Did Jesus Get Angry or Agonize?
A Text Critic Pursues the Original Jesus Story
Christianity is a religion of the book. From the outset, it has
stressed specific texts as authoritative scripture. Yet not one of these
original, authoritative texts exists today. We have only late copies,
dating from the second century to the sixteenth. And these copies vary
considerably. Indeed, the 5,700 manuscripts of the Greek New Testament
that have been catalogued contain more variations than there are words
in the New Testament. Some scholars say there are 200,000 variant
readings, others say 300,000, 400,000 or even more!
Some variant readings are simply scribal mistakes. Others are
editorial “improvements” intended to make the text easier to understand.
Still others are deliberate attempts by the scribes to make the texts
more amenable to the doctrines being espoused by Christians of their own
persuasion and to eliminate the possible “misuse” of the texts by
Christians affirming heretical beliefs.
1
Most of the variants are insignificant, of no real importance for
anything other than showing that scribes could not always spell or keep
focused. But in some instances, the variants have a real bearing on the
meaning of the text. Two intriguing examples are found in
Mark 1, involving the healing of a man with a skin disease (often translated “leprosy”), and in
Luke 22,
the account of Jesus’ agony in the garden. In both cases, modern
translators have generally opted for what I believe is the wrong variant
reading. In other words, almost everyone who reads the New Testament in
English has been misreading these key passages.
The surviving manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark preserve verse 41
of chapter 1 in two different forms. Both readings are shown here, in
brackets:
39And he came preaching in their synagogues in all of Galilee and casting out the demons. 40And a leper came to him beseeching him and saying to him, “If you wish, you are able to cleanse me.” 41And [“feeling compassion” or “becoming angry”], reaching out his hand, he touched him and said, “I wish, be cleansed.” 42And immediately the leprosy went out from him, and he was cleansed. 43And rebuking him severely, immediately he cast him out; 44and
he said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show
yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing that which Moses
commanded as a witness to them.” 45But
when he went out he began to preach many things and to spread the word,
so that he [Jesus] was no longer able to enter publicly into a city.
Most English translations render the beginning of verse
41 so as to emphasize Jesus’ love for this poor outcast leper: “feeling compassion” (the Greek used here,
SPANGNISTHEIS,
could also be translated “moved with pity”) for him. It is certainly
easy to see why compassion might be called for in the situation. We
don’t know the precise nature of the man’s disease—many commentators
prefer to think of it as a scaly skin disorder rather than the kind of
rotting flesh that we commonly associate with leprosy.
a
In any event, he may well have fallen under the injunctions of the
Torah that forbade “lepers” of any sort to live normal lives: They were
considered unclean, and were to be isolated, cut off from the public (
Leviticus 13–14). Moved with pity for such a one, Jesus reaches out a tender hand, touches his diseased flesh and heals him.
The simple pathos and unproblematic emotion of the scene may well
account for the fact that translators and interpreters, as a rule, have
not considered the alternative text found in some of our manuscripts.
The wording of one of our oldest Greek witnesses, the fifth-century
Codex Bezae (named after Theodore Bezae, who in 1581 gave the manuscript
to the University of Cambridge, where it still resides), supports the
alternative reading. And Codex Bezae is supported by three ancient Latin
manuscripts. Here, rather than saying that Jesus felt compassion for the man, the text indicates that he became angry (ORGISTHEIS).
Because of its attestation in both Greek and Latin witnesses, this
alternative reading is generally conceded by textual specialists to go
back at least to the second century. Is it possible, though, that this
is what Mark himself wrote?
Since most extant manuscripts use the term “compassion,” it is
tempting to count noses, so to speak, and give preference to this
popular variant. Most scholars today, however, are not at all convinced
that the majority of manuscripts necessarily provide the best available
text. In part, this is because the vast majority of our manuscripts were
produced hundreds and hundreds of years after the originals, and they
themselves were copied not from the originals but from other, much later
copies. Once a change made its way into the manuscript tradition, it
could be perpetuated until it became more commonly transmitted than the original wording.
One other consideration is the age of the manuscripts that
support a reading. It is far more likely that the original form of the
text will be found in the oldest surviving manuscripts—on the premise
that the text gets changed more frequently with the passing of time.
