We emphatically deny that such wild surmises[365] are called [pg 344] for by the state of the evidence in this case. All opposition to the authenticity of the paragraph resolves itself into the allegations of Eusebius and the testimony of אB. Let us accord to these the weight which is their due: but against their verdict we can appeal to a vast body of ecclesiastical evidence reaching back to the earlier part of the second century[366]; to nearly all the versions; and to all extant manuscripts excepting two, of which one is doubtful. So powerfully is it vouched for, that many of those who are reluctant to recognize St. Mark as its author, are content to regard it notwithstanding as an integral portion of the inspired record originally delivered to the Church[367].
12. Luke ii. 14. If there be one case more prominent than another in the criticism of the New Testament, wherein solid reason and pure taste revolt against the iron yoke of ancient authorities, it is that of the Angelic Hymn sung at the Nativity. In the common text all is transparently clear:
δοξα εν υψιστοισ θεῳ, Glory to God in the highest,
και επι γησ ειρηνη; And on earth peace:
εν ανθρωποισ ευδοκια. Good will amongst men.
The blessed words are distributed, after the Hebrew fashion, into a stanza consisting of three members. In the first and second lines heaven and earth are contrasted; the third refers to both those preceding, and alleges the efficient cause which has brought God glory and earth peace. By the addition of a single letter to the end of the last line, by merely reading εὐδοκίας for εὐδοκία, the rhythmical arrangement is utterly marred[368], and the simple shepherds are sent away with a message, the diction of [pg 345] which no scholar has yet construed to his own mind[369]. Yet such is the conclusion of Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Westcott and Hort, although Tregelles and the Cambridge fellow-workers allow εὐδοκία a place in their margins. Of the five great uncials C is unfortunately defective, but א*AB*D, and no other Greek manuscript whatever, read εὐδοκίας: yet A is so inconstant in this matter that in the primitive 14th or Morning Hymn, a cento of Scripture texts, annexed to the Book of Psalms, its reading is εὐδοκεία (Baber, Cod. Alex., p. 569), and such was no doubt the form used in Divine service, as appears from the great Zürich Psalter Od. The rest of the uncials extant (אcB3EGHKLMPSUVΓΔΛΞ, &c.), and all the cursives follow the common text, which is upheld by the Bohairic, by the three extant Syriac (the Peshitto most emphatically, the Jerusalem, and the Harkleian both in the text and Greek margin), by the Armenian and Ethiopic versions. The Vulgate, as is well known, renders “in hominibus bonae voluntatis,” and thus did all the forms of the Old Latin, and after it the Gothic. Hence it follows, as a matter of course, that the Latin Fathers, such as Hilary and Augustine, and the Latin interpreters of Irenaeus (who seems really to have omitted ἐν, as do D and a few cursives) and of the false Athanasius, adopted the reading of their own Bibles. Origen also, in a passage not now extant in the Greek, is made in Jerome's translation of it manifestly to choose the same form. We can only say that in so doing he is the only Greek who favours εὐδοκίας, and his own text has εὐδοκία in three several places, though no special stress is laid by him upon it. But here comes in the evidence of the Greek Fathers—their virtually unanimous evidence—with an authority from which there is, or ought to be, no appeal. Dean Burgon (The Revision Revised, pp. 42-46) affords us a list of forty-seven, all speaking in a manner too plain for doubt, most of them several times over, twenty-two of them having flourished before the end of the [pg 346] fifth century, and who must have used codices at least as old and pure as א or B. They are Irenaeus, of the second century; the Apostolical Constitutions and Origen three times in the third; Eusebius, Aphraates the Persian, Titus of Bostra, Didymus, Gregory Nazianzen, Cyril of Jerusalem (who has been quoted in error on the wrong side), Epiphanius, Gregory of Nyssa four times, Ephraem Syrus, Philo of Carpasus, a nameless preacher at Antioch, and Chrysostom (nine times over, interpreting also εὐδοκία by καταλλαγή) in the fourth; Cyril of Alexandria on fourteen occasions, Theodoret on four, Theodotus of Ancyra, the Patriarch Proclus, Paulus of Emesa, the Eastern Bishops at Ephesus in 431, and Basil of Seleucia in the fifth; Cosmas Indicopleustes, Anastasius Sinaita, and Eulogius of Alexandria in the sixth; Andreas of Crete in the seventh; with Cosmas of Maiuma, John Damascene, and Germanus, Archbishop of Constantinople, in the eighth[370]. Such testimony, supported by all later manuscripts, together with the Bohairic and Syriac versions, cannot but overpower the transcriptional blunder of some early scribe, who cannot, however, have lived later than the second century.
