Pay close attention to the verse numbering. Notice anything peculiar? So what happened to verse 11? Read on…. Those came way later in fact, chapters were added to the biblical text in the 13th century and verses were added in the 16th century. Keep that in mind. Since printing presses and copy machines were not even dreamed of in ancient Rome, when Christians wanted to share the gospel of Matthew with other Christians across the Roman Empire, there was only one thing they could do: copy it by hand.
And even though scribes took great care as they copied the text, errors crept in here and there over the centuries. For example, a certain word may have been added or deleted or misspelled. Sometimes a entire phrase was omitted. And every once in a great while, an entire verse was added or deleted. The error was imbedded.
So when Matthew wrote his original manuscript around 60 A. So now 4 copies of the gospel exist in 4 different places in the Roman Empire. And again. Over time errors are bound to creep in.
So any errors that creep into the manuscripts are isolated from the others and only exist within their own family of manuscripts. So when Bible scholars compare the ancient manuscripts from one geographic area with a set of ancient manuscripts from another geographic area they can put on their Sherlock Holmes hats and determine where the errors are. So getting back to the verse we now know as Matthew , that verse only shows up in 1 of the 4 manuscript families, it does not appear in the other 3 branches of the manuscript family tree.
And then that error was copied and recopied but contained to that particular branch of the manuscript family tree. Likely, the scribe was making a note to study and it inadvertently got added into the text from that point forward.
In our Statement of Faith at Riv, we state,. We believe the Bible is inspired by God, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.
It is composed of the 66 books of the Old and New Testament, and was written without error in the original manuscripts. It is the highest authority over all other forms of revelation. We can have absolute faith in the Word of God because we have centuries of scholarship studying its authenticity and God himself is protecting his word. There may be a note here or there that is up for debate like Matthew , but the message is still the same. As it says in at least Luke This is a placeholder for your sticky navigation bar.
This form is found in Codex G and M both 9th century , in a number of medieval Greek manuscripts, and in most of the lectionaries. Thus, though this longer reading shows up later than our main two options, it is surprisingly widely attested! Thus, it is indisputable that this kind of scribal mistake happened at times.
Some scribe or scribes of the fourth century or earlier who was familiar with Luke reproduced the content of that verse in Matthew Now, such a scribe would not have had a copy of Matthew and a copy of Luke both open in front of him and carefully copied a verse from one into the other.
Instead, just as in our example above, it would have happened from memory, possibly even by mistake. This might explain why the initial version was slightly shorter than Luke It was the central thrust of the verse rather than a word-for-word replication of it, which we are all prone to do with content that is longer than just a few words. Thus, on this theory, Matthew is not original but came into Matthew by parallel influence. Just as the later, longer form became quite widely attested after coming into existence, so too did the shorter form spread widely after the initial scribal error.
The verse is immediately followed by the parable about a group of slaves each trusted with a sum of money while their master is away, a parable found in Matthew 25, not in Matthew So, why would a scribe add the verse here?
If the surrounding context is not similar, what would cause someone to add the verse from Luke into Matthew 18? If intentional, what would be the motivation? If accidental, what would be the cause? For the answer, we have to look at a few scribal practices. Sometimes, a scribe accidentally skipped something when copying a manuscript.
If he afterword realized he had done so, what was he then to do? One common option was to write the missing words in the margin so that the reader could still find them and the next scribe could copy them back into the next manuscript. This was a reasonable solution, but it had some problems. One of those problems was that other sorts of notes were also written in the margins by scribes. Thus, a later scribe might have trouble telling if the words in the margins were missing words that needed to be copied back in or whether they were some other kind of marginal note.
In this way, sometimes extra material got copied into later manuscripts that was not meant to be there. A scribe occasionally mistook an explanatory note, cross reference, or some other kind of gloss for omitted words that needed to be put back into the text.
Now, when we look at the context around Matthew , it is actually not difficult to see why a scribe might have put Luke as a helpful cross-reference next to Matthew Note what is said in the following verses:. And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray.
The theme here is that Jesus seeks out and saves the lost. It may well be that a scribe wrote Luke in the margins as a cross-reference here. A later scribe, recognizing these biblical words, assumed that they belonged in the text and added them in.
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