Is there a Definitive New Testament?

Is there such a thing as a definitive New Testament? By definitive I mean to say a Greek New Testament that is “most nearly complete and accurate, [and] authoritative.”¹ That is to ask, is there a version of the Greek New Testament that serves as the standard to which translations in all languages are compared for accuracy?

            Actually, I can answer this question. There is no such thing, in fact, as a definitive New Testament.² This essay aims to give one small example as to why there is no definitive Greek New Testament. In church services one recent Sunday morning (May 17, 2026), the pastor was expounding on Luke 24:44–53. I was following along using two English translations and the Greek New Testament.³ Suddenly, I found a glaring difference between the two translations. For the beginning of verse 24:52 the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) read the following:

“And they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy…”

While the Revised English Bible (REB) read the following:

“And they <…> returned to Jerusalem full of great joy…”

The pointed brackets indicate text missing from the translation and hence the difference between the two translations.

Much to my surprise the words “worshipped him and” were missing in the REB! So the minister must have been reading from the NRSV (or a similar translation) because he made a point of emphasizing their worship of Jesus (literally “bowed the knee to him”) in his remarks on the passage.

So, I turned to see what the Greek text read. The Nestle-Aland 28^th edition included the Greek words ^[]proskunēsantes auton^\ “worshipped him.” The marks around the Greek words (^[]…^\) indicate that “the words, clauses, or sentences between the signs are omitted by the witnesses cited.”

The witnesses cited by the Nestle-Aland edition were: Codex Bezae (5^th /6^th century), Old Latin Manuscripts (4^th to the 13^th centuries), and the Sinaitic Syriac (4^th century).⁴ Some of these ancient Latin and Syriac versions eliminating the phrase are relatively early. But they are much later than the original autograph (of which there is no copy).

The Bible Society Committee that decided to include the phrase “worshipped him” was sharply divided. A minority of the committee voted not to include “worshipped him” in the text, considering them to be scribal interpolations. The majority, however, considered them to have been either accidentally or deliberately omitted from the text.⁵ The minority of the committee argued that one can discern “a Christological-theological motivation that accounts for” the words being added to the text but “no clear reason that accounts for their having been omitted.”⁶

There is a tendency on the part of the scribes of the Western Text (Bezae, Old Latin and Sinaitic Syriac) “to adjust” the text:

Words, clauses, and even whole sentences were changed, omitted, and inserted with astonishing freedom, wherever it seemed that the meaning could be brought out with greater force and definiteness…Another equally important characteristic is a disposition to enrich the text at the cost of its purity by alterations or additions taken from traditional and perhaps from apocryphal or other non-biblical sources.⁷

Here is some additional information as to how this disagreement between manuscripts is treated in modern translations: Constantine Tischendorf did not include the words “They worshipped him and” in the text but put them in a note.⁸ The New International Version (NIV) includes them in the text (the NIV is the most popular translation of the Bible by sales in America). An American Translation excludes “worshipped him and” (this is the translation of the New Testament scholar Edgar J. Goodspeed). The New American Bible for Catholics has the words in the text but translates them as “they did him homage.” The Holman Christian Standard Bible includes them in the text translating them as “After worshipping him.” The New American Standard Version does not include the words “worshipping him” in the text and has no note about them. The modern Greek translation of the Greek Orthodox church includes them in the text. Westcott and Hort (text critics of a previous century) preferred the shorter reading in Luke 24:52, regarding the words “worshipped him” as “Western non-interpolations” (in spite of the “generally inferior Western witnesses”).⁹

            What should we conclude from the brief essay? It is: The Bible does not spring immediately from the mouth of God to the printed page of the book on the table beside your bed. It must first pass through the inspired (or not) brains of the original writers and debatable ambiguities of modern textual criticism, as well as the theological biases and peccadillos of modern translators. The New Testament, it turns out, is much less, or perhaps much more than the original autographs.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹M. Agnes, Ed. in Chief, Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4^th ed.), under definitive.

²I give my reasons for thinking such to be the case in Hedrick, “The Greek New Testament is a Virtual Text.” Wry Guy Blog, Saturday August 8, 2020: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/2020/08/the-greek-new-testament-is-virtual-text.html.

³The Greek New Testament was the Nestle-Aland 28^th edition.

⁴See Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament. Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (3^rd ed.; Oxford: 1992).

⁵Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2^nd ed.; United Bible Societies, 1994), 163. See also the “Note on Western Non-Interpolations,” 164–66.

⁶Metzger, Textual Commentary, 166.

⁷Metzger, Text of the New Testament, 132—33. Metzger quotes Westcott and Hort.

⁸Constantinus Tischendorf, Novum Testamentum Graece (2^nd ed., 1860).

⁹Metzger, Textual Commentary, 164–65.

