A few thoughts on the concept of a "Majority Text"

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Out on the internet, and to a lesser extent within the halls of academia, there is a debate over the appropriate methods of New Testament textual criticism. It gets complicated. Given the thousands of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament available, and all the various differences among them, how should we go about judging which readings are original?

One option is to look for the earliest manuscripts. If copying errors pile up over time, all other things being equal we should find that the earliest manuscripts are closer to the original text than later ones. Another option is to count manuscripts -- once there's a decent pile of manuscripts, normally we would expect that any error would just affect the manuscript where an error was made, and its immediate descendants, leaving the majority of manuscripts with the non-mistaken reading. At any given place, then, all other things being equal, the reading found in more manuscripts is likely to be the better one.

Now, sometimes these two principles work together in perfect harmony. If a reading is found in the earliest manuscripts and in the great majority of the whole manuscript tradition, that's a great candidate for the original reading. It would take some kind of very compelling counter-argument to unseat a reading like that.

But sometimes there is a conflict between the principles. When the earliest manuscripts read one way, and the majority of manuscripts read another way, what are we to do?

In the case of the Greek New Testament, there are nearly 6000 manuscripts (including fragments of manuscripts) available to us. Most textual critics today tend to place a large deal of importance on the earliest manuscripts, and they tend to think that the majority text is not a particularly reliable method of finding the original text. Let us look at a couple examples.

Now, in today's textual criticism, various symbols and numbers are assigned to the New Testament manuscripts in order to make it possible to quickly and efficiently present the data on a given difference between manuscripts.

So, for example, here's a quotation from the critical apparatus of the UBS 5 Greek New Testament, showing which manuscripts end the book of Mark at 16:8:

{A} omit vv 9-20 א B 304

In the example above, א and B are abbreviations for two manuscripts commonly known as Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, two fourth-century uncial manuscripts. 304 refers to a miniscule manuscript from the twelfth century. The {A} at the beginning of the citation is a symbol of how confident the editors of the UBS 5 GNT are about this reading -- they feel basically certain that omitting verses 9-20 is correct. They come to this conclusion even though they only list three Greek manuscripts as supporting their reading.

Here's another case. In Mark 9:29, some English translations of the Bible read "prayer and fasting", while other simply read "prayer". The UBS 5 prefers the shorter reading here, and lists the evidence for it like this:

{A} προσευχῇ א* B 0274

The {A} once again shows that the preferred reading is virtually certain according to the editors: προσευχῇ is just "prayer". The first two manuscripts supporting the short reading are, again, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, though with an asterisk over Sinaiticus which shows that a later corrector of the manuscript wrote in "and prayer".

*From https://codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR=01FB804F&book=34&chapter=9&lid=en&side=r&verse=29&zoomSlider=0#34-9-29-15, an image of Mark 9:29. You can see in the bottom line, surrounded in red, the "and fasting" added by a later scribe. Notice how it is crowded and does not match the handwriting of the rest of the verse. The ink also appears to be of a different color.

The third manuscript, 0274, is a fifth-century uncial.

So we have two cases where, from the UBS apparatus, it looks like the editors of preferred a reading found in א, B, and one other manuscript to the entire combined weight of all other known manuscripts. In fact, looking at an older Nestle edition (1949, 19th edition), the same readings are preferred at Mark 9:29 and Mark 16:8, but only א and B are listed as supporting witnesses.

Proponents of the majority text will sometimes say that there is something unreasonable or obsessive about the way that modern critics use Aleph and B. And at first glance this seems like this might be a reasonable accusation. Should one really just trust Aleph and B and throw all other evidence out?

But there is more to this textual criticism business than the simple counting of manuscripts.

Whenever we speak of a 'majority text', we must ask -- majority of what? For example, if we're counting up witnesses to the text of the Greek New Testament, even the proponents of what is usually called the "majority text" won't count modern printed Bibles. If they did, then a small print run of 5-10,000 copies of some new edition of the Greek New Testament would suddenly carry more weight than the entire collection of handwritten manuscripts that have survived. That wouldn't make sense.

