Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
(2 Peter 1.21)

Most of the modern versions omit the word holy and give a rendering similar to that of the English Revised Version of 1881, 'Men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Ghost'. Those who favour the modern versions insist that the Greek manuscripts followed by the earlier translators were incorrect, and that the best authorities have APO (from) in place of HAGIOI (holy). While it is true that some ancient copies support the revised rendering, the great majority of the documents, including some which preserve a very ancient form of the text, confirm the reading followed by the translators of 1611.

The Old Latin copies now available to Biblical Scholars were written between the 4th and 13th centuries, but they represent a form of the New Testament text widely used as early as the 2nd century. The copies which include holy are known by the symbols—it-ar, c, div, h, p, z and 81. The Philoxenian Syriac and Sahidic (Coptic) must have been based on Greek copies at least a century older than the Codex Vaticanus. These also include the word holy in this place, and the 4th century Codex Sinaiticus supports this reading. Witnesses of the same century include the Latin Vulgate and Didymus (A.D. 398).

Two great uncials of the 5th century, Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Ephraemi , also read 'holy men of God'. The Ethiopic Vermony, and an 8th century uncial manuscript found in the monastery at Mount Athos. In 735 Bede found holy men in his copies, and a very numerous array of later copies beginning with the uncial K of the 9th century, and including many Byzantine lectionaries, have the same reading. All of these documents, covering a wide area and preserving the text as it was known in the earliest period of its transmission, confirm that the Authorised Version, and the Greek manuscripts upon which it was based, were correct in retaining the word holy, and reading 'holy men of God'.

The Incorrect Reading

The abbreviated form of the text, omitting holy, must have appeared at least as early as the 3rd century, but the evidence indicates that the omission was detected shortly afterwards without gaining very wide or permanent acceptance. The earliest copy with the incorrect reading is papyrus 72 of the 3rd or 4th century. The Harclean Syriac and Bohairic (Coptic) of the 5th century show that their underlying Greek copies, possibly of the 3rd century, omitted holy. The Codex Vaticanus of the 4th century, the Armenian Version of the 5th and Fulgentius in the 6th are all similarly defective in this text. Modern editors of the Greek text offer another eleven witnesses from the 9th century to the 15th, for the omission of 'holy', but the documentary evidence is slender compared with that which supports the full and correct form of the text set forth in the AV.

Great harm is done to the cause of truth by casual and un substantiated assertions from the pulpit or in the press that a word here and a sentence there, and a whole paragraph in another place, must be regarded as spurious. Such statements are often made by men who have not examined or evaluated the evidence, and they tend to undermine confidence in the Holy Scriptures as the inspired and inerrant Word of God. The translators of our English Bible took great care to achieve accuracy and to present their translation in language appropriate to the Divine Author, appropriate to the inspired writers, and appropriate to the subject matter. Although they had access to comparatively few manuscripts, the discoveries of more recent times show that those documents preserved the text of Holy Scripture in the same form as that attested by the great majority, from the earliest times and over a wide area.

Those 'holy men of God' who spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost did not describe themselves in this way, but acknowledged their sinfulness 'Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned' (Ps. 51); 'I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips' (Isaiah 6). In His condescending mercy, God chose these men to be His messengers and set them apart for Himself. In this respect they were 'holy men of God', and the Holy Spirit directed the mind and the hand of the Apostle as he penned this acknowledgment of the high calling of God which it was their privilege to experience.

This article was first published in Quarterly Record 439.