The Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath - different translations.
Different translations miss out the "also" in Luke 6:5. Why?
This article is about the small differences between Biblical translations, why these differences are there, and what it means about the Bible.
One Sabbath Jesus was passing through the grainfields, and His disciples began to pick the heads of grain, rub them in their hands, and eat them. But some of the Pharisees asked, “Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”
Jesus replied, “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, took the consecrated bread and gave it to his companions, and ate what is lawful only for the priests to eat.”
Then Jesus declared, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” Luke 6:1-5 (BSB translation)
I happened to look at the Greek for Luke 6:1-5 today as I was reading this and noticed something strange.
καὶ ἔλεγεν αὐτοῖς ὅτι Κύριος ἐστιν ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ τοῦ σαββάτου.
kai elegen autois oti Kurios estin ho uios tou anthropou kai tou sabbatou
And he-said to-them that Lord is the Son of Man also of-the Sabbath.
The “also” here is actually the word “and” καὶ kai in Greek, but in this context it means “also”; this usage of is καὶ in fact a fairly common idiom in New Testament Greek and is quite obvious because of the context.
But the BSB (Berean Study Bible) doesn’t have the ‘and/also.’ This gave me pause for thought: usually the Berean Bibles are fairly reliable for giving a very literal translation of the Greek.
I then looked at the King James. It does have the “also.” When I looked at Luke 6:5 on Biblehub, which shows a lot of translations side by side, most agree and do not have the “also”, however the King James Version has:
“And he said unto them, That the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.”
As it turns out the Greek I had been looking at was not the one I usually use but the Textus Receptus - this is the version of the Bible in Greek that was published by the fifteenth/sixteenth century Renaissance scholar Erasmus, using as his source the Bible that the Greek Orthodox church uses. The Textus Receptus is a very late text (1516), but it happens to be the only text that the Reformers such as Martin Luther and the translators of the King James Bible had available for their translation.
To their credit, the NET Bible however (the one edited by Daniel Wallace, probably the world expert on the language of the Greek New Testament) has a footnote:
The term “lord” is in emphatic position in the Greek text. To make this point even clearer a few MSS add “also” before the reference to the Son of Man, while a few others add it before the reference to the Sabbath.
The NET Bible translates the verse this way:
Then he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”
The reason why Daniel Wallace says that the term “lord” is in the emphatic position is simply because it is first in the Greek, which is why my word-by-word English translation above was, “And he said to them that Lord is the Son of Man also of the Sabbath.”
It is to be noted that there were no capitals in First to Third Century Greek texts of the New Testament, which is why the word Kyrios can be legitimately translated sometimes as lord and sometimes Lord. Which did Jesus mean? Kyrios can mean both. And Kyrios in Greek was actually the word used to translate the Hebrew word Adonai, which is a fairly apt translation, as Adonai can mean both the Lord above and a human lord as well - Samuel 26:17 has David calling Saul Adonai.
Then Saul recognized David’s voice and said, “Is this your voice, my son David?” And David said, “It is my voice, my lord the king.”
Actually, in the early Greek manuscripts of the New Testament neither were there word divisions (itwaswrittenlikethiswiththewordsallinarow), nor question marks, commas, nor many other punctuation marks and textual conveniences we take for granted today.
Due to archaeology and searches of monasteries and other repositories of ancient texts, we now have many very early manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. The earliest New Testament manuscript may well be 7Q5, a manuscript found in 1947 in the Qumran caves, i.e. one of the Dead Sea scrolls, which appears to be a fragment from Mark’s Gospel and dates to before 40AD. The controversy about this manuscript is outlined by Daniel Wallace in an article on bible.org; I think some scholars have an a priori position which rules out early New Testament manuscripts and this is why they resist 7Q5.
The earliest manuscript known before these more recent discoveries was P45, a fragment of the gospel of John from the early 2nd century.
However there is another fragment from Mark called Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 5345, which may be first century as well.
Altogether more than 43% of the New Testament is found in Second Century fragments, of which some may come from the First Century.
Anyway I went to my Nestlé-Aland Greek New Testament to have a look at the footnotes. You see, the footnotes tell you which particular manuscripts have the particular variant.
At the front of the Nestlé-Aland NT are pages and pages like this of abbreviations, showing which ancient manuscript the abbreviations refer to:
The date column shows the century that scholars believe the manuscript was written in.
In any case, this is the footnote in my Nestlé-Aland Greek New Testament for Luke 6:5.
The variant without the “also” is found in seven ancient manuscripts; interestingly, the word order is different as well, which is actually an insignificant variant really because it doesn’t change the meaning any (except for the placement of Lord at the beginning, which is emphasises it).
τοῦ σαββάτου ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου
literally:
“Lord is - of the Sabbath - the Son of Man.”
