A two-part article. Part 1: Simon Escobedo. Part 2: Mike Porter.
Part 1: An Internal Critique
A number of days ago, I came across a Unitarian who sought to minimize, if not eliminate, the appeal Trinitarians make to 2 Peter 1:1, specifically the phrase τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ – “our God and Savior Jesus Christ.”
The grammatical significance of the construction is well known. Under what is commonly called the Granville Sharp rule, when two singular, personal nouns are connected by καί (“and”) and share a single definite article, they normally refer to the same individual. Thus, τοῦ θεοῦ … καὶ σωτῆρος (“the God and Savior”) naturally identifies the one person who follows: Jesus Christ. The verse therefore stands as another significant New Testament attestation to the deity of Christ.
The response from this particular Unitarian, however, was that Codex Sinaiticus contains a significant textual variant:
“Lord and Savior”
rather than
“God and Savior”
along with a number of other manuscripts that follow this reading. On this basis, the objection was that the verse should instead read, “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” bringing it into line with what was characterized as the broader New Testament pattern: Jesus is “Lord,” but not “God.”
The objection was then summarized this way:
“It is not wise to base an argument on a major textual variant. Is this favorite proof-text actually another Trinitarian proof-text?”
There is a certain irony in that objection, which will become apparent shortly.
I had encountered this argument a few years ago from the same critic, but at the time I largely dismissed it for several reasons. First, I was unaware of any published Unitarian treatment that made this textual variant a significant part of the argument. Second, the textual evidence appeared to favor θεοῦ. And third, even if κύριος were the original reading, the argument against the deity of Christ would not follow. “Lord” is hardly a weak title when applied to Christ in the New Testament, particularly given the ways κύριος functions in contexts involving Old Testament YHWH texts.
When the argument resurfaced, however, I decided it deserved a closer examination. After all, if an objection is going to be presented as a serious reason for rejecting a Trinitarian reading, it should be examined on its own terms. And, as is often the case in theological debate, truth becomes particularly clear when the internal weaknesses of an opposing argument are exposed.
The Sinaiticus Reading
Unitarian treatments of 2 Peter 1:1 frequently seek to avoid the force of the standard reading, “our God and Savior, Jesus Christ.” The appeal to Codex Sinaiticus offers an apparent way to do so: if κυρίου (“Lord”) is original rather than θεοῦ (“God”), the verse would read “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” apparently removing the explicit identification of Christ as God.
The problem is that the textual evidence does not make this an easy case.
The standard reading, θεοῦ, has strong external support. The earliest continuous witness to 2 Peter, Papyrus 72 (P72), reads θεοῦ, as does Codex Vaticanus. Codex Alexandrinus and the great majority of extant manuscripts likewise support the reading. Modern critical editions also retain θεοῦ.
By contrast, the κυρίου reading has a very plausible explanation as a secondary alteration. The immediate context of 2 Peter repeatedly uses the familiar expression “Lord and Savior,” making assimilation to that recurring formula an obvious possibility. A scribal confusion involving the abbreviated nomina sacra for θεοῦ and κυρίου is another possibility. In either case, θεοῦ has the advantage of being the more difficult reading and therefore does not look like a reading conveniently created by later Trinitarian scribes.
Interestingly, from what I could find, the Sinaiticus variant does not appear to function as a significant argument in several treatments of the passage. Dustin Smith, for example, does not appeal to it; neither does Anthony Buzzard, and James D. G. Dunn likewise passes over it in his discussion of the passage. Smith instead attempts to resist the identification of Jesus as “God and Savior” on other grounds, appealing to the distinction between God and Jesus and, more fundamentally, to a Unitarian framework. At the same time, he acknowledges that the grammatical construction can, in isolation, identify one person.
This is important because it brings us to the more fundamental problem with the appeal to Sinaiticus.
The Variant Does Not Solve the Grammatical Problem
Here is the irony mentioned earlier.
The appeal to the Sinaiticus reading is intended to escape the force of the Granville Sharp construction. If θεοῦ is replaced with κυρίου, the argument goes, we no longer have “God and Savior” and therefore no longer have a grammatical construction identifying Jesus as both.
But the replacement does not actually eliminate the construction. It merely changes the first noun.
The variant reads:
τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος
“our Lord and Savior”
The same grammatical relationship remains: one definite article governs two singular nouns joined by καί. Thus, if the construction requires explanation in the θεοῦ reading, it requires explanation in the κυρίου reading as well.
