dan wallace favorite text not in the bible

One lesson we must learn from Misquoting Jesus is that those in ministry need to close the gap between the church and the academy. In retrospect, keeping these two pericopae in our Bibles rather than relegating them to the footnotes seems to have been a bomb just waiting to explode.

Thus, the excuse that one can proclaim it because the story really happened is apparently not valid. It was probably a story conflated from two different accounts. Second, the pericope adulterae is most likely not even historically true. Something is amiss in our theological seminaries when one’s feelings are allowed to be the arbiter of textual problems. The same preacher who declares the Markan passage to be inauthentic extols the virtues of John 8. First, in terms of popularity between these two texts, John 8 is the overwhelming favorite, yet its external credentials are significantly worse than Mark 16’s. But there are two problems with this approach. And we all know of preachers who can’t quite give it up, even though they, too, have doubts about it. I would even preach on it as true historical narrative, even after I rejected its literary/canonical authenticity. For years, it was my favorite passage that was not in the Bible. Strong emotional baggage is especially attached to the latter text. The problem here, though, is a bit different. Today the text is not printed in modern translations, and it hardly raises an eyebrow.Įhrman has followed in Gibbon’s train by exposing the public to the inauthenticity of Mark 16.9-20 and John 7.53-8.11. Gibbon did so before the general public, in language designed to offend.” Yet by the time the Revised Version appeared in 1885, no trace of the Comma was to be found in it. “Others had done before him, but only in academic and learned circles. This scandalized the British public of the eighteenth century, for their only Bible was the Authorized Version, which contained the formula. Edward Gibbon, in his six-volume bestseller, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, noted that the Comma Johanneum, or Trinitarian formula of 1 John 5.7–8, was not authentic. Letting the public in on scholarly secrets about the text of the Bible is not new.

Dan wallace favorite text not in the bible