Today, those who are interested in the original Greek will wind up using something like the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament or perhaps, if you’re odd, an earlier critical text, like Westcott and Hort’s The New Testament in the Original Greek. If you’ve got a strong attraction to the early fundamentalist movement, perhaps you will read Scrivener’s edition. Maybe you’re into Robinson and Pierpont. It doesn’t matter for our purposes today, because it’s not the usual text-critical issues that I’m concerned with today.
Here’s Westcott and Hort’s Matthew 4:7:
This would appear in English as something like
Jesus said to him, Again, it is written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. …
But if we walk back into history and pull up the earliest surviving manuscript that has Matthew 4:7 in it, we get Vaticanus, where the verse reads like so:
This would appear in English something like this:
JsSAIDTOHIMAGAIN
ITISWRITTENTHOU
SHALTNOTTEMPT
LDTHYGD
Gone are the lower-case letters, gone the accents, gone the verse divisions and even word divisions. But perhaps most interesting are the weird little abbreviations: “Js” for Jesus, “LD” for “Lord”, “GD” for “God”. These abbreviations, known as nomina sacra, are scattered throughout all the earliest Christian writings we have.
If we are attempting to reconstruct the oldest text form based on the existing witnesses, I think there’s a strong case to be made that the nomina sacra should be included.
Now, the new way of writing Greek, with capital and lowercase letters, with word-spaces, verses, and commas and such, has much to recommend it. I’m not suggesting we all start using facsimiles of Vaticanus instead of the usual texts.
But if we make sure to keep the format of the old documents in mind, I suspect we can avoid certain ways of misreading the New Testament.
For example, in today’s world, an organization known as the Gideons drops Bibles all over the place, especially in hotel rooms. The idea, if I understand it correctly, is for evangelism — that people who are not Christians will stumble upon these Bibles, begin reading, and experience a conversion.
The early Church did not use the Bible this way. We can say this on historical grounds — writing materials were expensive, and most people were illiterate, so no one would think of dropping a Bible into every room of some hotel.
But a look at the text itself will reveal that the Bible was a sort of insider document. If the Gideons produced a Bible in the format of early Greek manuscripts, you would find bits like this:
IANDMYFRAREONE
JSSAITHUNTOHIMIAMTHEWAYTHETRUTHANDTHELIFENOMNCOMESTOTHEFRBUTBYME
ANDASTHEYTHUSSPAKEJSHIMSELFSTOODINTHEMIDSTOFTHEM … FORASTHATHNOTFLESHANDBLOOD
HOWTHATCTDIEDFOROURSISN
REPENTANCETOWARDGDANDFAITHTOWARDOURLDJSCT
Imagine handing a member of the general public a tract about the good news of Jesus Christ, except that instead of Jesus, Christ, God, Father, and Lord, your tract simply had the abbreviations Js, Ct, Gd, Fr, and Ld.
The Bible, in point of fact, has always operated within a tradition of interpretation. It doesn’t now, and never has, contributed autonomously to the spread of Christianity via spontaneous reading of it by outsiders. The Bible has always functioned within a community of readers who explain it, just as an early reader would need to have it explained that JSCTOURLD is Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Perhaps one day there will be a critical edition of the Greek New Testament that uses the nomina sacra.