I have a new “Op-Ed” piece just posted at the Web site Bible & Interpretation. If you don’t know the site you might spend some profitable time exploring its many features and thick archives, drawing in a “Who’s Who” from the world of Biblical Studies and Archaeology.

My essay deals with the thorny question of whether or not the description of the “Last Days of Jesus” (scholars call this the “Passion Narrative) in the Gospel of John is dependent or independent of Mark, our earliest Gospel. And further, if John is independent, as I argue, does it rest upon sources that might in fact be more primitive, and potentially more reliable, for getting at the “historical Jesus.” You can read the entire essay here:

“The Gospel of Mark: Priority Does not Mean Primacy“

I have an guest Op-Ed essay titled “Older is Not Always Better” Remembering Wescott & Hort” up on the Bible & Interpretation Web site for October, 2009. If you don’t know this site, recently revived and expanded, you should add it to your regular “stops,” RSS feeds, or general browsing. It has a wealth of information on biblical studies, including archaeology.

I began my New Testament Greek as a young college freshman at what was then called Abilene Christian College (today Abilene Christian University), one of the flagship schools of the Churches of Christ. In those days ACU, as we called it, was inhabited by the likes of Lemoine Lewis, Jimmy Jack Roberts, Abraham Malherbe, and Everett Ferguson. For biblical studies it could not be beat, as the marvelous fledgling journal, The Restoration Quarterly, where so many of us published our first articles, stands witness.

Based on that first year Greek course, taught by an unsung master of the language, Robert L. Johnston, from whom I subsequently took Classical Greek as well, I decided on Greek as my college major, with a second major in Bible. Almost all the advanced Greek courses were taught by the legendary Paul Southern, and mainly consisted of sitting with Dr. Southern around a table and reading aloud and translating without notes or English versions, from a straight copy of the 2nd edition of Wescott and Hort’s The New Testament in the Original Greek (1896). Southern would pepper the students with detailed questions of grammar, demanding us to parse verbs from memory or analyze syntax. There was surely a fear for any of us who came unprepared, but also a respect for the ways in which we were forced to truly learn the Greek text of the New Testament.

That was my first introduction to B. F. Westcott (1825-1901) and F. J. A. Hort (1828-1892), the towering pioneers of the textual criticism of the Greek New Testament. This involves the critical evaluation of extant manuscript copies of the text, with their variations, interpolations, and differences, in order to determine what is thought to be the most original text. Dr. Southern swore by Wescott and Hort, whose work to this day serves as the bedrock of all subsequent critical editions of the Greek New Testament, including the standards of the United Bible Societies used by most scholars and students today (Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece and Aland-Black-Metzger-Wikgren, The Greek New Testament-an edition intended more for translators that is less exhaustive in citing textual variants in the manuscripts).

Generally speaking Wescott and Hort favored the Alexandrian text, which they called the “Neutral Text,” namely based on the two chief 4th century witnesses Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. Today, with the addition of the Bodmer Papyri and other even earlier witnesses, that take the Alexandrian type of text to the early 2nd century, the essential judgment of Wescott and Hort seems to be upheld.

In contrast, the more traditional Byzantine text (that Wescott & Hort called the Syrian text), upon which the King James version and most all translations until the 20th century were based, was considered inferior, characterized by numerous additions, interpolations, and theologically motivated changes in what was considered to be the original.

Wescott & Hort, to this day, draw the ire and condemnation of more conservative Christian believers as “infidels,” who attempted to change the text of God’s word. I just did a Google search “Wescott and Hort” and most of the top Web sites that popped up are devoted to proving that these amazing scholars were basically involved in a “plot from hell” to destroy God’s truth.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Westcott and Hort’s work was their upholding of certain readings from the so-called Western textual tradition, based on manuscripts like Codex Bezae (designated D). Generally scholars are agreed that the Western text is heavily interpolated with loose paraphrasing and lots of traditional and even apocryphal material added. However, at the end of Luke in particular, as well as a few other scattered places, the Western text is strangely shorter than the Neutral/Alexandrian text, with some surprising omissions that Wescott and Hort judged to be closer to the original.