The earliest complete manuscripts of the New Testament are listed first. Hebrew Aleph א = the codex Sinaiticus, which is a third century manuscript of the whole New Testament found in St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert by 19th Century scholars. It is kept in London. B = the codex Vaticanus, a fourth century manuscript that was found in the Vatican Library. W = the Freer Gospels, a fifth century manuscript that was purchased by American Industrialist and collector of ancient art during a trip to Egypt in 1906. All these are considered good authorities. The Syriac translation is syr and cop is the Coptic - these are very early translations - the New Testament spread very widely, very quickly. The Diatessaron is the earliest known gospel harmony, but the only version we have today is a reconstruction from 1881.
Interestingly the one with the “also” in it is in at least 51 manuscripts; this reading is the most common by far, probably because it made it into the Orthodox Greek version, but for modern Western scholars today the earlier manuscripts are counted as more authoritative.
ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ τοῦ σαββάτου
Literally “Lord is the Son of Man also of the Sabbath.”
A is the Codex Alexandrinus, which was brought by the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch Cyril Lucaris from Alexandria to Constantinople, and then given to Charles I of England in the 17th century. It’s a fifth century complete manuscript of the New Testament. You can look many of the others up in my photo of the list. Byz Lect is the Byzantine Lectionary: these are the daily Bible readings used in the Byzantine era, and are notable for their copious quantity.
Nestled into the middle of these two readings in the footnotes is also a third reading, which says,
καὶ τοῦ σαββάτου ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου
Literally “the Lord is also of the Sabbath the Son of Man.” In Greek grammar this reading is no different in meaning, actually, to the previous one and this brings up a great point about the way God foreordained the preservation of His word: for the great thing about the Greek language is that the grammar makes texts extremely resistant to word order changes, far more so than English where “The man bit the dog” has a completely different meaning to “The dog bit the man”. In New Testament Greek
ὁ κύων ἔδακον ὁ ἀνθρώπος
ὁ κύων ὁ ἀνθρώπος ἔδακον
ὁ ἀνθρώπος ἔδακον ὁ κύων
all mean “the dog bit the man”, because the grammar is indicated in the word endings, not the word order.
And
ὁ κύνος ἔδακον ὁ ἀνθρώπον
ὁ κύνος ὁ ἀνθρώπον ἔδακον
ὁ ἀνθρώπον ἔδακον ὁ κύνος
all mean, “the man bit the dog”.
Going back to Luke 6:5, the other interesting thing in the footnote is this: after the variant without the also, it says, “see Mt. 12:8”
It turns out, Matthew 12:8 has the version without the also.
“For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
And after the variant with the also, it says, “see Mk. 2:28”
Mark 2:28 has the version of the saying with the also.
“So the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath.”
Some translations say “even of the Sabbath” which is acceptable I guess.
One reason the fact is pointed out in the footnotes that the variant saying is found in the other Gospels is perhaps because one of the main reasons for variants seems to be that the scribe (who perhaps had just finished copying out Mark’s Gospel) may have transcribed the phrase from his memory from Mark’s Gospel, instead of what was on the page in front of him.
But this begs the question, which version of this saying in Luke 6:5 is the correct one?
If you happen to believe that the Orthodox Church preserved the ‘correct’ version of the New Testament faithfully, then the version in the King James Bible is also correct.
But if you think the version of the Bible that we should use is the one that Biblical scholars find is based on the best evidence for a particular textual reading, then the Berean Study Bible is the correct reading.
The good news is, though, that there are no important theological differences between the Textus Receptus and the other more ancient versions. If anything, in the case of Luke 6:5, the word kai “and, also” simply gives a slightly greater emphasis to Jesus’ saying that the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath, but doesn’t materially change the meaning.
And the fact that the saying is preserved in both ways in Mark and Matthew indicates that the gospel writers themselves didn’t consider the absence or presence of that one particular word as significant - which of course is why we have four gospels.
God considered it important to have four written eye-witness testimonies to the events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. They don’t match in every detail: but they do bear witness to something that truly happened. And the level of preservation of the actual text is remarkable. There are no materially important differences between thousands of ancient copies of the New Testament, which had spread throughout the ancient world by the end of the second century and already been translated into Coptic, Latin, Syriac, and other languages.
And the apostles - the eyewitnesses themselves - staked their lives on the truth of the gospel: an apostle had to be an eyewitness of the Resurrection (Acts 1:22).
And of the eleven disciples/apostles who witnessed Jesus’ resurrection (excluding Judas of course, who didn’t stick around to see the Resurrection ), ten of the apostles actually died as martyrs for their testimony that they had seen with their own eyes the literal, physical resurrection of Jesus.
Beautifully done, especially your final thoughts.