Did Jesus Pray to a Sun-god? Hardly. - Mt. 27:46

A friend recently posted a link to an article from thedailybeast.com on my Facebook timeline. The title of the article was: The Ancient Text Where Jesus Prayed to a Greek God. You can look the article up in the archives of the Daily Beast.

The ancient text to which they are referring is Codex Bobiensis, referred to in textual criticism as "k." Bobiensis is a fragmentary fifth-century manuscript now in the National Library at Turin. Unlike the famous Shroud, also housed at Turin, "k" is not a forgery.

Bobiensis, which contains about half of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, is the oldest of the Old Latin texts, but it belongs to a special sub-type called Afra (African). North Africa, the home of St. Augustine, was its original provenance.

Although the manuscript dates from the fifth century, it represents a textual type that is much older than that. The readings of "k" match those in quotations from Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, who died in 258 CE. Some scholars believe that this text type goes back to a papyrus of the second century, which would be earlier than any NT papyrus that we have.

Bobiensis is not a text that you just pick up and read. It is full of bizarre orthography, and textual critics have made long lists of equivalencies to help one to read it. It happens to be one of my favorites of the ancient texts. It happens that another ancient text that I've been writing about, Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew, agrees more often with "k" than with any other ancient text.

I used to have a book containing readings from "k," but I no longer have it. Nor do I have a copy of "k," for the simple reason that I can't afford one.

My task in this little article is to explain my reasons for rejecting the hypothesis, referred to in the above-mentioned article in the Daily Beast, that in Matthew 27:46 Jesus was praying to the Greek sun-god Helios.

Those words of Jesus on the cross, which can be translated as "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" did not come out of nowhere. Jesus was quoting Psalm 22.2. The words have been reported to us in Aramaic, but they were originally written in Hebrew, and Hebrew Matthew tells us that they were spoken by Jesus (Rabbi Yeshua) in "the holy language." So let's go back to the source.

Psalm 22.2, Masoretic Text:

אֵלִי אֵלִי לָמָה עֲזַבְתָּנִי

Phonetic transcription: eli eli lamah azavtani

This agrees with the words as reported in Hebrew Matthew.

But in canonical, Greek Matthew the words are reported to us in some form of Aramaic, as "eloi eloi lema sabacthani" (Received Text) or "eli eli lema sabacthani" (D et al.). But this is not the Syriac (Eastern Aramaic) of the Peshitta, which has "il il lemana sh'baqthani," or the Old Syriac "eli eli lmn shbqthni." It is a dialect that is intermediate between Hebrew and Eastern Aramaic, and that fits the description of Palestinian Aramaic.

I don't have a copy of "k," but I do have a copy of the Vulgate, which was written ca. 400 CE and continued many Old Latin readings. It says: "Heli Heli lema sabacthani," and translates it as "Deus meus Deus meus ut quid dereliquisti me." This is, as I've said, a direct quote from the second verse of Psalm 22. It has nothing to do with Helios.

[UPDATE: Since writing this, I have discovered that on my hard disk I have the full text of OLD LATIN BIBLICAL TEXTS, by John Wordsworth (the book that I once had in a hard copy), which contains a transcript of CODEX BOBIENSIS, "k." It turns out that "k" only includes Matthew 1:1 through 15:36. The Daily Beast article is therefore bogus, and nothing but empty sensationalism and an April Fool's prank.]

I don't know much about the Daily Beast, but I think it should stick to political reporting.

Text © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.