9:10 AM Take your Bibles please and turn to Luke 2:14 — a Christmas verse if ever there was one. The critical text of the Greek New Testament reads as follows:
δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις θεῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας
We might paraphrase this as:
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men of [i.e., who enjoy God’s] goodwill.
What happened to “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth goodwill toward men”? There are two readings here in the Greek manuscripts, and they are very similar:
“of good will” (genitive case) = eudokias
“goodwill” (nominative case) = eudokia
The latter reading is represented by the KJV and the NKJV. The former reading has been adopted by most modern English translation. So which is it? What is the original text here? In his blog LXX Studies, John Meade has an excellent discussion of the variant. He concludes:
Thus the angels are pronouncing peace to men of God’s favor, not peace on earth, goodwill to men [indiscriminately].
I tend to agree with this conclusion. The external evidence for eudokias seems definitive. Meade takes it a step further and suggests that the reading is a Septuagintalism or Hebraism. This may or may not be the case. But his discussion raises several important questions:
1) If you are a pastor, can you follow this discussion? If you had to choose between the genitive or the nominative here, would you know what to do and how to proceed? If not, why not?
2) Assuming that a knowledge of Greek is necessary to be able to resolve this problem, what about textual criticism? Few students study this area of exegesis. Yet it is an essential part of our task as exegetes/teachers/pastors. In fact, the bottom portion of our printed Greek New Testaments (the so-called textual apparatus) sometimes takes up half the page, so important are textual variants in the study of the New Testament. Can you make an intelligent decision here, based on the textual evidence provided to us by the Greek manuscripts, the early versions (Latin, Coptic, Syria), and the statements of the early church fathers (the “patristic” evidence)?
3) Can the LXX shed light on New Testament Greek? I imagine John Meade would answer, “Much in every way.”
As the God-man, Jesus presented the sternest challenge ever made to humanity. He demanded peoples’ total allegiance and obedience. Here Luke reminds us that “peace” is available only to those who enjoy God’s goodwill, that is, those who comprise the new humanity that Christ came to establish, the people of God. “Christmas, then,” writes Meade, “is not an empty hope for world peace.”
It is remembering [he continues] how God in Christ actually brought peace on earth to the people of his favor in the past, and that past historical reality is the ground for a certain hope that he will act in the future, that he will indeed come again to establish his justice and righteousness in the consummation of his kingdom in the new creation. “World peace” is part and parcel of why we cry, ”Come, Lord Jesus!” It is not a lament or a gripe to God, as if the first advent of Christ had failed. The first advent brought peace through the blood of Jesus’ cross. The second advent will fulfill or consummate what Christ’s first coming inaugurated.
It’s worth thinking about.