This is not to say that one can blindly follow the oldest manuscripts in
every instance, of course. This is for two reasons, the one a matter of
logic and the other a matter of history.
In terms of logic, suppose a manuscript of the fifth century has
one reading, but a manuscript of the eighth century has a different one.
Is the reading found in the fifth-century manuscript necessarily the
older form of the text? Not necessarily. What if the fifth-century
manuscript had been produced from a copy of the fourth century, but the
eighth-century manuscript had been produced from one of the third
century? In that case, the eighth-century manuscript would preserve the
older reading.
The second, historical, reason that one cannot simply look at the
oldest manuscript, with no other considerations, is that the earliest
period of textual transmission was also the least controlled.
That’s because in the first three centuries of Christianity, most
of the copyists of the Christian texts were not professionals trained
for the job but simply Christians of this or that congregation who were
able to read and write, and so were called upon to reproduce the texts
in their spare time. Because they were not highly trained or
experienced, they were more prone to making mistakes.
Professional scribes probably began copying New Testament
manuscripts only in the fourth century, after the Roman emperor
Constantine converted to the faith and Christianity suddenly shifted
from being a minor religion of social outcasts to being a major player
in the religious scene of the empire.
More and more highly educated and trained persons converted to the
faith. They, naturally, were the ones most suited to copying the texts
of the Christian tradition. It appears that around this same time
Christian scriptoria (places for the professional copying of
manuscripts) arose in major urban areas.
2 The texts they produced were increasingly clean and consistent.
One factor in favor of the “angry” reading is that it sounds wrong.
If Christian readers today were given the choice between these two
readings, no doubt almost everyone would choose the one more commonly
attested in our manuscripts: Jesus felt pity for the man, and so he
healed him. The other reading is difficult to figure out. What would it
mean to say that Jesus felt angry?
But the fact that one of the readings makes such good sense and is
easy to understand is precisely what makes some scholars suspect that it
is the error. For scribes also would have preferred the text to be
nonproblematic and simple to understand. The question is, Which is more
likely: that a scribe copying this text would change it to say that
Jesus became wrathful instead of compassionate, or to say that Jesus
became compassionate instead of wrathful? Which reading better explains
the existence of the other? When seen from this perspective, the “angry”
Jesus is obviously more likely.
There is even better evidence than this speculative question of
which reading the scribes were more likely to invent. It comes from the
Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Remember, just twenty years after Mark
wrote his gospel (but long before any of our extant gospel manuscripts
were produced), Matthew and Luke used Mark’s account as a source for
their own stories about Jesus.
3 It is possible, then, to examine Matthew and Luke to see what they made of this story.
Matthew and Luke both took over this story from Mark. It is striking that Matthew (
8:2–4) and Luke (
5:12–16) are almost word for word the same as Mark in the leper’s request and in Jesus’ response in verses
40–41.
Which word, then do they use to describe Jesus’ reaction? Does he
become compassionate or angry? Neither. Oddly enough, Matthew and Luke
omit the word altogether.
If the text of Mark available to Matthew and Luke had described
Jesus as feeling compassion, why would each of them have omitted the
word? Both Matthew and Luke describe Jesus as compassionate elsewhere,
and whenever Mark has a story in which Jesus’ compassion is explicitly
mentioned, one or the other of them retains this description in his own
account.
4
What about the other option? What if both Matthew and Luke read in
Mark’s gospel that Jesus became angry? Would they have been inclined to
eliminate
that emotion? There are, in fact, other occasions on
which Jesus becomes angry in Mark. In each instance, Matthew and Luke
have modified the accounts. In
Mark 3:5
Jesus looks around “with anger” at those in the synagogue who are
watching to see if he will heal the man with the withered hand.
Luke 6:10 has the verse almost the same as Mark, but he removes the reference to Jesus’ anger.
Matthew 12:13 completely rewrites this section of the story and says nothing of Jesus’ wrath (see also
Matthew 19:14;
Luke 18:16).
