William Trollope (1842) defends John 8:1-11

[Nazaroo]

William Trollope was a brilliant Scottish scholar, well versed both in the Classics, and in text-critical opinions throughout the empire and continent.

He produced a phenomenal commentary tome on the NT (1842) meant to be used alongside Horne's famous general introduction to the subject.

He was comfortable citing ancient authors in a half-dozen languages, and knew his subjects better than most specialists.

Later, emmigrated to Australia, and Britain lost a national treasure.

QUOTE:________________________________________----

JOHN CHAPTER VIII. (vol. II)
CONTENTS: - The woman taken in adultery, vv.1 - 11. Christ asserts his divinity, vv. 12-20. ...
  Verse 1. Ιησους δε κ.τ.λ. The narrative of the Woman taken in adultery, contained in the opening of this chapter, together with the last verse of Chap. VII. are wanting in a great number of the best MSS. 1 Many of those, also, which retain the passage, mark it with obelisks, as an indication of supposed spuriousness; 2 and it exhibits a greater variety of readings than any other portion of the Scriptures whatsoever. 3 In some copies it is found at the end of the Gospel; 4 in others, elsewhere; 5 and in others, again, at the end of Luke ch. 21. 6
Origen, Chrysostom, 7 and Theophylact have taken no notice of it in their commentaries; and it is first explained by Euthymius, a writer of the 12th century. 8
Many of the old versions are without it; 9 and several of the ablest critics have rejected it as spurious. 10
Now Papias, in a fragment cited by Eusebius, relates a tradition respecting a woman who was accused of many crimes before our Lord, which was taken from the Apocryphal Gospel of the Nazarenes; and it has been thought 11 that this was the legend in question, which has by some means found its way into the narrative of St John.
Others have thought that the incident is the relation of a real fact; but that it is one of those events in our Lord's ministry which were not inserted, for want of room, in any of the four Canonical Gospels, though they were long preserved in the Church by oral tradition. 12 See Luke 1:1, John 20:30.
Several of these histories were recorded in the margins of early copies, so that some of them at length obtained a place in the text; 13 and it may not be impossible, from the remarkable variations in the MSS., that the preservation of this story is to be thus accounted for. 14 See on Matt. 20:28 Luke 6:1.
The weight of the evidence however, both internal and external, unquestionably preponderates in favour of its authenticity. 15
The majority of MSS. are considerably on its side; and its absence from those in which it does not appear, is traced by Augustine (de Adult. Conjug. II.e.) to a scrupulous fear, that the ignorant might be thereby induced to think lightly of the sin of adultery. 16
At the same time it is sufficiently evident, why Jesus thought proper to evade the question of the Scribes. A snare was laid for him similar to that which lurked in the insidious question respecting tribute-money in Matt. 22:17. 17
Had he countenanced the punishment of the woman, they would have accused him to the Romans of invading their judicial authority; 18 and had he, on the other hand, referred them to the pro-consular tribunal, they would have held him up to popular hatred, as sanctioning the infringement fo their liberties and rights.
That he did not palliate the atrocity of the offence is evident from the caution with which he finally dismissed her. 19
Whitby, Lightfoot, Mill, A. Clarke, Michaelis, Kuinoel, Doddridge, &c. - [Grotius, Beza, Le Clerc, Wetsein, Tittman, &c.] See also Horne's Introd. Vol. IV. p. 315. 20
_____________________________________

A few observations are worth noting.

(1) Euthymius, a writer of the 12th century, was hardly the first early father to cite John 8:1-11. But in the 1840s, the early fathers had hardly been explored by scholars, and the great compilations and translations of these works had not yet been published. Only specialists had any inkling of the great hordes of writings of the early fathers.

(2) When Trollope states that "Several of these histories were recorded in the margins of early copies, so that some of them at length obtained a place in the text;" he is copying the claim of an earlier commentator.

But there is NO KNOWN CASE of any story whatever being copied (accidentally or otherwise) from the margin and into the main text of a copy of the Gospels. The few cases where something like this may have happened for a small phrase or clause, never seemed to have any great circulation or impact on the stream of transmission of handcopied manuscripts.

Recently, people like Bart Ehrman have repeated this claim, but no evidence of any successful "insertion" of any substantial portion of text has ever been observed!

