Immediately after misrepresenting Sinaiticus through misrepresenting the textual variant, Bentley then simply misrepresents it by gross and unexplainable error. He begins a section where he is alleging purposeful editing of the text of a by scribes for theological reasons. He rightly notes that Westcott and Hort and Tischendorf continued to hold a high view of Scripture, and quotes W&H as saying, “It will not be out of place to add here a distinct expression of our belief that even among the numerous unquestionably spurious readings of the New Testament there are no signs of deliberate falsifications of the text for dogmatic purposes.” But when he turns to a to actually refute their own views, he blunders on his first attempt. We read,
For example, in the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel we are told of a leper who says to Jesus, ‘If you will, you can make me clean’. Codex Sinaiticus continues, Jesus, ‘angry, stretched out his hand and touched him, and said, “I will; be clean”‘. Later manuscripts, perceiving that to attribute anger to Jesus at this point made him appear, perhaps, too human, alter the word ‘angry’ to ‘moved with compassion’.
The text referred to is Mark 1:41, which reads in a, “Moved with compassion, he stretched out His hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I am willing; be cleansed.'” I have a photo-mechanical reprint of a in my library, prepared by Tischendorf himself, and I checked it as well: it reads splagcqeis, “moved with compassion.” Bentley is simply in error. There is a textual variant here that reads “angered,” but it is found in D and a very small number of other less important witnesses. I suppose it is possible Bentley simply misread a textual source somewhere, but to start out your demonstration of purposeful emendation with the scholarly equivalent of a face-plant in figure skating is ominous. And, of course, our Muslim writers, quoting extensively from Bentley, do not catch his error.
