Why John 7.53-8.11 and Mark 16.9ff Are not Canonical

Last updated on: December 2, 2018 at 1:27 am by Ben Witherington

Why John 7.53-8.11 and Mark 16.9ff Are not Canonical 2018-11-08T09:31:52-05:00 Ben Witherington

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Here’s another excellent post by my friend Larry Hurtado. I entirely agree with him on this matter. What was in the original inspired text written by the NT authors is what should be considered canonical and Biblical, PLUS NOTHING. No later additions. Text determines canon, not the other way around, see my Baylor Press book What’s In a Word, and my Living Word of God, also by Baylor. BW3

More on Rethinking the Textual Transmission of the Gospels
by larryhurtado
In earlier postings, I’ve questioned the paradigm/model of an early “wild” period of textual transmission of the Gospels and a subsequent/later period of textual stability (here, here, and here). The model may seem intuitively credible, but the manuscript evidence doesn’t seem to support it. To cite one thing, the manuscript evidence suggests that significant textual variants continued to appear, or at least first became widely accepted, well into the Byzantine and early Medieval periods. Here are some examples.

Take the sizeable variant known as the pericope of the adulteress.[1] The passage first appears in the extant manuscripts in the fifth century (e.g., Codex Bezae), and not in earlier manuscripts (e.g., P66, P75, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, as well as a number of somewhat later manuscripts). But thereafter the passage became a regular part of the Gospel of John at 7:53-8:11. So, the “success” of this passage, in terms of widescale incorporation into the Gospel of John, came, not in some early “wild” period, but later, in the period of supposed textual stability. The variant may well have first appeared early in some now-lost early manuscripts, but obviously did not enjoy that “success” till later.

Or consider the “long ending” of the Gospel of Mark (which became 16:9-20 in the Medieval text). Due to the comparatively less frequent usage and copying of Mark in the earliest centuries, the first Greek manuscripts that allow us to check the matter are Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, which don’t have these verses. Again, to find the variant in the manuscript tradition we have to go later, to the fifth/sixth century, in Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Bezae and others. And once more, this sizeable variant became thereafter solidly a part of the Medieval text of Mark. So, another sizeable variant that may have featured in some early manuscripts but only became a “success” later.

Still more striking, consider the variant at 1 John 5:7-8. The earliest Greek manuscripts with these words (or variations on them) are a small number from the Medieval period. Yet the variant became part of the “Textus receptus” (and so part of the KJV) thereafter.[2]

Now if we combine these facts with studies of the textual character of our earliest Greek manuscripts (papyri commonly dated to the third century or earlier), there is further reason to question the model of early/wild and later/stable textual transmission. Studies by Barbara Aland and Min on the papyri for the Gospel of Matthew, and the more recent and more sophisticated study of early papyri of the Gospel of John by Lonnie Bell, all show that these texts were transmitted basically with care—no “wild” variants in evidence.[3]

The major points to make are these: (1) The process of producing and incorporating significant and intentional textual variants continued well into the supposed period of textual stability. Indeed, it appears that factors (yet to be identified) may have made for the “success” of such variants in the later period, in contrast with the earlier centuries. (2) The earliest extant Greek evidence does not support the notion that in the first centuries the text of the Gospels was transmitted in some free-wheeling “wild” manner in which variants were introduced freely, producing some highly fluid state of affairs. The earliest witnesses do show variants, to be sure, although almost entirely those relatively small ones incurred in the process of copying, not the larger and intentional variants, and clearly some copyists were more skilfull than others, and followed somewhat distinguishable practices.[4]

The larger point is that there is much to be explored about the textual transmission of the Gospels all across the first several centuries down through the Byzantine and early Medieval periods. What factors made for the “success” of major variants only in these later times? What factors made for a relatively cohesive transmission of Gospel texts reflected in our earliest Greek evidence? Time for a more data-based model/paradigm!

[1] Chris Keith, “Recent and Previous Research on the Pericope Adulterae (John 7.53–8.11),” Currents in Biblical Research 6 (2008): 377-404; David Alan Black and Jacob N. Cerone, eds., The Pericope of the Adulteress in Contemporary Research (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016).

[2] On this and the other variants mentioned in this blog, see, e.g., Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Edition, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft/United Bible Societies, 1994), and the references cited at the respective places.

[3] Barbara Aland, “Das Zeugnis der frühen Papyri für den Text der Evangelien: Diskutiert am Matthäusevangelium,,” in The Four Gospels 1992, ed. F. Van Segbroeck et al. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1992), 325-35; Kyoung Shik Min, Die früheste Überlieferung des Matthäusevangeliums (bis zum 3./4. Jh): Edition und Untersuchung, ANTF 34 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005); Lonnie D. Bell, The Early Textual Transmission of John: Stability and Fluidity in Its Second and Third Century Greek Manuscripts, NTTSD 54 (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

[4] E.g., James R. Royse, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri, NTTS 36 (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

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