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| PAPYRUS 66 --- BOOK OF JOHN |
What a distress to be born
blind!
What a greater distress to
CHOOSE
to be blind ...
spiritually !
John 9:35 ... The Man Born Blind
JESUS heard that they had
cast him out;
and when HE+ had found him,
HE+ said unto him, Dost thou
believe
on the SON+ of GOD?
John 9:35
He answered and said, Who is
he, Lord,
that I might believe on
HIM+?
And JESUS said unto him, Thou
hast both seen HIM+,
and it is HE+ that talketh
with thee.
And he said, LORD, I
believe.
And he worshipped HIM+.
John 9: 36-38
+ + +
What a greater distress to
CHOOSE
to be blind ...
spiritually !
The Westcott-Hort and
Tischendorf revision camps changed GOD , Theou, to MAN, anthropou, in
their revised Greek Text of John 9:35... changing the very words of The LORD
JESUS CHRIST.
They based their revisions
upon these four Codices: Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Bezae, and Washingtonensis.
That is: four uncial manuscripts out of 49 uncials which contain the book
of John, according to NA-26th introduction, p.49.
They also cited minuscule
579 ( Hoskier's "Paris-97" , a 13th century ms ) , Sahidic-Coptic ms,
Syriac-Sinaiticus ms, and an Old Latin ms "d" !
THAT IS THE SUM TOTAL of
Tischendorf and Westcott-Hort's evidence for making SON+ of GOD into son
of man.
The revisers swayed a huge
number of Bible publishers , scholars, and translators to adopt their new-found
reading.
Did they now have more
enlightenment
than HUNDREDS of other
uncials, minuscules , manuscripts
in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and Bohairic, and
more accuracy than the ancient versions and Early Christian writers such
Tertullian* ... COMBINED ?
*[ See Tertullian's
writings: Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, Against Praxeas, chapter
22, p. 618. ]
The COMBINED number of
manuscripts
of a
RELIABLE nature ,
·
spread about a wide
geographic area,
·
spread over several centuries,
·
spread through a variety languages,
·
distributed under the watchful eye of an assortment
of church families
·
quoted verbatim by at least one reputable church apologist,
Tertullian
should
give pause
to those evaluating the
WEIGHT of the manuscript evidence.
It is of great
significance that the "son of man" reading is found in LOCALIZED
manuscripts, all characterized by the Alexandrian text-types, under the
watchful eye of a limited amount of church families, perhaps based in Egypt.
Later evidence ...
is found in Nestle-Aland's
26th edition. Two more manuscripts have "son of
man."
What are they?
One is Papyrus 66 and the other is Papyrus 75.
Are they RELIABLE
witnesses to the text ?
Papyrus 66 is early, yes,
but horribly corrupted with a large amount of corrections of every sort done by
an assortment of scribes following an even greater assortment of exemplars and
text-types. The age of Papyrus 66 is debatable, with the latest scholarly work
by Brent Nongbi placing it in the middle of the 4th century.
Philip W. Comfort and David
P. Barrett included a print out of the entire Papyrus 66 in their ( revised,
2001 ) book, The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts.
It shows the incredible number of errors and corrections in it,
errors which even a novice is able to discern.
Papyrus 75's scribal work is much more professionally
executed; it does not exude the errors that Papyrus 66 does. Unfortunately,
Papyrus 75 is extremely similar to Codex B ( Vaticanus).
Like Papyrus 66, it is
now thought to be a product of the 4th century. [ See Wikipedia article on
Papyrus 75 ].
Thus, to summarize, we are
left with:
·
4 ( out of 49 ) uncials,
·
2 Papyri ( one unreliable and the other a mirror-image of the
uncial Codex B ) ,
·
and a tiny handful of minuscules
which are the basis for
changing the words of The LORD JESUS CHRIST as HE+ reveals His+ identity to the
man born blind who received his sight at His+ hands.
+ + +
See following post for list of Bibles with MAN instead of THEOU.
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