jesus mocked him, and beat him; and they blind-folded him, and asked him, saying, “Prophesy! Who is he that struck thee?”’ Except for dropping ‘unto us, Christ’ to economize the passage, the Greek of Luke here is identical to that of Matthew (legontes, Prophēteuson [hēmin Christe]! Tis estin ho paisas se?). Luke then combines this with Mark’s detail that they covered his eyes, which Matthew omitted (or rather altered, having them spit ‘in his face’ rather than cover ‘his face’). Luke thus combined Mark with Matthew, recast mostly but not entirely in his own words, to make what he deemed to be a better passage. That Luke knows the details Matthew added, and even borrows his exact words, is sufficient proof that Luke knew and used Matthew. [And likewise] on no theory of Q is this element of the Passion Narrative a part of Q, so this cannot be explained by appealing to Q. Luke is using Matthew. And if here, so everywhere. There is simply no need of an imaginary Q.

Which is all true, as far as it goes. But what if, in fact, both Matthew and Luke are quoting or redacting Mark…because their copies of Mark said more here than ours do.

You can see the similarities:

  • Luke 22:63–64: ἐνέπαιζον αὐτῷ δέροντες καὶ περικαλύψαντες αὐτὸν ἔτυπτον αὐτοῦ τὸ πρόσωπον καὶ ἐπηρώτων λέγοντεςΠροφήτευσον, τίς ἐστιν ὁ παίσας σε?’
  • Matthew 26:67–68: Τότε ἐνέπτυσαν εἰς τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ καὶ ἐκολάφισαν αὐτόν οἱ δὲ ἐράπισαν λέγοντεςΠροφήτευσον ἡμῖν, Χριστέ, τίς ἐστιν ὁ παίσας σε?’
  • Mark 14:65: Καὶ ἤρξαντό τινες ἐμπτύειν αὐτῷ καὶ περικαλύπτειν αὐτοῦ τὸ πρόσωπον καὶ κολαφίζειν αὐτὸν καὶ λέγειν αὐτῷ, ‘Προφήτευσον’.

And alas…there are manuscripts of Mark that contain all or part of the rest of that last line, τίς ἐστιν ὁ παίσας σε, “who is it who struck you?” In fact some contain features distinctive of Matthew (like the addition of ἡμῖν, the command that Jesus prophecy “to us”). This all could indicate scribal harmonization of Mark to Matthew. Or it could mean the rest of this line was in Mark when Matthew and Luke composed, and only is lacking in most of our manuscripts because a scribe accidentally dropped it, skipping ahead to the next sentence, not realizing they failed to copy several words. This kind of error is another that is very common across ancient manuscripts. In this scenario, that last line, expanding on what the soldiers said, will just be Matthew and Luke preserving the (now lost) words of Mark.

The rest is all just standard redaction of Mark, who already has the spitting, the covering of the face, the striking, and the questioning. Matthew drops the covering of the face (or else, scribes copying Matthew did), Luke drops the spitting (or else, scribes copying Luke miswrote “struck,” ἔτυπτον, for “spat,” ἐμπτύειν). But the rest is all just saying the same thing as Mark, if in slightly different words. In other words, the only thing that definitely would suggest Luke is using Matthew here is the completion of the “Prophecy” line, which does not exist in our critical text of Mark, only in some manuscripts of Mark. But that could easily be a scribal omission in our text of Mark.

So, maybe, in fact, Mark wrote the whole line; then Luke could be getting it from Mark. And if that’s the case, we needn’t posit Luke knew Matthew. And if that’s the case, Q theorists aren’t committed to this being evidence that Q contained a crucifixion narrative. Of course Q theorists could get to the same safe result by simply attempting to embrace a triple source theory for Luke, whereby he used both Q and Matthew; it’s just that when you start doing that, Q starts to look like, well, Matthew—so why do we need Q? And that’s where all the other evidence Luke knew Matthew comes in and spoils the game. We don’t need this one line to be evidence for that. But we can safely say it is more probable that Mark in fact had the whole line, and our version simply suffered a loss of those final words due to scribal error.

That could solve some problems for apologists while creating others. As I point out in There Are No Undesigned Coincidences: The Bible’s Authors Are Simply Changing Up Their Sources, once we recognize the high probability of this kind of error in the preservation of the text of Mark, any hope one might have had that Mark’s “omission” somehow entails that Mark preserved a real story unknowingly is certainly dashed. And such scribal errors are far too common to rule that out here. And for myself, I believe there’s a good chance that’s indeed what happened here.

