Interpolations and Textual Corruptions: The Blurry Lines

written by Bart D Erhman

After the past two posts, I am now in a position to answer the question that led to this brief hiatus in my discussion of the afterlife, involving the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke.  To refresh your memory, here is the question:

QUESTION:

If, in your suspicion, the original Gospel of Luke began at 3:1 and the infancy narrative found in 1:5-2:52 is a later addition, do you think that should be indicated in NT reconstructions and translations in a way similar to how Mark 16:9-20 is often bracketed?

RESPONSE:

Different scholars will have different opinions on this question, in no small measure because the majority of scholars (I would imagine) are reluctant to say that Luke 1-2 were originally lacking from the Gospel.   But suppose the majority were convinced?   Would they say that brackets should be placed around the story, as happens, typically, with passages otherwise recognized as probably not belonging in the New Testament, such as the ending of Mark’s Gospel (Mark 16:9-20) or the story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53-8:11) or the passage that affirms the doctrine of the Trinity in 1 John, called the “Johannine comma” (1 John 5:7-8)?

I think the answer is almost certainly “no,” and for a technical but important reason that involves the difference between two widely recognized phenomena whose technical names are “textual corruption” and “interpolation.”

These are two different phenomena, and even though the boundaries between them can be blurred and blurry at times, it is important (in most scholars’ views) to keep them distinct in one’s mind.

A textual corruption is …

A textual corruption is the alteration of a text made by a scribe after the book was put into circulation in its “final” form by an author or an editor.  In other words, it involves a passage (there are many thousands of them, of course) that a scribe has clearly changed, as evidenced by the fact that we have different manuscripts that have different forms of the text, one set of manuscripts with one way of wording a passage (a paragraph, a sentence, a verse, a word, whatever) and one or more other sets of manuscripts with a different wording.

Textual critics are principally concerned with establishing what the text that was first put into circulation actually said, at every point, based on the various readings that can be found in our surviving manuscripts.   They are concerned with determining which ways of wording the text represent scribal alterations and which represent the text as it was inherited by the scribe – when both (or all) forms of the text still exist among the manuscripts that survive.  They want to isolate the “textual corruptions” found in some manuscripts and determine the earliest form of the text, the one that was first circulated when the book was originally published.

An interpolation is different (in theory and principle) from a textual corruption.  By definition, an interpolation of the text is an addition to the text that was made at some point before the final published form of the text that lies behind all our surviving manuscripts came to be put in circulation.  In other words, by definition an interpolation cannot be found in any of our surviving manuscripts.  Why?  Because someone changed the text after a first edition of the book was written, but before the book was circulated in the form that is attested in all our surviving manuscripts.  This someone could have been an editor of the book doing his work after the author originally wrote it, for example, or even the author himself who was producing a second (or third or whatever) edition of the book after producing a first addition but before the book was circulated in the form that was later copied by scribes.

And so an interpolator is more like an editor of a text (whether it was the author editing his own work or a different person editing the work as it came to him).  A scribe is a copyist of the work once it was put in circulation)  Interpolations and scribal alterations are therefore considered different phenomena.

With a lot of overlap.  There is overlap because in *one* sense a scribe who alters a text is editing it, just as an editor does.  A lot of my own scholarship in textual criticism has been an attempt to show that scribes were in fact working as editors – even more than that, they were sometimes working as authors!  But still there is a difference between interpolations and textual changes because the latter represent changes found in at least one of our manuscripts (so we know for certain that it was a change made by at least *one* scribe after the book was published!) and the former represent (hypothetical) changes found in precisely *none* of our surviving manuscripts.

Another reason interpolations and scribal corruptions overlap is because – here it gets even more tricky — there are places where scholars are convinced that there were scribal alterations made very early in the history of the transmission of the text that occurred *after* the book was originally put in circulation in the textual form that has come down to us but that affected *all* of our surviving manuscripts.  In other words, in these places (no one can agree where it has happened!) all of our manuscripts have the wrong reading, but not because of an interpolation made before the text in its final form was put in circulation but because the text in that final form was changed very early by a scribe whose alteration came to be the form of the text copied by all later scribes.

This kind of latter change – if detected – requires the scholar to “emend” the text.  A “textual emendation” is a (typically strong) suggestion by a scholar (or many scholars) of what the original text *really* read even though all surviving manuscripts read something else.  It is different from an interpolation because, in theory, the change was made by a copyist after the text had been circulating in the form that lies at the base of all surviving manuscripts, not by an editor prior to publication (that is, the widespread circulation) of the book in that form.  As I said, the lines are blurry.

BUT: back to the question.  Suppose Luke 1-2 is an interpolation.  Should they be bracketed, like Mark 16:9-20, John 7:53-8:11; or 1 John 5:7-8?   My view is decidedly NO.  These other passages are textual corruptions: there are manuscripts that lack the passages.  Not so with Luke 1-2.  Brackets, in my opinion, should indicate passages that are highly dubious based on a study of the manuscripts, i.e., textual corruptions, not passages that scholars have argued are interpolations.