Wescott and Hort identified nine of these passages, which they labeled as “Western non-interpolations,” and they put them as brackets as secondary additions to the original in their edition of the New Testament. I am a great fan of the original Revised Standard Version and to this day prefer it over the New Revised Standard Version (1989), which is the scholarly preference today. The RSV New Testament was published in 1946–the year of my birth. It was roundly condemned as the “Devil’s Bible” and actual book burnings were reported in some circles. The passion and hatred was fueled by any number of features of this impressive new translation but I think the most widespread charge was that the scholars were trying to destroy God’s revelation by a subtle removal of key passages, including the secondary ending of Mark (16:9-20), which was printed in smaller text to mark it as an addition to the original text. In fact, the protest was so great that eventually subsequent printings of the RSV put the text size back to normal and just added a note indicating that these verses were likely secondary to the original.

The RSV also, for the most part, removed and added to footnotes at the bottom of the page, most of the nine “Western non-interpolations” that Wescott and Hort had identified from the Western text:

Matthew 27:49: And another took a spear and pierced his side, and out came water and blood

Luke 22:19b-20: “…which is given for you, Do this in remembrance of me.” And likewise the cup after supper, saying, “This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”

Luke 24:3: (they did not find the body) of the Lord Jesus

Luke 24:6: he is not here, he is risen

Luke 24:12: But Peter rose and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; and he went home wondering at what had happened.

Luke 24:36: and said to them, “Peace be to you!”

Luke 24:40: And when he said this, he showed them his hands and his feet

Luke 24:51: and was carried up to heaven

Luke 24: 52: worshiped him, and

When I first encountered this list of passages in brackets in in Dr. Southern’s Greek classes, now over 40 years ago, I was quite surprised. I had grown up on the King James Version of the Bible and this introduction to textual criticism of the Greek New Testament came as a bit of a shock to me–much like the experience Bart Ehrman describes in his book, Misquoting Jesus. But it seemed to me, even at the young age of eighteen, that these additions to Luke, not to mention the three interpolated endings of Mark, were self-evidently secondary additions that the theologically motivated scribes had added to the text over the centuries. It also seemed quite telling to me that with the exception of Mathew 27:49, all of these “Western non-interpolations” were inserted into the last chapters of Luke, and each of them either serves to harmonize the text of Luke with that of John and Paul, and thus to reinforce a growing Christian Orthodoxy regarding the Lord’s Supper and Christology in ways that the original text of Luke does not support. I suppose you could say I was a fairly “instant convert” to the view that such readings were secondary.

Interestingly enough, that is far from the end of the story. I was noticing recently that the English Standard Version, that purports to be a kind of Evangelical Christian, but scholarly update of the old RSV, has put all of these verses at the end of Luke back into the text! The late and much beloved, Bruce Metzger, in his A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2nd Edition, 1994) notes that a sharp disagreement arose among members of the committee regarding Wescott and Hort’s so-called “Western non-interpolations.” A majority of the scholars, including obviously Metzger himself, were convinced that the traditional longer readings were original and should stay, while a minority maintained that there is such an obvious Christological-theological motivation that accounts for this material having been added they should continue to be footnoted but not included as part of what was considered to be the original Greek version of Luke. Of course the majority prevailed, and translators of a more conservative bent were jubilant that the RSV decision to footnote these interpolations had not been questioned by leading scholars. The issue is such a major one in the eyes of editor Metzger that he includes a special note, at the end of the Gospel of Luke, defending the committee’s decision (pp. 164-166). Basically the defense rests upon the assertion that the subsequently discovered Bodmer Papyri (particularly the fragment P75), unknown to Wescott and Hort, has allowed us to project the Alexandrian type of text, with these interpolations, back to the second century, so they should no longer be considered late and secondary additions.

Here I find myself in strange agreement with those “convervatives” who argue that “older is not necessarily better,” in defending the Byzantine textual traditions, the manuscripts of which tend to be much later than the Alexandrian textual tradition. Not that I an any way think the Byzantine text is the closest to the original. What I am saying is that the antiquity of a text, even a late 2nd century text, has nothing to do with such a text being free of interpolations.

First, from an historical point of view The New Testament text itself in the original, which we do not have, is already a series of interpolations. Matthew and Luke offer their expansions on the core text Mark, John, as we have it today, is an expansion of the earlier “Signs Source,” and the so-called Deutero-Pauline letter take authentic Paul material and expand, interpolate, and even recast them. Admittedly, this phenomenon makes the enterprise of sorting out the authentic from the inauthentic a more subjective process, but it is in no way without sense or method.

