Matthew 26:53 and the Irrationality of Modern Academic Thinking

Modern scholars, including GNT exegetes, have largely lost the ability to think in terms of evidence; they operate primarily on peer pressure and authority. When they hit on something preposterous, they look around at others with credentials and see what they say.

If other credentialed “experts” mostly agree that what seems wrong is actually OK, they will seldom want to challenge the most respected authorities, unless they have already given up and pigeonholed themselves as deviants who are never going qualify for a position at the most respected academic posts anyway. The twentieth century went monopolistic. There is only one big GNT textual authority with academic standing: Nestle-Aland, United Bible Society (NU). The publishing houses are monopolistic. Academia itself, even with thousands of marshaled voices, also acts primarily as a monopoly where money rather than independent thinking calls the shots.

In order to maintain the monopoly of academic authority, media and publishers must constantly provide the illusion of debate and critical thinking. In multicultural Marxism it is called problem-reaction-solution or thesis-antithesis-synthesis. It is impossible to level the charge against academia that there is no critical thinking or lively debate. Controversy is everywhere.

How can this paradox of debate–no-debate be maintained? Simple. There are certain areas where individualistic choice and controversy are encouraged and other areas that are taboo. As Voltaire said, you know who rules you by whom you dare not criticize.

Matthew 26:53 is a good example of this. The textual problem is purely grammatical and has no theological significance because everyone agrees on the meaning, which is obvious. In this case the question is not how to translate it or what it means, but was the NU textual choice competent in the editors’ own area of primary expertise.

The GC method of solving these questions with grammatical evidence is construction statistics. This kind of evidence is public and open to everyone, not depending on subjective opinion or authority, once the constructions are identified.

πλείω δώδεκα λεγιῶνας ἀγγέλων means more than twelve legions of angels. It is simple and clear. The Greek and English word orders are the same. Yet, when the cases are examined, there is no other construction like it in the NU GNT. It is unprecedented in the GNT to use the accusative of the comparand without the competitive conjunction. The ordinary conclusion that most people who had become familiar with the ways Koine constructs comparatives would come to is that it is ungrammatical and therefore was a scribal error and that NU has made a simple judgment error in its primary job of selecting the original text.

There are two kinds of grammatical errors: the kind that ordinary people make who have not received enough education, and the kind that even terrible speakers would never make. For example, lots of people say He don’t, or to who, or Our Father who is in heaven, or Him and me did it with improper case or person agreement, but nobody says Him don’t or Him doesn’t with improper subject case. Both kinds are grammar errors, but the second kind could not have been written by the original Evangelists. Unfortunately for NU in the case of Matthew 26:53, they have selected the second kind. It is simply not true that people can make up any grammatical variants they want. Multiculturalists can only stretch grammar so far.

Of course Byzantine Majority proponents will readily agree that NU is mistaken. But they have not done the necessary academic groundwork to support their text the way NU did, so they are easily dismissed. It has been a mistake of laziness or lack of funds on their part, because they actually could do the academic groundwork. There is no critical apparatus for the Byzantine text, citing the source, like the NU apparatus.

In modern academic sophistry there are two usual approaches for supporting wrong decisions and assertions. The main approach is to baldly insist that it is good grammar without a shred of supporting evidence. This is the approach that Expositor’s Greek New Testament takes. This approach targets the authority respecter that characterizes most of modern academia and the seminaries. Not one trained scholar in a hundred who takes NU as an authority will question the assertion of Expositor’s that this accusative comparand is good Greek. The question is basically taboo. It is off limits, unthinkable. The thought will not even occur to the average trained scholar. 

The second approach is even simpler and more stupid. The experts just do not even mention it. This is what most commentators on Matthew 26:53 do. The result of this solution is an even more efficient method of removing the question from the area of critical thought. The national media does it all the time. There is nothing about it in Metzger’s Textual Commentary.

Do the translators know that NU is bad Greek? Yes, any competent translator knows, although many commentators may not be aware. Why do they pass over it in silence? Well, what else are they supposed to do? Commentary is not their job. Their job is getting the translation right. Of course commentators like A. T. Robertson in Word Pictures know and pass over it in silence. Maybe they are embarrassed by the peccadilloes of their authorities.

Here a third line of defense for dubious textual and grammatical decisions that should be mentioned. The issue is just too trivial to try readers’ patience with. It is better just to skip over it. This kind of thinking makes sense to authority people like modern scholars. However, it does not make sense to critical thinkers. Critical thinkers wonder that if the supposed authority makes this kind of elementary blunder and all the blind followers just swallow and pass over it, what kind of worse elementary blunders are they making that might start to unravel?

For example, the NU experts say that they reject the Byzantine and accept the Alexandrian texts because they use the oldest texts. But do they? Bart Ehrman says no; they often choose the newer uncials over the older papyri. The papyri are older but have more mistakes. If people started thinking about the implications of that line of reasoning, it might weaken their faith in the whole set of Alexandrian texts. Questions start popping up about relative error rates in the two text families.

