Jesus’ Anger Rewritten as Compassion

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Textual variants among ancient manuscripts aren’t always this controversial. One scribe might have spelled a word differently on his manuscript, while another might have accidentally skipped or repeated some of the text he was copying. These cases are minor variants and don’t really change the meaning of the text. Other times, however, scribes added or even changed text to clarify a passage or suit the theological preferences of their communities. That’s when things get interesting, and Mark 1:41 is an especially intriguing example.

In Mark 1:41, a leper has approached Jesus seeking to be healed. Most Greek manuscripts (the New Testament was originally written in Greek), as well as later translations, say that Jesus was moved with compassion and healed the man. A few manuscripts, however, say that Jesus became angry before healing him. So which was it—anger or compassion? If this were a popularity contest, the “compassion” reading would surely win. In 1998 the authoritative book Text und Textwert recorded only two Greek manuscripts (and a few early Latin ones) that contained the “anger” reading. But as Dr. Jeff Cate recently announced in The Folio, the bulletin of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center at the Claremont School of Theology, close examination of one of those two Greek manuscripts has shown that it contains the word neither for anger nor for compassion.^a Just as Matthew and Luke did when retelling Mark’s story in their gospels (cf. Matthew 8:2–4; Luke 5:12–16), the scribe of this Markan manuscript simply left it out.

This now leaves the other Greek manuscript, the fifth-century Codex Bezae, as the sole Greek witness to the “anger” reading. Much like the cheese in “The Farmer in the Dell,” Codex Bezae stands alone.

But most interesting of all, the Codex Bezae may in fact have the better (i.e., original) reading. As New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman pointed out in a 2005 article in BAR’s sister magazine Bible Review, “one factor in favor of the ‘angry’ reading is that it sounds wrong.”^b It is much easier to believe that early scribes were troubled by Jesus’ getting angry and changed it to feeling compassion, rather than the other way around. Later scribes also would have preferred the easier “compassion” reading and copied it until it became the more popular reading. (As Ehrman explains, there are other passages in Mark that seem to support the “anger” reading as well.) Thus does Codex Bezae now stand as a lonely witness to what is very likely the original Greek text of Mark 1:41.

Textual variants among ancient manuscripts aren’t always this controversial. One scribe might have spelled a word differently on his manuscript, while another might have accidentally skipped or repeated some of the text he was copying. These cases are minor variants and don’t really change the meaning of the text. Other times, however, scribes added or even changed text to clarify a passage or suit the theological preferences of their communities. That’s when things get interesting, and Mark 1:41 is an especially intriguing example. In Mark 1:41, a leper has approached Jesus seeking to be healed. Most Greek manuscripts (the […]