If you are especially acute in your Bible reading and come to the story in John 5 regarding the healing of the man by the pool of Bethzatha, you may wonder why the text skips from verse 3 to verse 5. In addition, if you compare any modern translation with the King James Version (which does contain 5:4) you will see that the KJV also has a longer ending to verse 3. These two combined passages read as follows: “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water; whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.”
So we are left with two options: either the biblical manuscripts on which KJV relied added these words to John's original or those ancient documents on which all modern translations rely deleted them. But in either case, as Gordon Fee points out, such a major change had to be made purposefully rather than accidentally. When textual scholars are faced with such a problem, they approach it from a number of different angles before making a reasoned decision. Below is a brief summary of the sort of evidence that lies behind their decisions in the case of this apparently missing text.
Manuscript Evidence
Since the ancient manuscripts of the NT vary in their wording of this passage, one logical question to ask would be how many of them contain John 5:3b-4 and how many do not. I will rely heavily on the noted NT scholar Gordon Fee for this point. In a detailed essay on the subject written for the Evangelical Quarterly in 1982, he arrived at the following tabulation:
31 contained both 5:3b and 5:4.
8 contained both 5:3b and 5:4, but with asterisks at start and finish to indicate that the reading was of dubious authenticity.
5 contained 5:4 but not 5:3b.
10 contained 5:3b but not 5:4.
9 contained neither 5:3b nor 5:4.
This alone does not lead us to any firm conclusion. However, it does help to explain why the translators of the King James Version decided to include John 5:3b-4 since the Greek text, the “Majority Text,” upon which it was based lived up to its name by mainly choosing the readings evidenced by most of the manuscripts they had available at the time. You can see that by that criterion, 5:3b-4 wins by a slim margin. But that is by no means the end of the story.
In the field of textual criticism, as in many other areas, quality counts more than mere quantity. We are to weigh the evidence, not just count it. And it is obvious that one must give much greater weight to the earlier manuscripts than to later ones that have a way of becoming more and more corrupted each time they are copied and re-copied. And since chronology of the manuscript is so important, it has been used by both proponents and opponents of John 5:3b-4 to bolster up their respective views.
For example, it is pointed out by fans of KJV that Tatian produced the Diatessaron (a Syrian translation of the four Gospels) around AD 170, and it contained 5:3b-4. This is well before the earliest complete Greek manuscripts of the NT, labeled Vaticanus and Siniaticus, which have been dated to about AD 350. Additionally, it has been stated that the Coptic version of John's Gospel also predates these two Greek manuscripts. There are two errors made in this sort of comparison. In the first place, it is a comparison between apples and oranges in that the original date of composition of one document is being compared to the date of the earliest manuscript of another document. If the Greek text of the NT can be changed over years of copying, as it obviously has been, then so can any other ancient manuscript.
And secondly, the argument totally ignores the even earlier papyrus manuscripts of John which do not include this passage. Look at it this way, all the Greek manuscripts are copies originating from John's original writing in, say for convenience sake, AD 70, while any translations or commentaries must date to later time periods, generally pinned down by historical references. So we arrive at the following much fairer comparison, including early Christian writers who referred to this passage in John including 5:3b-4. The first group of writings below includes all or part of this disputed passage while it is absent in the second set:
Date of Composition Date of Manuscript
Diatessaron ca. 170 late 5th cent.*
Coptic ? 4th cent.
Syriac Peshitta early 5th cent. 534
Tertullian On Baptism 200 8th cent.
John Chrysostom 390 9th cent.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Vaticanus ca. 70 350
Siniaticus ca. 70 350
p66 ca. 70 200-225
p75 ca. 70 200-225
*There are earlier fragments of Diatessaron available, but they do not contain John's Gospel.
You can see from the above that those who wish to defend the priority of the KJV reading must do so by unfairly comparing the original date of composition of the above translations and commentaries with the earliest manuscript date for the Greek manuscripts. If instead, one compares only the dates of compositions with one another or only the earliest manuscript evidence for both versions, one arrives at the inescapable conclusion that the earliest versions did not contain John 5:3b-4. As Blum summarizes, “No extant Greek manuscript before A.D. contains these words.” Therefore one must rely on early commentators or translations from the Greek into different languages to defend the authenticity of the longer version, and even there the actual manuscript evidence comes from much later times.
There is another powerful argument for the priority of the shorter text to be derived from the manuscript data. Textual scholars also take into account how widespread geographically the various manuscript types are. To explain, if one variant reading appears in documents originating from both Eastern and Western branches of Christianity, then that indicates that it should be given more weight than a reading which only appears in one geographical area. A look at the manuscripts listed by Fee shows that those missing the disputed verses appear over a wide geographical area. By contrast, those including 5:3b-4 are concentrated in the so-called Western text, known for its frequent expansions of the NT.
A third argument for the spurious nature of the disputed verses can be derived from the manuscript evidence. Note that there are a total of 15 ancient manuscripts that are missing either verse 3b or 4, but not both. As Fee points out, that means that if those words were originally in the Greek text, it requires two separate deletions over time, not just one, in order to arrive at the text used by the KJV. More likely is a scenario in which the disputed words were originally introduced into the text as an explanatory note which was treated in different ways by subsequent copyists, some accepting only the longer ending of verse 3 as part of the text, others only verse 4, and yet others putting it all in, but with asterisks to note that it was merely a note of clarification, not necessarily to be considered the inspired words of John himself.