Did Mark Say Barabbas’s Name Was Also Jesus?

In OHJ (p. 406) I point out this interesting tidbit, also featuring observations from Origen: that there were manuscripts of Matthew (that even he saw) where Barabbas is actually named Jesus Barabbas—and in both verses where Barabbas’s name is mentioned, ruling out error as an explanation: someone added the name in both places on purpose. And we have some of those manuscripts! Since Barabbas means “Son of the Father,” setting up a mythic Levitical Yom Kippur legend between two “Sons of the Father,” Jesus the humble hero and the other the murderous rebel, it is very notable that some manuscripts actually made this parallel clear by naming both men Jesus. This is clear evidence of mythmaking. But who came up with the idea?

[This is found not only in Greek but] also in several Armenian, Georgic and Syriac manuscripts, demonstrating that even in Greek the variant existed as early as the fourth century (we have it attested in several later Greek manuscripts as well), and Origen reports that he saw it in Greek manuscripts of the early third century. In these manuscripts Barabbas is named ‘Jesus Barabbas’ twice (in two distinct verses: 27.16 and 27.17), which cannot be accidental; therefore either a scribe deliberately changed his name to Jesus Barabbas in both verses (indicating the scribe understood the mythic symbolism and intended to make it even more clear) or that is what Matthew originally wrote. The latter is the more probable hypothesis [see my next point]. Matthew often improves on Mark in this way, though the copy of Mark that Matthew derived his text from may also have said ‘Jesus Barabbas’, since the evident tendency to delete them from Matthew could also have purged them from Mark. But even if Matthew added them, that entails Matthew understood the mythic symbolism (and thus intended to make it even more clear), since there would be no other reason to add them (either by Matthew or later scribes).

Origen [also] gives the reason why the name ‘Jesus’ was then being removed from manuscripts: it was considered inappropriate to associate the name ‘Jesus’ with a sinner. And indeed, the name ‘Jesus’ is conspicuously absent from the Gospels (apart from the Jesus), despite that being one of the most common names of the time (even in Acts only one other person is ever even mentioned as having the name: Elymas the Sorcerer’s father was supposedly named ‘Jesus’, according to Acts 13.6-8; and that is probably a literary invention).

OHJ, p. 406 nn. 43–44

Origen is probably right. And if that’s the case, and Matthew originally wrote “Jesus Barabbas” and the “Jesus” was scrubbed by scandalized scribes, then it’s as likely Mark originally wrote “Jesus Barabbas.” The only difference is that we have far fewer manuscripts of Mark, and there might always have been fewer, and so the scrubbing of his manuscripts was more effective and thorough. Origen’s observation matches what we know from text-critical studies to be a common enough phenomenon, particularly as all extant manuscripts reverently hide the divine name of “Jesus” (among other reverent words) under a form of abbreviation called a nomen sacrum, demonstrating the concern. Imagine the conundrum of a scribe, having to abbreviate the first name of the villain Barabbas out of reverence! Less vexing to just delete it. I think this bears a preponderance of probability. I think it is more likely Matthew was just copying Mark, than that Matthew (or even more improbably, a later scribe) came up with the idea of making Mark’s mythic parallel even more obvious by actually giving Barabbas the name of Jesus.

Apologists won’t like this one, though. It undermines their position, by establishing mythmaking as the ready mode of Gospel authors and whitewashing the common enterprise of scribes transmitting what they wrote. It also throws a wrench in more desperate apologetics like the one I call the Argument from Name Frequency (pro tip: that argument was bullshit from day one).

Did Mark Also Say Jesus Was a Nazorian?

A final example is the problem of what “Nazarene” means in the oft-repeated moniker “Jesus the Nazarene.” Because that’s largely a contrivance of modern scholarship. The manuscripts don’t quite vindicate this reading. Most Gospel texts don’t say “Nazerene” at all. They mostly say “Nazorian.” Which does not refer to someone from Nazareth. And how could dozens of verses all get switched from Nazarene to Nazorian? The collective evidence suggests, on text-critical grounds, that it went the other way around: only after it was decided that this word is supposed to refer to Nazareth did it start getting switched out for the correct form for that sense. Nazorian was probably everywhere the original reading. How else would Matthew never have heard of any other form of the word? Just as with “Jesus Barabbas,” it is more likely Mark also consistently wrote Nazorian, and that his text was “fixed” more successfully, owing again to their being fewer manuscripts to control (then and extant).