For example, there is no textual evidence whatsoever that indicates that the last verse of Psalm 51, surely one of the most spiritually moving texts in the entire Tanakh/O.T. is an interpolation. But any common sense reading of the text would conclude that such is the case, and scholars are fairly agreed that a pious Pro-Temple/Pro-Sacrifice, editor of that Psalm became a bit worried that its implications might prove a threat to the hieratic enterprise. Or to offer another example, in my judgment the last phrase in the saying of Jesus regarding John the Baptizer in Luke 7:28/Matthew 11:11 is an obvious gloss, though there is no Greek textual evidence to support my view:

I tell you among those born of women none is greather than John; yet he who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.

It is worth nothing, however, that in this case the very “late” 15th century text of Hebrew Matthew preserved by Rabbi Ibn Shaprut, does in fact lack this phrase. So is the addition of the phrase then “early” or “late”?

Recovering the original text of any ancient document requires a number of related approaches, and one is clearly the careful dating of the sequence of manuscript witnesses and variants. But the “older” is surely not the more original, and judgments of content and substance must finally prevail. I remain convinced, after all these years, that my initial judgment that Wescott and Hort’s position on the Western non-interpolations was self-evident remains the case.

Michael Servetus (aka Miguel Serveto) is surely one of the most remarkable men of history, though he is largely unknown in general circles. He was born in Spain in 1511 and died in 1553, at age 42, burnt at the stake as a heretic by John Calvin’s Geneva Council. He was a brilliant scientist and his field was primarily medicine, but it was his theological views that led to his universal condemnation by both Catholics and Protestants. Servetus rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, and although he maintained belief in the virgin birth, he denied that Jesus was God. He was fluent in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, and in his primary work, De trinitatis erroribus (“On the Errors of the Trinity”), he ably argued that the Bible itself, in neither Old Testament nor New Testament, supported the subsequent Trinitarian notion of Jesus as God.

There is a bit of buzz on the Internet these days, among Christian evangelical circles, regarding a modern writer who calls himself “Servetus the Evangelical,” who has penned a new book titled The Restitution of Jesus Christ. The author, who has chosen to remain anonymous, is apparently a well-known Evangelical Christian. He plans to divulge his true identity on September 29, 2011, the 500th anniversary of Servetus’ birth. You can visit his website at servetustheevangelist.com, where you can read excerpts of the book, purchase the whole, or try your hand at guessing the author’s identity based on clues posted on the first of each month.

I obtained a copy of the book and I have to say I am much impressed. It runs 600 pages, is thoroughly researched and documented, and fully in touch with the massive amount of scholarly discussion currently available on the “Christology of the New Testament.”

Our modern “Servetus” has stirred a bit of buzz on the Web, mostly negative, by those who either question his motives for remaining anonymous or harshly dismiss him as a heretic and apostate. My guess is his critics have not bothered to examine his arguments. You can hear an interview with the author, complete with disguised voice, at Truth Matters.

Whoever the author is, he has surely done his homework, and given his staunchly conservative stance on the inspiration of the New Testament documents, his attempts might well end up having quite an impact on the growing “biblical unitarian” or “One God” movement that is making significant inroads within a variety of evangelical Christian circles. See the following links for a few examples:

http://focusonthekingdom.org/

http://kingdomready.org/

http://www.christianmonotheism.com/

http://www.biblicalunitarian.com/

A recent statement titled “A Note on Ambiguities Contained in Covenant and Mission,” issued by the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is rightly causing lots of stir and controversy among Jewish leaders. Despite what had come to be seen as progress based on the 1965 Second Vatican Council declaration, Nostra Aetate, with its assertion that the Jewish people collectively are not to be blamed for the death of Jesus as well as a general understanding that interfaith dialogue should not have as its purpose the conversion of Jews, this latest statement from the USCCB makes clear that the Catholic Church stands firm in its historic position that Christianity has superseded and thus effectively replaced Judaism:

“The long story of God’s intervention in the history of Israel comes to its unsurpassable culmination in Jesus Christ, who is God become man.”  According to the document, “we also believe that the fulfillment of the covenants, indeed, of all God’s promises to Israel, is found only in Jesus Christ.”

Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamantion League (ADL) has issued for formal statement of protest, highlighted on the ADL Web site:

ADL Troubled By U.S. Bishops’ Statement That Appears to Green Light Missionizing Of Jews

The Catholic News Service (CNS) has also posted a story:

Jewish leaders say bishops’ June statement could hurt dialogue

A more pointed story was just posted by Israel National News ISN):

US Jews Enraged by Catholic Document Urging Missionizing of Jews

Despite Pope John Paul II’s language about the Covenant with Israel being one that was “never revoked,” the Bishops were keen to make clear that such language does not in any way preclude “supersessionism,”that is, the notion that this “Old Covenant” has in point of fact become obsolete. Jews remain valuable as “historic witness” to God’s previous dealings with humankind, but there is nothing in the Roman Catholic understanding of salvation, past or present, that declares the Jewish people, short of accepting Christ, as enjoying a fulfilled relationship with God. Accordingly, the historic Christian insistence on the “conversion of Jews” remains central to the Christian mission, despite any progress in ecumenical dialogue and exchange among Rabbis and Bishops.

It has become somewhat fashionable in our time, and particularly among certain circles of biblical scholarship, to argue that the documents of the New Testament, and those associated with Paul and John in particular, do not in fact support the subsequent Christian doctrine that Israel’s covenant with God has been superseded and made obsolete. New Testament scholars are familiar with the work of Loyd Gaston (Paul and the Torah 1987), supported by John Gager (Reinventing Paul 2000) and the late Kirster Stendahl, who argue that Paul upheld Israel’s Sinai covenant as eternally valid for Jews, while Gentiles are part of a new covenant through Christ. According to this view when Paul seems to speak negatively about the Torah, or the insufficiency of Israel’s covenant for salvation, he has in view only attempts by his opponents to force such upon his Gentile converts. As attractive as such a view might be for modern ecumenical relations between Christians and Jews, I am convinced that Alan Segal (Paul the Convert 1992), Ed Sanders (Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People 1983) and any number of others, have adequately demonstrated that for Paul both Jew and Gentiles find hope for salvation only in the New Covenant brought by Christ.

In that sense there is really “nothing new” in this latest clarification by the Catholic Bishops. They are simply saying clearly what orthodox Christians have said now for nearly 2000 years, despite some hope by Rabbis and Jews interested in Jewish-Christian dialogue that things might have changed. The fact remains, Paul’s view that his Jewish brothers and sisters are accursed from God, cut off from Christ, having a “zeal for God, but without true knowledge” could not be more clear. They are branches broken off the Olive Tree of Israel, God’s true people, for their unbelief in Christ, while Gentiles who do accept Christ are “grafted in,” as wild shoots (Romans 9-11).

In my book The Jesus Dynasty I maintain that Jesus was and remained a Jew and never entertained the establishment of a new religion. In contrast, it was Paul who might actually be called the “founder” of Christianity, with its distinctive theological doctrines. Even though Jews disagreed on how one might reflect and live out all the teachings and commandments of the Sinai revelation, especially regarding what came to be called halacha (literally “the way” or “the walk”), that is how to fulfill the various commandments, in general religious Jews, who took seriously the revelation of Torah, agreed on the obvious point that Israelites of all persuasions were obligated to live according to the commandments in order to be faithful to the Covenant.

Historians and scholars seem to be in almost universal agreement that what is called “the Jesus movement,” as represented by the teachings of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, was a movement within Judaism/s of its time and is most properly understood in this way, rather than as a “new” religion, separate from the mother faith. Likewise, I think there is general agreement, as far as I am aware, that James the brother of Jesus, leader of the Jesus movement after Jesus’ death, remained an observant Jew himself (Acts, letter of James, Josephus, Hegesippus, etc.).

To be “observant” in this broader context does not so much imply a uniform “orthodoxy” such as later developed within Rabbinic Judaism, but that whatever one’s halachic view, one remained “in the camp” in terms of covenental identity with the Jewish people and a concerted attempt to embody the teaching and commandments of the Sinai revelation. Judaism, as it developed, was understood as a religion, a people, and a culture, so matters of “definition” could be quite complex, i.e., you could have one who was born as a Jew, spurning the religion, or living immorally, or even turning to another faith, and yet, technically, remaining “Jewish.” In the same way non-Jews might take up Jewish customs and observances and still, nonetheless, not be considered “Jews” in a formal sense. E. P. Sanders, in his book Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, might be one of the best summaries of this entire matter. He exhaustively explores the various “Judaisms” of the period, showing ways in which they differed, but also what gave them their essential identity, something he terms “covenantal nomism.”

