ou>J mi CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIB RARY The Robert M. and Laura Lee Lintz Book Endowment for the Humanities Class of 1924 3 1924 091 301 089 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924091301089 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS FROM THE SINAI PALIMPSEST • r<.'. -5*i (O-n .A [ <'f\ ^rSi^ ^:H \ci^\?\> » /'i7//<7 29a Script, inf., Luke xx. 33-44- Script sup. {reversed), Acts of Eugen.a. ' {Frontispiece. k LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS FROM THE SINAI PALIMPSEST BY AGNES SMITH LEWIS Hon. D.D. (Heidelberg), Ph.D. (Halle), LL.D. (St Andrews), LiTT.D. (Dublin), F.N.B.A. LONDON WILLIAMS & NORGATE 14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. TO Rev. Canon ROBERT HATCH KENNETT, D.D. RKGIUS PROFESSOR OP HEBREW IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE AND JAMES RENDEL HARRIS, Lirr.D., LL.D. DIRECTOR OP STUDIES AT WOODBROOKE SETTLEMENT, BIRMINGHAM THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF THEIR KIND INSTRUCTION IN THE SYRIAC TONGUE, IN PALiEOGRAPHY, AND OTHER ARTS, WITHOUT WHICH IT COULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN PREFACE This little book has been written at the sugges- tion of some young friends, theological students at Westminster College, Cambridge, who thought that the substance of a lecture which I gave them a few years ago might be made interesting to a wider public. I have tried to avoid those technicalities which often repel even people of high intelligence from the reading of a serious book, wherever I could do so without making my meaning obscure. Every reader of the English Bible has the right to know all he can about it. My remarks are not intended for those wjio are acquainted with Greek or with Syriac ; and if this work should fall into their hands, I trust that they will for- give its many omissions, and reflect that the way is open to them to search for furthur information in more scientific books. Those who wish to read my translation of the Sinai Vll vin LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS text may obtain it from Messrs Clay & Sons, of the Cambridge University Press Warehouse, Ave Maria Lane, London. The page which I have chosen from 362 others for the illustration, exhibits as its first word, nay, as its first letter, one of those minute points in which my reading of the Syriac text differs from Dr Burkitt's. Its upper script is turned upside down. My thanks are specially due to my twin-sister, Dr Margaret Dunlop Gibson, for help in the reading of my proof-sheets; and to the Rev. James Hastings, D.D., for his permission to use matter which has already appeared in the Expository Times. AGNES SMITH LEWIS. Castle-brae, Cambridge, October 191 3. CONTENTS CHAP. I. PRELIMINARY 3. CAUSES OF variants .... 3. THE GENEALOGIES AND THE VIRGIN-BIRTH 4. VARIANTS IN MATTHEW. 5. VARIANTS IN MARK .... 6. VARIANTg IN LUKE .... 7. VARIANTS IN LUKE — CONTINUED . 8. VARIANTS IN JOHN .... 9. VARIANTS IN JOHN — CONTINUED . 10. A FEW SUGGESTED EMENDATIONS IN THE REVISED VERSION .... 11. SOME AGREEMENTS OF SCIENCE WITH BIBLE TEACHING PAGE I 12 27 45 66 82 III 132 170 189 204 iz Light on the Four Gospels from the Sinai Palimpsest CHAPTER 1 PRELIMINARY The publication of the Syriac text of the Gospels from the Sinai Palimpsest in October 1894, has given rise to fresh discussions with regard to more than one interesting problem connected with the birth and life of our Lord, and especially with the mystery of the Incarna- tion. I wish to offer a few suggestions about these, and also about the position which the version represented by the Sinai Palimpsest, and which, for want of a better term, I shall continue to call the Old Syriac, occupies in relation to the text represented in the earliest Greek MSS. ; the text which, from its age-long 2 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS acceptance by the Christian Church, has a first claim to the title of Orthodox. I am aware that the fact of my having been the discoverer of the chief, because the oldest and most perfect known representative of this version, gives me no special insight into the question ; and anything which I have to advance about it can be only a theory. Yet, if that theory be wrong, it seems to me that success in the search for truth is frequently like success in the art of photography : we advance to a sure know- ledge of our subject in spite of our mistakes, and sometimes even by means of them. Two chief theories have been in vogue to account for the general agreement of the Synoptic Gospels ; some of our Lord's dis- courses and parables being reported by their authors in nearly identical words, although the chronological arrangement and the structure of their respective narratives vary so greatly. The theory of oral transmission has been almost bowled out of the field by that of an original Gospel, from which the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke all in their turn borrowed. PRELIMINARY 3 But is the oral theory so unreasonable ? This is surely a case where the probabilities of human conduct must be taken into account. The immediate followers of our Lord were not bookmen, still less were they scholars. They were, like most Oriental peasants, in close touch with their fellow-men, and with the life of the synagogue, of the city-gate, and of the bazaar. Let us try to imagine how such people would act, when placed in circumstances of unique, nay, of transcendent importance. If we could transport ourselves to that upper room in Jerusalem, where, day by day, the disciples watched for the coming of the Holy Ghost, in suppressed but ecstatic rapture over the recollection of their Risen Master ; or if we could follow them for long months after Pentecost, within the doors of their meeting- places, what should we hear ? No formal read- ing from the Law or the Prophets, surely, no set prayers nor liturgy, but a pouring into each other's ears of what each could recollect, whether of our Lord's actions. His parables,' His discourses, and even of His outward mien! 4 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS One and another would supply details ; one would pick up some dropped phrase, to which the other would assent; and these stories would be repeated, improved upon, or revised, till at last, each of them fell into an approved form, which those who had the best memory or the most acceptable gift of speech would be called upon to relate. The necessity for com- mitting this to parchment did not become evident immediately, and thus the Gospels are said to have been composed at a later date than any of the Epistles. The wants of posterity were held of little account by men who ex- pected their Master's second advent to take place during their own lifetime. But when some of the Apostles died, and then some of the older disciples ; when children were born who had to be taught to realise what they had never seen ; and when the community was scattered by persecution— then, as Luke teUs us, many took in hand to set in order a declaration of those things which were most surely believed by all. That this was done in Greek by three out of the four Evangelists has long been an accepted PRELIMINARY tradition ; though it is now on philological evidence disputed. Papias reported that St Matthew wrote his Gospel in Aramaic, and, if so, it is hard to believe that one of the Syriac versions, which has come down to us, does not give us, to a large extent, some of his original expressions. • These Greek Gospels, no