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The Original Versus the Received Text with Special Emphasis on the Case of the Comma Johanneum

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Abstract

Questioning the legitimacy of critical inquiry into a text qua text, rather than as mediated through the lens of reception, is the most salient characteristic of the epistemological challenge posed to traditional philology by reception theory. The assumption which underlies this attitude is that scholarship is a variety of reception and is therefore subject to the same laws. Yet, while no one would deny that a text can only be kept alive through the medium of reception (a view that can be traced back to Plato’s Phaedrus), one may at the same time doubt whether this exhausts the gamut of possibilities at our disposal. The availability of philological methods inaugurated by the humanists does not allow us to treat the axis ‘text-reception’ as the only available one. I argue that it should be supplemented by the axis ‘text-scholarship’, which runs parallel to it. While reception is a spontaneous process of the text’s adaptation to changing historical circumstances, scholarship is a critical activity which addresses the text as an object of study in its own right. To illustrate my point, I discuss the relevant evidence supplied by the Jewish, Greco-Roman and early modern interpretative traditions with special emphasis on the notorious case of the Comma Johanneum, which in my opinion effectively highlights the fundamental tension between the original and the received text.

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Notes

  1. S. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Cambridge, MA, 1980, p. 305.

  2. Ibid., p. 342. C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text. Latin poetry and the hermeneutics of reception, Cambridge, 1993, p. 3; see also C. Martindale, ‘Introduction: Thinking Through Reception’, in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. C. Martindale and R. F. Thomas,. Malden, MA and Oxford, 2006, pp. 1–13.

  3. Plato, Phaedrus 275D–E; tr. C. J. Rowe, with slight changes.

  4. Ibid., 276A, 277A.

  5. Cf. H. R. Jauss, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, New Literary History, 2, 1970, p. 10: ‘A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period. It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue’.

  6. R. Chartier, ‘Texts, Printing, Readings’, in The New Cultural History, ed. L. Hunt, Berkeley, 1987, pp. 155–6, 161. See also ibid., p. 161, on ‘the close-knit relationship among three poles: the text itself, the object that conveys the text, and the act that grasps it’.

  7. The story appears in Livy XL.29. See also Plutarch Numa 22.

  8. Baba Metzia 59b. See M. Halbertal, People of the Book. Canon, Meaning, and Authority, Cambridge, MA, 1997, pp. 48–9.

  9. Temurah 16a; Baba Bathra 12a.

  10. Halbertal, People (n. 8 above), pp. 63–7, discusses the contribution of Nachmanides and his school (thirteenth–fourteenth centuries), as well as their polemics with other interpretative trends. He also quotes the following statement by a prominent twentieth-century halakhist R. Moshe Feinstein (1895–1986): ‘In a dispute, the Sages should follow the majority even when its ruling is far from the truth and is not as God intended it. … God will no longer interpret and decide concerning the rulings of the Torah as “it is not in heaven” and He has retroactively agreed to the understanding and interpretation of the Sages’ (ibid., pp. 66–7).

  11. R. Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz, Chazon Ish, Jerusalem, 1954 (1st edn. Vilna 1929), part Orech Hayim, pamphlet ‘Lessons’, sign 28, para. 6; my translation. I am grateful to Shlomo-Dov Rosen for drawing my attention to this text.

  12. See P. Struck, Birth of the Symbol. Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts, Princeton, 2004, p. 18: ‘[W]ith the discovery of the Derveni papyrus some decades ago, alongside the fragments of other famous allegorists from the classical period, we have indication enough that allegoresis forms a more or less continuous strand of literary thinking through the classical, Hellenistic, and early- and late-Roman periods’.

  13. See M. Finkelberg, ‘Homer as a Foundation Text’, in Homer, the Bible. and Beyond. Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World, ed. M. Finkelberg and G. G. Stroumsa, Leiden. 2003, pp. 91–6.

  14. See e.g. Plutarch, Moralia 24C–E or 27A–B.

  15. See esp. St Basil, Ad adulescentes, 1.5; 5.6; 4.1–2; 4.4.

  16. See J. I. Porter, ‘Hermeneutic Lines and Circles: Aristarchus and Crates on the Exegesis of Homer’, in Homer’s Ancient Readers. The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes, ed. R. Lamberton and J. J. Keaney, Princeton, 1992, pp. 70–1; Struck, Birth (n. 12 above), pp. 22, 63–71.

  17. See, e.g., Strabo VII.3.6–10.

  18. Porter, ‘Lines and Circles’ (n. 16 above), pp. 91–3.

  19. Seneca, De brevitate vitae 13.2. I am grateful to Maren Niehoff for drawing my attention to this passage.

  20. See J. M. Levine, ‘Erasmus and the Problem of the Johannine Comma’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 58, 1997, p. 576.

