Reflections on God's Anger
In Mark’s Gospel a leper comes to Jesus begging, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” The text says, “Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’” The alternate reading says that Jesus was “moved with anger” (Mark 1:40-41). This is an example of a variant in the manuscript tradition. We do not possess a single original manuscript of the New Testament (this is true of the Hebrew Bible as well). We have copies—copies of copies. The vast majority of manuscripts date from the ninth century and later. A smaller group of manuscripts date earlier. A few generally considered very reliable date from the fourth to the sixth centuries. We have a few papyrus manuscripts that date even earlier that contain portions of the New Testament, but many of these show evidence of having been copied without the greatest care. It is the work of textual scholars to compare these manuscripts, rate their comparative value, ...