For a fuller treatment of William Trollope's evidence, go to our new webpage on him here:

http://adultera.awardspace.com/TEXT/Trollope.html


UPDATE": For footnotes see next few postings:

Peace,
Nazaroo

 

[Nazaroo]

I have added additional footnotes to clarify and update the arguments presented in Trollope's defence.




Footnotes

1. The circularity of the logic should not escape the reader: Since the manuscripts are seriously divided, it is the manuscripts which ought to be judged "best" or otherwise, based on the text they carry, and not the text being judged by conveniently selected manuscripts.
Also, "best" is only a relative term, and gives no real indication of the objective quality of any manuscript. It is conceivable that all manuscripts could be about equally "bad". If the original text can in fact be logically reconstructed with reasonable accuracy from available evidence (something which proponents of any critical text claim), then it is quite possible (and perhaps likely), that even the best individual manuscript will be inferior to a corrected 'critical' text.
Finally, no manuscripts are identified as "best", and no evidences or arguments are offered to indicate independantly which ones are "best" or otherwise, or why, or even who is doing the categorizing. This is simply not real science.
Incidentally, "a great number" (not given) turns out to be less than a dozen manuscripts, out of thousands which contain the verses. The phrase "a great number of the best" is meaningless, without clear scientific criteria for which manuscripts are "best", and why others are to be excluded from the count. It is obvious that the vote can be arbitrarily rigged by how manuscripts are classified, and which manuscripts are to be counted at all.

2. Obelisks or other small marks in the margin could have any meaning. In fact marks on manuscripts have a full range of popular meanings, for example segmentation of the continuous text for public reading, Lection ('Lesson') marks, liturgical instructions, breathing and pause-marks for public readers and cantors, special notices for calendars and sermon scheduling, punctuation, accents, abbreviations of names and keywords, corrector's marks, and finally, primitive text-critical or religious notes and annotations.
The majority of "marked" manuscripts will have the passage in its proper place, written in the hand of the original scribe. Many marginal markings are clearly by a second, unknown hand, and have often been added centuries after the manuscript was made. With others, it is impossible to detect when the markings were made or who made them.
At their very best, these marks must be considered secondary to the evidence of the main and original text of the manuscript, and cannot possibly cancel out the significance or weight of original hand including the passage.
In any case, automatically assuming ALL such marks must indicate spuriousness or doubt is a plain fallacy, but not one made by accident. It is designed to mislead, by obscurring the typical usage of the manuscripts, and the common meanings for such markings.

3. This often repeated claim appears to be based upon some brief collations made by Beza centuries earlier. The majority of manuscripts in existance have never been collated, and neither has any particular passage in the NT been thoroughly collated. No one can possibly know at this time where in the NT text we will find the most variations.
The claim is unsupportable with the available evidence.

4. In fact, the copies referred to in some cases place the passage after the SECOND LAST verse of John's Gospel. But only one manuscript in existance leaves out the last verse: Codex Sinaiticus (and the passage also). This is another strike against the manuscript, indicating clearly that Alexandrian editorial activity has been at work here.

5. "elsewhere" is vague. In fact in only 2 or 3 manuscripts of very late date (12th century) is the passage misplaced to the wrong point in John's Gospel. This must have occurred when scribes attempted to restore the passage from a copy where it was previously deleted, but had no copy on hand to tell them where to put it.
This clearly indicates two things however: (1) that some copy or copies were missing the passage (in the 12th century), and that (2) the scribes believed the passage to be authentic, but had no means to restore it. In any case, the vote of the scribes who made the copies outweighs the vote of the unknown copy lacking the verses, since we cannot establish even what text that missing copy contained, how old it was, or who made it.

6. Again, the "others" who insert the passage at Luke 21 are also very late manuscripts (10th-12th century), and have clearly been copied from one another, or a common ancestor, and form a close genealogical "family". They are not then independant witnesses, but their vote collapses to their common ancestor, which cannot be traced earlier than the 9th century.
This case tells us clearly two important facts however: (1) someone had at some point given orders to leave out the passage, and (2) at least one copyist chose to disobey his orders and hide the passage in Luke. This is a strong vote in favour of the passage, while at the same time revealing conscious and hostile editorial activity to remove the verses.
It matters not that the orders to delete the passage may have been justified in someone's mind on the basis of some ancient exemplar. The point is these manuscripts sabotage their own testimony by revealing that the very people who made them did not assent to the textual omission of the passage. The manuscripts are self-neutralizing, and tell us nothing new, since it is already known that early manuscripts also left out the verses on many occasions.