doubt, embodied much of what had been already stereotyped in oral form. Hence the frequently verbal agree- ment of the Synoptics. Being the undoubted work of the Evangelists, one of whom, Matthew, was an Apostle, and being written in the popular Greek language of the day, they were at once accepted by the Greek-speaking section of the Church, whose metropolis at that time was Antioch. Is there any improbability in supposing that these Greek Gospels were translated into Syriac, the vernacular of Palestine, very soon after their promulgation ? The labour of making many copies must have employed many hands ; and the Semitic natives of the country, most of whom were unacquainted with Greek, or who 6 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS had a knowledge of it sufficient only for com- mercial purposes, would demand at a very early period a version in their own tongue. Is it not possible that this version (from Greek into Syriac) was made by men who had either been themselves eye-witnesses of the events recorded, or in whose ears were still ringing certain phrases or expressions heard by them in the synagogue from the lips of those who had been eye-witnesses ? If this were so, they would, whilst giving in general a faithful rendering of the Greek text before them, occasionally and naturally fall into the habit of incorporating with it, or modifying it so as to incorporate, those phrases or expressions with which they had acquired a sacred familiarity. And the result would be just what we have in the Old Syriac Gospels, and in the Western texts generally. This, of course, presupposes an older date for the Sinaitic text than that of Tatian's Diatessaron (a.d. i6o). Should it be proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the Diatessaron came first, I frankly admit that my PRELIMINARY theory would be baseless. Yet I cannot imagine how a body of Christians, in the first fervour of their faith in the Risen Saviour, could have been content to wait till a.d. i6o for a version of the New Testament. And my supposition will at least account for the curious circumstance, that the Old Syriac Version is extant only in the Gospels. The Peshitta or Syriac Vulgate is supposed to be a revision of this Old Syriac text, made by Rabbula, Bishop of Edessa, about a.d. 415. It comprises the GDspels, the Pauline and the Catholic Epistles ; whilst the Philoxenian and the Harcleian include, with these, the four shorter Apostolic ones. And in the case of the Palestinian Syriac, or Galilean, not only have fragments of the Pauline Epistles been discovered by Dr Land, Dr Rendel Harris, myself, and others, but considerable portions of these, in a consecutive text, are in a palimpsest manuscript now in my own possession, which I have called Codex Climaci Rescriptus. In the Old Syriac not a word of the Episdes has been seen anywhere ; or, if seen, it has not been clearly differentiated 8 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS from the text of the Peshitta. A quotation from the Acts, which is supposed to be Old Syriac, has been found in Aphraates ; but the Acts is a history ; and a version of it might be affected by the same causes as those that have given us variants in the Gospels. I am thus assuming that the text of the old Greek MSS., as represented substantially in the works of Griesbach, Lachman, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Scrivener, Westcott and Hort, Nestle, and others of those eminent scholars whose labours have paved the way for our Revised Version, has the first claim to our veneration. But it may at the same time be conceded that the Syriac MSS. give us, in their remarkable divergences from the received text, a true echo of what was in the minds of some of the early disciples, as having fallen from the lips of their Master. I grant that this is to claim a very high antiquity for the Old Syriac Version. But is there any certain reason for pronouncing it absolutely impossible ? It seems to have become a maxim of safe — I will not say sound PRELIMINARY — criticism to fix the date of a document at the very latest period which the facts will warrant. Does this exclude the possibility, when we arc in the realm of conjecture, of a much earlier date being the true one ? Those who wish to see how the argument for the priority of the Sinai Version over the Diatessaron is strengthened by a number of minute details should study Dr Hjelt's book. Die Altsyrische EvangelienUbersetzung^ for them- selves. His theory offers the one satisfactory ex- planation of a circumstance which has long puzzled me. Why is the conclusion which has been added to St Mark's Gospel, i.e. chap, xvi. vv. 9-20, absent in the Sinai Version and present in the Curetonian .'' for chap. xvi. vv. 17-20 is the only portion of Mark which we possess in the latter. The answer is, " Because Tatian came between them." Tatian copied that conclusion from some of the Greek MSS. which he used in addition to the Old Syriac, and the translator (or editor) of the Curetonian followed him. lo LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS It has been suggested, with some plausibility, that the Syriac MSS. and the Old Latin ones, which have a close resemblance to them, are merely incorrect copies of the Sacred Autograph, and were as such rejected by the Church when the Canon of the New Testament was fixed. It may be so, but I would urge that there are in the Sinai Palimpsest some remarkable readings, which are more in harmony with their context than those of similar passages hitherto known. In citing these, I must explain that they are taken not only from the major portion of the text as transcribed in 1893 by Professor Bensly, Dr Rendel Harris, and Dr Burkitt, but also from the minor portion which my third visit to Sinai in 1895 enabled me to add to it. The greater conciseness of the Sinai text in John xvi. 28, where the phrase, "I leave the world," is omitted, and in John xvii., where "even as I am not of it" {i.e. the world), occurs in ver. 16 only (not in ver. 14), might even be held to indicate that the text from which it is translated is an earlier one than the Sinaiticus, the Vaticanus, or the Alexandrinus. PRELIMINARY 1 1 But, side by side with those instances of conciseness, and with those which commend themselves by their appropriateness, such as Mark x. 50, xvi. 3 ; Luke i. 64 ; John xii. 31, we have in the same codex variations which, if they are not corruptions, can only be ex- plained on the supposition that our Lord repeated His parables and portions of His dis- discourses more than once to different audiences. We see no inherent improbability in this, when we consider that our short Gospels chronicle the events and teachings of a three years' active ministry. Of these we have assuredly no verbatim report, but one made several years later, from memory. CHAPTER II CAUSES OF VARIANTS The age which accepted the theory of verbal inspiration has passed away. It was a comfort- able and convenient theory, but it received its death-blow in England at last from the Revised Version of the Bible. No one who has ever read two out of the 3829 extant MSS. and frag- ments of the New Testament, or even two of their printed texts, and has observed the many slight variations in the order of their words, and sometimes even in the words themselves, can continue to hold this theory for a single moment. We must recollect that before the Four Gospels came to us, copies of them were multiplied during 1500 years by the hands and the brains of fallible men. No special 13 CAUSES OF VARIANTS 13 Providence watched over the scribes ; and the miracle is, that in spite of vagaries in spelling, and of occasional diversities of diction, the substantial agreement among these MSS. shoidd be so great and so preponderating as it is. Dr Hort has estimated that, though 30,000 variants have been counted in the New Testa- ment, seven-eighths of its text are in no way affected by them. Those that are not due to orthography (that is, spelling) amount to one- sixtieth of the whole text. Substantial variants amount to about one word in a thousand. The causes of these variants are not far to seek. Any honest printer would smile at the ignorance of an author who expected him to have no mistakes in a first impression, even of a concert programme. And the copying of Gospel MSS. was, in the early centuries, some- times done under circumstances which were very far removed, I will not say from the quiet, but certainly from the method and regularity, of a modern printing-office. Moreover, most of these variants occur in the least important parts of the Gospel narrative. 