Textual criticism: the bloody sweat episode
October 5, 2015
Bart D. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He came to UNC in 1988, after four years of teaching at Rutgers University. At UNC he has served as both the Director of Graduate Studies and the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies.
A graduate of Wheaton College (Illinois), Bart received both his Masters of Divinity and Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary, where his 1985 doctoral dissertation was awarded magna cum laude. Since then he has published extensively in the fields of New Testament and Early Christianity, having written or edited twenty-six books, numerous scholarly articles, and dozens of book reviews.
In one of the most famous books of Ehrman: Misquoting Jesus, exposes and tries to explain the many differences between the oldest copies of the New Testament. Continuously blogs at: http://ehrmanblog.org, which he presents the following anecdote from when he was a student (taken from http://ehrmanblog.org/when-i-first-realized-the-importance-of-textual-criticism-the-bloody-sweat/):
When I First Realized the Importance of Textual Criticism: The Bloody Sweat
By Bart Ehrman (August 20, 2015)
I think I first came to see precisely why textual criticism could be so important my first semester in my PhD program, during a seminar I was taking that had almost nothing to do with the study of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. It was an “exegesis” course (i.e. focused on interpretation) on the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke – studied, of course, in the Greek). My realization of the importance of text-critical issues was not even connected to my own research. It had to do with what a friend and colleague of mine had discovered.
For that seminar we had to make a class-presentation of our study of a passage in the Synoptics. My fellow-first-year student Mark Plunkett (who later went on to teach at Ohio Northern University before deciding to scrap the academic thing and become a gynecologist) (really!) was devoting his term paper to the prayer of Jesus before his arrest as found in the Gospel of Luke.
As many readers of this blog know, Luke had as one of his sources for his account of the life and death of Jesus the Gospel of Mark. It is very interesting, and highly enlightening (I then learned and have since emphasized repeatedly) to compare Luke with Mark in order to see how he changed his source in a story he took from him. This is called “redaction criticism,” the study of how a redactor (= editor) changed the text he was copying in producing his own account.
In Mark’s version of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (14:32-42), after his Last Supper and before the betrayal of Judas, we are told that Jesus was deeply troubled and distressed. Oddly enough, even though Luke got his story from Mark, he does not nclude that comment. Jesus then, in Mark, tells his three disciples, Peter, James, and John, that he is “deeply grieved even to death” – another comment that Luke omits. In Mark then Jesus falls face first to the ground to pray. In Luke he simply takes his knees. In Mark, Jesus prays three times that God will “remove this cup from me” (i.e., not make him go through with his passion). In Luke Jesus prays only once, and he prefaces the prayer with “if it be your will.”
It sure seems like Luke is changing Mark’s story to de-emphasize, or even to eliminate, the idea that Jesus was upset, distressed, grieved, and eager to get out of having to be crucified.
My colleague, Mark Plunkett, pointed all this out. And he argued one other thing: when Luke reworked the story from Mark, he did so by creating a literary structure for the passage that is both absent from Mark and central to understanding Luke’s own emphasis.
The structure is called by the technical term, a “chiasmus.” A chiasmus (named after the Greek letter of the alphabet, “chi,” which looks like an English X) is a structure in which a passage has a number of statements in two parts, with the statement in the first part being mirrored by a statement in the second part, as follows: the first statement of the first part is similar in substance to the last statement of the second part; the second statement of the first part is similar in substance to the second to last of the second part, and so on. Usually it is diagrammed like this (if the passage has seven statements):
A
B
C
D
C’
B’
A’
The point of the structure is that the focus of the readers attention naturally falls on the middle element (in this case, with 7 statements, the statement that is found in D). In the case of this passage in Luke, it works like this
A Jesus tells the disciples to pray so they not fall into temptation
B He leaves the disciples
C He takes his knees
D He prays: Father, if it be your will…
C’ He arises from his knees
B’ He returns to the disciples
A’ And again he tells them to pray so they not fall into temptation
The focus of the passage is actually in this case highlighted by two elements of the structure. First, it begins and ends (A and A’) with the injunction to the disciples to pray to avoid temptation. Second, it is centered on Jesus’ own prayer. Note how this focus works in the context of the entire longer passage. The disciples do not pray. They instead fall asleep. Jesus does pray. Immediately afterward, the troops come to arrest Jesus. The disciples who have not prayed do indeed “fall into temptation.” They flee the scene. Jesus who *has* prayed does not fall into temptation. He calmly submits to his Father’s will.
Mark’s passage —the one on which Luke is based— is concerned to show Jesus’ distress prior to his arrest. Luke’s account, on the contrary, is s concerned to show that prayer can deliver one from temptation. Same basic story; very different emphasis.
When my friend Mark Plunkett finished his presentation to the class and the discussion led on to other things, I jotted a note to him. His discovery of this chiasmus structure was important for another reason. It could be the solution to a textual problem (that Plunkett was not aware of).
In some manuscripts of Luke’s Gospel – a lot of them in fact – the passage of Jesus’ prayer has an additional two verses that would fall plop down right into the chiasmus. These are the famous verses where we are told that Jesus went into great agony and began to sweat drops as if of blood, in such great distress that an angel had to come down from heaven to provide him with support. This is the passage that we get the phrase “sweating blood” from. It is the only passage that narrates this vivid detail from Jesus’ life. That is, it is not found in any of the other Gospels. And it is not found in a number of manuscripts of Luke.
In my jotted note, I told Plunkett that if he was right about the structure of the passage, it would almost certainly show that the passage of Jesus’ bloody sweat, found in some manuscripts of Luke but not others, was not original.
And why does that matter? For lots of reasons. But here’s one. If that passage is not original to Luke, then in Luke’s Gospel – not just in this passage, but in the entire Gospel – Jesus never feels any agony going to his death. He experiences a passionless Passion. This issue affects the entire portrayal of Jesus in the Gospel. It involves just these two disputed verses. So it’s pretty important.
