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55 ChAPtER FOuR The Parable of theTwo Sons (Matt. 21:28-32) in Irenaeus and Codex Bezae Denis Minns In his introductory essay in William Sanday’s Novum Testamentum Sancti Irenaei, Alexander Souter remarks that as Irenaeus “is the earliest surviving writer of the Christian era who quotes the New Testament both extensively and accurately,” “it is obvious that if we can secure the words of his New Testament text as he dictated them we shall be in possession of an extremely early type of text, whose claims to be in close connection with the original autographs will deserve examination.”1 Of course, the fact that so much of what Irenaeus wrote survives only in Latin, and to a lesser extent, Armenian, translation, adds considerably to the risk of contamination that is inherent in the transmission of the biblical text of any patristic author. It was the sorting out of some of those problems that was addressed so magisterially in Novum Testamentum Sancti Irenaei. Westcott and Hort had judged that, both in the original Greek and in the Latin translation, the New Testament quotations in Adversus haereses were Western,2 and Souter agreed that “even as two different things,” they “are both Western texts.”3 The “Western text,” has, of course, been subject to much criticism since Westcott and Hort: Kurt and Barbara Aland note that “hardly anyone today refers to this putative Western text without placing the term in quotation marks,” as I have just done.4 In the same place they assert that “it is quite inconceivable that the text of Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis could have existed as early as the second century.” C. B. Amphoux, on the other hand, holds that it is incontestible that the “modèle fundamental” of Irenaeus’s Greek text of the New Testament was “une texte proche du Codex de Bèze.”5 The purpose of this paper will be to argue that, in one instance, the text known to Irenaeus was, in its essentials, that of Codex Bezae. It will be necessary to argue this, as the evidence is not immediately clear, and its interpretation has been disputed. The textual tradition of Matthew 21:28-32 is notoriously complicated. Three main forms of the parable can be distinguished. Much scholarly argument has been devoted to the questions of which form is prior and how the other two arose from it. The three forms are enumerated differently by different scholars. I give them here with the abbreviated manuscript evidence as recorded by B. Metzger in A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament.6 56 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacy I. The first son refuses but afterward repents and goes. The second son says “yes,” but does nothing. The question “which of the two did the will of the father?” is answered “the first.” ) K W Π itc, q vg syrc, p, h al II. The first son refuses but afterward repents and goes. The second son promises to go, but does not. The question “which of the two did the will of the father?” is answered “the second.” D ita, b, d, e, ff2 , h, l syrs al III. The first son promises to go but does not. The second son refuses, but later repents and goes. The question “which of the two did the will of the father?” is answered “the second.” B f13 700 syrpal arm geo al Though Tischendorf (editio octava critica maior) had cautiously limited himself to claiming Irenaeus as a witness only to the order of sons in form I, the third edition of the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament cites Irenaeus as a witness to form I as a whole. But Irenaeus does not say expressly which of the two sons did the Father’s will and, so far as concerns the order of the sons, he is as much a witness to form II as to form I. Form II, although the most difficult, has found few champions. In general, it is either said to require the far-fetched assumption, first suggested, and that halfheartedly , by Jerome, that the chief priests and the elders gave an answer they knew to be untrue, or it is written off as a scribal blunder. In either case, it is regarded as a transitional stage in the evolution of form III from form I, or of form I from form III.7 Josef Schmid and Antonio Orbe argued that Irenaeus knew the parable in form II.8 In Orbe...

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