This morning I came across a puzzling sentence in Through the Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an anthology in English of Bonhoeffer's writing I regularly use. The sentence was vintage Bonhoeffer – astringent, christocentric, pastorally focused on the covenant commitments of Christian community. Except for one clause which was so unlike Bonhoeffer's voice I couldn't hear him say it or imagine he wrote it.
Now it so happens I'm currently reading for the severalth time New Testament Interpretation 1860 -1986, by Stephen Neill and updated by Tom Wright. The chapter on the Cambridge triumvirate of Westcott, Lightfoot and Hort is a remarkable account of scholarship and spirituality at the service of the New Testament. The Westcott and Hort text of the Greek New Testament, prefaced by Lightfoot's outline of the principles of textual criticism was one of the great gifts to the church in the 19th Century. Encouraged by the example of those who meticulously pieced together a more reliable text of the New testament, I decided to go looking for the Bonhoeffer sentence in the book from which it had been taken.
Here's the two versions of the sentence. Where's the error and which was the one Bonhoeffer wrote? I'll give the full and correct quotation tomorrow – it deserves more than a moment's pondering.
We
now know that we have been taken up and borne in the humanity of Jesus,
and therefore that new nature we now enjoy means that we too must bear
the sins and sorrows of others.
Leave a Reply to Graeme Clark Cancel reply