Indeed, if “Lord and Savior” were taken to refer to two distinct persons, the problem would become even more obvious. Why should τοῦ κυρίου … καὶ σωτῆρος naturally identify two persons merely because the first noun is κύριος? The grammatical construction itself does not suddenly cease to function because the noun has changed.
This exposes the internal difficulty with the argument. The construction is rejected when the first noun is “God,” because that would identify Jesus as God. Yet once the first noun is changed to “Lord,” the same construction is implicitly retained in order to identify Jesus as both Lord and Savior.
In other words, the variant does not remove the grammatical issue; it simply relocates it.
One cannot dismiss the force of the construction when it yields a conclusion one dislikes and then quietly rely upon the same construction when the conclusion is more acceptable. That is special pleading: the grammatical principle is set aside when the first noun is θεός, but effectively retained when the first noun is κύριος.
Nor is it sufficient simply to say that the two nouns could refer either to one person or to two. That possibility is precisely what the grammatical construction addresses. The question is not whether two nouns can theoretically have different referents. Of course they can. The question is what the particular syntactical construction most naturally indicates in this context.
The same point becomes even more significant when we consider the parallel constructions elsewhere in 2 Peter. The letter repeatedly uses the expression “Lord and Savior” with reference to Jesus Christ. The construction is not ordinarily understood as introducing two distinct persons. Once again, the appeal to Sinaiticus does nothing to eliminate the grammatical relationship between the two nouns.
The selective application is therefore difficult to avoid: the grammatical principle is set aside when its first noun is θεός, but the resulting variant still depends upon essentially the same syntactical relationship when its first noun is κύριος.
The Textual Variant Does Not Rescue the Unitarian Argument
The argument therefore fails on its own terms.
Even if one were to grant, for the sake of argument, that κυρίου is the original reading, the grammatical difficulty the variant was invoked to escape would remain. “Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” still presents a singular construction in which “Lord” and “Savior” are joined under one article and applied to the same person.
More importantly, the textual evidence itself does not justify treating the Sinaiticus reading as though it decisively overturned the standard text. The θεοῦ reading is supported by the earliest continuous manuscript witness to the letter, by Codex Vaticanus, by Codex Alexandrinus, by the majority of manuscripts, and by modern critical editions. The κυρίου reading has plausible explanations as a secondary alteration, particularly given the recurring “Lord and Savior” formula elsewhere in the letter.
Consequently, the Sinaiticus variant cannot bear the argumentative weight placed upon it.
The standard reading remains:
τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ
“our God and Savior Jesus Christ.”
And even if the secondary reading were preferred, the fundamental grammatical issue would still be standing.
The textual variant, in other words, does not rescue the Unitarian argument. It merely changes the noun around which the argument has to be made.
Now we can turn to the textual evidence itself – and that evidence makes the appeal to Sinaiticus even less compelling.
Part 2: An External Critique of the Textual Evidence
The Evidence for θεοῦ
Part 1 showed that the objection fails even if κυρίου is granted. The evidence shows that κυρίου is not original. So overwhelming is the evidence that no critical edition has treated the question as open.
The fullest record is the Editio Critica Maior (ECM) of the Catholic Letters, produced by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster. It prints θεοῦ at 2 Peter 1:1 and lists the witnesses to each reading (variant unit 1:1/32). The Institute’s Genealogical Queries database, built on the ECM, shows 125 Greek manuscripts extant at this word. 120 read θεοῦ. Five read κυρίου: Codex Sinaiticus (א), Codex Psi (Ψ, 044), and the minuscules 398, 442 and 621. One Apostolos lectionary, L596, joins them. The proportion is 96 percent to 4 percent, or 24 to 1.
The manuscripts are spread through the centuries. Note the steady string of manuscripts showing θεοῦ compared to the other reading:
Period
θεοῦ
κυρίου
3rd to 5th century
3 (P72, B, A)
1 (א)
7th century
1
0
9th century
6
1 (Ψ)
10th century
12
1 (398)
11th century
19
1 (621)
12th century
28
1 (442)
13th century and later
51
0
Total
120
5
A manuscript dated to two centuries is counted in the earlier one.
This count does not depend on piles of Byzantine copies. Kurt Aland, in describing the method of the edition, reported that 372 of the 522 Catholic Letters manuscripts agree with the Majority text in at least 90 percent of 98 test passages. The editors collated in full the roughly 150 that depart from the Majority text by more than that, and chose a representative group from the rest. Every manuscript with a claim to an independent text is therefore in the pool, and the five κυρίου witnesses are what that pool produced. The manuscripts left out are Byzantine copies, and the Byzantine text reads θεοῦ.