  21. See, e.g., L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars. A Guide to the Transmission of Greek & Latin Literature, 3rd edn, Oxford, 1991, pp. 130–1 (Petrarch), 144–5 (Poliziano); R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850, Oxford, 1976, pp. 39–40 (Valla); J. H. Bentley, ‘Erasmus, Jean Le Clerc, and the Principle of the Harder Reading’, Renaissance Quarterly, 31, 1978, pp. 309–10; A. Grafton, Defenders of the Text. The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800, Cambridge, MA,1991, pp. 27, 47–75 (Poliziano).

  22. J. H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ. New Testament Scholarship and the Renaissance, Princeton, 1983, pp. 32–69; J. Monfasani, ‘Criticism of Biblical Humanists in Quattrocento Italy’, in Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus, ed. E. Rummel, Leiden, 2008, pp. 15–38; C. Linde, How to Correct the Sacra Scriptura? Textual Criticism of the Bible Between the Twelfth and Fifteenth Century, Oxford, 2012, pp. 179–83, 262–65.

  23. See Bentley, Humanists, (n. 22 above); E. Rummel, Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation, Cambridge, MA, 1995, pp. 96–125; Biblical Humanism (n. 22 above).

  24. As exemplified e.g. in the work of Lorenzo Valla, see Linde, How to Correct (n. 22 above), pp. 208–11. For medieval predecessors of this approach see ibid., pp. 199–239.

  25. See also C. Asso, ‘Martin Dorp and Edward Lee’, in Biblical Humanism (n. 22 above), p. 195 and n. 135.

  26. See H. J. de Jonge, ‘Novum Testamentum a nobis versum: The Essence of Erasmus’ Edition of the New Testament’, Journal of Theological Studies, 35, 1984, pp. 394–413.

  27. See C. A. L. Jarrott, ‘Erasmus’ Biblical Humanism’, Studies in the Renaissance, 17, 1970, p. 119: ‘Yet one of his [Erasmus’s] most important contributions to the history of thought was his use of humanistic method for the interpretation of scripture’.

  28. It should be noted in this connection that, from a purely philological point of view, some readings reflected in the Old Latin Versions of the New Testament and in the Vulgate were indeed superior to those found in the Byzantine Greek text. This, however, was not the issue of the controversy arising around Erasmus’s edition. On Latin versions as witnesses to the Greek text see Bentley, Humanists (n. 22 above), pp. 45–6; Monfasani, ‘Criticism’ (n. 22 above), p. 20; cf. B. M. Metzger and B. D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament. Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th edn, Oxford, 2005, pp. 100–109. On Nebrija see Bentley, Humanists (n. 22 above), pp. 79–91; C. del Valle Rodríguez, ‘Antonio Nebrija’s Biblical Scholarship’, in Biblical Himanism (n. 22 above), pp. 57–72.

    On the Complutensian Polyglot in general see Bentley, Humanists (n. 22 above), pp. 70–111; E. Rummel, Jiménez de Cisneros: On the Threshold of Spain’s Golden Age, Tempe, Arizona, 1999, pp. 57–65.

  29. On Dorp and his polemics with Erasmus see Levine, ‘Erasmus’ (n. 20 above) 582–4; Asso, ‘Dorp and Lee’ (n. 25 above), pp. 168–74.

  30. Erasmus to Dorp, c. May, 1515, no. 337, in Erasmus, The Correspondence … Letters 298–445, 1514–1516, transl. R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson, Collected Works of Erasmus, 3, Toronto and Buffalo, 1976, pp. 111–39 (133–4).

  31. Novum Instrumentum omne, ed. Erasmus,1st edn, Basel, 1516, p. 618.

  32. It was inserted into it in 1581 by a Frankfurt printer. It was also absent from the 1518 Aldine edition, from the 1521 edition published at Hagenau by Nicholaus Gerbel, a German humanist and friend of Luther, and from the 1534 edition by the Parisian printer Simon Colinaeus, all of which closely followed Erasmus’s text.

  33. The practice was far from unusual. Thus, since the only manuscript Erasmus used for the Greek text of the Book of Revelation lacked the last six verses, he translated the Vulgate text into Greek and inserted it into his edition, openly acknowledging the fact [Novum Instrumentum (n. 31 above), p. 675]. In the fourth edition (1527), Erasmus replaced the passage with the Complutensian text [pace Pfeiffer, History (n. 21 above), p. 77].

  34. St Thomas, Expositio super primam et secundam Decretalem ad archidiaconum Tudertinum, no. 2 (Damnamus). Contrary to what is stated in Bentley, Humanists (n. 22 above), p. 95, St Thomas does not claim here that the Arians have suppressed the Comma: he only discusses the words ‘et hi tres unum sunt’ which follow it, arguing that the Arians have added them in order to compromise the Doctrine of the Trinity. The deleted text is supported by the Greek manuscripts.