As I note in OHJ, even the author of Acts does not appear to know of the Nazarene appellation, imagining the Christians called themselves “the Nazōraioi (Acts 24.5), which in English corresponds to ‘Nazorian’, by analogy with Athēnaioi, ‘Athenian’.” Nazors (or Nazor) isn’t a town at all, much less the town of Nazareth. Epiphanius likewise knew the original Torah-observant sect of Christians by this same appellation, the Nazorians (OHJ, 281–82). This has serious implications (OHJ, 401–02; emphasis now added):

It should be clear that Nazōr– and Nazar– are completely different roots; and –eth and –ai are completely different terminations. The original meaning was probably not a town of origin but an attribute or label (a name with a secret meaning, as I show in Proving History some Christians in fact believed). This lack of connection between the terms is actually an argument for the historicity of Nazareth (at least when the Gospels were written), as there is no other explanation why Nazōraios would generate an assignment to Nazareth other than that there was an actual Nazareth and that sounded close enough (otherwise, if the evangelists were inventing the town, they would have named it Nazōrai).

Conversely, this also argues that Jesus did not come from Nazareth, as otherwise there is no good explanation why he was called a Nazorian (Mt. 26.71; Lk. 18.37; Jn 18.5-7 and 19.19) and his followers Nazorians, other than that this was a term originally unconnected with Nazareth and therefore preceded the assignment of that town to Jesus (it’s not as if Matthew, e.g., needed to find scriptural confirmation that he originated in Nazareth; Mark didn’t, and neither did Luke or John). Otherwise Jesus would have been called a Nazaretos (‘Nazarethan’) or a Nazaranos (‘Nazaran’).

Mark created the loosely similar word, Nazarēnos, for this purpose, unless that was a later scribal modification. And we have reason to believe it was, because Mk 10.47 originally agreed with the other Gospels in saying Nazōraios (e.g. in Codex Sinaiticus); Mk 14.67 may have (e.g. Codex Koridethi and Codex Sangallensis 48); as might Mk 16.6 (e.g. Codex Sangallensis 48 and Codex Regius); and there is significant confusion in the mss. as to the spelling in Mk 1.24, as also in those other three verses, leaving all cases accounted for—for Mk 1.24 alone [the manuscript concordance of Reuban] Swanson identifies no less than five different variant spellings …

[Meanwhile] Matthew knows no other spelling than Nazōraios (and he was using Mark as a source). John also knows no other spelling than Nazōraios. Luke uses Nazarēnos only twice, only one of which is a lift from Mark (Lk. 4.34, redacting Mk 1.24), the other introduced in a story unique to Luke (Lk. 24.19), but elsewhere, in another lift from Mark, he uses Nazōraios (Lk. 18.37, redacting Mk 10.47), and this spelling can’t have come from Matthew, who does not use the word at all in his redaction of the same story (in Mt. 20.29-34). It therefore must have come from Mark, which argues that Mark originally wrote Nazōraios.

Notably, in Luke’s one lift from Mark that reads Nazarēnos, the manuscripts again don’t agree on the spelling (some seven variants are known, including spellings similar to Nazōraios); and in his one unique use, a great many mss. in fact read Nazōraios. … [So] it would appear that Nazarēnos was a later scribal invention and might never have been in the Gospels of Mark or Luke originally.

So…

[It] should already be obvious from the fact that Christians were originally called Nazorians (Acts 24.5), and the originating sect of Christianity, which remained Torah-observant, continued to be so-named for centuries [per Epiphanius]. Yet Christians [themselves] neither came from nor were based at Nazareth. So the word clearly meant something else. And this is explicitly admitted in later Christian sources [as I document in Proving History; index, “Nazareth”]. In fact, that the messianic fable had to be set in Galilee was already established in scripture (Isa. 9.1- 7); and scripture likewise insisted the messiah had to be a ‘Nazorian’ (Mt. 2.23, obviously reading some scripture or variant we no longer have…

These facts obviously inspired the selection for Jesus’ home a town in Galilee with the nearest-sounding name, ‘Nazareth’. That this is what happened is supported by the fact that those two words (Nazōraios and Nazareth) are not at all related, yet Matthew reports that scripture said Jesus would be a Nazorian, and Acts says the Christians were called Nazorians, and Epiphanius confirms a Torah-observant Christian sect did exist in Palestine called the Nazorians, and Jesus is frequently called a Nazorian in the Gospels (in John and Matthew, he is only so called). So the scripture and the name came first; the Gospel narrators then forced a fit, as best they could, with otherwise unrelated background facts (like a town with a near-enough-sounding name).

