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...καὶ εἶ
πεν αὐτῷ ὁ Ἰ[η]σ[οῦς]· ἀμήν λέγω σοι σή
μερον· μετ’ ἐμοῦ ἔσῃ ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ.
ἦν δὲ ὡσεὶ ὥρα ἕκτη καὶ σκότος ἐγένε
το...
πεν αὐτῷ ὁ Ἰ[η]σ[οῦς]· ἀμήν λέγω σοι σή
μερον· μετ’ ἐμοῦ ἔσῃ ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ.
ἦν δὲ ὡσεὶ ὥρα ἕκτη καὶ σκότος ἐγένε
το...
4 comments:
Appealing to a single late medieval minuscule that places a dot after σήμερον (“today”) is not serious evidence that Luke intended “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise.” Punctuation is editorial, not inspired; the earliest Greek manuscripts have no commas at all, and medieval scribes often inserted dots for reading pauses that reflect liturgical habit or theology, not Luke’s syntax. A 13th-century witness can only show that some Byzantine copyists read the line that way; it cannot overturn Luke’s own style, the earliest versional evidence, or the narrative context.
Luke’s idiom is decisive. Across the Gospels Jesus uses the formula “Amen, I say to you” (ἀμὴν λέγω σοι / ὑμῖν) scores of times, and never once adds “today” to that introductory formula. By contrast Luke loves to use σήμερον to mark the time of salvation in the main clause: “Today a Savior is born” (Lk 2:11), “Today this Scripture is fulfilled” (4:21), “Today I must stay at your house” (19:5), “Today salvation has come to this house” (19:9). In Luke 23:43 the natural, Lukan reading is the same: “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” “I say to you today” is redundant—when else is a speaker speaking?—and foreign to Jesus’ fixed “Amen, I say to you” formula. Even where the New Testament uses a true “today I testify” idiom (Acts 20:26), it employs another verb (μαρτύρομαι), not λέγω; Luke never frames Jesus’ sayings that way.
The versional stream supports the mainstream punctuation. The Old Latin and the Vulgate read, “Amen dico tibi: hodie mecum eris in paradiso.” The Syriac Peshitta and the older Syriac Sinaitic likewise attach “today” to the promise, not to “I say to you.” When later writers mention the alternative, they treat it as a secondary, problem-solving repunctuation. Theophylact (11th c.) says some “force” the text by punctuating after “today,” precisely to evade the difficulty they perceived, and Hesychius notes “some” did so, while he himself resolves the problem another way—evidence that the “today… I say” reading was known but exceptional, not original.
Nor does theology force the comma after “today.” The objection is that Jesus did not ascend to the Father that day (Jn 20:17) and was in “the heart of the earth” for three days (Mt 12:40). That is true, but it misses what “paradise” denotes at that moment in redemptive history. The New Testament teaches Christ’s descent to the realm of the dead: “You will not abandon my soul to Hades” (Acts 2:27, 31; Ps 16), “He descended into the lower parts of the earth” (Eph 4:9), and Jesus himself describes a blessed compartment of Hades as “Abraham’s bosom” (Lk 16:22–26). In Second Temple and early Christian usage “Paradise” can name that righteous abode of the dead. Read this way, Jesus’ body was in the tomb, but his soul was among the righteous dead, and the thief—newly repentant—would be with him there “today.” That harmonizes perfectly with Luke’s “today” theology and with the rest of Scripture, without inventing an un-Lukan “I say to you today” idiom.
Ironically, the “comma after today” is the real case of doctrine driving punctuation. If we let Luke speak in his own voice, the sentence reads as virtually every critical edition and translation punctuates it: “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” It is immediate assurance to a dying penitent, not a vague promise deferred to an undefined future.
I really appreciate your reply, thank you.
The Parable of Lazarus and Rich Man Understood Hebraically
👇🏾
https://hoshanarabbah.org/blog/2015/01/31/lazarus-and-rich-man/
Thank you.
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