In sum, Matthew and Luke have no qualms about describing Jesus as
compassionate, but they never describe him as angry. Whenever one of
their sources (Mark) did so, they both independently rewrote the term
out of their stories. Thus, whereas it is difficult to understand why
they would have removed “feeling compassion” from the account of Jesus’
healing of the leper, it is easy to see why they might have wanted to
remove “feeling anger.” Combined with the circumstance that the latter
term is attested in a very ancient stream of our manuscript tradition
and that scribes would have been unlikely to create it out of the much
more readily comprehensible “feeling compassion,” it is becoming
increasingly evident that Mark, in fact, described Jesus as angry when
approached by the leper to be healed.
At what, though, would Jesus be angry? This is where the
relationship of text and interpretation becomes critical. Some scholars
who have preferred the text that says Jesus “became angry” have come up
with highly improbable interpretations. They attempt to exonerate Jesus
by making him look compassionate even though they realize that the text
says he became angry.
5
One commentator, for example, argues that Jesus is angry with the state
of the world that is full of disease; in other words, he loves the sick
but hates the sickness. Another interpreter argues that Jesus is angry
because this leprous person had been alienated from society, but this
overlooks the fact that the text says nothing about the man being an
outsider and that it would not have been the fault of Jesus’ society but
of the Law of God (specifically, in Leviticus). Another argues that, in
fact,
that is what Jesus was angry about, that the Law of Moses
forces this kind of alienation. This interpretation ignores the
conclusion of the passage, in which Jesus affirms the Law of Moses and
urges the former leper to observe it: “Go, show yourself to the priest
and offer for your cleansing that which Moses commanded” (
Mark 1:44).
All these interpretations have in common the desire to exonerate
Jesus’ anger and willingness to ignore what the text really says. Should
we opt to do otherwise, what might we conclude?
First, we should note that in the opening part of Mark’s gospel
Jesus does not come off as the meek-and-mild, soft-featured, Good
Shepherd of the stained-glass window. Rather, Mark begins his gospel by
portraying Jesus as a physically and charismatically powerful authority
figure who is not to be messed with. Jesus is introduced by a wild-man
prophet in the wilderness (
1:4–8); he is cast out from society to do battle in the wilderness with Satan and the wild beasts (
1:12–13); he returns to call for urgent repentance in the face of the imminent coming of God’s judgment (
1:14–15); he rips his followers away from their families (
1:20); he overwhelms his audiences with his authority (
1:27); he rebukes and overpowers demonic forces that can completely subdue mere mortals (
1:27,
34); and he refuses to accede to popular demand, ignoring people who plead for an audience with him (
1:36–38).
It is possible that Jesus is being portrayed in the opening scenes
of Mark’s gospel, including the scene with the leper, as a powerful
figure with a strong will and an agenda of his own, a charismatic
authority who doesn’t like to be disturbed.
There is another explanation, though. As I’ve indicated, Jesus does
get angry elsewhere in Mark’s gospel. The next time it happens is in
chapter 3, which involves, strikingly, another healing story. Here Jesus
is explicitly said to be angry at Pharisees who think that he has no
authority to heal the man with a crippled hand on the Sabbath.
In some ways, an even closer parallel comes in a story in which
Jesus’ anger is not explicitly mentioned but is nonetheless evident. In
Mark 9,
when Jesus comes down from the Mount of Transfiguration with Peter,
James and John, he finds a crowd around his disciples and a desperate
man in their midst. The man’s son is possessed by a demon, and he
explains the situation to Jesus and then appeals to him: “If you are
able, have pity on us and help us.” Jesus fires back an angry response,
“If you are able? Everything is possible to the one who believes.” The
man grows even more desperate and pleads, “I believe, help my unbelief.”
Jesus then casts out the demon.
In each of these stories, Jesus’ anger erupts when someone doubts
his willingness, ability or divine authority to heal. Maybe this is what
is involved in the story of the leper as well. As in the story of
Mark 9, someone approaches Jesus gingerly to ask: “If you are
willing you are able to heal me.” Jesus becomes angry.
Of course
he’s willing, just as he is able and authorized. He heals the man but,
still somewhat miffed, rebukes him sharply and throws him out.
In Mark, Jesus gets angry. In Luke, he does not. In fact, Luke’s
Jesus never appears disturbed at all. He is imperturbable. There is only
one passage in this gospel in which Jesus appears to lose his
composure. And this brings us to our second passage,
Luke 22:43–44, the authenticity of which is hotly debated among textual scholars.