Variant Readings
One standard tip-off that a Bible
passage probably comes from a later hand is the presence of
variations in wording within the disputed section when comparing the
manuscripts with one another. And as textual scholar Bruce Metzger
notes concerning the manuscripts containing John 5:4, they have “a
rather wide diversity of variant forms in which the verse was
transmitted.” As just one example, some manuscripts say "angel" and others say "angel of the Lord."
Lack of Biblical Parallels
A somewhat weak, but indicative, argument from absence comes from the facts that (a) elsewhere in the Bible when an angel is mentioned, he/she is always visible to observers and (b) nowhere that I am aware of is there an example of an angel healing anyone in the Bible of a disease or physical disorder, although there are stories of angels preserving believers' lives by providing food or rescuing them from their enemies. Actually, the closest example I can think of in which an angel is believed to be part of a healing process is when Jesus' enemies accuse him of healing by the power of the (fallen) angel Satan.
Linguistic Considerations
One standard way of determining if a dubious passage of Scripture is genuine is to compare the specific words utilized in it with the language that is characteristic of the author's authentic writings. The disputed passage in question fares very poorly in such a comparison. If you don't count simple articles, prepositions or pronouns in the disputed text, that leaves sixteen more substantial Greek words. R.E. Brown notes that seven of them appear nowhere else in John's writings. And as Borchert points out, three of these key words do not appear anywhere in the New Testament. These are strong indications that a later hand was at work in the composition of John 5:3b-4.
In addition, Fee in his paper reviews the unusual grammatical constructions and unusual usages found in John 5:3b-4 that are not at all characteristic of John's other writings. For example, in genitive constructions such as “the eyes of the blind” where both are definite nouns, John's word order never varies; it is always “the X of the Y.” There are actually 97 such occurrences in John's Gospel as well as 27 more in John's epistles. In stark contrast, the literal word order of 5:4 translates to “the of the water agitation.”
He
concludes: “No one of these perhaps is sufficient in itself to
cause one to question the authenticity
of
5:3b and 5:4. But the effect is cumulative and it is devastating. In
the space of 34 words
there
are
10
unusual
words
or
non-Johannine
features
of
style,
only
two
of
which
might have been called for by the special subject matter. The others
are not only non-Johannine in the sense that he does not use them
elsewhere, but more significantly in the sense that John uses
different words or phrases when he expresses identical ideas
elsewhere.”
Most Probable Scenario
Next we come to obvious question as to which of two scenarios would have been the most probable: copyists deleting an authentic passage from the NT text or copyists adding explanatory phrases to the text. So first to note is the fact that the “narrative reads perfectly well without them.” (Ellis) Secondly, the early scribes would have gone out of their way to preserve every word of authentically inspired writings. But even a very pious copyist might have easily inserted into the text or added in the margin an explanatory note as to why the troubling of the water was important to those wishing to be healed. From that point on, subsequent copyists would have had difficulty distinguishing the scribe's note with the actual text.
Zane Hodges argues that the passage concerning angels was probably purposefully deleted by later scribes, especially in the West, who objected to the prominent role given to angels in 5:4. Fee replies, “Hodges’ explanation as to how a deletion of this kind may have taken place does not appear to be an adequate reading of the evidence from Tertullian nor from all the other extant second century Christian literature. Given the love of angels found everywhere in early Christian piety, it is easy to account for the addition of the prevailing superstition about the pool to texts of the Gospel of John, but it still remains a singular mystery as to why anyone in the second century would have rejected it. In any case there are no known historical reasons for such a thing.”
If the disputed words are in fact spurious, you may be curious as to where the superstitious belief in a presumably invisible angel stirring the waters came from in the first place. Leon Morris voices the explanation given by most commentators on the subject: “The disturbance [in the water] may have been caused by the intermittent bubbling up of a natural spring [which fed the pool].” He also cites an alternative explanation: “R.D. Potter says that there is no spring there now. He argues from fragments of stone piping that water was piped in from the Temple area or elsewhere. 'Then the 'moving of the waters' would be the necessary renewals.'”
Moral Argument
Edwin Blum expresses the thought many readers of the KJV have probably had regarding the thought conveyed by the longer version: “But the Bible nowhere teaches this kind of superstition, a situation which would be a most cruel contest for many ill people.” Consider the situation of someone who was badly in need of a cure at the time. If the story of the angel sent from God were true, then those who were too poor to have a servant nearby all the time to be on the lookout for the troubling of the waters and assist them into the pool before anyone else beat them to it, were totally out of luck if they were (a) too blind to see the stirred-up water in the first place or (b) too infirm to move rapidly enough to beat the others into the water or (c) unable to swim, since the pool was so deep that “a cripple would have had to be carried and held all the time.” (Muller)
Fee
seconds these opinions: There is a kind of capriciousness to ‘grace’
that allows only one person to be healed, and only the first one into
the pool at that. It is no surprise that the invalid whom Jesus cured
had lain there 38 years. His condition was such that he could never
have been the first one into the
pool.
One wonders how this can be grace that loads all the advantages
toward the one who is
least sick, and
thus most able to jump into the pool, while month after month, year
after year,
those who need it most must
lose hope of ever being made whole. One can gladly affirm that
such
an account is no part of the inspired original.”
Conclusion
The overwhelming conclusion from each one of the nine independent arguments given above is that John 5:3b-4 represents a later addition to the text of John's Gospel.
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