Here is a polemic against the explicitizing tendency in the scribes of the Byzantine textform. The Alexandrians, for sure, had a sort of elitism operating in their persistent Atticisims, and this is an issue that has to be kept in mind in textual criticism. But in mentioning the film “Crash” in my last post, I’ve been thinking lately about how artistically and no less intellectually handicapping the need for determinacy is. Think of the movie “Crash.” Consider how not one scene is allowed to pass without the overt message of the film slammed in your face. No investment is required on the part of the audience - it is an aggressive, violent foisting of the content. But I need to talk about Ephesians.
In what is almost universally accepted as the earliest text, Ephesians 5.22 reads,
Ὑποτασσόμενοι ἀλλήλοις ἐν φόβῳ Χριστοῦ,
αἱ γυναῖκες τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδρᾴσιν ὡς τῷ κυρίῳ.
The Koine move towards explicitization, however, (characterized most generally by the insertion of prepositions where the case itself functioned well enough in Attic), is assumably what motivated the Majority text to insert ὑποτάσσεσθε folllowing ἀνδρᾴσιν. In a way, this is nothing more than stating what is implied, and the imperitival “be subject” is certainly what is being implied. However, in another sense, this completely perverts the message of the passage. When the verb is implied, the reader must return to the head proposition, thus understanding that wives being subject to their husbands is simply one manifestation of universal submission to others that is the norm in the church. But when the Majority text (and the same goes for ὑποτασσέσθωσαν in MSS A I P Ψ, and a few in the strain following Aleph) supplies the verb for the reader it allows the text to be read as though the subjection of wives to husbands is somehow meaningful in itself, which simply flies in the face of the message of the haustafeln in its every manifestation in the New Testament. For the message of the household codes is that our subjection to earthly structures of power is meaningful not because these structures are blessed or intrinsically good, but because by submitting to them we can show forth our ultimate submission to Christ, the eschatological trust in our Creator’s care for us. In this paradigm, all submission happens only as an outworking of our constant state of being in submission to one another in reverence of Christ.
