Aenon?

I love this little piece of forensic textual criticism. Not sure what weight I'd give it, but it is a little bit of evidence in favour of something or other...

John 3:23 says "Now John also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim, because there was plenty of water, and people were coming and being baptized."

Fine. The only problem with this is that none of the other gospels or any other historical source records a place called Aenon. The place is simply not there. It was claimed to be near Salim/Salem, which is attested elsewhere, but not only is there no mention of Aenon in history, there's no suitable location in geography or archaeology either. 

So it appears that John either knew of a place that nobody else knew of, or his source gave him false information. Of course, if the writer of the fourth gospel was fed false information, he can't have been an eyewitness, as some claim, but we came to that conclusion by other means long ago on this blog.

Anyway, assuming that John is working with false information, where did he get this wrong information from? The amazing thing is that textual criticism offers a fairly compelling case for the source.

As you probably know, not all the manuscripts of the new testament documents agree in every detail. Sometimes a 'jot' or 'tittle' is different between two otherwise identical manuscripts, sometimes the odd word has been changed here or there.

One passage in Luke's gospel (3:18) is generally rendered thus: "And with many other words John exhorted the people and proclaimed the good news to them." Its the word 'exhorted' here that is of interest.

In the 'Textus Receptus' (i.e. the generally accepted manuscript of the NT), the Greek word here translated as 'exhorted' is 'parakalon' (sorry for transliterating the Greek into Roman letters, but Greek letters confuse me), but in one variant manuscript (Codex Bezae) the word used is 'parainon', which has basically the same meaning, but is clearly a different word.

D. Paul Glaue ("Der alteste Text der geschichtlichen Bucher des Neuen Testaments," Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kude der alteren Kirche, Vol 45, 1954, pp. 90-108) pointed out that it looks like the author of John was using an early manuscript of the 'parainon' variant text of Luke as a source and misunderstood the meaning. Remember, he was reading a document which was written all in capital letters, with no spaces between words. So when faced with an unusual letter combination, he wouldn't necessarily know how to break the words apart. Splitting the letters into 'par'  (in the vicinity of) and 'ainon' (springs; fountains) gives the text an entirely different meaning, something like: "And [he did] many other things, in the vicinity of Ainon, he [preached] the good news to people." So it looks like John mistook Ainon as a place name, and inferred from it that there was water there, and so it was a good place to do some baptising...

Make of that what you will.

But if it is true, then this is evidence that the author of John copied from the gospel of Luke.

[For more info, read this.]

The Bible's Buried Secrets

Did you see the recent documentary series on BBC2? Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou presented a three part series attempting to 'prove' some controversial theories with the aid of archaeology. Conservative Christians up and down the UK tweeted and blogged their outrage.

For what its worth, here's my take on what she had to say. I suppose all this contains spoilers, if you haven't seen the shows.

Episode 1. Was there a King David?
Yes. Next.
Well, the most I think you can say from the evidence presented in the programme was that there probably was a historical King David, but that some of the claims made about him in the bible may be a bit exaggerated. But when you find inscriptions relating to a king 'of the line of David' from a time, supposedly only 100 or so years after the alleged time of David, then I'm happy to believe that, yes, there was at some point a bloke called David. His descendent was a king, so its not unreasonable to think that he might have been a king too.

Episode 2. Did God have a wife?
Now this is the one that got people in a flap. But the bible makes it clear, Ashera was worshiped in the same temple as God, in Jerusalem, for at least 65% of the time that the (first) temple was there. Given the evidence, its not unreasonable to deduce that the people (well, the 'bad' kings and some priests at least, but presumably a significant subset of the people too) considered the goddess Ashera to be worthy of worship alongside God. Its not too far a jump from there to making them a couple. So if the question is 'Was God believed to have a wife by some people?' then the answer is certainly yes. The programme could not possibly address the question 'Did (the real) God have a wife?' as the assumption underlying the whole thing is that there was and is no real God.

Episode 3. Where was the garden of Eden?
This topic didn't actually sound that exciting to me, but I found this theory the most interesting and convincing of the three. The first temple was decorated as a garden? Totally plausible. The Adam character is the priest/king with the divinely appointed task of tending the 'garden'? Yes, I can see that. I'm surprised Melchizedek wasn't invoked at some point, given that he was priest and king in (Jeru)Salem. The Ezekiel stuff makes more sense in this context rather than talking about the fall of Lucifer. So, yes, I'm with the reasoning the whole way. Even the snake stuff. But at the end we never find out which king! Why not? Why not even speculate? Which King was Adam?