Counting Witnesses for the Angry Jesus in Mark 1:41: Interdependence and Insularity in the Latin Tradition

Abstract

A survey of recent literature on the remarkable reading in Mark 1:41, depicting Jesus’s anger at a leper who approaches him to be healed — supported by just Codex Bezae, a segment of the Old Latin version, and perhaps the Syriac Commentary on the Diatessaron, attributed to Ephrem — reveals a tendency to ascribe the acceptance of the alternative reading depicting Jesus’s compassion to the overwhelming preponderance of its support. It is clear though that the UBS3 and UBS4 committee preferred this reading on the basis of the ‘diversity and character’ of its evidence1. The present article examines the implications of the predominantly Latin support for the reading that depicts Jesus’s anger in light of the question of textual diversity, considering palaeographical, codicological, and textual evidence of a northern-Italian provenance for its manuscripts and text forms, while arguing that the insular character of the tradition raises serious doubts regarding the independence of its testimony when it differs distinctively in relation to the Greek tradition.