Luke and John share the detail
that soldiers offer Jesus spoiled wine, which is attributed to a Jewish
bystander in Mark 15:23 and Matthew 27:34. Unlike the Synoptic accounts, John
does not depict this as ironical, mocking, or especially cruel: Jesus explicitly
says he is thirsty and they provide him drink. This is soaked in a sponge and
placed on a branch of hyssop. Raymond Brown notes that the mention of hyssop is
confusing, since this plant is not known in Palestine, nor is there reason to
think a branch of the relatively small bush could support the weight of a
wine-soaked sponge. (Brown, Death of the Messiah, 1075-1077) There have
been various attempts to resolve this peculiarity and particularly influential
is a biblical manuscript from the -eleventh century (476*) that renders John
19:29 as hyssos (spear) instead of hyssōpos (hyssop). Many
commentators and some translations (e.g., New English Bible) have accepted this
variant and emended the text of John thus, despite significant reasons to doubt
its originality. As G. D. Kilpatrick observes, the Greek word hyssos
corresponds to Latin pilus, a spear that was used by legionaries and not
auxiliaries that were present in prewar Judaea. (G. D. Kilpatrick, “The
Transmission of the New Testament and Its Reliability,” in Luke on Jesus,
Paul and Christianity: What Did He Really Know?, ed. John S. Kloppenborg
and Joseph Verheyden, Biblical Tools and Studies 29 [Leuven: Peeters, 2017[,
219-239) Though it is conceivable John included this as an anachronism, it does
little to resolve the problems of historical plausibility. However, Bruce
Metzger makes an important observation that the origin of this particular
textual variant is accidental and not an attempt to resolve the peculiarity of
John’s narrative here, a haplographic error in particular—the omission of
repeated letters in a manuscript. (Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on
the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. [New York: United Bible Societies, 1994],
217-218) The use of hyssop, frankly, is confusing and difficult to explain
satisfactorily. (Christopher B. Zeichmann, The Roman Army and the New
Testament [Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2018], 96-97)