14 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS in the connecting-links between its weighty sentences. For instance, the phrase, "Jesus answered and said unto him," may be put in at least thirteen different ways : — Jesus answered, and said unto him, Jesus answering, said unto him, Jesus answered him, saying, Jesus said unto him, Jesus answered, saying, Jesus answering, said. And Jesus said unto him, And Jesus said, Jesus said, Jesus answered, and said. And Jesus answering, said unto him. And Jesus answered him, saying. And Jesus answered, saying. In Greek, we can place the verb before its subject, " Answered Jesus and said unto him." Or we can prefix an adverb to the phrase, "Then Jesus answered," etc. Take two different MSS., say the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Bezae, and if in one place— Matt. xi. 4, for instance— you do not find a perfect verbal CAUSES OF VARIANTS 15 agreement in this phrase, it will be counted as a variant. In Greek also, you can begin it with " AiroKpiOeU Se" or with "/cat airoKpideii." The man who would allow his faith in the Gospels to be shaken by such a trifle has never comprehended God's ways of working in the realm of Nature. Why, we may ask, has God allowed these variants to exist ? Why has He not made the very copyists of His Word infallible ? Our answer is, Look at His plans in other depart- ments where we are concerned. We are fellow- workers with Him in the humble sphere of feeding and clothing ourselves. God provides the corn, but man has to sow and reap, grind and cook, before it becomes fit for his susten- ance. God gives us the sheep's fleece, and the down of the cotton-plant, but how many human hands must work on them before they are turned into well-fitting garments ? Henry Drummond, in his Ascent of Man^ pp. 257-266 seqq.^ points out that man becomes a nobler animal through the effort to supply his own bodily wants. So God, having provided us 1 6 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS with the Revelation of His truth which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments (so saith the Westminster Assembly's Shorter Catechism, compiled in a.d. 1648), left to His human prophets perfect freedom to use their own words in delivering His message, and to human scribes to embody their own ideas of accuracy in copying it. Have the latter been faithful ? It is the same with them as with all who use God's other gifts. He gives us pure water, rising from the earth in mountain-springs, but is it pure when it reaches the cities ? Or when it has passed through them .? And He has given us the institution of marriage, which was designed for our comfort, and, when properly observed, is an untold blessing to ourselves and to the generations that shall follow us. But human perversity has exceeded itself in its manifold methods for spoiling this divine arrangement. The many marriages which are contracted from unworthy motives, resulting in grievous suffering to both parties ; the tales, not entirely fictitious, which CAUSES OF VARIANTS 17 we read in modern novels, in the records of the Divorce Courts, or those which our own ex- perience of life has led us to observe, tell with a thousand tongues of how man has marred God's plan for his welfare. We are called to be fellow-workers with Him also in the transmission of His Word. He makes even our mistakes, and those of our fellow-men, to praise Him, for the very variants which frighten the weak-minded amongst us act as a stimulant to others, inciting them to search the Scriptures more diligently, to eliminate the mistakes of mere copyists, and to ascertain what it was that the Evangelists actually wrote. Thus it was that the seed of the Word sprouted anew, so to speak, in the sixteenth century ; and thus it has been throughout the whole of , the nineteenth cen- tury ; till at length a company of scholars met in the Jerusalem Chamber at West- minster, and gave us the Revised Version of our English Bible. Has that Version given us the last word ? We trow not ; for when any good thing becomes 1 8 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS stereotyped, it ceases to grow. And growth is a law of life. We can never forget how our Revisers have revealed to us the original beauty of many passages in God's Word. For instance, the passage in Isa. viii. 21-ix. 7. And in the New Testament, their restoration of " love " in the thirteenth chapter of i Corinthians is an out- standing example. " Charity = caritas " is an artificial word, coined by St Jerome because of the poverty of the Latin language, which could not distinguish between ayairri and e/oa>p, between the disinterested love of friends and the love of sweethearts. But "charity" is a very inappropriate term for the expression of our feelings towards God ; especially as we often use it in the sense of " almsgiving " or of "forbearance." The love which the Aposde Paul desired so greatly for himself and for his spiritual children has God for its first object ; and man, the child of God, for its secondary one. Charity, in such a connection, is simply absurd. The object of this little book is not to CAUSES OF VARIANTS 19 depreciate the work of the Revisers. They have accomplished a great task, in which learning, skill, ingenuity, and patience were alike required. But, as I have said, "growth is a principle of life," and before the last of these distinguished men had passed away, new light has been shed on the subject of their labours, from sources to which they had not complete access : chiefly from the early Syriac I and Latin Versions, from the Greek cursives, I and from the Oxyrhynchus papyri. I am induced to write about the Old Syriac Version chiefly because it has been suggested to me by some of my young friends, who are preparing for the Christian ministry, that I ought to gather into a small compass the chief characteristics of the ancient text which I had the happiness of discovering in the library of St Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in the year 1892, which my twin-sister, Mrs Margaret Dunlop Gibson, helped me at that time to photograph in its entirety ; and whose text was first identified, at my request, as being similar to that of the Curetonian manuscript. 