Looking over the whole Lead thread on CWOB, this brief aside from Donald Schell jumped out at me:

I will note that ‘The Great Commission’ a poorly attested addition and arguably late addition to Matthew’s Gospel

Ok—let’s talk about this. I’ve seen this kind of thing in several places and it is begging for some informed discussion.

Basically, the bibles that we read from in church are “eclectic texts”. What does this mean? It means that they are translated from a base Greek text that has been compiled from literally thousands of manuscripts by hundreds of scholars who have been at work on this process for about a hundred and fifty years. The goal of this eclectic text is to recover the earliest possible form of the text; to read the books of the New Testament in the state in which they left the authors’ pens—or, at least, the best that we can do towards that.

Our evidence consists of three major bodies of Greek texts and two additional categories. We have three types of Greek biblical texts determined by style of writing and materials which is roughly correlated to age: papyri, uncials, and miniscules.

Papyri tend to be the oldest. That is, we have papyrus fragments of the New Testament that date anywhere from the 7th century (fairly late) to roughly the year 200 (the celebrated papyrus P46). The problem is that the papyri tend to be fragmentary meaning that we only have bits and pieces. P46, for instance, only has parts of the Pauline Letters. Most contain only a few verses. So—they’re old, but very spotty.

Uncials get their name from their letters—all uppercase. Many papyri (particularly the earlier ones) are written in these letters two but the key difference between the two is material: the uncial manuscripts were written on parchment (prepared skin) rather than papyrus (early fiber paper). As a result, the uncials preserved a heck of a lot better than the papyrus. Uncials containing large sections of the Bible were big projects and expensive to produce in Antiquity—we only get them after the legalization of Christianity. Thus, our best, most trustworthy, and most extensive witnesses to the NT text are the big early uncials. There’s a handful of them that are considered the primo references often referred to as the Great Uncials.

Then we have the miniscules. They’re called this because they’re written in lower case characters and they tend to be later than the uncials.

The two other categories are early translations from the Greek into other languages, and citations from the Church Fathers. The latter will become quite important in a moment so file that away…

A whole bunch of Germans (other people too—but mostly Germans) have dedicated their scholarly lives to going through all of the little bits and manuscripts and have sorted them based on the quality of their readings. The best manuscripts are those with the most careful and accurate scribes and that give us a faithful reproduction of the text. Because of their work, we can rank the various manuscripts and sources on how well they represent the earliest recoverable text by specific books. The best are referred to as the “First-Order Witnesses” and these are the places where we go when we want to see what a text said.

Basic procedure for assembling an eclectic text, therefore, is to start with the major first-order witness uncials, create the text where they agree, then supplement from any papyri that are earlier than the actual base uncials in question. Miniscules provide minor evidence.

Going back to original claim on the authenticity of Matthew 28:19 let’s be very clear: There are no first-order witnesses that omit any part of this verse as we are familiar with it. None. One of the major later unicals (D) adds in a “now” that also appears in early pre-Vulgate Latin versions and two uncials (B and D) have a slightly different form of the participle “baptizing”, but  nothing is missing. There are no surviving papyri of Matthew earlier than the Great Uncials that contain this verse. Remember, the papyri are fragmentary—we don’t have an old one that covers this section.

So—where is this claim coming from if there is no hint of it whatsoever in the actual manuscript evidence? A dude named Conybeare noticed that when the early Church Father Eusebius of Caesarea (died 340) cited this verse—and he did it a couple of times—that he consistently cited it in a different form: “Go ye therefore and make disciples of all the nations in my name”. No mention of baptism or of the Triune formula. The argument goes that since Eusebius was writing before the Great Uncials were written, and since Eusebius was relying on the great text-critical work of Origen, he may be referring to an earlier form of the text than the Great Uncials.

Thus, one Father may have recourse to an earlier form. However, nobody else writes it that way and, by way of counter-example, we have Tertullian (died 220 or so) citing the usual form of the verse in his treatise On Baptism (Ch. 13).

The problem with this argument is that there is no way that it can be disproven. We can establish that Tertullian writing around the year 200 in North Africa knew the standard text but that doesn’t rule out Conybeare’s suggestion.

The big problem, as I see it, is that Conybeare’s suggestion (also forwarded by Kirsopp Lake and other contemporaries) rests entirely on a textual paradigm of citation. That is, the assumption is that Eusebius is looking up every passage and copying it word-for-word from an older and possibly unique text that also happens to be better than all of the surviving ones. Rather than, say, writing it from memory in the form he likes it best…

I’ve noted in my other research that Eusebius’s version of the Beatitudes actually was different from the received version—he flips Matt 5:4 and 5. So does Origen, the Great Uncial D, and some of the Latin, Syriac, and Boharic translations. Note that—here there was a material change and it leaves a number of footprints in the tradition…

Furthermore, the Eusebius theory fits handily into a philosophical construct favored by certain modern folks. That is, some people believe that the Church only gradually came to think of a Trinity and therefore they view any mention of the Trinity with suspicion and call it a late addition to the text whether there’s any textual warrant for it or not.

The claim, again, is this:

I will note that ‘The Great Commission’ a poorly attested addition and arguably late addition to Matthew’s Gospel

The evidence is this:

• The verse appears as received in all of the first-order witness that contain it.
• One Church Father, Eusebius writing in the early 300s, writes it differently
• Other earlier Church Fathers don’t write it differently
• In other cases where Eusebius was looking at a genuinely different text we see signs of that change in other text traditions

On the strength of the actual evidence, then, we’ve got to conclude that, contra the starting claim, the Great Commission in its familiar form is very well attested textually and there is only one hint read through a particular philosophical construct to the contrary.

QED: Not buyin’ it.