6
Jesus is praying on the Mount of Olives just before he is betrayed and arrested (
Luke 22:39–46). After enjoining his disciples to “pray, lest you enter into temptation,” Jesus leaves them, drops to his knees and prays:
Father, if it be your will, remove this cup from me. Except not my will, but yours be done.
In a large number of manuscripts the prayer is followed by the
account, found nowhere else in the Gospels, of Jesus’ heightened agony
and so-called bloody sweat:
And an angel from heaven appeared to him,
strengthening him. And being in agony he began to pray yet more
fervently, and his sweat became like drops of blood falling to the
ground.
The scene closes with Jesus rising from prayer and returning to his
disciples to find them asleep. He then repeats his initial injunction
to them: “Pray, lest you enter into temptation.” Immediately Judas
arrives with the crowds, and Jesus is arrested.
The manuscripts that are known to be the earliest and that are
generally conceded to be the best (the “Alexandrian” text) do not, as a
rule, include the passage about Jesus’ so-called bloody sweat (
Luke 22:43–44).
So perhaps they are a later, scribal addition. On the other hand, the
verses are found in several other early textual witnesses and are, on
the whole, widely distributed throughout the entire manuscript
tradition. So were they added by scribes who wanted them in or deleted
by scribes who wanted them out? It is difficult to say on the basis of
the manuscripts themselves.
Some scholars have proposed that we consider other features of the
verses to help us decide. One scholar, for example, has claimed that the
vocabulary and style of the verses are very much like what is found
elsewhere in Luke: For example, appearances of angels are common in
Luke, and several words and phrases found in the passage occur in other
places in Luke but nowhere else in the New Testament (such as the verb
for “strengthen”). The argument hasn’t proved convincing to everyone,
however, since most of these “characteristically Lukan” ideas,
constructions and phrases are either formulated in uncharacteristically
Lukan ways (for example, all the other angels in Luke speak but this
one doesn’t) or are so common in Jewish and Christian texts outside the
New Testament that their appearance in Luke’s gospel is not particularly
surprising or significant. Moreover, there is an inordinately high
concentration of unusual words and phrases in these verses: For
example, three of the key words (“agony,” “sweat” and “drops”) occur
nowhere else in Luke, nor are they found in Acts (the second volume by
the same author). In sum, it is difficult to authenticate these verses
on the basis of their vocabulary and style.
Another argument scholars have used has to do with the literary
structure of the passage, which appears to be deliberately in the form
scholars call a chiasmus. When a passage is chiastically
structured, the first statement of the passage corresponds to the last
one; the second statement corresponds to the second to last; the third
to the third to last, and so on. The purpose of this careful design is
to focus attention on the center of the passage, which provides the key
to its interpretation. Without the disputed verses, the chiasmus is
structured as follows:
Jesus (a) tells his disciples, “Pray lest you enter into temptation” (verse
40). He then (b) leaves them (verse
41a) and (c) kneels to pray (verse
41b).
The center of the passage is (d), Jesus’ prayer itself, a prayer
bracketed by his two requests that God’s will be done (verse
42). Jesus then (c′) rises from prayer (verse
45a), (b′) returns to his disciples (verse
45b),
and (a′) finding them asleep, once again addresses them in the same
words, telling them, “Pray lest you enter into temptation” (verses
45c–46).
The mere presence of this clear literary structure is not really
the point. The point is how the chiasmus contributes to the meaning of
the passage. The story begins and ends with the injunction to the
disciples to pray so as to avoid entering into temptation. Prayer has
long been recognized as an important theme in the Gospel of Luke (more
so than in the other Gospels); here it comes into special prominence.
For at the very center of this carefully constructed chiasmus is Jesus’
own prayer, a prayer that expresses his desire, bracketed by his greater
desire that the Father’s will be done (verses
41c–42).
The prayer at the center supplies the key to the passage’s
interpretation. This is a lesson on the importance of prayer in the face
of temptation. The disciples, despite Jesus’ repeated request to them
to pray, fall asleep instead. Immediately the crowd comes to arrest
Jesus. And what happens? The disciples, those who have failed to pray,
“enter into temptation”; Jesus is left alone to his fate. What about
Jesus, the one who
has prayed? When the crowd arrives, he calmly
submits to his Father’s will, yielding himself up to the martyrdom that
has been prepared for him. Luke is trying to show that only prayer can
prepare one to die.