Nor does the count hide a split by text type. Sinaiticus belongs to the Alexandrian text, and the leading Alexandrian witnesses to the Catholic Letters read θεοῦ: P72, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, and the minuscules 33, 81 and 1739. The Byzantine tradition reads θεοῦ without exception, in the uncials K (018), L (020), 049 and 0142 and in the minuscules 18 and 35. The five κυρίου witnesses stand outside the Byzantine tradition: Sinaiticus, Ψ and 442 belong to the Alexandrian tradition, and Aland placed 398 and 621 in Category III. The Unitarian cannot claim the Alexandrian text for κυρίου, because P72 and Vaticanus are among its earliest and best representatives, and both read θεοῦ.
The versions point the same way, and I take them up below.
Sinaiticus Is Important, and It Is Outweighed
Sinaiticus is a fourth-century codex of the whole New Testament, and nothing in this article lowers its standing. The question is what it can decide at this one word. Sinaiticus does not get a veto vote because it is Sinaiticus. Textual critics weigh witnesses by age, accuracy and independence, and at 2 Peter 1:1 Sinaiticus falls short on each.
Age. P72 is dated to the third or fourth century and Vaticanus to the fourth. Neither is later than Sinaiticus, and P72 may be earlier. Sinaiticus is not the oldest voice in the tradition. It is one of three at the earliest level, and the other two read θεοῦ.
Accuracy. The Institute’s Genealogical Queries tool measures how often each manuscript agrees with the ECM’s initial text across the Catholic Letters:
Witness
Date
Agreement with the initial text
Reading at 1:1
Vaticanus (B)
4th century
96.0%
θεοῦ
Alexandrinus (A)
5th century
91.2%
θεοῦ
Sinaiticus (א)
4th century
90.0%
κυρίου
P72
3rd or 4th century
86.6%
θεοῦ
The initial text is the editors’ own reconstruction, so these figures measure closeness to their text and do not test it independently. They do show how the method ranks the witnesses, and it places Vaticanus about six points ahead of Sinaiticus in these letters. P72 is the earliest of the four, not the most accurate. Its value here is its date and its agreement with Vaticanus.
Independence. Three words before θεοῦ, Sinaiticus reads εἰς δικαιοσύνην where every other Greek manuscript in the ECM reads ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ. The ECM records that reading under Sinaiticus alone. A manuscript that stands alone against all the others in the same clause earns no casting vote against P72 and Vaticanus.
Company. Four later manuscripts read κυρίου, and they do not move the needle. Ψ (Codex Athous Laurae, 044) is an uncial of the ninth or tenth century. In the Catholic Letters its text is mostly Alexandrian with some Byzantine influence, which is why Aland placed it in Category II, his class for manuscripts of special quality that show Byzantine influence. The minuscules 398, 621 and 442 date to the tenth, eleventh and twelfth or thirteenth centuries. They stand against 120 manuscripts spread from the fourth century to the sixteenth. Agreement in an error that every scribe is pulled toward does not show a common ancestor. The “Lord and Savior” formula pulls toward κυρίου in every century, so five scribes can reach it independently.
The editors. Westcott and Hort, who ranked Sinaiticus and Vaticanus above every other witness, printed θεοῦ at this verse. So do Nestle-Aland and the ECM. The editors who valued Sinaiticus most did not follow it here.
How κυρίου Arose
The external evidence settles the reading, and the internal evidence explains the variant. The author of 2 Peter has a fixed way of naming Christ, and “Lord and Savior” is the formula. It appears in identical words at 1:11 and 3:18, and the disputed 1:1 differs from both by one noun:
Verse
Greek
NASB95
1:1
τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ
“by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ”
1:11
τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ
“the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”
3:18
τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ
“the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”
The formula appears twice more, at 2:20 (“the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”) and at 3:2, where the Greek reads τοῦ κυρίου καὶ σωτῆρος. That makes four uses of “Lord and Savior” and one of “God and Savior.”
The one use that differs is the one in dispute, and it differs by a single noun. That is the pattern in which scribes harmonize. A copyist who knows the formula would write the familiar noun, and the noun was close at hand. κυρίου stands in the very next verse (τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν, 1:2, NASB95 “in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord”) and again at 1:8 and 1:11.
The change in the other direction has no such explanation. θεοῦ ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος occurs nowhere else in the letter, so a scribe who wrote it would be breaking the pattern, not following it. The reading that departs from the author’s habit is the one a scribe is unlikely to create, and the reading that matches the habit is the one a scribe is likely to create. That is why θεοῦ is the harder reading, and it is the reading Part 1 called more difficult.
