Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You why would an editor add the Virgin birth to Luke? By Bart D. Erman, read by John Paul Middlesworth? Is it possible that Luke's gospel originally lacked the story of the Virgin birth, but that it was added later in order to make the book more orthodox? That's the question I'm pursuing in this thread. Based on a paper I delivered to a group of Mt scholars 20 years ago, it appears that in the earliest form of Luke's gospel, what we have is an account that locates Jesus'adoption appointment to sonship and its accompanying empowerment at the baptism when God declared, quote, today I have begotten you, unquote. It is true that throughout the work of Luke acts there are other kinds of christological traditions preserved as well, especially in the speeches of acts. But many of these are also adoptionistic, even though they appear to embody an even earlier adoptionistic notion that it was at the resurrection, not the baptism, that God conferred a special status upon Jesus and invested him with a special power.
[00:01:05] At this point I should stress that I am not going to give an exegesis of Luke's gospel. That is to say, I am making no claims about what the text actually meant or about what the author intended it to mean. I am instead asking how the text could have been read, and, as it turns out, no surprise either to postmodernists on the one hand or historians of interpretation on the other. And there are no rules in the universe that require these to be different people. It could have been read in radically different ways by radically different interpreters. Marcian could have read the text as a docetist and genuinely believed that his docetic reading is what the text said, just as an adoptionist could have read the same text, believing that his adoptionist reading is what the text said. Texts rarely constrain readings they more normally enable them. But suppose someone should want to try to constrain the reading of the text. How could one try to counter a reading of Luke's gospel that takes it to support an adoptionistic understanding of Jesus as the one who was adopted and empowered by God at his baptism, so that Jesus was not himself divine by nature? There are several strategies that might be considered. One approach would be to argue on exegetical grounds that the adoptionistic interpretation was inadequate or wrong, and mount an argument based on details of the text. That would be the approach typically taken by modern scholars, as some of you have been thinking of counterarguments for the exegesis I botched at some point or another.
[00:02:34] Another approach would be to write a polemical treatise that attacks an adoptionistic perspective on other grounds and maligns adoptionists as being willful, stupid, or demonically inspired. That would be the approach typically taken by ancient scholars, the heresyologists.
[00:02:50] There are three other strategies that I would like to consider here, which are somewhat more subtle, though possibly in the long run equally effective. You could change the actual text of the document, you could place it in a canon with other texts that present competing perspectives, and you could propagate alternative narratives that stress the points you want to make about Jesus.
[00:03:11] First, it is possible to change the text itself so that it is no longer as amenable in your judgment to an adoptionistic reading. This appears to have happened in the case of Luke, although it is not clear in many instances when, where, or by whom such changes were made, or whether they were made precisely to counter an adoptionistic reading, or if this just happened to be one of the beneficial side effects of the changes.
[00:03:37] Whoever added the first two chapters of the Gospel certainly threw a monkey wrench into an adoptionistic reading of the baptism, for among the many other purposes these opening chapters achieve, one is to show that it was at his very birth that Jesus was the son of God. As the angel Gabriel announces to Mary prior to her conception of Jesus, quote the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the spirit of the most high will overshadow you. For this reason, the child that is born of you will be called holy, the Son of God, unquote. Jesus is now the Son of God because of his miraculous conception, not his baptism. In some very real sense he is God's son rather than the son of Joseph, for example, later to be adopted by God.
[00:04:25] Someone may well object that it would be unlikely for Luke himself to have added this beginning to his narrative, since the christology it embraces does in fact seem to stand at Ods with what the rest of the account assumes. The objection applies to other christological conceptions used by Luke as well. In the infancy narrative, for example, Jesus is said to have been born the Lord and the Christ in chapter two, verse eleven unto you this day is born in the city of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord. Yet according to acts, chapter 238, Jesus became the Lord and Christ at the resurrection. Let all the house of Israel therefore know that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.
[00:05:08] To that objection, I think it would be safe to reply that Luke as an author seems in general to have been altogether casual by our standards, at least in how he handled his christological ideas and that he used various traditions available to him, for example, in the speeches and acts, but also in the accounts in the gospels that sometimes stood at ods with one another if pushed too hard. In Luke ten one, Jesus is called the Lord during his ministry, even though acts 236 indicates that he did not become the Lord until the resurrection. So to acts 1323 through 24 designate the savior during his lifetime, but he is said to have been made the savior at the resurrection in acts 531, and so it's not inconceivable to me that Luke himself created the christological tensions between the infancy narratives and the rest of his account.
[00:06:04] On the other hand, it may be that someone else tacked on the beginning of the gospel using traditions that to some extent coincided with those of the rest of the gospel and to some extent conflicted with them. The effect, in any event, whether or not that was the purpose, was to modify the adoptionistic possibilities of the text. Other passages were certainly altered by someone other than the author of Luke himself. An obvious case in point is the voice of the baptism in Luke 322, even though virtually all of our earliest witnesses attest the quotation of psalm two seven you are my son today I have begotten you. The vast majority of manuscripts, all of our greek ones apart from Codex, give the other more theologically innocuous and more synoptically harmonized rendering, you are my beloved son, in you I am well pleased. Now, rather than an adoption formula, the text gives an identification formula in which Jesus is pronounced rather than made the Son of God. This change must have been made sometime in the second or early third century, as it is found in our oldest greek manuscript, p. Four, and it obviously became very popular very fast as it came to dominate the textual tradition. No doubt its survival was not at all hurt by the circumstance that its words are precisely those of the parallel account in Mark.
[00:07:30] The unknown scribe or scribes who altered this text were not doing something unheard of in the history of textual transmission, for we have a range of texts throughout the New Testament that were altered in an apparent attempt to undermine an adoptionistic reading or, the flip side of the coin, to promote an understanding of Jesus as himself divine.
[00:07:50] Sometimes this happened in passages where the divinity of Christ is already expressed, but where scribes felt it could be expressed yet more emphatically, such as in John 118, which originally spoke of the unique son who was in the bosom of the Father, but which came to be changed by scribes in Alexandria to read the unique God who was in the bosom of the Father, the change, in fact, doesn't make much sense, since if Christ was the unique Father, it's a bit hard to understand who the Father is in whose bosom he resides. But the change became popular in modern times, especially among english translators of the text.
[00:08:29] A similar motivation lay behind the change of the confession of one Timothy 316, which in its oldest form speaks of Christ as the one who was made manifest in the flesh. But a scribe, simply by putting a vertical line through the omacron and drawing a superlinear line over the word, modified it so that it now speaks of God, who was made manifest in the flesh. There are numerous other examples of this phenomenon that I don't need to go into here. I give all the significant ones that I could find in my study on the orthodox corruption of scripture. But I should point out that there are other, more subtle instances of such changes that occur in Luke's gospel, with the same result of making it less susceptible of an adoptionistic reading. These would include the passage I've already referred to, in which the voice at the transfiguration of Jesus in chapter nine declares, this is my son whom I have chosen. But when was Jesus chosen? In this narrative? In the oldest form of the text, it was at his baptism. But scribes, alert to the adoptionistic possibilities of that reading, have change not only the text in chapter three but also the one here in chapter nine, once again harmonizing it to mark so that now, in the majority of later witnesses, the voice speaks of, quote, my son who is beloved, unquote.