Parenthetical Statements in Mark

The ancient Greeks did not punctuate their literature by using two curved half-circle marks known from the sixteenth century as parentheses, although they did write what we today call parenthetical statements that jump off the page screaming “additions to the sentence” for the careful reader.¹ Here is an example of a parenthetical statement in Mark 3:30, for which the translators do not provide parenthesis: “because they said he has an unclean spirit.” The phrase explains why Jesus said what he did in 3:28–29. One translation (NRSV) set the phrase off from verse 30 by a dash; another translation (REB) turned the phrase into a complete sentence (adding words not present in the Greek): “He said this because they had declared he was possessed by an unclean spirit.”

            In other cases, translators use parentheses to set off the parenthetical phrase/sentence. The word parenthesis is Greek (parenthesis), which translated means “putting in beside”; that is, adding something additional to the sentence. The “something additional” is extraneous and always subordinate to the main statement.² In the Gospel of Mark, however, they also have the character of an explanation. In Mark 3:30 the parenthetical statement explains why Jesus said what he did: his interlocuters had accused him of being spirit possessed, and that is what prompted his response in Mark 3:28-29.³

            There are several other instances of parenthetical statements in Mark, or at least some translators think so: 2:10–11; 5:42; 7:3–4; 7:11; 7:19; 13:14; 15:22; 15:34. Modern translators⁴ use parentheses or dashes to designate the statement as parenthetical. In some cases, however, they do not even acknowledge its parenthetical character (for example, Mark 15:34, which is exactly like Mark 15:22). And in some cases, they seem to skip over parenthetical statements (for example, Mark 16:4: which reads: “for it was very large”).

            Readers will remember that ancient scribes in ancient Greek manuscripts did not separate words from one another. Here is how my last statement would have appeared in an ancient Greek manuscript: greekmanuscriptsdidnotseparatewordsfromoneanother

They did not use punctuation marks, except in rare cases. All of that is supplied by the modern text critics, translators, and editors.⁵

            Given the propensity of ancient scribes to introduce new readings into ancient Greek manuscripts,⁶ one wonders if some of these parenthetical statements in Mark might be marginal notes made by ancient scribes that eventually made their way into the body of the text during the first and second centuries, a period for which we have virtually no ancient manuscripts preserved.⁷

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Britannica, *“Parenthesis, grammar,” https://britannica.com/topic/parenthesis

²J. A. Cuddon, Literary Terms and Literary Theory (3^rd ed.; Penguin, 1998), 639.

³There are a great number of such statements in John. See C. W. Hedrick, “Authorial Presence and Narrator in John. Commentary and Story,” in Gospel Origins and Christian Beginnings, 74–93 (edited by James Goehring, et al.; Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1990).

⁴The two translations I am using for this essay are NRSV, New Revised Standard Version and REB, Revised English Bible.

⁵C. W, Hedrick, Wry Guy Blog. ”The Lowly Punctuation Mark in the New Testament.”

http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=lowly+punctuation+mark

⁶For example, Mark 9:44 and 46 are added to the text of Mark. These two verses repeat Mark 9:48 and do not appear in early manuscripts of Mark. Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2^nd ed.; United Bible Societies,1994), 86–87.

⁷See the dates given in the back (pages 792–819) of the 28^th revised edition of the Nestle, Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece (Greek-English New Testament).

Ancient Scribes and Modern Translators - and the Bible

What one reads in one’s New Testament (NT) is largely determined by these two groups, ancient scribes and modern translators. An ancient scribe is a literate person who makes a living by copying manuscripts. They, of course, were, at one time, living, breathing people with opinions and prone to errors. A modern translator is a person linguistically skilled in the ancient form of the Greek language called koine (the common dialect of the Hellenistic and Roman periods) and in the target language of the translation—in this case English. They too are living, breathing people with opinions and prone to errors. And both groups in their time contribute to what a NT text says.

            The original author of a text produces an “autograph,” which is an author’s original, first-copy of a text. When completed, the autograph determined what the text originally said. Alas, at that point the author loses control of the written text. Scribes will make copies of the autograph and in so doing will introduce errors and make other deliberate changes in the copies they produce. And still other scribes will make further copies of the text from the first copies and introduce further errors and changes.

At this point a third group becomes involved in a text’s transition from koine Greek into English: the textual critic. There are over 5000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Alas, the original autographs no longer survive and existing copies differ from one another.¹ Textual critics aim to restore the readings of the original autograph, and periodically publish a koine Greek edition of the NT, showing in an apparatus at the bottom of pages the numbers of significant differences existing among the manuscripts of the Greek NT. Text critics decide the most probable readings, which are published in the text above the apparatus. The 28^th edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek NT is the current edition from which translators work.