20 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS by the late Dr Bensly and by Professor Burkitt. It was transcribed in 1893 by these two gentle- men, and by Dr Rendel Harris (whose good advice had prepared me for its discovery), to the extent of about four-fifths ; while most of the remaining fifth, which one of these original transcribers considered illegible, was deciphered by me in 1895, and supplemented during three subsequent visits which my sister and I made to the monastery in 1897, 1902, and 1906. No one therefore can know better than myself what the text of the palimpsest manu- script really is — not even Professor Burkitt, who has tacked its variants, including nearly the whole Gospel of St Mark, to his new edition of the Curetonian Syriac Gospels. Why, it may be asked, should the text of a Syriac manuscript, which is confessedly a translation, and not the original, be considered of so much importance by scholars ? Their opinion of its value has increased rather than diminished, as the years have gone by since its first publication in 1894. CAUSES OF VARIANTS 21 One reason is because of the language in which it is written. Syriac or rather Christian Aramaic was undoubtedly the mother-tongue of our Lord the Christ. We know this from the few Syriac phrases which are incorporated in the Greek text, instead of being translated, such as " Talitha cumi " (" Maiden, arise ") ; « Ethphatha "^ (" Be opened ") ; and, above all, by His dying words on the Cross, " Eli Eli, lama sabaqthani " (" My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? "). It is worth noting that these words were spoken in the Galilean dialect of Aramaic which bewrayed St Peter, a dialect which bore the same relation to the literary or Edessene Syriac as Doric to Attic, or as Scotch to English. There are not many MSS. of this dialect extant ; the oldest one being a palimpsest, chiefly of St Paul's Epistles, in a continuous text^ not broken up into Lessons, which has been assigned by the chief Semitic authorities in the British Museum to the sixth century, and is now my property. If our Lord had spoken Edessene Syriac in ' Greek, Ephphatha. 22 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS that supreme moment of His sufferings, He /would have said "lemana shabaqthani" instead of « lama sabaqthani." And I cannot help won- dering if He would have said " sibboleth " instead of " shibboleth " if He had lived in the days of Jephthah. The first specimen of spoken Aramaic which we find in the Bible is in Gen. xxxi. 47. There we are told that when Jacob and Laban had set up a heap of stones as a witness between them, Jacob called it in Hebrew," Galeed," " the heap of witness," and Laban called it " Jegar-sahadutha," which means the same thing in Aramaic. This shows that Aramaic was the language spoken in Charan, where Laban dwelt. A tongue akin to Aramaic is largely used in the cuneiform script of Assyria and Babylonia. It must therefore be very ancient. Through- out the Old Testament, the country north of Palestine is always called Aram ; its people were the Aramaeans, and their language was Aramaic. But when they became Christians, finding that they were often mistaken for Armaians, i.e. heathen, they allowed their land to be called by CAUSES OF VARIANTS 23 its Greek name of Syria, themselves to be christened Syrians, and their speech Syriac. The children of Judah who returned from Babylon in the time of Cyrus brought the Babylonian Aramaic ■ with them, the very tongue which Abraham had spoken in Ur and in Charan. The common people had then for- gotten Hebrew, so that Ezra and other scribes had to translate the Law to them, as well as to expound it. This continued until our Lord's time, for we find that all proper names in the New Testament, where they are not Greek, are Syriac ; such as Sapphira, « the beautiful one " ; Cephas, " a stone " ; and all names beginning ( with "Bar," "the son of," equivalent to the Hebrew « Ben," or the Celtic " Mac." The second reason lies in the purity of its \i text. The Sinai Gospels have lain in the recesses of a lonely monastery, unread for at least 1200 years, since the day when John the 1/ Stylite, of Beth-Mari Caddish, at a place called /' Ma'rrath Me§rin, near Antioch on the Orontes, covered them over with a second writing a collection of biographies of Holy Women. 24 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS CAUSES OF VARIANTS 25 The doings of these remarkable, but rather frisky saints, form very instructive reading ; so we cannot wonder that in the year a.d. 697 or 778 John the Stylite took an old volume of the Gospels and used it as writing-material on which to record the adventures of these ladies. The papyrus-plant had then been all used up ; paper was waiting to be invented by the Chinese, a century later ; and vellum must have been very scarce in a desert monastery. It seems to us almost miraculous that a trans- lation of the Four Gospels, made in the second century, and copied, probably, in the fourth one, should, when deciphered and released (as Dr Rendel Harris puts it) " from its palimp- sest prison," i.e. from behind the bars of its superimposed writing, show such a great amount of agreement with the English Authorised Version. In no particular is this agreement more striking than in the many phrases of the Textus Receptus which are omitted by the Revisers. Every passage once familiar to our fathers, which our nineteenth-century Revisers, or Drs Westcott and Hort, have agreed to omit, are in this fourth-century manuscript conspicuous by their absence. The longest of these are Mark xvi. 9-20 and John vii. 53-viii. 11. The first of these can hardly have been written by St Mark, for the simple reason that any author who cared for his own credit would have fitted the 9th verse of chap. xvi. on to the broken 8th verse in a better style ; and would not have finished a sentence with the word yap^ " for." St Paul, it is true, has furnished us with a phrase ending in yap (Phil. i. 1 8), but that is an interrogative sentence ; and any of our Cambridge students who may do it will never be in Class I. of the Classical Tripos. Mr F. C. Conybeare, of Oxford, in the year 1891 made the very interesting discovery of an Armenian MS. at Edschmiatzin, where these twelve verses were written as a separate section, and to them was attached the name of their probable author, Ariston the Presbyter, whom some identify with Aristion, the Presbyter named by Papias in Eusebius* History. It would hardly be safe to say, however, that ■i 26 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS these two long passages are not part of the Gospel. To those who think, with me, that the Synoptic narratives are none of them the product of a single mind ; and that none of the inspired editors whose names they bear can have actually copied from one another's writings, it is easy to believe that Mark xvi. 9-20 and John vii. 53-viii. 1 1 may not be the work of the Evangelists to whose Gospels they are now attached, and may yet be perfectly true records. CHAPTER III THE GENEALOGIES AND THE VIRGIN-BIRTH The genealogy of Joseph, with which the Gospel of Matthew begins, presents us with the same serious difficulties in both Greek and Syriac MSS. It consists of three parts, each containing fourteen verses. Yet, in the second part, i.e. from David to Jechonia, we know from 2 Kings that there were seventeen, not fourteen genera- tions ; and that ver. 8 reads, Joram begat Ozias. Here the names of three of these kings are omitted, for Ahaziah, Joash, and Amaziah really came between Joram and Uzziah or Azariah, as he is called in the Old Testament. Why is Jehoram credited with being the immediate father of his own great-great-grand- son .? To explain this, I must bring forward a 27 28 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS view which has come to us from Hilary ^ and Jerome,* and has lately been advocated by Dr J. M. Heer. The Jewish nation is not the only one which has practised what is called the damnatio memoriae that is, the blotting out of a hated name from all public records and even inscriptions on stone. Instances of this will be found in the histories of Amen-hotep, the so-called " heretic " king of Egypt, who transported his capital from Memphis to Tel-el-Amarna in b.c. 1450 ; of Philip V. of Macedon, of Alcibiades, of Commodus, and others. References to it occur frequently in the Old Testament, in passages such as Exod. xxxii. 