The proponents of the 'majority text' also won't accept Latin copies of the New Testament for their counting purposes. After all, there's something like 10,000 copies of Jerome's Vulgate translation of the Greek New Testament out there, outnumbering the 6,000 or so Greek manuscripts. Do we really want to establish the original Greek text by counting up 10,000 copies of whatever it is Jerome chose for his Latin translation of a given verse against all the Greek manuscript evidence? Of course not.

The proponents of the Greek majority text also wouldn't accept new manuscript fragments of the Greek New Testament. Using a pen and some notebook paper, if I wanted to, I could produce 10,000 "manuscript fragments" of a given verse in less than a year, just in my free time. Nobody is going to allow my own little personal manuscript factory to outweigh the entire historical record of Greek New Testament manuscripts.

In other words, there must always be various sorts of filters for an attempt to use a 'majority text' methodology to establish the original reading of some verse. Otherwise, as in the case of accepting Vulgate copies, or accepting 10,000 copies of 1 Timothy 3:16 that I've created in my apartment this year, or simply counting up printed Greek New Testaments, any hope of recovering the original text could swiftly be drowned in late, low-quality witnesses.

Of course, if you can mentally accept that even a 'Majority Text' methodology has to have various controls on the witnesses it hears from, then we can start asking -- how tight should such controls be?

Should we include Greek manuscripts made right up to this morning, or just from the first eighteen centuries? The first fourteen? The first ten? The first five? Each of these choices may yield a different 'majority' text.

One natural cut-off is at the eighth and ninth centuries. Up to the eighth century, almost all manuscripts are written in an uncial style -- in what are today known as upper-case Greek letters. From the ninth century on, the great majority of Greek texts were in miniscule style, lower-case. In addition to being later, these miniscules are also confined to the area around Constantinople, inside the rump state of what was once the Byzantine Empire.

So let's suppose we are restricting ourselves to uncials from the eighth century or before. Let's also imagine we're restricting ourselves to pretty much complete copies of the New Testament: just manuscripts that have survived in more or less their original condition, not little fragments, or manuscripts with most of their books missing.

As it turns out, there are only three well-preserved nearly complete New Testaments from the first eight centuries: Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus.

In other words, wherever Sinaiticus and Vaticanus agree, you are looking at the majority text of all the fairly complete New Testaments to have survived from the first eight centuries of Christianity.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that we should restrict our evidence base that strictly, but it is an interesting thought experiment. When looked at from this angle, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are not some tiny fragment of the relevant evidence for New Testament readings. They are in fact a very large proportion of the earliest available evidence, even if it would be a stretch to call their agreements a "majority text".

Let's go back to the end of Mark. Consider the following quote from Eusebius, the first major historian of Christianity, as translated by J. A. Kellhoffer and as it appears on page 398 of Amy Donaldson's magnificent dissertation on patristic treatment of Greek variants:

At any rate, the accurate ones of the copies define the end of the history according to Mark with the words of the young man who appeared to the women and said to them, "Do not fear. You are seeking Jesus the Nazarene" and the [words] that follow. In addition to these, it says, "And having heard [this] they fled, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

For in this way the ending of the Gospel of the Gospel according to Mark is defined in nearly all the copies. The things that appear next, seldom [and] in some but not in all [of the copies], may be spurious ...

In other words, by ending the Gospel at "for they were afraid", Eusebius testifies that "nearly all the copies", and in particular the "accurates ones" testify to the abrupt ending of Mark. When we consulted UBS 5 above, the only Greek manuscripts to be found were three manuscripts.

Jerome, the greatest Christian linguist of his day, echoes the words of Eusebius (Donaldson, p. 402): "... nearly all the Greek manuscripts do not have this section to the end ...".