Non-Jews, in most of these forms of emerging Judaism, were not expected to “convert” to Judaism in order to have a spiritual relationship with God. They could function within the more universal “Noahite” covenant, and the notion and even social existence of the “righteous Gentile” or the “God-fearer” has been extensively documented, particularly during the late Roman empire. Here I recommend the monumental study of my teacher Louis Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Roman World. One way of putting it was the adage “The righteous of all the nations will have a place in the world to come.” Jesus appears to share this openness to the non-Jew and the messianic vision of the Prophets was that all nations would learn to walk in the light of the Torah’s essential ethical teachings.

If Paul did indeed redefine the people of Israel (what he calls the “true Israel” ) as those who had faith in the heavenly Christ, thus excluding those he called “Israel after the flesh” from his new covenant, and if he also held the view that the Torah given to Moses was valid “until Christ came,” so that even Jews are no longer “under the Torah,” or obligated to follow the commandments or mitzvot as given to Moses but a new “Law of Christ,” then most historians have agreed that we are not merely dealing with a movement “within Judaism,” but the makings of a “new religion” that comes to be called Christianity. This is not to deny Paul’s “Jewishness,” in the cultural sense of that term. He surely believes in the God of Israel, Jesus as the Messiah of Israel, and the Torah and Prophets as Scripture. But in Paul’s thinking, instead of humanity divided as “Israel and the nations” which is the classic understanding of Judaism, we have “Israel, the Gentiles or “non-Jews,” and the new people called “the church of God.” This does not mean that Paul advocated immoral living, he surely did not. In all his letters he takes pains to enforce and reinforce the essential ethics revealed in the Torah as applicable to Gentiles upon his followers.

The rub comes for Jews–if it is now okay for a Jew who is “in Christ” and thus part of this new spiritual Israel, to fail to circumcise his or her children, to ignore observance of the Sabbath and the festivals, to eat anything set before them, and to generally “live as a Gentile” in terms of observing such marks of Torah observance then Paul’s position takes him outside of “Judaism” or observant Torah faith. Such a view implicitly leads to the abolition/replacement of the mother faith. It was upon that basis that the entire super-sessionist/replacement idea that became so current in Christianity developed. Paul takes the position in Romans 9 that any Jew who does not share his faith in Christ is “lost” and cut off from God, no matter what might be his or her spiritual devotion, Torah observance, or even reliance upon the grace of God.

Then there is also the matter of “justification by faith.” Judaism in all its forms has taught that all humans are sinners and can only be accepted in God’s eyes through repentance and faith. Psalm 51 would be the most classic expression of this, the Thanksgiving Hymns in the Dead Sea Scrolls reflect the same for the Qumran community, as srict was they were in their legal interpretations, and Rabbinic literature reflects the same. As a Jew Jesus expressed these very ideas when he speaks of the two men praying in the Temple, one of them a “sinner” who smites his breast and turns to God, and is thereby “justified,” and the other self-righteousness, thinking he had no need of justification. E.P. Sanders is very good to make it clear that the notion that Christianity depends on “grace” and Judaism on “works” is a terribly unfortunate misunderstanding of Judaism. What divides Paul from Judaism is his insistence that this grace bringing justification is only extended to those who accept his Christ faith.

With these three elements based on Paul’s perceptions and heavenly visions: a new definition of Israel, the abrogation of the Sinai covenant, and the restriction of God’s grace to those who “accept Christ as savior,” we truly have a “new religion” and by no theological, cultural, or historical definition could it properly be called “Judaism,” but even more to the point, it must ever stand opposed, by its own self-identity, to all forms of Judaism as expressions of faithfulness to the God of Israel. Talk about irony. But such are the ways of the history of religions when it comes to the Abrahamic faiths–with each successive manifestation, first Christianity, and finally Islam, seeking to invalidate that which went before, while offering lip service to superseded obsolescence. For a full discussion of this point, and particularly the ways in which a more universal view of Hebraic faith addresses the issues of super-sessionism, see the treatment in my recently republished book, Restoring Abrahamic Faith.