The nomina sacra add a second route. In the abbreviations, θεοῦ is written ΘΥ and κυρίου is written ΚΥ, one letter apart. The manuscripts show it. Sinaiticus writes ΚΥ at this point, and Vaticanus and P72 write ΘΥ. A one-letter slip explains how κυρίου could arise in one copy, and the formula explains how it could arise again. Neither explains how θεοῦ came to stand in every other line of the tradition.
Codex Sinaiticus (א), 2 Peter 1:1: εἰς δικαιοσύνην τοῦ ΚΥ ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος ἸΥ ΧΥ. The nomen sacrum is ΚΥ (κυρίου).
Codex Vaticanus (B), 2 Peter 1:1: ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ τοῦ ΘΥ ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος ἸΥ ΧΥ. The nomen sacrum is ΘΥ (θεοῦ).
Papyrus 72 (P72), the opening of 2 Peter.
Papyrus 72, 2 Peter 1:1: τοῦ ΘΥ ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος ἸΗΥ ΧΡΥ. The nomen sacrum is ΘΥ (θεοῦ).
The apparatus at 1:2 shows the same scribes at work on the neighboring phrase. Ψ and 398 shorten it to “of our Lord,” and 442, 621 and the lectionary L596 insert “Savior” after “God.” These copies also read κυρίου at 1:1.
That leaves one way to rescue κυρίου: to say that Trinitarian scribes changed it to θεοῦ. The change would have to be made before P72, in the third or fourth century or earlier. It would have to be accepted by the Greek tradition in every text type and by the Latin, Bohairic, Harklean, Armenian, Georgian and Slavonic translators, and it would have to leave no trace of the original reading except in Sinaiticus, the Sahidic, the Philoxenian, four medieval copies and one lectionary. A change that complete, that early and that free of surviving evidence is harder to explain than the harmonization it is meant to replace. The simpler account fits all of the evidence: Peter wrote θεοῦ, and a few scribes harmonized.
The Peshitta Has No 2 Peter
The Unitarian appeals to the Peshitta as a very old translation that reads κυρίου. What was originally known as the Peshitta does not contain 2 Peter.
Syriac is the Aramaic dialect of Edessa and the language of the Syrian churches. Their Bible reached its standard form in the Peshitta, a translation from the Greek made in the early fifth century. Its New Testament has 22 books, not 27. It left out 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John, Jude and Revelation. These were the books the wider church had been slowest to receive. Eusebius, writing about a century before the Peshitta, lists 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John and Jude, along with James, among the disputed books, and he is unsure about Revelation (Ecclesiastical History 3.25). A Peshitta reading at 2 Peter 1:1, whether for κυρίου or for θεοῦ, does not exist, because the version never had the verse.
A modern New Testament called “the Peshitta” has 2 Peter. As noted earlier, 2 Peter was not part of the original Peshitta. The first printed Syriac New Testament (Vienna, 1555) lacked all five books. In 1630 Edward Pocock printed 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John and Jude at Leyden from a manuscript in the Bodleian Library. John Gwynn edited that text in 1893 and identified it as the Philoxenian version of 508. His edition stands in the standard 1905 edition of the Peshitta published by the British and Foreign Bible Society. The earliest known Syriac text of 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John and Jude is therefore the Philoxenian, and printed editions of the Peshitta add it to fill the gap. Revelation entered the printed editions from the Harklean, which was the Syriac version of that book available to the editors. In 2 Peter, then, the text printed under the name “the Peshitta” is the Philoxenian. It is wrong, therefore, to say that “the Peshitta” reads κυρίου at 2 Peter 1:1. That reading belongs to the Philoxenian, and the age of the Peshitta cannot be attached to it.
The Syriac Versions
Four Syriac versions bear on the question, and the Unitarian has confused two of them.
Version
Date
What it is
At 2 Peter 1:1
Old Syriac
Before the Peshitta
Gospels only
No 2 Peter
Peshitta
Early 5th century
The standard Syriac Bible, 22 New Testament books
No 2 Peter
Philoxenian
508
A revision of the Syriac Bible that supplied the five missing books
κυρίου
Harklean
615-616
A revision of the Philoxenian against Greek manuscripts
θεοῦ
Only the last two carry 2 Peter, and they differ from each other:
Philoxenian
Harklean
Date
508
615-616, 108 years later
Made by
Polycarp, for Philoxenus, Miaphysite bishop of Mabbug
Thomas of Harqel, Miaphysite scholar, at the Enaton monastery near Alexandria
Purpose
A Syriac Bible nearer to the Greek and closed to readings a Nestorian could use
A scholarly recension checked against Greek manuscripts
Method
A fairly exact revision of the earlier Syriac
A mirror translation that follows the Greek closely, with variants marked in the margin and by asterisks and obeli
At 1:1
κυρίου
θεοῦ
Both are late witnesses, more than a century after P72, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, and neither can compete with them. Between the two, the Harklean is the better guide to its Greek source. His translation attempted to very closely mirror the Greek, even when it became awkward. A mirror translation lets a scholar see which Greek reading stands behind each Syriac word, and Thomas recorded the readings of the Greek manuscripts he consulted, effectively making it a critical text. The Philoxenian is a looser rendering than the Harklean, so it is a less precise guide. Where the two disagree at 1:1, the Harklean is the one revised against Greek manuscripts. The Harklean’s Greek model has been traced to a group of minuscules that includes 1505, 1611 and 2138. In the ECM all three read θεοῦ at 1:1.
