Irenaeus

55

ChAPtER FOuR

The Parable of the Two Sons (Matt. 21:28-32)

in Irenaeus and Codex Bezae

Denis Minns

I

n 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 Cantabri-

giensis 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 abbre-

viated manuscript evidence as recorded by B. Metzger in A Textual Commentary on the

Greek New Testament.^6