7. The supposed 'silence' of Chrysostom has been cast in doubt by the fact that a 13th century monk appears to have known of a text by that author whereby he mentions the passage. We quote Wieland Willker's recent post in his Textual Criticism Blog:
Tommy Wasserman and Jennifer Knust (SBL 2008, via ETC blog) mention an interesting reference to Chrysostom:
"Jacobus de Voragine, a thirteenth-century Dominican monk, scholar and author, serves as our final example. Preaching a sermon on the pericope on the third Saturday of Lent, he offered a list of by then traditional suggestions regarding what Jesus wrote: 'According to Ambrose,' Jacobus reports, 'Jesus wrote, "terra terram accusat"; according to Augustine, he wrote this [also] (i.e., terra terram accusat) and then, afterwards said to the woman "qui sine peccato est uestrum"; according to the Glossa, Jesus wrote their sins ('eorum pecccata' ); and, according to John Chrysostom (who, as far as we know, never discussed the pericope adulterae), he wrote 'terra absorbe hos uiros abdicatos' ("Earth, swallow these men who have been disowned.")"
(Sabbato Sermo 1.45-48)

We have no other reference that shows Chrysostom's acquaintance with the PA. It is possible that Jacques de Voragine simply misattributes the words. On the other hand it is possible that he had access to sources lost today. The sermon can be found online at:
http://thesaurus.sermones.net/voragine/document.xsp?id=sermo_243
Does anybody know anything more about this?

Whether or not this monk may have turned out to have made a mistake in his own citation or identification of the author, it is likely that some early father/writer made the statement that the monk found.
But until positive evidence can be found eliminating Chrysostom from the list of possible writers, the claim of his 'silence' regarding the passage must forever hang in doubt.
In any case, Chrysostom's silence may very well pale into insignificance, if a contemporary writer of equal note indeed cited John 8:1-11. At that point, Chrysostom's actions will hardly matter.

8. This statement is simply wrong. It is "explained" by Ambrose (c. 370 A.D.) and Augustine (c. 400 A.D.) to name a few rather important early writers.
Nor is Euthymius even the only "Greek-speaking" writer to mention the passage, since a commentary by Didymus (c. 360 A.D.) quotes the story, and both Rufinus and Theodoret give rather strong allusions to it.

9. Unfortunately, the 'old versions', (e.g., Syriac, Armenian etc.) appear to have been originally made from Lectionary-style texts, that is, copies of the Gospels prepared for church use. This is no surprise, since those forms of the text would be most useful to underground churches just starting out in foreign lands and distant outposts of the Empire.
If the passage existed in those times (and it appears to have existed), it was avoided in public reading during church services, as being too controversial or unedifying, just as many other passages are avoided by the Lectionaries and liturgical calendars.
This is no indication of inauthenticity or doubt however. Its just the pragmatic activity of church organizers, choosing whats "best" for their congregations, under surveilance by hostile forces.

10. Again this seems logically fallacious, and puts the cart before the horse. Who are the "best" critics should be judged by their performances, and not the other way around. We can't decide on the status of Holy Scripture or the "best" text based on the opinions of critics.

 

[Nazaroo]

11. Apparently this idea was first proposed by Schmidt in his Einleit. in d. NT. TH. 1. p.159 seq., according to Bloomfield.

12. The claim that the Pericope de Adultera was an oral tradition that circulated for a long time cannot be sustained. This idea is based on theories of oral transmission by the 19th century German schools, which were discredited by subsequent textual discoveries and archaeological evidence. See Kenyon, The Bible and Modern Scholarship, pp. 16 fwd. and especially pp. 7-9.