To those with whom the evidence of אBD and of the Latins united appears too mighty to resist, we would fain prefer one request, that in their efforts to extract some tolerable sense out of εὐδοκίας, they will not allow themselves to be driven to renderings which the Greek language will not endure. To spoil the metrical arrangement by forcing the second and third members of the stanza into one, is in itself a sore injury to the poetical symmetry of the passage, but from their point of view it cannot be helped. When they shall come to translate, it will be their endeavour to be faithful, if grammatical faithfulness be possible in a case so desperate. “Peace on earth for those that will have it,” as Dean Alford truly says, is untenable in Greek, as well as in theology: “among men of good pleasure” is unintelligible to most minds. Professor Milligan (Words of the New Testament, p. 194) praises as an interesting form “among men of his good pleasure,” which, not at all unnecessarily, he expounds to signify “among men whom He hath loved.” Again, “among men in whom He is well pleased” (compare chap. iii. 22) can [pg 347] be arrived at only through some process which would make any phrase bear almost any meaning the translator might like to put upon it. The construction adopted by Origen as rendered by Jerome, pax enim quam non dat Dominus non est pax bonae voluntatis, εὐδοκίας being joined with εἰρήνη, is regarded by Dr. Hort “to deserve serious attention, if no better interpretation were available” and for the trajection he compares ch. xix. 38; Heb. xii. 11 (Notes, p. 56). Dr. Westcott holds that since “ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας is undoubtedly a difficult phrase, and the antithesis of γῆς and ἀνθρώποις agrees with Rom. viii. 22, εὐδοκία claims a place in the margin” (ibid.): no very great concession, when the general state of the evidence is borne in mind[371].
13. Luke vi. 1. ἐγένετο δὲ ἐν σαββάτῳ δευτεροπρώτῳ. Here again Codd. אB coincide in a reading which cannot be approved, omitting δευτεροπρώτῳ by way of getting rid of a difficulty, as do both of them in Mark xvi. 9-20, and א in Matt. xxiii. 35. The very obscurity of the expression, which does not occur in the parallel Gospels or elsewhere, attests strongly to its genuineness, if there be any truth at all in canons of internal evidence[372]: not to mention that the expression ἐν ἑτέρῳ σαββάτῳ ver. 6 favours the notion that the previous sabbath [pg 348] had been definitely indicated. Besides אB, δευτεροπρώτῳ is absent from L, 1, 22, 33, 69 (where it is inserted in the margin by W. Chark, and should not be noticed, see above), 118, 157, 209. A few (RΓ, 13, 117, 124 primâ manu, 235) prefer δευτέρω πρώτω, which, as the student will perceive, differs from the common reading only by a familiar itacism. As this verse commences a Church lesson (that for the seventh day or Sabbath of the third week of the new year, see Calendar), Evangelistaria leave out, as usual, the notes of time; in Evst. 150, 222, 234, 257, 259 (and no doubt in other such books, certainly in the Jerusalem Syriac), the section thus begins, Ἐπορεύετο ὁ Ἰησοῦς τοῖς σάββασιν: this however is not, properly speaking, a various reading at all. Nor ought we to wonder if versions pass over altogether what their translators could not understand[373], so that we may easily account for the silence of the Peshitto Syriac, Bohairic, and Ethiopic, of the Old Latin b c l q f (secundâ manu) q, and (if they were worth notice) of the Persic and the Polyglott Arabic, though both the Roman and Erpenius' Arabic have δεύτερῳ, and so too the Ethiopic according to Scholz; e “sabbato mane,” f “sabbato a primo:” the Harkleian Syriac, which renders the word, notes in the margin its absence from some copies. Against this list of authorities, few in number, and doubtful as many of them are, we have to place the Old Latin a f* ff2 g1.2, all copies of the Vulgate, its ally the Armenian, the Gothic and Harkleian Syriac translations, the uncial codices ACDEHKMRSUVXΓΔΛΠ, all cursives except the seven cited above, and the Fathers or scholiasts who have tried, with whatever success, to explain the term: viz. Epiphanius, Chrysostom, Isidore of Pelusium, Pseudo-Caesarius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Jerome[374], Ambrose (all very expressly, as may be seen in Tischendorf's note, and in Dean Burgon's “The Revision Revised,” pp. 73-4), Clement of Alexandria probably, and later writers. Lachmann and Alford [pg 349] place δευτεροπρώτῳ within brackets, Tregelles rejects it, as does Tischendorf in his earlier editions, but restores it in his seventh and eighth, in the latter contrary to Cod. א. Westcott and Hort banish it to the margin, intimating (if I understand their notation aright) that it seems to contain distinctive and fresh matter, without deserving a place in the text even as well as Ἰησοῦ in Matt. i. 18. On reviewing the whole mass of evidence, internal and external, we submit the present as a clear instance in which the two oldest copies conspire in a false or highly improbable reading, and of a signal exemplification of the Canon, Proclivi orationi praestat ardua.
