Friday, April 10, 2026

W. H. P. Hatch, "The Text of Luke 2:22"

  

THE TEXT OF LUKE 2:22

 

This verse contains a textual problem which has perplexed editors of the New Testament since the days of Erasmus and the Complutensian edition. The question is, What pronoun should be read after καθαρισμοῦ?—αὐτῶν, or αὐτοῦ, or αὐτῆς

 

Αὐτῶν is attested by אABLWΓΔΠ etc., by nearly all the minuscules, by the Peshitta, the Harclean, and the Palestinian Syriac, and by three minor ancient versions (Ethiopic, Armenian, and Gothic). The Arabic Diatessaron also has the plural pronoun, agreeing with the Peshitta at this point. Origen found αὐτῶν in his text of the Gospel, and, so far as is known, he was acquainted with no other reading in this place. He quotes Luke 2:22 in his Fourteenth Homily on Luke, which deals with the Circumcision and Purification, and he discusses the difficulty involved in the plural αὐτῶν without mentioning any variant reading. If he had known of such, he would certainly have made some reference to it. The Homiliae in Lucam were written at Caesarea, after Origen’s withdrawal to that city from Alexandria in the year 231. We may therefore assume that αὐτῶν formed part of Luke 2:22 in the text current at Caesarea and Alexandria in the early part of the third century, and that there were no rival claimants for the place. It was also the Antiochian, or ‘Syrian,’ reading, as its predominance in the minuscule manuscripts proves.

 

Αὐτῶν is sometimes explained as referring to the Jews.* But this is contextually objectionable, because the subject understood of ἀνήγαγον is the parents of Jesus. Moreover, this interpretation becomes much more difficult, not to say impossible, if one believes, as the present writer does, that the first two chapters of Luke (except the preface) are based on a Semitic original. Some think the plural pronoun is used of Mary and Jesus; whilst others, with much better reason in view of the context, refer αὐτῶν to Joseph and Mary. But both of these explanations are fraught with the difficulty that the Mosaic Law prescribed purification only for the mother after childbirth. No ceremonial impurity attached to the father or to the child.

 

The feminine pronoun αὐτῆς is found in no Greek manuscript of the New Testament. Its attestation is not only of inferior quality; it is also extremely scanty, being limited to a citation in a work wrongly ascribed to Athanasius, to a catena on the Gospel, and to Erpenius’s edition of the Arabic published in 1616. Αὐτῆς is obviously a learned correction either of the reading αὐτῶν or of the variant αὐτοῦ, which is discussed below. It was made by some one who knew that the woman only according to the Jewish Law needed purification after the birth of a child.

 

On the other hand Codex Bezae and at least eight minuscules have αὐτοῦ after καθαρισμοῦ. The Sahidic version and the Amsterdam edition of the Armenian also have ‘his cleansing’ here. Eius of the Old Latin and the Vulgate, as well as the pronominal suffix in the Sinaitic Syriac, are ambiguous; they may be interpreted either as masculine or as feminine. But inasmuch as αὐτοῦ is an early ‘Western’ reading, being found in Codex Bezae and the Sahidic version, whereas αὐτῆς is very slightly attested and is doubtless only a learned correction of αὐτῶν or αὐτοῦ, it seems altogether probable that αὐτοῦ rather than αὐτῆς underlies the Old Latin and the Sinaitic Syriac. For the Old Latin and Old Syriac versions were made from manuscripts of the ‘Western’ type. Moreover, there is no evidence that the reading αὐτῆς was in existence when either of these versions was made. It is quite possible, however, that many readers of the Old Latin and Sinaitic Syriac understood the mother of Christ to be meant. Αὐτοῦ can only refer to Jesus, whose circumcision and naming are recounted in verse 21. But from the point of view of the Mosaic Law it is erroneous to speak of the purification of the child. Nevertheless, Griesbach regarded αὐτοῦ as a speciosa lectio, and Zahn thinks that it may be the right reading in Luke 2:22.

 

A few authorities have no pronoun at all after καθαρισμοῦ. The omission undoubtedly arose from a feeling that the Evangelist could not have written either αὐτῶν or αὐτοῦ in this place. This reading, however, has no more claim to be regarded as correct than the feminine pronoun αὐτῆς.

