Peter SmytheA Different Kind of Word Preacher

But we do see Him who was made for a little while lower than the angels, namely, Jesus, because of the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, so that by the grace of God apart from God he might taste death for everyone. (Hebrews 2:9, NASB with Smythe edit)

In dealing with Jesus’s Descent Into Hell, Hebrews 2:9 might well be the most provocative and controversial verse of this series. Just two weeks ago I received my new NASB from Cambridge in the mail and I promptly made this edit. If you go through any English translation of the Bible, you won’t see “apart from God” in any one of them.

Have I lost my mind? Is this one of those Pentecostal “revelations” that has no basis in scripture? Have I gone too far in trying to demonstrate that Jesus descended into hell? To show you that I haven’t, I have to take you on a short introduction through textual criticism to demonstrate why “apart from God” is the proper reading.

Our Bible Text

The average Christian hardly gives any thought to translation let alone just what it is that makes up our Bible canon or text. I imagine that many of them think we have Paul’s original letters somewhere in the Louvre, the Vatican, or some museum of some sort. The thing is we don’t. Our Bibles are based upon copies of copies of the original letters, not the original letters themselves.

The original letters, whether by Paul, Peter, the writer of Hebrews, etc. originally penned their letters and sent them to the respective churches. In that time there weren’t any printing presses or Kinko’s so if someone wanted a copy of the letter, he had to do by hand. History appears to indicate that the first copies of the New Testament letters were informal copies done by church members or others like them. If you put yourself in their place, you can understand how copies of letters even as short as Jude might contain spelling errors, left-out words, or some other scribal mistakes.

It was only sometime later, some scholars put it around 300 A.D., that the professional “copy” centers arose. In these centers, someone would read aloud whatever text was to be copied and the scribes, which might number 20 or more, would write down what they heard. As with anyone, some of the scribes made mistakes due to mishearing words, wandering minds, or whatever else might come about. Sometimes, if the scribe didn’t hear a word correctly, he might fill in what he thought fit or what he thought he might have heard. Interestingly, if a mistake was made, that mistake was usually handed down in copies of the copies. Until the invention of the printing press, this was life.

First Published Greek Testament

When Gutenberg invented the printing press, it was just a matter of time before someone would want to print a Greek New Testament. That someone was Desiderius Erasmus. In or around 1515, Erasmus contracted with a printer to be the first publisher of a Greek New Testament. After contracting to do the job, Erasmus went to Basel to seek out suitable manuscripts that he could use as the basis of the text. He didn’t find a great number of them, some put it at half a dozen, but what he did find he used for his testament. From what scholars can deduce, it appears that Erasmus relied mostly on a single 12th century manuscript and he made copyediting changes where he thought that the manuscript deviated from his ideas of the original text. For parts of Revelation, he actually translated the Latin Vulgate into Greek to finish out the book. Erasmus got his Greek New Testament out before a competing firm and thus established himself as the first publisher of the Greek New Testament. For what it’s worth, it is Erasmus’s text upon which the King James translation was based and it is called the “Textus Receptus.”

 Variants

Some years after Erasmus’s edition, there came some other scholars who noticed “variants,” i.e., variations in spelling, words, etc. from the Textus Receptus. One scholar, John Mill, printed a “critical apparatus” that compared the variants that he found to Erasmus’s Textus Receptus. Mill’s work sort of opened the gates for the desire to obtain more Greek manuscripts and establish a “recognized” text.

Indiana Jones

In seeking out the very best Greek manuscripts and “recovering” the original texts, Lobegott Friedrich Constantine von Tischendorf (1815 - 1874) became a modern-day Bible Indiana Jones. He wrote to his fiance, “I am confronted with a sacred task, the struggle to regain the original form of the New Testament.” He set out to fulfill this calling by locating every manuscript tucked away in every library or monastery that would let him in. In 1844, he found his Holy Grail:

It was at the foot of Mount Sinai, in the Covent of St. Catherine, that I discovered the pearl of all my researches. In visiting the monastery in the month of May 1844. I perceived in the middle of the great hall a large and wide basket full of old parchments; and the librarian who was a man of information told me that two heaps of papers like these, mouldered by time, had been already committed to the flames. What was my surprise to find amid this heap of papers a considerable number of sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek, which seemed to me to be one of the most ancient that I had ever seen. The authorities of the monastery allowed me to possess myself of a third of these parchments, or about forty three sheets, all of the more readily as they were designated for the fire. But I could not get them to yield up possession of the remainder. The too lively satisfaction which I had displayed had aroused their suspicions as to the value of the manuscript. I transcribed a page of the text of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and enjoined on the monks to take religious care of all such remains which might fall their way. (Constantine von Tischendorf, When Were Our Gospels Written? (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1866), 23)

Since his “too lively” display aroused the suspicions of the monks, they wouldn’t let him take the manuscript with him. Fifteen years later he was able to return to the monastery where he reported:

I unrolled the cover, and discovered, to my great surprise, not only those very fragments which, fifteen years before, I had taken out of the basket, but also other parts of the Old Testament, the New Testament complete, and in addition, the Epistle of Barnabas and a part of the Pastor of Hermas. Full of joy, which this time I had the self-command to conceal from the steward and the rest of the community, I asked, as if in a careless way, for permission to take the manuscript into my sleeping chamber to look over it more at leisure. (Constantine von Tischendorf, When Were Our Gospels Written? (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1866), 29)

Tischendorf recognized this document to be the earliest surviving witness to the text of the New Testament: “the most precious Biblical treasure in existence - a document whose age and importance exceeded that of all the manuscripts which I had ever examined.” This manuscript has been named the Codex Sinaiticus and it is considered one of the best witnesses to the original text. He was also able to recover the Codex Vaticanicus which is on par with Codex Sinaiticus. During the course of his work, he published 22 editions of the early Christian texts, along with 8 editions of the Greek New Testament.

Our Current Bible

Tischendorf set a standard for procuring Greek manuscripts to establish the text and today Bible researchers and scholars have recovered over 5,300 manuscripts containing all or parts of the New Testament. By comparing the texts for scribal errors (those misspelled words, etc.) they have what they consider to be 95% or more of the original text. The last 5% involve judgment calls where the scholars cannot definitively pick one version over another of the same scripture. That’s where Hebrews 2:9 comes in. In the next post, I’ll show you why I’ve struck out “by the grace” and put in “apart from,” which, incidentally, will help prove that Jesus’s descent into hell is orthodox doctrine, not some new-fangled Word of Faith theory.

[Note: In this post, I’ve included the images of three books on Textual Criticism. Frankly, Bart Ehrman’s book is the easiest to read and I’ll be using his analysis of Hebrews 2:9 in the next post, but I really don’t care for any of his theological views. He says that he began his studies as a Christian, but now has become agnostic and it shows in his treatment of certain scriptures. Both the Alands’ and Metzger’s books are good, but they are rather technical. They give great histories of how the Greek manuscripts have been recovered and where we now stand with regard to the original texts, but be ready for some heavy reading.]