The attribution of the Syriac text of 2 Peter to Polycarp is Gwynn’s, and the ECM and Nestle-Aland follow it. This Polycarp is the sixth-century translator, not Polycarp of Smyrna, who translated 2 Peter. His version is a witness to the Greek manuscript he held in 508, and that manuscript was later than P72 and Vaticanus. On any view the text is a later translation and not the Peshitta.
The Other Versions
The Unitarian needs the versions to support κυρίου, and they do not. I count six versions for θεοῦ and two for κυρίου:
Version
Language and region
Origin
At 1:1
Latin (two text types)
Latin, Western church
Begun in the late 2nd century
θεοῦ
Bohairic
Coptic of Lower Egypt
Debated, from the 3rd to the 6th century. The absence of Revelation suggests 3rd century.
θεοῦ
Harklean
Syriac
615-616
θεοῦ
Armenian
Armenian
Early 5th century
θεοῦ
Georgian
Georgian
End of the 5th century
θεοῦ
Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic
9th century
θεοῦ
Sahidic
Coptic of Upper Egypt
By the early 4th century
κυρίου
Philoxenian
Syriac
508
κυρίου
The six that read θεοῦ were made in different languages and regions over some seven centuries, each from the Greek manuscripts its translators held.
The Sahidic is the one early version that stands with κυρίου, and it deserves a direct answer. It was made in Upper Egypt in the age of Sinaiticus, and it shows that κυρίου existed in Egypt by the fourth century. It does not show that κυρίου came first. In the same period P72 and Vaticanus read θεοῦ, and so does the Bohairic. A reading that the “Lord and Savior” formula invites can arise early and still be secondary. The Coptic tradition divides, and so does the Syriac.
A version is evidence for the Greek its translator read, one step removed from the manuscripts. The versions add to the case for θεοῦ and take nothing from it.
Why No One Treats This as a Controversy
Four things keep the question closed.
The editions agree. The Textus Receptus, Westcott and Hort, Nestle-Aland and the ECM all print θεοῦ at 2 Peter 1:1. The ECM does so with the whole body of evidence set out in its apparatus. Bruce Metzger’s A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2nd ed., 1994) explains the choices of the committee behind the UBS text. It has entries for 2 Peter 1:1 (Συμεών or Σίμων), 1:2 and 1:3, and none for θεοῦ or κυρίου, because the committee did not regard the reading as a significant variant.
Those who have examined the variant reject it. Philip Comfort, in his New Testament Text and Translation Commentary, lists κυρίου as a variant and rejects it. He notes that the editions read θεοῦ and sends the reader to Murray Harris’s Jesus as God for the full discussion of the verse. Terrance Callan, in a study of the earliest copies of 2 Peter, takes θεοῦ as the text and says it probably identifies Jesus Christ as God. In the literature I have been able to find, no scholar defends κυρίου at this verse, and as Part 1 noted, Dustin Smith, Anthony Buzzard and James Dunn do not use it.
The manuscripts decide it. 120 of the 125 Greek manuscripts in the ECM read θεοῦ, including P72 and Vaticanus, two of the three earliest witnesses. Sinaiticus stands against them with four later manuscripts, and it is alone against every other Greek manuscript three words earlier in the same verse.
The internal evidence explains the variant. “Lord and Savior” is the author’s formula, and a scribe who drifts toward it produces κυρίου. Nothing explains a drift in the other direction.
Sinaiticus is a great manuscript, and here it has made the kind of change that scribes make. The Peshitta has no 2 Peter, and the Syriac scholar who revised the Philoxenian against Greek manuscripts wrote θεοῦ. The question is not close.
The Granville Sharp construction therefore stands as Peter wrote it, and the conclusion of Part 1 stands with it. The apostle speaks of “the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ.”
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