Of course, a real man could have been assigned this town for scriptural and mythopoeic reasons; so the historicity of Jesus is not undermined by this revelation. But one of the favorite arguments for his existence is tanked by it. You can no longer deploy the Hitchens maneuver and claim Jesus “must” have existed because we can’t otherwise explain how he came to be “from Nazareth.” And thus it matters that text-critical considerations actually strongly argue for Mark and Luke consistently having used the unrelated word “Nazorian,” and all manuscripts ever attesting “Nazarene” are later scribal emendations to solidify the historicizing myth of his origin and get rid of the original esoteric meaning of what a “Nazorian” actually was.

Conclusion

So problems for your pet theories can both arise or vanish with credible textual criticism. Scribal error was so common, and the kinds of errors that were particularly common actually perform so very well as explanations of many difficulties or oddities in our surviving text of the Bible, that there is no need to resort to convoluted armchair apologetics or wild speculations about an author’s hidden intentions. And attending to the manuscript history as well as the text-critical context of any crux in the extant text can often be crucial to assessing what might actually have happened. You certainly don’t want to overlook it.

This does not mean just any text-critical theory you can come up with is therefore probable. You need a preponderance of evidence supporting it in each particular case. Manuscript evidence is nice, but you won’t always have it; and even when you do, it might not always be clear. But you can have evidence in the form of there being a definite problem with the text that needs some solution; plus the high probability of a text-critical solution at that point given the inherent and surrounding Greek (or even the variations found across the Synoptics, for example); and the lack of any evidence to the contrary; as well as what intelligent authors were back then more or less likely to do usually; and other considerations.

There are many examples I already explore in various other places, such as in On the Historicity of Jesus, where I discuss evidence that, for instance, Codex Bezae preserves more original readings of Luke-Acts than our critical edition does. Just two cases in point:

  • Emmaus might have originally been Oulammaous (OHJ, p. 483). There are good text-critical reasons to think so. And they stem in part from recognizing that what we know as “the Emmaus narrative” is actually a mythic recapitulation of the story of the boy Jesus in the temple, the author of Luke deliberately inventing both tales as end-caps to his entire Gospel. Which is an observation now recently confirmed by a new study (yet without noticing the evidence in Codex Bezae) by Reverend Dr. Rob James, Professor of Anglican Formation and Studies at the Vancouver School of Theology: The Spiral Gospel: Intratextuality in Luke’s Narrative (James Clarke, 2023). To its results, which independently replicate and thus corroborate several of my own arguments, can now be added the manuscript evidence from Codex Bezae of Emmaus being a multi-step corruption for the correct Septuagint reading of Oulammaous, a.k.a. Bethel, a.k.a. “God’s House.”
  • Codex Bezae also provided evidence that Luke’s empty tomb narrative might have originally said the stone covering Jesus’s tomb took “twenty men” to move (OHJ, p. 486). Because that would align Luke’s version of the story symbolically with the Antiquities of Josephus, wherein we learn it took “twenty men” to open the doors to the Jerusalem temple. Whoever wrote that line was clearly drawing from the Antiquities of Josephus in order to equate the tomb of Jesus with the temple of God, and thus Jesus leaving the tomb with God leaving the temple (thereby and therein inaugurating a new divine order). To suppose a later scribe “figured out” that Luke-Acts draws often from the Antiquities of Josephus and thus dug into that and found this detail and thus “added” this line to Luke to somehow improve its ingenious application of the Antiquities to improve on the mythical symbolism of the tale seems less likely than that…Luke is the one who did this, and all other manuscripts lack the line because it was lost in transmission, deliberately or by error. One of those theories requires more, and more improbable, coincidences than the other.

So there are many reasons, from the mundane to the scary, why textual criticism is an essential methodology for studying and understanding the Bible and its creation and transmission.

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