I have posted WM 110: Reeves & Hill on John 5:4; Text Note: Luke 9:55-56 (listen here).
In this WM I do two things:
First, I offer some thoughts on a passage from a new book that I have recently begun
to read. It is Ryan M. Reeves & Charles E. Hill’s Know How We Got the Bible (Zondervan, 2018) in the “Know Series”
edited by Justin Holcombe.
I devoted WM 46 (listen here) to challenging an online article
Reeves had written on Erasmus and his Greek NT, in which he perpetuated some of
the old “Erasmus Anecdotes” and added a few new ones.
See also this
blog post: Response to Ryan Reeves.
Here's the passage from Reeves and Hill's Know How We Got the Bible which I review (p. 26):
In the Reformation era, European
scholars had a smaller number of biblical manuscripts or copies of the Hebrew
Old Testament and Greek New Testament books, than have been found today. Their
best copy of the New Testament, for example, dated from the twelfth century.
After the rise of archaeology in the nineteenth century, we began to discover older copies of the New Testament. From
these older copies, we learned that a few verses in Bible translations were not
likely in the autographs, or original writings of Scripture.
For example, the twelfth-century
copy of John 5:4 reads:
For
an angel came down at certain times into the pool and stirred the water: so the first one who entered after the
stirring of the water became healed
of whatever disease he had. (author transl.)
Older copies of John do not have these words, meaning they were
not likely in the Gospel as originally written by the apostle John.
I point out that it is inaccurate to say that John 5:4 did not appear in any Greek mss. prior to the twelfth century. See my text note on this passage, which shows that John 5:4 appears in Codex Alexandrinus (dated
fifth century) and in the Church Father Tertullian (c. 220).
Toward the end of this discussion I note that feminist theologians used to speak of the “hermeneutics of
suspicion" and suggest that when you read any modern work on Biblical
origins and development, even if the authors are credentialed scholars
teaching in “conservative” or “evangelical” schools, one should employ a
“hermeneutics of suspicion" or simply a grain of salt.
Second, I provide a spoken word version of my previously posted Text Note on Luke 9:55-56.
JTR
