Rejoinder to Hixson on the CJ: Part One of Three

After I posted WM 149, Dr. Elijah Hixson (EH) posted three rather long comments (totaling over 2,000 words) to my blog in response to my review of his article. I took some time today to read and begin to write a few responses to his comments. I thought it might be better to post my rejoinders as a series of three new blog articles, rather than adding to the pile of comments.

I’ll copy EH’s comments below (in blue), along with my responses:

(1/~4?) Jeff, thanks for this. Forgive me for responding to what you’ve written. I rarely have time to listen to things, and responding to audio/video is much more difficult than responding to a recording, so I have got to go by what you’ve written.

JTR: Thanks for responding to the written notes for this episode. There were a few things in the audio version that expanded and clarified a few points. Feel free to listen if time allows, but happy you took time to respond to the written article (I think this is what you meant to write above, rather than “responding to a recording”). Hope you don’t mind me offering this rejoinder and some clarifications to your comments.

Perhaps the best way to start is to say explicitly why I did the work for the post. I’ll come back to it at the end. I decided that, since the THGNT lists more than the usual few manuscripts at 1 John 5:7–8, the best way I could prepare myself to write about that variant when I got to it in the textual commentary would be to look at all the manuscripts myself. I had no intentions of blogging about it when I started, nor did I have any idea what I would find. At some point in the middle, I realised how valuable the info is, and in light of how difficult it would be to get all the appropriate permissions to use the images in a printed book, I thought a blog would be a good way to get the info out there.

JTR: Thanks for providing this background info on how you came to write the article. As I pointed out in the WM 149 audio, everyone should appreciate your labors (whatever his views) in collecting this material (and images) together as an online resource. Thanks for this.

I had read some TR advocates appealing to known provenance (I think blog post(s) by Taylor DeSoto most recently, but I’ve seen a similar line of argument used in KJV-only literature—I draw a distinction particularly because my criticism of appealing to provenance isn’t relevant to KJV-onlyism), and that argument has always been strange to me—because (as you mention) the default Christianity before the reformation was Catholic or Orthodox, “known provenance” often includes things like Mary-worship, 2nd commandment violations, etc. It’s fine to appeal to known provenance as long as we’re clear that these are not churches that Reformed Baptists and Presbyterians would ever approve of in any other sense, and all of them accepted a lot more into the canon (Psalm 151 for example) than we do now as well. It’s difficult for me to take the ‘unprovenanced/heretical church use’ objection seriously when the provenanced manuscripts were used by churches that most reformed Christians would probably consider heretical. There’s no point in whitewashing that.

JTR: This is where things get a little cloudier for me. As I’m sure you’ll understand, without specific references to which authors or articles you’re responding to, it’s hard to know exactly where this critique was aimed, or to access its validity. In short, as I’m sure you can understand, without specifics, it might even come across as a “straw man” argument.

Contrary to what you say here, it seems to me that confessional TR advocates, in particular, are well aware of the shortcomings within the Christian movement that necessitated the Reformation, while also affirming the providential preservation of the text, despite these ecclesiastical shortcomings, and the definitive affirmation of the text by the Protestant orthodox during the Reformation.

Given that the confessional TR position does not depend on a “reconstruction” method, but a “preservation” method, the fact that the pre-Reformation churches which produced and used the now extant mss. had errant beliefs or practices seems less relevant, while it would, on the other hand, necessarily be highly relevant to the “reconstruction” approach.

You make reference to the fact that prior to the Reformation, some Christians “accepted a lot more into the canon”, and you use the apocryphal Psalm 151 as an example of this. Would you not agree, however, that any acceptance of non-canonical, uninspired writings as part of Scripture at any point in Christian history would have been in error? Psalm 151 is an interesting example. As I understand it, Psalm 151 appears in Codex Sinaiticus and some other LXX mss., but it was never accepted by Jews as part of the Hebrew Bible (and no Hebrew version of Psalm 151 was known until an expanded version of it was uncovered in the DSS), nor was it ever confessionally affirmed as canonical by Christians. This example, it seems to me, actually supports quite nicely the Confessional Text emphasis on text as a canonical issue (ergo, the title of last fall’s “Text and Canon” conference). Those who accepted Psalm 151 as canonical were in error, as were those who accepted the so-called shorter ending of Mark, the freer logion in Mark, or the expanded “Western” readings in Acts, etc.. The Protestant Reformation offered a needed providential occasion for giving clear definition to the canon of Scripture (and the canonical text).

You write: “One of the main problems I see here is that EH seems to imply that the reason TR advocates embrace the CJ is because of this sort of external evidence. That is, he assumes that TR advocates are engaged in the same sort of reconstruction methodology as modern/postmodern text critics.” Though you may have inferred it, I assure you I did not imply that. I have not ever assumed that TR advocates are “engaged in the same sort of reconstruction methodology” as I am. I do see TR advocates embracing evidence when it is convenient for the TR position though, and my point here is that it is inconsistent to do so in every case. The bigger point is that the mis-handling of evidence where mis-handling can be clearly seen points to mis-handling of evidence when it cannot be as clearly seen. Your own words about GA 177 (source: http://www.jeffriddle.net/2010/08/daniel-wallace-on-comma-johanneum.html) are: “Wallace is no friend to the traditional text, and he dismisses the value of this new witness. Still it adds some weight to the argument for the authenticity of the comma.” Going from your own words, you were quick to affirm that 177 “adds some weight to the argument for the authenticity of the comma.” Except 177 is the one that was written with a verse number in a hand that signs and dates the manuscript to a (presumably) Catholic priest in 1785—well after the Reformation.

