Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Christopher B. Zeichmann on "hyssop" in John 19:29

  

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)