 

The Complutensian editors, followed by Beza and the Elzevir editions, adopted αὐτῆς; but Erasmus and Stephanus printed αὐτῶν in their New Testaments. The Antwerp and Paris Polyglots adhere to the Elzevir tradition, whereas the London Polyglot reproduces the text of Stephanus. Αὐτῶν is read by Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Westcott and Hort, Baljon, and von Soden. No editor has ever adopted αὐτοῦ, and none since Alter has printed αὐτῆς.

 

The present writer believes that the first two chapters of Luke (except the preface) are based on a Semitic source. The Greek variants in Luke 2:22 can be readily explained if one assumes, with Bousset, Gressmann, Plummer, and Moffatt, that the underlying document was written in Aramaic; and this assumption seems reasonable at least so far as the narrative parts of the chapters are concerned.

 

The source in Luke 2:22, like the Targum of Onkelos on Lev. 12:4 and 6, probably had יומי דכותה. The suffix in דכותה was intended to be read as feminine, meaning ‘her purification.’ Luke, or whoever translated the source into Greek, having read in the preceding verse about the circumcision and naming of Jesus, took it as masculine, ‘his purification,’ and translated it by καθαρισμοῦ αὐτοῦ. This was the original text of Luke 2:22. But before the time of Origen it was perceived that αὐτοῦ could not be right, and it was changed to αὐτῶν, which was suggested by the verb ἀνήγαγον and seemed to improve the sense. In course of time αὐτῶν became the dominant reading, though αὐτοῦ survived in texts which preserved the ‘Western’ tradition. But neither αὐτοῦ nor αὐτῶν was universally satisfactory, since the Mosaic Law demanded purification of the woman after childbirth and of her only. Accordingly αὐτῆς appeared as a learned correction, but its range was extremely limited until the appearance of the Complutensian edition in 1522. The adoption of αὐτῆς into the text of several early printed editions of the New Testament is due in part to the Vulgate eius, which was understood as a feminine pronoun. (W. H. P. Hatch, “The Text of Luke 2:22,” The Harvard Theological Review 14, no. 4 [October 1921]: 377-79)

 

Robert Alter on Psalm 11:7

  

The upright behold His face. With the wicked disposed of in the previous verse, the psalm ends on this positive note of the upright beholding God— even as God from the heavens beholds all humankind. In the Hebrew, the noun is singular and the verb is plural; presumably one of the two (probably the verb) should be adjusted. The Masoretic Text reads “their face,” with no obvious antecedent for the plural, but variant Hebrew versions have “His face.” (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:46)

 

Thursday, April 9, 2026

Discussion with a Disingenuous Baptist (Adam)

Update: Adam keeps trying to get the video taken down. So here are the Zoom details so you can download it:


https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/7nHap6qpk3cP_TzDGl0t2Yri8PT4TBVfHl4QaVak9bMElayg7fGfK2hUfN0qLHXX.T680M5GqWnNx1naG 

Passcode: 4r@?FP!+

Please download and upload onto your own youtube and other channels. You have my express permission to do such.












Alberto Rus Lhuillier on Medicine among the Maya

  

Medicine

 

The Maya in common with other Mesoamerican groups believed that illnesses could have both natural and supernatural causes. To treat illnesses due to natural causes the healers first determined the symptoms and then made use of the vast supply of natural cures available (animal, mineral and plant), prescribed in a variety of different forms. Amongst these were infusions, poultices and ointments. Hundreds of recipes used to cure many aches and pains have been collected from colonial documents, and a great number of these prehispanic remedies were still used today and their effectiveness is well proven.