JTR: Sorry, but it still seems to me that your discussion of these mss. as empirical evidence and your conclusion that this serves as some sort of "defeater" to the TR position misses the point of confessional TR advocacy, which is not based on “reconstruction.” I think I made a point in the introduction to the WM 149 audio (but not in the notes) that has been often made in my podcasts, namely that TR advocates readily concede that some TR readings, especially like the CJ, are not well supported by extant external evidence and are more difficult to defend on empirical grounds (if you don’t have time to listen to the entire podcast you can listen to the first few minutes and will be able to hear this). This is hardly a "whitewashing" of the evidence.

Though it may seem to you that confessional TR advocates are only pointing to the empirical evidence “when it is convenient” I do not think this is, in fact, the case. Again, many times over we have acknowledged that some TR readings (like the CJ) are harder to defend than others. The argument for the CJ is not made on the basis of empirical evidence by confessional TR advocates.

You then move on to a “bigger point” about “mishandling of evidence.” Here you give as a lone example a blog post I wrote nearly ten years ago (August 26, 2010), in which I made the briefest of references to Dan Wallace’s discovery of the CJ in the margin of ms. 177. This discovery had been made a month earlier in July 2010, and the images of it had not yet posted online. Note that at the end of DW's post from July 2, 2010, he expressed a hope that one day the micro-film of mss. like 177 would be digitized and made available for others to see online.

I stand by my comments in the article. Dan Wallace is not a friend of the traditional text. He, like everyone else (from KJVO to modern text advocate), has implicit bias and operates under the influence of his own presuppositions. The only point I was making was that the discovery of this ms. provided, from my perspective, yet more evidence for the tenacity of the CJ in the Christian tradition. And this is true even if the marginal addition is late. In this sense it does indeed “add some weight” (however slight one might assess that weight to be) to the argument for the CJ. For these reasons, I hardly think one could call my very brief comments in that blog post a “mishandling of the evidence.”

Getting back to your 2020 article and away from my ten-year old blog post, you note that the CJ in 177 includes the verse notation, it was owned by a priest who signed the ms.in 1785, and this leads to your conclusion that the CJ addition was composed “well after the Reformation.”

Let me offer some responses:

First, on the verse notation: This well may show that the addition comes after the appearance of the CJ in printed editions of the Greek NT and the editorial addition of versification in the sixteenth century. Question: Is it also at least in the realm of the possible that the person who added the CJ had BOTH an ancient ms. or mss. AND a printed edition of the Greek NT which included the CJ? If this were the case, then it would be impossible to ascertain the date for the source of the CJ addition on the basis of the appearance of the verse notation.

Second, you note that this 11^th century ms. was signed by a RC priest in 1785 and you make a subjective conjecture that the same person who signed the ms. also added the CJ, though you acknowledge that the ink is different and “some of the letters are a little stylized.” You may be right about this conjecture, but I am sure you will also be willing to say that this speculation cannot be definitively proven. If the CJ was not added by the same person who signed his name, then the question of date is less certain. Whatever the marginal CJ's date in 177, the fact that this mss. was at one time owned and signed by a RC priest is irrelevant to establishing anything, pro or con, with regards to the authenticity of the CJ as part of the text of Christian Scripture.

Third, perhaps the CJ addition was made to 177 “well after the Reformation.” If it were, what exactly does this prove? The Protestant consensus on the authenticity of the CJ was settled by at least 1600. Calvin, for example, affirms it in his commentary on 1 John. It had, in fact, been known and accepted in the Christian tradition long before the Reformation. As I note in WM 149, various pre-Reformation theologians had assumed its authenticity in their theologizing, including Bernard of Clairvaux (c. 1090-1153), Peter Lombard (c. 1095-1160), Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), Peter Abelard (1079-1142), and Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) (for a listing of these and other medieval theologians who made ready use of the CJ, see Grantley McDonald’s 2011 dissertation “Raising the Ghost of Arius”, pp. 57, 62.). The fact that the CJ was added to “correct” 177 only shows the tenacity of the CJ within the Christian tradition, whatever the date given to the marginal addition of the CJ in 177.

You say it’s not about evidence, but you were appealing to evidence to support it. Without checking to see what 177 was and by assuming that it would support the TR you appealed to the evidence of a priest in 1785 as if it supports the authenticity of the CJ. What I was implying was that TR advocates would do better to admit up front that the evidence is against the TR here.

JTR response: Again, my less than 500-word blog article from August 2010 only makes brief reference to 177, a ms. which had only been “discovered” one month earlier and was not yet available to view online. One can hardly fault me for failure to examine the ms. when its images were not yet available to examine at the time I wrote this popular-level blog article, which never claimed to be an exhaustive academic study of 177. If anything, my comments on 177 were measured. For these reasons, I hardly think it is reasonable or fair to use this as any kind of an example of a TR advocate’s “mishandling of evidence.”

If we want to see real “mishandling of evidence” let’s examine how many modern critical text advocates like James White have propagated the “rush to print” and “rash wager’ anecdotes about Erasmus’s 1516 Greek NT and the CJ’s inclusion into it. Smiles.

JTR