33, "Whosoever hath sinned against Me, him will I blot out of My book"; also in Deut. ix. 14, xxv. 19, xxix. 20; 2 Kings xiv. 27 ; Ps. ix. 5, "Thou hast destroyed the wicked. Thou hast blotted out their name for ever and ever" ; Ps. Ixix. 28, " Let them be blotted out of the Book of Life." • See Minge's Patrologioy yo\. ix., Comm. on Matt. i. 8. ' Migne, vol. xxv.; Jerome, vol. vii., c. 10, Comm. on Matthew. GENEALOGIES AND VIRGIN-BIRTH 29 And in the New Testament, Rev. iii. 5, " I will in no wise blot out his name out of the Book of Life." These three kings, Ahaziah, Joash, and Amaziah, were not worse than others of their line ; Joash, indeed, was better than some of the other Jewish monarchs. But they were all descendants of the wicked Ahab unto the fourth generation, through Athaliah, Ahab's daughter, wife of King Jehoram ; and not only had a curse been pronounced on the pro- geny of Ahab, but he had broken the second commandment, the one of the Ten Words to which a special curse upon those who defied it was attached. In other words, he had pro- moted and fostered idolatry. Matthew made no mistake in omitting these three kings, for that had been done, spme centuries earlier, by the priests who were the official guardians of the Temple records. For evidence of the care with which Jewish family records were kept, we need only refer to the lists in Genesis, Samuel, Chronicles, Ruth, and Nehemiah ; also to the papyri lately 30 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS discovered by Dr Rubensohn in the island of Elephantine, just below the first cataract of the Nile. Though we are told by Julius Africanus (in Eusebius, H.E. i. 7) that Herod the Great caused most of the registers to be burnt, in order to hide from the Roman Emperor the fact that he was not himself in the line of Jewish kings ; there is little doubt that these would soon be replaced from memory by those who could trace their own descent either from Aaron or from David, or probably from registers kept in private families. In ver. 1 2 we read, And after they were brought to Babylon^ Jechonia begat Shealtiel^ and Shealtiel begat Zerubbabel. This is the Jechonia, of whom it is said in Jer. xxii. 30, JVrite ye this man childless. It is quite legitimate to suppose that Jechonia was childless, because the sons whose names we find in i Chron. iii. 17, 18 died young, and not because they were never born to him. The chronicler, in fact, makes Pedaiah, brother of Shealtiel, the father of Zerubbabel ; and there is no inconsistency in this, because by GENEALOGIES AND VIRGIN-BIRTH 31 the law of a Levirite marriage, Shealtiel might marry the widow of the childless Pedaiah, or even if Pedaiah married the widow of the ■ childless Shealtiel, her son Zerubbabel might be reckoned to either of them. Whatever be the reason of it, Zerubbabel is more than once called the son of Shealtiel in the Book of Ezra. It cannot be aflSrmed, then, that Matthew has made a mistake in either of these passages. He doubtless wrote exacdy what was in the Temple register. Generations before Matthew was born, the priests had expunged the names of Ahab's descendants, through his daughter Athaliah, to the fourth generation ; and since the time of Ezra, Zerubbabel had, even in his own lifetime, been called the son of Shealtiel. Dr Heer has pointed out that the genealogy of Joseph in Matthew's Gospel is cast in exactly the same mould as the very short one which concludes the Book of Ruth. It is probable that this was the customary form for such documents ; and if any change had been made in the entry, which was probably dictated by 32 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS Joseph, regarding our Lord's birth, the con- sequence to Mary would have been terrible. She would probably have been put to death by stoning. So we must not wonder that the Sinai text reads (ver. i6), Joseph^ to whom was betrothed Mary the Virgiriy begat Jesus, who is called the Christ. The phrase which qualifies this statement of Joseph's paternity is probably an addition by Matthew himself to the statement which he found in the official register. For the descendants of Levi and for those of David, as the Sinai text affirms both Joseph and Mary to have been, such registering was imperative. The verse has been so much and so variously modified, both in the Curetonian MS. and in the Greek ones, that the shock of surprise which was felt both in the Unitarian camp and in the Orthodox one, at once gave rise to a charge of heresy. This charge, happily, could not be substantiated, for after the publication of the full text it was seen that not only is ver. 1 6 self-contradictory, but the story of the Annunciation, which begins in ver. 21, is sub- GENEALOGIES AND VIRGIN-BIRTH 33 stantially the same as it is in all Greek MSS. The only contradictory point in the narrative is in ver. 21, She shall bear to thee a son, and in ver. 25, And she bore to him a son. As, however, these phrases are found also in the Apocryphal book called the Protevangelium Jacobii in its Syriac version, a seventh-century palimpsest belonging to myself, whose text has been published by me as No. XL, Studia Sinaitica, they cannot have the significance, to Semitic minds, which we Westerns would naturally attribute to them. The chief purpose of the Protevangelium is to inculcate a belief in the perpetual virginity of our Lord's mother, and from its fables the whole worship of the Virgin in the Roman and probably in the Greek Church has sprung. Though it was condemned in the sixth century by Pope Gelasius in the Decretum Gelasii — a decree which has never been repealed, — Romanist writers frequently use its stories, like weapons from a rich armoury, to defend their otherwise unproved assertions about the incidents in Mary's life. 3 34 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS Joseph, from a legal point of view only, was the father of our Lord. In modern Arabia, as in ancient Babylon, a man is considered the father of a widow's young children if he marries her. They no longer belong to the tribe of their real father, but to that of their stepfather. The reason for this is obvious ; for we know that the strength of a clan must have been measured by the number of its men who could fight. Canon Girdlestone brought to my notice, that one of the laws in the famous Code of Hammu- rabbi, king of Babylon, circa B.C. 2200, is to the effect that if a man has adopted a boy as his son, that boy becomes doubly his if he teaches him a handicraft. And there can be no reasonable doubt that Jesus learnt the art of carpentering in Joseph's work- shop. It was no fine art, such as that of a modern cabinet-maker; for Eastern people, when left quite to themselves, do not fill their houses with pretty furniture. An early tradi- tion says that the articles which came out of Joseph's workshop were chiefly