Eusebius and Jerome were written around the same time that Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus were produced. If their testimony is correct, it would appear that the abrupt ending of Mark, now existing in just three manuscripts, was in the fourth or fifth century the overwhelming majority reading.

Or consider Matthew 6:4. In this verse, the "Majority Text" of today reads "reward you openly". But א, B, and some other manuscripts read just "reward you." But here's Augustine, who did his writing in the fourth and fifth centuries (Donaldson, 357-358):

Many Latin copies have this reading: "And your Father who sees in secret will reward you publicly." But because we have not found the word "publicly" in the Greek copies, which are earlier, we have not thought that anything needed to be said about it here.

There you have it. Today's majority text of this verse is not even found in Greek copies, and so not worth discussing!

Or take Jerome's comments on Matthew 16:2b-3 (Donaldson, 372). Here there's a reading found in today's Majority Text, of which Jerome says, "This is not found in the majority of manuscripts." Or take Jerome on Matthew 24:36, where today's Majority Text includes the words "nor the son". But Jerome says (Donaldson 380), "In some Latin manuscripts is added: 'nor the Son,'' though in the Greek copies, and especially those of Adamantius [i.e., Origen] and of Pierius, this addition is not found." In all those cases, it is the text that agrees with א and B that the Church fathers consider to be in the majority in their day.

I would encourage the reader who wishes to read further to look into Donaldson's dissertation at Matthew 5:22; Mark 8:10; Luke 7:35, 22:36; Galatians 5:19-21; Ephesians 1:6, 3:14, 5:22 -- these are just a small selection of references from patristic sources that suggest the present majority text has not always been the majority text.

The case for at least some א B readings becomes stronger if we consider the existence of various translations of the Bible that were made in the first few centuries of Christianity.

Above, we read the Greek evidence for the abrupt ending of Mark from UBS 5 as follows:

{A} omit vv 9-20 א B 304

But that's if we only restrict ourselves to Greek manuscripts of the NT itself. If we include patristic citations and manuscripts in other languages, we get the following, also from UBS 5:

{A} omit vv 9-20 א B 304 syr^s cop^sams arm^mss geo^{l, A} Eusebius mss^{acc. to Eusebius} Epiphanius^1/2 Hesychius mss^{acc. to Severus}; Jerome mss^{acc. to Jerome}

That includes the testimony we discussed above from Eusebius and Jerome, as well as some evidence from Epiphanius and Hesychius that we did not discuss. As for the rest of those abbreviations, according to Peter Heard's online article "A Case against the longer ending of Mark", the external evidence for the abrupt ending of Mark includes (the list below directly quoted from Heard's words):

• The oldest Old Latin manuscript (VL 1 = Codex Bobiensis, from the fourth or fifth century) concludes at Mark 16:8 with a version of the Shorter Ending and lacks 16:9–20
• The oldest Syriac manuscript (the Sinaitic Syriac, from the fourth century) ends at 16:8
• The oldest Sahidic manuscript (sa 1 = P. Palau-Ribes Inv. Nr. 182, from the fifth century) ends at 16:8
• The earliest evidence we have for the Christian Palestinian Aramaic version of Mark (Codex Sinaiticus Rescriptus in St Petersburg, Syr. No. 16) ends at 16:8
• The oldest Armenian manuscripts (going back to the ninth century) end at 16:8
• The oldest Georgian manuscripts (translated from the Armenian) end at 16:8

We see above that it is quite possible to find places where early Christian writers explicitly say that a reading we now find in א and B reflects the majority text of their time, while the majority text of today was not the majority text in their time. But I have not yet seen the reverse. That is, I do not know of any place where a fourth or fifth century writer agrees that today's majority text constituted the majority text of their day, against the testimony of א and B.

So it would seem to me, based on patristic testimony from the first half of the first millennium, that if we wish to reconstruct the "majority text" of the fourth and fifth centuries, we would be better off relying on an agreement between א and B than on the majority text of today -- which after all is simply the majority text of the late medieval Byzantine rump state.

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