The judgments of text critics as to the readings of the original author’s copy of a NT text are not always accepted by translators of the text, resulting in different readings between translations. In other words, each translated version of the NT differs in some degree. Here is one example. One finds in Mark 1:41 different readings between the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) and The Revised English Bible (REB). The NRSV follows the text critical judgment that Mark’s autograph originally read in Mark 1:41 “moved with pity” (splagxnistheis), while the REB follows a lesser supported reading “moved to anger” (orgistheis). Text critics selected the reading “pity” as the original reading because they could easily understand why an ancient scribe would change anger to pity but could not so easy understand why a scribe would change pity to anger. In the end the committee was more impressed with the superior support of manuscripts that read pity rather than the less impressive manuscript support for anger.²

I noted fourteen other instances where scribal changes contributed to different readings in the translation of the Gospel of Mark between the NRSV and REB.³ While these changes are not particularly significant, they are enough to make the point that the NT read in the church today is as much a human book as a divine book. The autographs were written by imperfect human beings, prone to error, and, in any case, the autographs no longer exist. Virtually all the over five thousand manuscripts of the Greek NT come from the third century and later. Scribes have introduced innumerable new readings into their copies, both deliberate and accidental. And translators decide what readings they will translate. Hence, it is misleading to refer to the NT as the “Word of God.” If the texts were initially divinely inspired, their words, both Greek and English, were, and still are, decided by human beings.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (3^rd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University, 1992), v.

²Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2^nd ed., 3^rd printing; Stuttgart: United Bible Societies, 1998), 65. Note that one other reading in Mark attributes anger to Jesus but without a scribal change to pity: Mark 3:5.

³Here are the other fourteen instances in Mark: 3:14, 32; 6:22, 41, 47; 7:4, 35; 9:42; 10:2; 11:19; 12:23; 14:39, 68; 15:10.

The Greek New Testament is a Virtual Text

The word “virtual” means that a thing “is so in essence or effect, although not formally or actually.”¹ Thus, the Greek New Testament (GNT) that a scholar pulls off the shelf is a modern construct comprised of readings derived from over 5000 ancient manuscripts, which have been critically compared to each other and evaluated in order to determine what the original author’s copy (the autograph) of an ancient manuscript might have read, according to the scholars who made the GNT. Our modern GNT never existed as such in antiquity in any one gathering of ancient manuscripts. It exists only virtually in that its readings are from different ancient manuscripts. There can be any number of GNT since different groups of scholars evaluate the data differently.

Frequently translations of the GNT used by translators differ from the critical text they are translating. Luke 22:42-45, the prayer of Jesus on the Mount of Olives, is one such example: Verses 43-44, however, are omitted by the Revised Standard Version and an American Translation, both of which read:

“Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will but thine, be done.” And when he rose from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping from sorrow. (RSV, Luke 22:42, 45)

The following translations, however, include verses 42-43 in their translations: New International Version, James Moffat translation, New American Bible, The Berkeley Version, the New Living Translation:

“Father if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done.” An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. When he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow. (NIV, Luke 22:42-45)

            The Nestle/Aland text (28th revised edition of the GNT) includes Luke 22:42-43 in the text in double square brackets. Double square brackets indicate that the enclosed words are thought not to be a part of the original text, but they are rather very early insertions into the text. The rationale of the Editorial Committee that established the Nestle/Aland GNT was as follows: The absence of these verses in ancient and widely diversified manuscripts, as well as their being marked with asterisks and obeli (signifying spuriousness) by scribes in other manuscripts, and their having been transferred to Matthew’s Gospel (after 26:39) in a few manuscripts strongly suggests that they were not part of the original text of Luke. The presence of Luke 22:43-44 in many manuscripts, some ancient, and as well as their citation by Justin, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Eusebius, and many other Fathers of the church is proof of their antiquity. The Committee did not think it probable that the two verses were deleted by scribes who felt that the account of Jesus being overwhelmed with human weakness was incompatible with their belief that he shared the divine omnipotence of the Father. The Committee thought it more probable that they were added to Luke from an early source, oral or written, of extra canonical traditions. In view of the evident antiquity of the two verses and their importance to the textual tradition a majority of the committee decided to retain the words in the text but to enclose them in double square brackets.²

            Specifically, how is the GNT a virtual text? The readings of the original author’s copy, the autograph, may exist somewhere among some 5000 Greek manuscripts dating 3rd century³ and later, but the best that scholars can do is make an intelligent guess at what the autograph might be, based on reason and logic. As this instance shows, however, even logic and reason are sometimes unable to achieve a definitive solution. One cannot look at the apparatus⁴ of the GNT without recognizing the relative value of the scholarly reconstructions and the challenge they present to the popular epithet of the New Testament, that it is the Word of God.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Oxford English Dictionary, Compact Edition, s.v., virtual (4th definition).

²This description is adapted from Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (4th ed. rev.; United Bible Societies, 2000), 151.

³There are a few manuscripts dated 2^nd century: P⁵² (John 18:31-33. 37-38); P⁹⁰ (John 18:36-19:1; 19:2-7); P⁷⁷ (Matt 23:30-39); P^98(?) (Rev 1:13-21); P¹⁰⁴ (Matt 21:34-37; 21-43-45 [?]); *0189 (Acts 5:3-21). Two of these are dated 2^nd/3^rd century: P⁷⁷; *0189.

⁴The apparatus of the GNT is the data listed at the bottom of the page noting the significant differences in readings between the ancient manuscripts.