plough-handles, made of very perishable wood ; and for that GENEALOGIES AND VIRGIN-BIRTH 35 reason, no specimen of our Lord's handiwork was preserved by His disciples. Joseph was indeed a model husband. Though it is evident from ver. 1 9 that he at first suspected Mary of infidelity to him, when he had been made aware by divine revelation that his suspicion was groundless, he at once threw the mantle of his protection over her. And the Syriac versions bring out, more clearly than the Greek original, what was her true position in regard to him. In the Old Syriac and in the Peshitta alike, we are told that she was betrothed to him at the time of the Annuncia- tion (Luke i. 27). She was still only betrothed at the time of her visit to Elizabeth ; for, after its completion (possibly after she had been present at the circumcision of Elizabeth's son), she returned to her own' house (Luke i. 56) ; but when she accompanied Joseph to Bethlehem, she had the status of his wife ; for otherwise, she would have committed an outrage on all Eastern ideas of propriety by accompanying him. Thus it came to pass that our Lord was born in wedlock ; and that the journey 36 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS to Beth Lehem, followed by the flight to Egypt, and a two years' residence there, saved Mary from becoming the object of gossip and perhaps of slander from the people of Nazareth, who would have been astonished at her return, so shortly after her marriage, with a baby. Con- siderations of this kind probably determined Mary to undertake the journey to Beth Lehem. The Syriac versions, as we have said, leave us in no doubt about her position, for in Luke ii. 5 they call her Joseph's wife — no ambiguous word, such as /jieij.v>j Or " drew on." 78 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS at a very early period, to the end of ver. 4. Possibly a scribe left it out by accident, and afterwards inserted it on the margin ; then a later scribe, copying his work, embodied it in the text at the wrong place. Codex Bezje, and the Palestinian Syriac Version have it also at the end of ver. 3 ; whilst the Gospel of Pseudo- Peter, published in 1892, actually puts it into the speech of the women as they walked to the sepulchre, instead of only into their thoughts, as it is here. In Mark xvi. 8, " And fled from the tomb ; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them " is omitted. In Mark xvi. 8 we read, ^^ And when they had heardy they went out ; and wenty and said nothing to any man ; for they were afraid" "Here endeth the Gospel of Mark." And after a row of red stops, we have on the same narrow column, also in red, " The Gospel of Luke." The omission of vers. 9-20 is the more surprising, because vers. 17-20 are the only portion of St Mark's Gospel which is extant VARIANTS IN MARK 79 in the Curetonian manuscript. On this subject, which has given rise to so much discus- sion among scholars, it may be presumptuous in me to venture an opinion ; but, apart from the fact that a name, that of Ariston the Presbyter, has been found by Mr F. C. Conybeare attached to this section, in an Armenian MS. of Etchmiadzin, I think that they put into the mouth of our Lord some words which it would be difllicult for anyone to justify : for the promise contained in vers. 17, 18 has not been fulfilled. It is indeed recorded that the signs here described did follow the Apostles and early disciples ; but, after the first century, we have no trustworthy historical evidence that they followed anyone who believed. Why did miracles of healing cease with the Apostolic age ? I have a theory on the subject which is at least not more fanciful than some which I have met with. It is this : — Jesus Christ, being the Son of God, was, even in His human body, the source of all the life in the universe — animal life as well as moral and spiritual. An inexhaustible, vital power lay 8o LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS hidden under His humble exterior. He could exert or repress it at will ; but repression was not the usual impulse of His loving heart. Sinners felt uncomfortable in His presence ; they shrank from His direct gaze ; and bodily disease, which springs from decay and corruption, was simply arrested by this ever-flowing stream of vital force which, emanating from His person, flowed into the persons of those who came near Him. Bodily defects were thrown ofF by the people who were thus quickened. And some- thing of this force remained with those who had been much in His society, gradually sub- siding as the years rolled on. Thus the power of healing the sick by the laying on of hands was possessed by the Apostles, but it could not be transmitted to those who had not seen God manifest in the flesh. In Cureton's manuscript the Gospel of John follows that of Mark, and is in its turn followed by that of Luke. The Sinai Palimp- sest, on the contrary, shows us the four Gospels in the order familiar to us. Why do these two representatives of the Old Syriac Version difFer VARIANTS IN MARK 8 1 from each other on so important a point ? They are linked and yet separate. Their relation to each other, and to the Diatessaron, and to the Peshitta, will for some time continue to present a fruitful field for discussion. CHAPTER VI VARIANTS IN LUKE Of only one ancient manuscript can it be said that it is perfect, and has never lost a leaf. That one, strange to say, is the Codex Sinaiticus, the Greek manuscript of the whole Bible, plus the Epistle of Barnabas, and part of the Shepherd of Hermas, which was found by Constantine Tischendorf in the very same monastery of St Catherine, on Mount Sinai, where, half a century later, I found the Old Syriac text of the Gospels. This fact, to my mind, shows that there was some exaggeration in Tischen- dorf's tale about its being in a waste-paper basket. A basket, if you please I but not one intended to contain rubbish 1 I became aware — and possibly my habit of constantly talking modern Greek with my twin-sister, Mrs 83 VARIANTS IN LUKE 83 Gibson, made the monks more communicative to us than their predecessors were to Tischen- dorf— that these holy fathers had a habit of keeping nearly all their manuscripts in boxes ; a practice which made it difficult for them to find one on short notice; and that those MSS. which had lost their bindings were consigned to baskets ; but not with the least intention of throwing them away. As for the famous document being in an outhouse, there is now scarcely a room in the whole monastery which does not deserve that description ; for almost every apartment within the quadrangle of its walls has a door opening to the outer air. Unlike the Greek Sinaiticus, this Syriac MS. had the misfortune to lose seventeen of its leaves, in the days before a second Syriac text was written over the Gospel one, and it was turned into a palimpsest, or twice-scraped thing. Note that the vellum was polished with pumice- stone, once in the fourth century, to prepare its surface for receiving the text of the Gospels ; then again in the seventh or eighth century, to cover that Gospel up and hide it under the 84 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS Tales of Holy Women. It may have been for this very reason, viz. that because of careless treatment, seventeen of its leaves had dropped away, John the Stylite considered it chiefly fit for being used as writing material. On the very last page, at the end of a line, we find the date of the later writing. At the spot where this occurs there is a hole in the vellum, and