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| Dean Burgon defended the Majority Text; he had first-hand experiences with manuscripts. |
I want to touch upon Burgon's defense of the ending of Mark and the Woman Taken in Adultery (John 8).
Both are easily studied in English, as Dean Burgon has shown. Mark's ending was already in the Vulgate and continued until the magical Codices Aleph and B (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus) - both promoted by Tischendorf - were used to remove Mark 16:9-20 from the Gospels. Mark 16:1-20 was in all the manuscripts that survived, so the apostolic origin is clear. But sadly, for the modern critics, Aleph and B, for their 1500 years, had no children, no descendants, no proof Mark ended abruptly.
This does not enter the typical believer's mind - but listen up. For the rationalists (modernists, apostates) the short ending eliminated the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, especially since they imagined Mark was first and Matthew/Luke used Mark as their outline, with the never-proven Q providing the other material.
The apostates consider John's Gospel to be very late (?), Gnostic (!), and mythical (!?), so that finished the Resurrection for good.
I am quite sure that Kurt Aland's precious Greek New Testament (now used at all seminaries and colleges, with a few exceptions) simply continued the ruse started by Tischendorf, which was greatly desired already by the rationalists. Aland depended on Westcott and Hort, while Westcott and Hort needed Tischendorf, who relished lies, fraud, and the Church of Rome.
Or - one might say, the Westcott-Hort-Nestle-Aland efforts satisfied the assumptions of the rationalists from Halle and other rationalistic hotspots.
The woman taken in adultery - John 8 - is also found in early witnesses. It is also not found in some. The reason may well be that some early copyists found the story at odds with the Sixth Commandment and at variance with Jesus' teaching. That is more of a touchy-feely criticism, not a factual one.
As I have written before, falsification is best achieved by removing text, not by adding text. John 8 - without the woman caught in adultery - is abrupt.
Hills has more material, which I am using in the second edition of The Bible Book.
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| Pieter Brueghel II, Christ and the Woman Caught in Adultery |