Another example is their use of the shorter and more difficult texts as selection criteria. Do they really use these claimed principles in selecting Alexandrian texts over Byzantine? No, if Byzantine texts are shorter and more difficult, NU always chooses Alexandrian texts anyway.

So for critical thinkers, Matthew 26:53 is a rabbit hole. There is a lot more underground than first meets the eye, and critical thinkers do not just look away the way authority scholars do.

At this point the discussion is at the abstract rhetorical level. The reader will begin to see the difference between academic rhetoric and objective evidence when the GC constructions are brought to bear on the text.

The ordinary way is a genitive object of a comparative adjective or adverb (86 occurrences in our sample). As the object of the comparative (like object of a preposition), these genitives are substantival. An example is Matthew 3:11, ὁ δὲ ὀπίσω μου ἐρχόμενος ἰσχυρότερός μού ἐστιν, the one coming after me is greater than me. μού is the genitive object of the comparative ἰσχυρότερος.

πλείω is a contraction for the accusative plural comparative πλειόνας. πλείω δώδεκα λεγιῶνας ἀγγέλων would fit this first comparative pattern if accusative λεγιῶνας were changed to genitive λεγιῶνων, which some of the Alexandrian texts do.

The second common way to form the comparative construction is with the comparative conjunction ἢ, meaning or (19 of these in the sample). The comparands are in accusative or any case determined by the grammatical relation (here, it is accusative for direct object). This can be seen in Matthew 19:24, πάλιν δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν, εὐκοπώτερόν ἐστιν κάμηλον διὰ τρήματος ῥαφίδος εἰσελθεῖν ἢ πλούσιον εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ Θεοῦ, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. πλείω δώδεκα λεγιῶνας ἀγγέλων would fit this second accusative comparative pattern if the comparative ἢ were added.

There are other, less common, comparative constructions in Koine—for example, using prepositions. However, it is easy to see that one of the scribes made a natural mistake by omitting the actual small ἢ in Matthew 26:53 because he confused it with the equivalent construction that omits it. It is not the kind of mistake that an illiterate original speaker would make but the kind that a scribe might make in the scriptorium, trying to hear phrases read, remember them and copy them using the materials available.

There are no precedents in GNT for an accusative comparative object like λεγιῶνας in our sample without a comparative conjunction or preposition. It is not a New Testament language pattern. No commentary shows any examples of such a construction. The bald assertion that it is grammatically OK fails the test of critical evidence that requires evidence. Sources like NU an Expositor are infected with the modern problem of overconfidence, and their followers are infected with a lack of critical thinking.

Christians are given a mind in the image of God and taught by our Lord to make comparisons and suspect fraud and false claims. We are to test a tree by its fruits.

An examination of the Alexandrian texts reveals the story behind the construction. The MMS have written it six different ways, five of them as impossible Greek, none of them in the way that is easiest to explain. The easiest hypothesis is that the first copyist in the time in Egypt before Matthew was canonized simply omitted the small ἢ by mistake as a natural confusion with the equivalent genitive construction. 

The Sinaiticus scribe tried to fix it with the genitive but then got the angels back into the accusative. A Sinaiticus corrector fixed this second mistake by putting both words into genitive. Ephraemi Rescriptus followed this correction. Bazae tried to follow this grammatically correct construction but also had to be corrected. Sinaiticus, the one NU likes best, is all by itself with a grammatically impossible construction.

The difficulty with all the Alexandrian genitive corrections, even though they finally get good grammar, is that the accusative persists in half of them, inappropriately for the genitive construction, and therefore was in the original. Accusative would not be introduced into an original genitive comparison if it were original. From this it is easy to conclude that the original was accusative with ἢ, the second common comparative construction.

Here is the correct Byzantine original and Bezae corrected.

• πλείους ἢ δώδεκα λεγιῶνας ἀγγέλων—good

Here is a list of the six Alexandrian copy errors.

• πλείω δώδεκα λεγιῶνας ἀγγέλων Vaticanus, Bezae corrected—no precedents
• πλείω δώδεκα λεγιῶνων ἀγγέλους Sinaiticus original—no precedents
• πλείους δώδεκα λεγιῶνων ἀγγέλων Sinaiticus corrected, Regius—good
• πλείω δώδεκα λεγιόνης ἀγγέλων Bezae original—no precedents
• πλείους ἢ δώδεκα λεγιῶνων ἀγγέλων Alexandrinus—no precedents

Most of the early NU Alexandrian MMS are apparently impossible Greek, just scribal errors. What a bunch of bad choices NU has to support their superior Alexandrian hypothesis with bluff. The only one that is even good grammar that someone would actually write started out with the accusative and dropped the ἢ and was “fixed” by the Sinaiticus corrector, not by restoring the ἢ but by further changing the accusative original λεγιῶνας to genitive. The motive for the fix is obvious.

It does not take a detective to piece the puzzle together, but if the whole case is never even examined, then the original mass of Alexandrian errors can be foisted off on the gullible GNT scholars as the good original. This is the kind of thinking that the Grammatical Commentary is trying to correct by swinging back from authoritative grammar and textual criticism to objective evidence from the construction occurrences.

—Dennis Kenaga, April 2018