this makes it impossible for us to tell whether the date is 1009 or 1090 after Alexander the Great. If a flourish occurred in the script at the end of this line, such as may be seen on many other pages of the book, the date would undoubtedly be 1009, as I read it when left entirely to my own devices in 1892 ; but if the syllable " In " stood where the hole now is, as Dr Rendel Harris supposes, we must acquiesce in its being 1090, i.e. in the eighth century. From that time no one can possibly have read a syllable of the fourth - century Gospel text beneath it, until I detected our Lord's name, viz. " Jesus the Messiah" in 1892, and proceeded further to decipher the words, " Verily^ verily, I say unto you" words VARIANTS IN LUKE 85 which made me sure that the dirty pages which I had been exploring contained an early text of the Gospels. In the first chapter of St Luke's Gospel vers. 16-38 are on one of the lost leaves. The Magnificat, spoken by Mary, runs thus (vers. 46-55) : "Afy soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God the Saviour, Who hath regarded the lowliness of His hand- maiden. For from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For He hath done to me great things; He who by name is glorious and holy, whose mercy is unto the generation and on the tribe to those who fear Him. And He hath shewed strength with His arm : and hath scattered the imagination of the hearts of the proud ones. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and hath exalted the humble. . And He hath filled the poor with His good things ; and the rich He hath despised when in want. And He hath cared for His son Israel, and hath remembered His mercy : as He spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever." In ver. 63, ^^ And they all marvelled" is 86 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS transferred from the end of ver. 63 to the end of ver. 64. It is thus described as the efFect of Zacharias' tongue being loosed, rather than of his writing that his son's name was John. The phrase has perhaps suffered a transposition similar to that about the size of the stone in Mark xvi. 3, 4. In two old Latin MSS., the Vercellensis and Veronensis, this phrase comes after the word "loosened" and before "And his mouth was opened." This last phrase does not occur in the Sinai text. Thus we have at the end of ver. 64, " And straightway the string of his tongue was loosened, and he blessed God, and they all marvelled." In Luke i. 80, it is said of John the Baptist, " And he fled into the desert until the day of his shewing unto Israel." In chap. ii. ver. 4 we read, "And Joseph also went up from Nazareth, a city of Galilee, to Judaa, to the city of David, which is called Beth Lehem, he and Mary his wife, being great with child, that there they might be enrolled, because they were both of the house of David." Here the word used for " wife " is more explicit VARIANTS IN LUKE 87 than either the e/imjarevfiiivti of the Greek MSS. or the " espoused " of the Peshitta. It shows clearly that Mary was under the full legal pro- tection of Joseph. In Luke ii. 8 we read how " shepherds were there in that place, and they were awake, and were keeping watch over their ewes." In ver. 1 2 the angel says to them, " Behold, I give you a sign." In Luke ii. 14 we have, "Ana goodwill to men," the reading of our Authorised Version ; evSoKia, instead of evSoKiaf (with Codex Vaticanus, Codex L, and some important cursive Greek MSS. (fam. i), the Peshitta, the Palestinian Syriac, and the Coptic). It seems to me that both readings, "good- will to men," and " to men of goodwill," have in them an eternal truth. God, who willeth not the death of a sinner, proclaimed His "goodwill to men" by the human birth of our Lord. At the same time, it is only "men of goodwill" who accept His wonderful gift, and therefore it is they only who enjoy peace. In ver. 15 we are told that the shepherds 88 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS said one to another, " Come^ let us go to J*eih Lehem and see this thing which is come to pass as the angel hath shewed us" I submit that these words are more suitable than "tfj the Lord hath made known unto us" We are not told that they had heard the voice of God in any way. Is it not more nttural that they should speak of the angel whose song of praise was still ringing in their ears ? In ver. 35 we have a very curious reading, which, so far as we know, does not occur any- where else. It is in the blessing pronounced on Mary by Simeon : " And through thine own soul thou shalt cause a spear to pass." This may possibly be the original form of the passage. Those Christians who pay an undue adoration to the Virgin Mary, who, in fact, call her " Mother of God," cannot be expected to see that some time before the Crucifixion took place, she was partly the authoress of her own woes. For, like many another fond mother, she tried to control and restrain Him after He had taken the thread of His destiny into His own hands ; and one VARIANTS IN LUKE 89 cannot help thinking that if she had understood Him better, if, in short, she had maintained the sublime faith which she exhibited at the time of the Annunciation and during her subsequent trials, she would have saved both herself and Him from some needless pain. I do not, of course, refer to her sufferings at the time of His Crucifixion, but only to the incident re- lated in Matt. xii. 46-50. The word "spear" occurs also in the Peshitta ; the Curetonian MS. being here deficient. But the idea of Mary being an active agent in the piercing of her own heart is peculiar to the Sinai Codex, and could not have been imagined at a period later than the second century. How natural it is that the repeated revisions of the Old Syriac should have improved it away 1 In chap. ii. ver. .36, we have another unique reading. It is said of Anna the prophetess, " And seven days only was she with a husband after her virginity ; and the rest of her life was she in widowhood^ eighty and four years" Starding as this variant is, it may yet be the true reading. A marriage which lasts only 90 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS seven years is no uncommon thing, and if the same portion of wedded happiness had been allotted to Anna as to thousands of other women, this fact would have hardly been worth recording in a narrative so concise as Luke's is. But the mention of seven days shows us that Anna's experience had been by no means a common one. In vers. 41, 42 we have, *-^ And His parents (or kinsfolk) went every year to Jerusalem at the feast of unleavened bread of the passover. And when He was twelve years oldy they went up, as was their wont, to the feast. And when they had fulfilled the days of the feast, they returned, and the boy Jesus tarried behind them in Jerusalem ; and His parents knew it not." The Syriac word translated " parents " may possibly mean " kinsfolk." (It is found also in the Palestinian Syriac, the Peshitta having " and Joseph and his mother.") In chap. iii. vers. 4-6, the quotation from Isa. xl. 3-5 runs thus : " Make ye ready a way for the Lord, and make straight in the plain a path for our God" (with the Curetonian and the VARIANTS IN LUKE 91 Peshitta). " All the valleys shall be filled, the mountains and the hills shall be brought low ; the rough shall become smooth, and the difficult places plains ; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together" (almost with the Curetonian, but without its addition of " because the mouth of the Lord hath spoken," both