A small scribble for a scribe, a big disclose for a disciple. In the tradition of Judaism, Christianity sprang as the "religion of the book". Christianity began with Jesus, who was himself a Jewish rabbi (teacher) who accepted the author-ity of the Torah, and possibly other sacred Jewish books, and taught his interpretation of those books to his disciples. His followers were unusual in the Roman Empire: like the Jews, but unlike nearly everyone else, they located sacred authority in sacred books. The early Christian texts were copied by scribes for nearly fifteen centuries until the invention of printing.
It is probably safe to say that the copying of early Christian texts was by and large a conservative process. The scribes - whether nonprofessional scribes in the early centuries or professional scribes of the Middle Ages - were intent on conserving the textual tradition they were passing on. Most scribes, no doubt, tried to do a faithful job in making sure that the text they reproduced was the same text they inherited. Nonetheless, changes came to be made in the early Christian texts. Scribes would sometimes - lots of times - make accidental mistakes, by misspelling a word, leaving out a line, or simply bungling the sentences they were supposed to be copying; and on occasion they changed the text deliberately, making a "correction" to the text, which in fact turned out to be an alternation of what the text’s author had originally written.
Although most of the textual changes are insignificant, in some instances a question arises of the very meaning of the text or the theological conclusions that one draws from it.
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Reproduced above is the text of 1 Timothy 3:16–4:3 from Codex A, as presented in the photographic facsimile volume published by the British Museum in 1879. Of particular interest here is the reading in 3:16, where the questionable abbreviation QS is circled. Further down, in verse 4:3, there is another QS circled for comparison, and both instances are enlarged below the reproduction. |
One of the most controversial figures in the ranks of biblical scholarship in the eighteen century was J.J. Wettstein (1693-1754). In 1715 Wettstein went to England and was given full access to Codex Alexandrinus... One portion of the manuscript particularly caught Wettstein’s attention: it was one of those tiny matters with enormous implications. It involved the text of a key passage in the book of 1 Timothy. The passage in question, 1 Tim. 3:16, had long been used by advocates of orthodox theology to support the view that the New Testament itself calls Jesus God. For the text, in most manuscripts, refers to Christ as "God made manifest in the flesh, and justified in the Spirit". Most manuscripts abbreviate sacred names (the so-called nomina sacra) , and that is the case here as well, where the Greek word God (QEOS} is abbreviated in two letters, theta and sigma (QS), with a line drawn over the top to indicate that it is an abbreviation. What Wettstein noticed in examining Codex Alexandrinus was that the line over the top had been drawn in a different ink from the surrounding words, and so appeared to be from a later hand (i.e., written by a later scribe). Moreover, the horizontal line in the middle of the first letter, Q, was not actually a part of the letter but was a line that had bled through from the other side of the old vellum. In other words, rather than being the abbreviation (theta-sigma) for "God" (QS), the word was actually an omicron and a sigma (OS), a different word altogether, which simply means "who". The original reading of the manuscript thus did not speak of Christ as "God made manifest in the flesh" but of Christ "who was made manifest in the flesh". According to the ancient testimony of the Codex Alexandrinus, Christ is no longer explicitly called God in this passage. As Wettstein continued his investigations, he found other passages typically used to affirm the doctrine of the divinity of Christ that in fact represented textual problems; when these problems are resolved on text-critical grounds, in most instances references to Jesus’s divinity are taken away. It is striking to realize that the same correction occurred in four other early manuscripts of 1 Timothy, all of which have had correctors change the text in the same way, so that it now explicitly calls Jesus "God". Bart D. Ehrman: Misquoting Jesus, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 2005. |
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