14. Luke x. 41, 42. Ἑνὸς δέ ἐστι χρεία. This solemn speech of our Divine Master has shaken many a pulpit, and sanctified many a life. We might be almost content to estimate Cod. B's claim to paramount consideration as a primary authority by the treatment this passage receives from the hand of its scribe, at least if the judgement were to rest with those who are willing to admit that a small minority, whereof B happens to form one of the members, is not necessarily in the right. Westcott and Hort in the margin of their published edition (1881) reduce the whole sentence between Μάρθα ver. 41 and Μαρία ver. 42 to the single word θορυβάζῃ, the truer reading in the place of τυρβάζῃ: in their privately circulated issue dated ten years earlier they had gone further, placing within double brackets μεριμνᾷς καί and from περὶ πολλά downwards. They could hardly do less on the principles they have adopted, while yet they feel constrained to concede that, though not belonging to the original Gospel, the excluded words do not, on the other hand, read like the invention of a paraphrast. They do not indeed: and it is when abstract theories such as modern critics have devised are subjected to so violent a strain, that we can best discern their intrinsic weakness, of which indeed these editors have here shown their consciousness by a change of mind not at all usual with them. For the grave omission indicated above we have but one class of authorities, that of the D, a b e ff2 i l, and Ambrose, the Latins omitting θορυβάζῃ too: while ἑνὸς δέ ἐστι χρεία is not found in c also, and does not appear in Clement. The succeeding γάρ or δέ is of course left out by all these, and by 262, the Vulgate, Curetonian Syriac, Armenian, [pg 350] and Jerome. This testimony, almost purely Western, is confirmed or weakened as the case may be, by the systematic omissions of clauses towards the end of the Gospel in the same books, of which we spoke in Chap. X (see p. [299], note).
We confess that we had rather see this grand passage expunged altogether from the pages of the Gospel than diluted after the wretched fashion adopted by א and B: ὀλίγων δὲ χρεία ἐστιν ἢ ἑνός; the first hand of א omitting χρεία in its usual blundering way. This travestie of a speech which seems to have shocked the timorous by its uncompromising exclusiveness, much as we saw in the case of Matt. v. 22, is further supported (with some variation in the order) by L, by the very ancient second hand of C, by 1, 33, the Bohairic, Ethiopic, the margin of the Harkleian, by Basil, Jerome, Cyril of Alexandria in the Syriac translation of his commentary[375], and by Origen as cited in a catena: ὀλίγων δὲ ἐστι χρεία is found in 38, the Jerusalem Syriac, and in the Armenian (ὧδε being inserted before ἐστιν). This latter reading is less incredible than that of אBL, notwithstanding the ingenuity of Basil's comment, ὀλίγων μὲν δηλονότι τῶν πρὸς παρασκευήν, ἑνὸς δὲ τοῦ σκοποῦ. In this instance, as in some others, the force of internal evidence suffices to convince the unprejudiced reader (it has almost convinced Drs. Westcott and Hort, who have no note on the passage), that the Received text should here remain unchanged, vouched for as it is by AC*EFGHKMPSUVΓΔΛΠ (Χ and Ξ being defective), by every cursive except three, by the Peshitto and Cureton's Syriac (the latter so often met with in the company of D), by the Harkleian text, by f g1 g2? q of the Old Latin, and by the Vulgate. Chrysostom, Augustine (twice), John Damascene and one or two others complete the list: even Basil so cites the passage once, so that his comment may not be intended for anything more than a gloss. No nobler sermon was ever preached on this fertile text than that of Augustine, De verbis Domini, in Evan. Luc. xxvii. His Old Latin copies, at any rate, contained the words “Circa multa es occupata: porro unum est necessarium. Jam hoc sibi Maria legit.” “Transit labor multitudinis, et remanet caritas unitatis” is his emphatic comment.