being nearer to Isa. xl. 4, 5 than other manuscripts are. This is a very good instance for those who judge the Curetonian text to be an amplification of the Sinai one). In Luke iii. ver. 9, we read, ^^ And behold, the axe hath reached unto the root of the trees " (with the Curetonian). And in ver. 14, "Do violence to no man, and do injury to no man ; let your wages suffice for you " (with the Curetonian). This seems to me. a better rendering than "be content with your wages." Soldiers are not forbidden to ask higher wages from the Government ; but they are exhorted not to supplement their wages by living at the expense of the people on whom they are quartered. I know from personal observation 92 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS that this habit prevails in the Sultan's army. Several years ago, in 1896, Mrs Gibson and I rode from Egypt to Palestine over what is called by dragomans "the short desert." Stones were thrown at us by some Moslem youths while we were passing through a cemetery on the outskirts of the town of Gaza. The whirligigs, swings, and merry-go-rounds common to an English fair were jingling among the tombstones ; so that we could not be accused of being the first to disturb the quiet of a graveyard. Nevertheless, the crowd looked so angry that we thought it prudent to apply to the Governor for a guard of two soldiers to watch over our tents, which were pitched in a field close by. We retained one of these men to ride with us for four days as far as Bittir, on the JafFa-Jerusalem railway. He explained to us that he had to provide his own horse, but the peasant families on whom he was quartered for the night had to feed both it and him. He would just say " Bring me a chicken," and when he had eaten this, " Bring me another chicken." Then he would VARIANTS IN LUKE 93 ask for some tobacco, and even for a little money. It is probable that the better-paid Roman soldiers in our Lord's time did the same kind of thing ; for an unarmed subject population cannot easily put a limit to the exactions of an armed man who plays the part of a cuckoo in a robin's nest. More than one explanation has been given by commentators in different ages, as to why the genealogy in Matthew differs so completely from the genealogy in Luke. I think that Dr Heer, like Matthew Henry, has adopted the true explanation. St Matthew, having received the story of the Nativity from Joseph, gave also Joseph's genealogy, through which our Lord's claim to be the Messiah and the official descendant of David is asserted ; for Matthew's aim in writing his .Gospel was chiefly to convince his Jewish countrymen of this fact. Luke, on the other hand, gives us Mary's account of the Nativity, and therefore he gives us also Mary's genealogy. His chief aim was to convince his friend Theophilus and other Gentiles that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of 94 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS God. Our Lord's claim to the Messiahship would have had very little weight with them. I cannot think that the story of the Virgin Mary's parents being named Joachim and Anne rests on any secure foundation. It is derived from a fabulous book called the Protevangelium Jacobi (which I have myself edited in its Syriac dress), and which, though embodying early traditions, was excluded from the list of canonical, and even true books, by the Decretum Gelasii in the sixth century, but upon which the whole worship of the Virgin Mary in the Roman Church rests. Anne may have been the name of Mary's mother, though it has obviously been suggested to the mind of the romancer, by the story of the prophet Samuel, or more probably of Susannah. The Talmud tells us that the name of Mary's father was Heli.* Men, says Dr Heer, were often called the immediate fathers of their daughter's children. We can find more than * Jerusalem, Talmud, Chagizgah, fol. 77, 4. Some Jewish scholars deny that our Lord's mother is meant in this passage. But I would ask, What other Mary could there be against whom their ancestors had such a violent hatred? VARIANTS IN LUKE 95 one instance of this for ourselves in the Old Testament. Athaliah was the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, yet in 2 Kings viii. 26 ; 2 Chron. xxii. 2, she is called the daughter of Omri, who was Ahab's father. I love to think that our Lord was not an actual descendant of the gorgeous Solomon, nor of any Jewish crowned head excepting David, the sweet singer of Israel, whose poetic gift seems to have been inherited by the most blessed among women. No. He sprang from a line of more modest ancestors, amongst whom we find no kingly names save those of Zerubbabel and Salathiel, names which may possibly represent quite diflFerent people from those in i Chron.^ and in Ezra. Possibly Mary may have been descended from a more consistendy God-fearing stock than Joseph (see Zech. xii. 12). Justin Martyr* and Irenaeus' both assume that the genealogy in Luke is that of Mary. Justin, indeed, tells us that amongst the Jews a man was often called the father of his ' I Chron. iii. 19. * Dial, cum Tryphone, 43, 88, 100. ^ Book iii. c. 22. 96 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS daughter's children (Dial. 43), and it is possible in reading Luke iii. 23 to shift the bracket and make the parenthesis begin with " as," and end with " Joseph." We should then read, " yf»^ Jesus Himself was (beginning to be about thirty years old^ beings as was supposed^ the son of Joseph^ ofHelij ofMatthat" etc. The Sinai text, with the Curetonian, the Diatessaron, and the Old Latin Codices e and f, omits the word apxofievos, " beginning" (to be). I do not see that this omission affects the main question. But if we take the phrase about our Lord's age, and about His being supposed to be the son of Joseph, as parenthetical, we have a distinct statement that Jesus was the son (or grandson) of Heli. Dr C. Vogt calls attention to the fact that this statement, " /ind Jesus Himself was of Heli" is expressed in precisely the same grammatical form as all the other phrases expressing sonship which follow it; thus, " Jesus Himself was of Heli, of Matthat, of Levi," etc. The word woV, " son," does not come into the true genealogy at all, but into the supposed one. VARIANTS IN LUKE 97 Our English translators ought not to have inserted the explanatory words "which was" into that genealogy at all. It is a curious coincidence, though, of course, no proof, that some of our Lord's direct ancestors, according to Luke's gene- alogy, are referred to in the prophecy of Zechariah (Zech. xii. 12-14). After the state- ment that " they shall look on Him whom they have pierced," we are told that " the land shall mourn . . . the family of the house of David apart, and their wives apart ; the family of the house of Nathan apart, and their wives apart ; the family of the house of Levi apart, and their wives apart ; the family of the house of Shimei apart, and their wives apart." These names are found in Luke's genealogy ; the only doubtful one among them being that of Shimei, or Semei, which may, like some other Hebrew names, have been transliterated into a form which its bearer would hardly have recognised. Dr Riggenbach^ (quoted by Vogt, Biblische ' See TheologUche Studien und Kritiken (1885), p. 584 seqq. 7 98 LIGHT ON THE FOUR GOSPELS Studien, Band xii., Heft 2, p. 8i) remarks that Luke's genealogy cannot possibly be that of Joseph, because, if it were, he would never have taken all value and interest out of it by pre- fixing to it the words