  35. See A. Coroleu, ‘Anti-Erasmianism in Spain’, in Biblical Humanism (n. 22 above), pp. 73–92.

  36. The tradition of the circumstances of Erasmus’s insertion of the Comma Johanneum into the Greek text of the New Testament was questioned by H. J. de Jonge, who argued in an influential article (‘Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum’, Ephemerides Theologiae Lovanienses 56, 1980, pp. 381–9) that (a) the story of Erasmus’s promise is not supported by extant evidence and (b) Erasmus nowhere expressed the suspicion that the manuscript containing the Comma was produced with his edition of the New Testament in view. Yet, this exact suspicion was voiced by Erasmus in the endnote, mentioned above, to the 3rd edition: ‘Ex hoc igitur codice Britannico reposuimus, quod in nostris dicebatur deesse: ne cui sit ansa calumniandi. Tametsi suspicor codicem illum ad nostros esse correctum’ (‘Therefore, we have transferred from the British manuscript what has been said to be missing in our manuscripts, lest there is a pretext for unjust blame. Yet, I suspect that it is corrected against our manuscripts’, my translation): Erasmi Roterodami in Novum Testamentum ab eodem tertio recognitum Annotationes, Basel, 1522, pp. 617–18. Since ‘in nostris’ (‘in our manuscripts’) of the first sentence can only refer to the manuscripts Erasmus consulted for his edition, the ‘ad nostros’ of the second sentence should have the same sense (‘against our manuscripts’, that is, ‘with our manuscripts in view’) rather than indicating, as de Jonge suggests, the Latin Vulgate manuscripts.

  37. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, III, 37, ed. D. Womersley, London, 1994, II, p. 443 n. 120. On Gibbon and the Comma Johanneum see J. M. Levine, The Autonomy of History. Truth and Method from Erasmus to Gibbon, Chicago, 1999, pp. 157–240.

  38. Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes (n. 21 above), pp. 161–2.

  39. Metzger and Ehrman, Text (n. 28 above), pp. 137–52; cf. Bentley, Humanists (n. 22 above), pp. 112–13.

  40. Sir Isaac Newton, An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, London, 1841 (written 1690, first published 1754); Richard Bentley, ‘Notae in Epistolam Beati Joannis Apostoli Primam’, in Bentleii Critica Sacra. Notes on the Greek and Latin Text of the New Testament, Extracted from the Bentley MSS. in Trinity College Library, ed. A. A. Ellis, Cambridge, 1862, pp. 85–6; The Correspondence of Richard Bentley, II, [ed. C. Wordsworth], London, 1842, pp. 529–30; see also Dr. Bentley’s Proposals for Printing a New Edition of the Greek Testament, London, 1721; Gibbon, Decline and Fall (n. 37 above), pp. 441–3; R. Porson, Letters to Mr. Archdeacon Travis in Answer to his Defence of the Three Heavenly Witnesses, I John V.7, London, 1790.

  41. Novum Testamentum Graece, Textum ad fidem Codicum Versionem et Patrum recensuit et Lectionis Variatatem adjecit D. Jo. Jac. Griesbach, 2nd edn, London and Halle, 1796 and 1806, II, p. 531.

  42. Metzger and Ehrman, Text (n. 28 above), p. 148.

  43. See already Jauss, ‘Literary History’ (n. 5 above) p. 8; cf. C. Martindale, ‘Reception—A New Humanism? Receptivity, Pedagogy, the Transhistorical’, Classical Receptions Journal, 5, 2013, p. 171.

  44. Just as it was not a mere coincidence (a case discussed in E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, New Haven and London, 1967, pp. 139–40) that Simone Weil’s penetrating analysis of the Iliad’s unveiling of the role of brutal force in human life, intuitively grasped by the reader at any historical period, was contemporaneous with World War II.

  45. E. Rummel, ‘Introduction: Scholasticism and Biblical Humanism in Early Modern Europe’, in Biblical Humanism (n. 22 above), p. 13.

  46. Earlier versions of this article were read before the postgraduate forum of the Faculty of Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in October 2012, and at the conference ‘Early History, Late Evidence’, held at Beit Daniel, Zikhron Ya’akov, Israel, in June 2013. The current version was written during my term as an International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia. I am grateful to the anonymous referees of the IJCT and to the editor, Prof. Jill Kraye, for their stimulating comments and suggestions.

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    Margalit Finkelberg

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Finkelberg, M. The Original Versus the Received Text with Special Emphasis on the Case of the Comma Johanneum . Int class trad 21, 183–197 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-014-0346-y

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