Robert Sungenis on εως ου in Matthew 1:25

Commenting on the use of εως ου in Matt 1:25, Robert Sungenis wrote the following to defend the Catholic dogma of Mary’s perpetual virginity:

Other factors mitigate against regarding Mt 1:25’s use of heos hou as terminating the action of the verb. For example, Mt 1:25 contains a significant textual variant. One major Greek manuscript, Codex Vaticanus (B), omits hou (οὐκ ἐγίνωσκεν αὐτὴν ἕως ἔτεκεν; ouk eginosken auten heos eteken). Even more discrepancies appear in Mt 26:36. Codices B and 067 contain heos hou, but Codices D, K, L, W, Δ, Θ and 074 contain heos an; while Codex Sinaiticus (א), and C, 28, 33 contain heos; and Codex Alexandrinus (A) and P⁵³ have heos hou an. This evidence shows that the Greek transcribers saw no difference between heos and heos hou, otherwise they would not have replaced one with the other. In their minds, all the heos conjunctive forms were interchangeable, in the first century and long afterwards. (Robert A. Sungenis, The Gospel According to St. Matthew [The Catholic Apologetics Study Bible, volume 1; Goleta, Calif.: Queenship Publishing, 2003], 196)

To say that this is a desperate attempt by Sungenis to defend Catholic Mariology is an understatement. To think that, as one Codex (B) lacks the pronoun ου in Matt 1:25 “proves” that εως and εως ου were understood to have the same meaning as one another would mean that, based on the textual differences between John 1:18, ancient scribes and early Christians understood υιος (“son”) and θεος (“God”) to have the one and the same meaning!

As Eric Svendsen, author of Who is My Mother? The Role and Status of the Mother of Jesus in the New Testament and Roman Catholicism (Amityville, N.Y.: Calvary Press, 2001) wrote in response to Sungenis on this issue:

Sungenis has suggested here that if we can find instances of heos hou that act as textual variants where either heos an or heos alone appears in the NT, we have thereby established that heos hou is “interchangeable” in the minds of the scribes who composed these manuscripts with heos an or heos alone. Unfortunately, such a suggestion betrays a misunderstanding of how textual variants and scribal glosses came about. When scribes were copying a new manuscript from a parent manuscript, they rarely made intentional changes. In the majority of cases, the scribes either misheard (in the case of auditory copying) or misread (in the case of personal copying) a word or phrase, and wrote the resulting variant in its place. When they did make intentional changes, it was because of one of three reasons: (1) to make contextual sense, (2) to make grammatical sense, or (3) to make theological sense. Yet, in each case, the change is made precisely because the scribe sees a difference in the word or phrase in the text as opposed to the word or phrase in the variant he is supplying.

The point is, whether the change was intentional or unintentional, scribes never made the kind of changes that Sungenis suggests above; namely, that a scribe knowingly substituted one word for another simply because he saw them as interchangeable. Indeed, if they were really synonyms (hence, interchangeable), we would expect the scribe to make no change at all. Scribes were reverent copyists, taking every precaution to get the original wording right. That means if heos hou was the original reading, and the scribe intentionally changed it to heos an or heos alone, he would do so only on the assumption that there is a difference in the two constructions—he would never change it on the assumption that there is no difference between them, in spite of Sungenis’ odd insistence to the contrary.

Given Sungenis’ explanation above, one wonders whether he would treat other textual variants the same way. Is Sungenis willing to argue, for instance, that monogenes huios (“only begotten son”) is interchangeable with monogenes theos (“only begotten god”) in John 1:18? As a less theologically loaded example, does Sungenis wish to postulate that the reading, “watch yourselves, in order that you do not lose that which we have accomplished [eirgasametha]” is interchangeable with the variant reading, “watch yourselves, in order that you do not lose that which you have accomplished [eirgasasthe]” in 2 John 8, and that the copyists “saw no difference in meaning between” the two statements?