 

Illnesses caused the “bad winds” or by enemies, those provoked by failure to fulfill religious obligations or for any other unknown reasons were considered to have magic or supernatural origins. It was also necessary to cure them by these means. The Ritual of the Bacabs, a manuscript written in Maya and translated into English, records many spells as well as medical prescriptions. Cure by faith healers (brujos) is still a common practice today for sicknesses of supernatural origin. (Alberto Rus Lhuillier, The Ancient Maya [trans. Margaret Shrimpton; Mérida, Mexico: Dante, 1992], 53-54)

 

Joseph A. Fitzmyer on Luke 2:48

  

have been terribly worried and have been searching for you. Lit. “suffering pain, we are searching for you.” The ms. D and some ancient versions (OL, Curetonian OS) add another ptc., “and grieving.” Still other mss. (C, D, Θ, the Koine text-tradition) read the impf. ezētoumen, “we were searching,” instead of the preferred reading, the pres. indic. (translated here as a pf.). The verb odynasthai is used exclusively by Luke in the NT (see 16:24, 25; Acts 20:38); it expresses mental torment or anguish. Mary’s reproach implies that an obedient or responsible son would have acted otherwise. (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel according to Luke I–IX: Introduction, Translation, and Notes [AYB 28; New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008], 443, emphasis in bold added)

 

Notes on Job 42:13 and the MT vs. Targum on the Number of Job’s Daughters

  

13. The form of the numeral (šiḇʿānāh) is peculiar. Targ. construed it as a dual, thus doubling the number of sons without increasing the daughters. A surplus of girls ordinarily would be regarded as a calamity; cf. Ecclesiasticus 26:10–12, 42:9–11. The pagan Arabs used to bury unwanted daughters at birth (cf. Sale, The Koran, pp. 199, 438). Job’s daughters, well endowed with beauty and wealth, figure more prominently than the sons who are not even mentioned by name. Sarna (JBL 76 [1957], 18) suggests that the numeral šiḇʿānāh may be a genuine archaism related to the Ugaritic form šbʿny. (Marvin H. Pope, Job: Introduction, Translation, and Notes [AYB 15; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008], 352)

 

 

The Targum of Job reads:

 

והוו ליה ארבסר בנין ותלת בנן

 

 

13. And he had fourteen sons, and three daughters. (The Targum of Job and The Targum of Proverbs and The Targum of Qohelet [trans. Céline Mangan, John F. Healey, and Peter S. Knobel; The Aramaic Bible 15; Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1991], Logos Bible Software edition)

  

Taking šib‘ābāh as dual, corresponding to the doubling of all Job’s possessions in v. 12: see 1:3. (Ibid., n 9)

 

Robert Alter on Psalm 9 (LXX: Psalms 9-10)

 

 

This psalm and the next one are a striking testimony to the scrambling in textual transmission that, unfortunately, a good many of the psalms have suffered. The Septuagint presents Psalms 9 and 10 as a single psalm, and there is formal evidence for the fact that it was originally one poem. Psalm 9 in the Hebrew begins as an alphabetic acrostic: verses 2 and 3, aleph (four times); verse 4, bet; verse 6, gimmel (dalet, the next letter, is missing); verse 7, heh; verses 8–11, waw; verse 12, zayin; verse 14, ḥet; verse 16, tet; verse 18, yod; verse 19, kaf. It is notable that some lines of poetry have been interspersed between the acrostic lines, unlike other acrostic psalms in which the sequential letters of the alphabet occur in consecutive lines. Then Psalm 10 begins with the next letter of the alphabet, lamed, after which the acrostic disappears, to surface near the end of the psalm with the last six letters of the alphabet—verse 7, peh; verse 8, ayin; verse 12, qof; verse 14, resh; verse 15, shin; and verse 17, taw. Now, what accompanies this confusion is a whole series of points, especially in the second half of the psalm, at which the text is not intelligible and is in all likelihood defective. Something along the following lines seems to have happened to our psalm: at some early moment in the long history of its transmission, a single authoritative copy was damaged (by decay, moisture, fire, or whatever). Lines of verse may have been patched into the text from other sources in an attempt to fill in lacunae. Quite a few phrases or lines were simply transcribed in their mangled form or perhaps poorly reconstructed. When the chapter divisions of the Bible were introduced in the late Middle Ages, the editors, struggling with this imperfect text, no longer realized that it was an acrostic and broke it into two separate psalms. The result of this whole process, alas, is that we are left with a rather imperfect notion of what some of the text means. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:40)

 

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