What happens, though, when the disputed verses (verses
43–44)
are injected into the passage? The center of the passage, and hence its
focus, shifts to Jesus’ agony, an agony so terrible as to require a
supernatural comforter for strength to bear it. It is significant that
in this longer version of the story, Jesus’ prayer does not produce the
calm assurance that he exudes throughout the rest of the account;
indeed, after he prays “yet more fervently,” his sweat takes on the
appearance of great drops of blood falling to the ground. My point is
not simply that a nice literary structure has been lost, but that the
entire focus of attention shifts to Jesus in deep and heartrending agony
and in need of miraculous intervention.
This may not seem like an insurmountable problem until one realizes that nowhere
else in Luke’s gospel is Jesus portrayed in this way. Quite the
contrary, Luke has gone to great lengths to counter the very view of
Jesus that these verses embrace. Rather than entering his passion with
fear and trembling, in anguish over his coming fate, the Jesus of Luke
goes to his death calm and in control, confident of his Father’s will
until the very end.
That Luke deliberately portrayed Jesus this way becomes clear
through a simple comparison with Mark’s version of the story, which Luke
used as a source. Luke has completely omitted Mark’s statement that
Jesus “began to be distressed and agitated” (
Mark 14:33), as well as Jesus’ own comment to his disciples, “My soul is deeply troubled, even unto death” (
Mark 14:34). Rather than falling to the ground in anguish (
Mark 14:35), Luke’s Jesus bows to his knees (
Luke 22:41). In Luke, Jesus does not ask that the hour might pass from him (cf.
Mark 14:35); and rather than praying three times for the cup to be removed (
Mark 14:36,
39,
41), he asks only once (
Luke 22:42), prefacing his prayer, only in Luke, with the important condition, “If it be your will.”
Luke also remodeled Mark’s account of the crucifixion to show that
Jesus was calm and in control. Mark portrays Jesus as silent on his path
to Golgotha. His disciples have fled; even the faithful women look on
only “from a distance.” All those present deride him—passersby, Jewish
leaders and the two robbers who are to be crucified with him. Mark’s
Jesus has been beaten, mocked, deserted and forsaken, not just by his
followers but finally by God himself. His only words in the entire
proceeding come at the very end, when he cries aloud, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani” (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?). He then utters a loud cry and dies.
In Luke’s account, Jesus is far from silent, and when he speaks, he
shows that he is still in control, trustful of God his Father,
confident of his fate, concerned for the fate of others. En route to his
crucifixion, according to Luke, when Jesus sees a group of women
bewailing his misfortune, he tells them not to weep for him, but for
themselves and their children, because of the disaster that is soon to
befall them (
Luke 23:27–31).
While being nailed to the cross, rather than being silent, he prays to
God, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (
Luke 23:34).
On the cross, in the throes of his passion, Jesus engages in an
intelligent conversation with one of the robbers who is crucified beside
him, assuring him that they will be together that very day in paradise (
Luke 23:43).
Most telling of all, rather than uttering his pathetic cry of
dereliction at the end, Luke’s Jesus, in full confidence of his standing
before God, commends his soul to his loving Father: “Father, into your
hands I commend my spirit” (
Luke 23:46).
Luke thus made fundamental changes in his source (Mark) that are
key to understanding our textual problem. At no point in Luke’s Passion
narrative does Jesus lose control; never is he in deep and debilitating
anguish over his fate. He is in charge of his own destiny, knowing what
he must do and what will happen to him once he does it. This is a man
who is at peace with himself and tranquil in the face of death.
The only anomaly in Luke’s portrayal of Jesus is the account of
Jesus’ “bloody sweat,” an account absent from our earliest and best
witnesses. Only here does Jesus agonize over his coming fate; only here
does he appear out of control, unable to bear the burden of his destiny.
Why would Luke have totally eliminated all remnants of Jesus’ agony
elsewhere if he meant to emphasize it in yet stronger terms here? Why
remove compatible material from his source, both before and after the
verses in question? It appears that the account of Jesus’ “bloody sweat”
is not original to Luke but is a scribal addition to the gospel.
