The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament

628 Pages·1996·3.93 MB·English

by  Bart D. Ehrman

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

The Orthodox Corruption

of Scripture

The Effect of Early

Christological Controversies on
the Text of the New Testament

BART D. EHRMAN

Oxford University Press Oxford New York

Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay

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and associated companies

in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1993 by Bart D. Ehrman

First published in 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1996

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Translations of the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers are the

author's own. Translations

of the patristic writers—including Justin, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and

Tertullian—are from the

Ante-Nicene Fathers (eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson;

Edinburgh; T & T Clark

American Reprint Edition; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), unless

otherwise indicated. Quotations

from Eusebius are drawn from G. A. Williamson, Eusebius: The History of

the Church

from Christ to Constantine (rev. and ed. Andrew Louth; London: Penguin,

1989). These various

translations have been occasionally modified in order to make them

more inclusive.

The JBL style sheet has been used for all abbreviations.

Portions of the book incorporate material, slightly revised, from several

of the author's earlier

articles, all used here with the permission of the publishers, gratefully

acknowledged: “1 John 4.3

and the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture,” ZNW 79 (1988) 221-43; “The

Cup, the Bread, and

the Salvific Effect of Jesus' Death in Luke-Acts,” SBLSP (1991) 576-91;

“The Text of Mark in

the Hands of the Orthodox,” Biblical Hermeneutics in Historical Perspective

(eds. Mark Burrows

and Paul Rorem; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1991) 19-31, found also in LQ 5

(1991) 143–56.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ehrman, Bart D.

The Orthodox corruption of scripture: the effect of early Christological

controversies on the text of the New Testament Bart D. Ehrman.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13 978-0-19510279-6 (Pbk.)

1. Bible. N.T.—Criticism, Textual. 2. Jesus Christ—History of

doctrines—Early church, ca. 30-600. 3. Heresies, Christian—

History—Early church, ca. 30-600. I. Title.

BS2325.E47 1993 225’06—dc20 92-28607

15 17 19 18 16

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

Richard L. Ehrman

in memoriam

Acknowledgments

My personal and institutional debts have grown dramatically with the

writing of this work, and here I would like to make a grateful, if partial,

acknowledgment. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has

been supportive on all levels: the Faculty Research Council generously

provided funding through a Faculty Development Grant in 1989, and the

Institute for Arts and Humanities, under the direction of Ruel Tyson,

awarded me faculty fellowships for the summer of 1989 and the spring

of 1992, easing my teaching burden and providing a forum for

intellectual discourse with scholars in other fields—a surprisingly rare

treat in modern academia. I am also obliged to my graduate research

assistants, C. W. Thompson and Kim Haines Eitzen, who proved

assiduous in gathering, checking, and evaluating bibliographical items,

and, above all, to my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies,

who have tendered their moral and material support every step along

the way.

I am especially grateful to my wife, Cindy, whose understanding and

good humor grew with the length of the manuscript, and to my

daughter, Kelly, and son, Derek, whose capacity for fun and zest for life

have always provided a healthy antidote for the long hours that Dad was

shut up in his study or lost on another planet.

I would like to extend my special thanks to friends and teachers who

have read parts of the manuscript: my two perspicacious colleagues,

Peter Kaufman and Laurie Maffly-Kipp, extraordinary for their

recognition of inelegance; Elizabeth Clark and Bruce Metzger, whose

seasoned judgments have always been graciously extended and

gratefully received; and especially Joel Marcus, now of the University of

Glasgow, and Dale Martin, of Duke, two exceptional New Testament

scholars with mighty red pens, who carefully pored over every word of

the manuscript, saving me from numerous egregious errors and

infelicities of expression. Those that remain can be chalked up to my

willful disposition in refusing (in good heretical fashion) to take their

sage advice.

I have dedicated this work to the memory of my father, who did not

live to see the completion of the project, but whose intangible presence

can be felt throughout. Above all, he taught me that hard work can be

rewarding, that humor always has a place, and that some convictions are

worthy of a good fight.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina
B.D.E.

February 1993

Contents

Introduction

1. The Text of Scripture in an Age of Dissent: Early Christian Struggles

for Orthodoxy

2. Anti-Adoptionistic Corruptions of Scripture

3. Anti-Separationist Corruptions of Scripture

4. Anti-Docetic Corruptions of Scripture

5. Anti-Patripassianist Corruptions of Scripture

6. The Orthodox Corruptors of Scripture

Bibliography of Secondary Works Cited

Index of Scripture

Index of Modern Authors

Index of Subjects and Ancient Sources

Introduction

This is a book about texts and their transmission, about the words of the

emerging New Testament and how they came to be changed by scribes

of the early Christian centuries. My thesis can be stated simply: scribes

occasionally altered the words of their sacred texts to make them more

patently orthodox and to prevent their misuse by Christians who

espoused aberrant views.

Textual critics are commonly charged—not always unfairly and often

from among their own ranks—with disregarding research done in other

fields. Narrowly focusing on the manuscripts of the New Testament, they

often neglect the realia of ecclesiastical and social history that can

elucidate features of the text. And restricting their theoretical field of

vision to methods espoused by philology and Biblical higher criticism,

they bypass important foundational questions, such as what it might

mean to refer to the “corruption” of a text that is offhandedly called the

“original.”