13. The claim here is incredible. Even if a verse or two could be shown to be an interpolation (such as those possible unsuccessful interpolations found in Codex Bezae), no story of the size of the Pericope de Adultera has ever been interpolated into the NT, in any known manuscript, either successfully or unsuccessfully.
The only (half-)verse that comes close to having the appearance of a (temporarily) successful "gloss" is the infamous 1st John 5:7,8. But this unique case is something that happened after the invention of printing and mass-publications, 1,500 years after the NT was written. (We will not comment on the merits of the variant here, only that its timing was essential for the plausibility of any case for a "gloss".)
The whole inquiry concerning the Pericope de Adultera is to determine if this could have actually happened in this one clearly unique case. To claim it has happened elsewhere without any evidence is an absurdly unscientific way to approach the investigation. It is unknown what critic provided this falsifiable and blatantly false claim.
Not surprisingly however, it is a popular myth among secular humanists and other atheists who attack the Bible, even today. Apparently the philosophy is that "the end justifies the means", that is, its okay to lie about the Bible, because Christianity is "bad".

14. The 'logical' connection is here again completely non-sequitous. The number of variants found spread across the textual evidences cannot have any bearing on the claim that it was mistakenly copied from the margin of a manuscript. It doesn't make sense.
If the passage was indeed inserted into the textual transmission stream for John's Gospel at some specific later time through a unique event such as envisioned, then all copies of the passage should be even more homogenous than the background text, which would have had time to develop variations.
Even the allowance of "cross-pollenation" and mixing of texts through comparison and correction would still fail to generate MORE variants for the passage than the support text, namely John. Extra variants must be created either through sloppy copying, or deliberate editing, but the nature of the variants in the Pericope de Adultera is random and hardly affects the sense of the passage.
Only an independant written or oral process could create textual variants, but presumably the very same scribes copied the background and the passage together. In that case, only an oral process could account for the variants.
But here's the kicker. In order for the oral variants to be copied into the textual stream, the passage would have had to have been inserted simultaneously and independantly from many (corrupted) oral sources, not inserted in a single event such as from the margin by a copyist.
Could hundreds of copyists suddenly have found many differing copies of the passage in the margins of many exemplars, and then make the same boo boo, copying what they saw into the text?

15. Given what Trollope has presented here, this is an astounding conclusion. Did someone edit his work before it hit the press?
No. The answer is simpler. Trollope came to his own conclusion based upon the much larger and detailed evidence he found in his main source-book for this work: the Annotationis Sacrae (1826) by Samuel Thomas Bloomfield. There Trollope found plenty of evidence and arguments to convince him the passage was genuine.
However, rather sadly, he didn't adequately copy over those arguments and evidences here.

16. Later, Westcott & Hort and others would challenge the plausibility of Augustine's explanation for the omission of the passage.
But this is attack on Augustine is misguided and ineffective. Its not Augustine's explanation that matters at all. Its his witness to the existance of the passage in some manuscripts, and its omission in others. Whether or not Augustine rightly or wrongly imputed motives to those contending over the passage, the fact is, he witnesses to the battle itself, and in passing, the existance of the passage in many manuscripts, and its acceptance among the Latins in his time.
And this is both entirely consistent with other evidence and testimony, such as Jerome and Ambrose, and also an immense hurdle to those claiming the passage was an 'insertion'. No plausible mechanism for such a fraud or even a credible timing for its occurance has been proposed.

17. On the other hand, the consistency of the passage with Synoptic accounts of the controversy between Jesus and the religious authorities on other matters like taxes, also has little to do with the authenticity of the passage.
What needs to be shown is its consistency with the content and purpose of John, not the Synoptics.

18. This has been shown to be a weak argument, when based on the existing form and content of the passage.
Just how would consulting a travelling Rabbi on stoning get Jesus in more trouble than those who brought the woman to Him in the first place? Wouldn't the Romans be more angry with the scribes and Pharisees, than with Jesus? It was they who seemed to instigate the incident and attempt the stoning, not Jesus. He could easily defend himself before His accusers in this scenario, providing there was a fair hearing.
The plausibility of the entrapment rests on the other horn of the dilemma: that if Jesus clumsily backed out of the stoning, they could scandalize him before the Jewish people.

19. This finally, makes sound logic. But it unfortunately has no clear bearing on the authenticity of the passage, unless other evidences and arguments can be brought forward.

20. Horne also strongly defended the authenticity of the passage, in his Introduction, through at least nine editions. It was Samuel Davidson and Samuel Tregelles who took over the editing of the 10th edition, that cast doubt upon the passage, against the judgment of the original author.
This was a notorious bit of dirty-fighting, documented here:



Horne on John 8:1-11 < - - Click here for details.