Why, then, did scribes add these verses to the account? In the first example we discussed, from
Mark 1,
we saw scribes trying to make sense of a difficult passage. Like many
modern readers, they were confused or perhaps even troubled by Mark’s
description of Jesus’ display of anger toward the leper, and so they
changed the text. In this second passage, we see the scribes altering
the text to support their theological viewpoint.
One of the most significant disputes during the second and third
centuries involved the nature of Christ. Was he human? Was he divine?
Was he both? If he was both, was he two separate beings, one divine and
one human? Or was he one being who was simultaneously human and divine?
These questions were eventually resolved in the creeds that are handed
down even today, creeds that insist that there is “one Lord Jesus
Christ” who is both fully God and fully man. Before these determinations
were made, however, there were widespread disagreements.
7 My contention is that
Luke 22 was modified in order to stress the view that Jesus was fully human as well as divine.
The “bloody sweat” verses are alluded to three times by
proto-orthodox authors of the mid- to late-second century (Justin
Martyr, Irenaeus of Gaul and Hippolytus of Rome). Even more intriguing,
each time these verses are mentioned it is in order to demonstrate that
Jesus was truly a human being (as well as divine). The deep anguish that
Jesus experienced according to these verses showed that he really was
human, that he really could suffer like the rest of us. Thus, for
example, the early Christian apologist Justin, after observing that
Jesus’ “sweat fell down like drops of blood while he was praying,”
claims that this showed “that the father wished his Son really to
undergo such sufferings for our sakes,” so that we “may not say that he,
being the Son of God did not feel what was happening to him and
inflicted on him.”
8
Justin and his proto-orthodox colleagues understood that the verses
showed in graphic form that Jesus did not merely “appear” to be human:
He really was human, in every way. It seems likely, then, that since, as
we have seen, these verses were not originally part of the Gospel of
Luke, they were added because they portrayed so well the genuine
humanity of Jesus.
For proto-orthodox Christians like the scribes who amended this
text, it was important to emphasize that Christ was a real man of flesh
and blood because it was precisely the sacrifice of his flesh and the
shedding of his blood that brought salvation—not in appearance but in
reality.
Was Jesus an angry man? Yes, according to what I believe is the
oldest form of Mark. Did he agonize in the face of death? Yes, says
Mark. Never, says Luke. As we get closer to the original gospel texts,
ever sharper (and sometimes increasingly different) portraits of Jesus
begin to emerge.
The task of a New Testament textual critic is to try to recover the
oldest, most original form of the text. For we can’t say what the words
mean, if we don’t know what the words
were.
Footnotes:
a. See Kenneth V. Mull and Carolyn Sandquist Mull, “Biblical Leprosy—Is It Really?” BR 08:02.
Endnotes:
1. See Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effects of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993).
2. For an argument that there is no evidence of scriptoria in the earlier centuries, see Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 83–91.
3. See Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), chapter 6.
4. On only two other occasions in Mark’s gospel is Jesus explicitly described as compassionate: in Mark 6:34, at the feeding of the five thousand, and in Mark 8:2,
at the feeding of the four thousand. Luke tells the first story
completely differently, and he does not include the second. Matthew,
however, has both stories and retains Mark’s description of Jesus’ being
compassionate on both occasions (Matthew 14:14 [and 9:30], 15:32).
On three additional occasions in Matthew, and yet one other occasion in
Luke, Jesus is explicitly described as compassionate, with this term (SPLANGNIZO)
used. It is difficult to imagine, then, why they both independently of
each other would have omitted the term from the account we are
discussing if they had found it in Mark.
5. For these various interpretations, see Ehrman, “A Sinner in the Hands of an Angry Jesus,” in New Testmanet Greek and Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Gerald F. Hawthorne, ed. Amy M. Donaldson and Timothy Sailors (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003).
6. For a fuller discussion of this variant, see Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, pp. 187–194. My first treatment of this passage was cowritten with Mark Plunkett.
7. For a full discussion, see Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
8. The quotations come from Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, 103.
+p.+38.jpg)
+_+cover.jpg){kind=link}