If these charges are leveled against the present study, it will have

failed in one of its principal designs. To some extent, the study is meant

to dispel the notion that New Testament textual criticism is at best an

arcane, if rudimentarily necessary, discipline, of little interest to the

enterprises of exegesis, the history of theology, and the social history of

early Christianity—let alone to broader interests of scholars in the

humanities, such as the history of late antiquity, the use of literature in

religious polemics, and the construal of texts.

To be sure, the explicit goal of the study is itself traditional. I am

interested in seeing how scribes modified the words of Scripture they

inherited. The methods I use to attain this goal are also traditional: they

are the critical procedures customarily used to establish any text,

classical or biblical. But I am less concerned with interpreting the words

of the New Testament as they came from the pens of its authors than

with seeing how these words came to be altered in the course of their

transcription. Moreover, my understanding of this process of

transmission, that is, the way I conceptualize scribal alterations of a text,

derives less from traditional categories of philology than from recent

developments in the field of literary theory.

In Chapter 1 I sketch the socio-historical context for the phenomenon

I will call, and justify calling, the “orthodox corruption of Scripture.”

Here I deal with the theological debates of the second and third

Christian centuries, a period of intense rivalry among various groups of

Christians who advocated divergent ways of understanding their

religion. By the fourth century, one of these groups had routed the

opposition, co-opting for itself the designation “orthodoxy” and

effectively marginalizing the rival parties as “heresies.” Proponents of

fourth-century orthodoxy insisted on the antiquity of their views and

embraced certain authors of the preceding generations as their own

theological forebears. My study focuses on these earlier Christians—the

representatives of an “incipient orthodoxy”—because most scribal

alterations of the New Testament text originated during the time of their

disputes, that is, in the ante-Nicene age.

In particular, this chapter explores the ways proto-orthodox

Christians used literature in their early struggles for dominance, as they

produced polemical treatises, forged supporting documents under the

names of earlier authorities, collected apostolic works into an

authoritative canon, and insisted on certain hermeneutical principles for

the interpretation of these works. The documents of this new canon

could be circulated, of course, only to the extent that they were copied.

And they were copied by warm-blooded scribes who were intimately

familiar with the debates over doctrine that made their scribal labors a

desideratum. It was within this milieu of controversy that scribes

sometimes changed their scriptural texts to make them say what they

were already known to mean. In the technical parlance of textual

criticism—which I retain for its significant ironies—these scribes

“corrupted” their texts for theological reasons. Chapter 1 concludes with

a proposed theoretical framework for understanding this kind of scribal

activity.

The bulk of the study examines the textual tradition of the New

Testament for variant readings that appear to have been generated

within the context of orthodox polemics, specifically in the area of

Christology. Using rubrics provided by the orthodox heresiologists

themselves, I devote each of three chapters to a different christological

“heresy” of the period: adoptionism, the view that Christ was a man, but

not God; docetism, the view that he was God, but not a man; and

separationism, the view that the divine Christ and the human Jesus were

distinct beings. Each chapter describes the heresy in question (at least as

understood by its orthodox opponents), before discussing textual

variants that appear to have been created out of opposition to it. In some

instances this requires extensive text-critical argumentation to

distinguish the earliest form of the text from modifications effected

during the course of its transmission. I have provided a proportionately

greater treatment to variants of special interest to New Testament

exegesis, the development of Christian doctrine, and the history of

interpretation. A much briefer fifth chapter considers textual variants

that appear to have arisen in opposition to the patripassianist

Christologies of the late second and early third centuries. Chapter 6

summarizes my methodological and material conclusions, and proffers

some suggestions concerning the significance of the study for

understanding the debates between heresy and orthodoxy in early

Christianity.

Because this book is intended not only for textual scholars but also

for a variety of persons who might find the issues it raises of some

relevance to their own academic interests, I suggest two different

strategies of reading. For those who are not specialists in the text or

interpretation of the New Testament, who are primarily interested in

such things as the history of early Christianity, the development of

religious polemics, or the effects of texts on readers, I suggest reading

Chapter 1, the introductory and concluding sections of each of the main

chapters, and the conclusion (Chapter 6). These portions of the book are

relatively free from technical jargon; together they set the theoretical

framework and historical context of the study, explain in greater detail

my overarching thesis, describe the kinds of data I have used to establish

this thesis, summarize the conclusions that I think we can draw from

these data, and reflect on the broader significance of these conclusions

for textual critics, exegetes, theologians, and historians of late antiquity.

On the other hand, textual scholars and exegetes who are interested in

examining the evidence and evaluating the arguments I have adduced

will want to read the detailed exposition of each chapter. It is here that I

address a number of textual and exegetical issues that have intrigued

scholars throughout the modern era, and demonstrate on a case by case

basis how proto-orthodox scribes of the second and third centuries

modified their texts of Scripture to make them conform more closely

with their own christological beliefs, effecting thereby the “orthodox

corruption of Scripture.”