Hort has a very long note on this verse, despite that face that NA gives no apparatus for it. The patristic evidence strongly indicates that τὸ πάσχα was not present in many texts of the 2nd/3rd century. It is, however, present in all of our manuscripts.
This verse is also one of the things that gives us John’s 3-year ministry for Jesus, versus the apparently shorter period of the Synoptics.
το πασχα is obviously an intrusive gloss, identifying (or misidentifying) the festival in question.
It’s striking to come across things like this. It wasn’t in Georg Luck’s Conjectural Emendations article – I only found it by looking through the list of obelisked verses in W&H. I would think that an OCT apparatus would at least mention it, but I suppose the NA apparatus is a bit different from that. If so, is there anything that really replaces W&H?
It’s also surprising to me that an insertion, not widely present in the 2nd century, could have made it into all of our surviving texts. I had assumed that there wasn’t anything useful in Patristic quotations, since apparatuses never mentioned anything interesting. Maybe that was a bad assumption to make.
Do you think there is a single New Testament textual critic that hasn’t read what you’re reading? If the answer is no, how do your account for the fact that this doesn’t show up in the apparatus? I suggest reading some articles on the evaluation of patristic evidence.
Postscript: Ruben Swanson didn’t include any patristic evidence in his parallel copper apparatus. There was some criticism about that.
Certainly an OCT editor would mention it, and remove it if he was worth his salt. Textual traditions are full of such incorporated glosses. But NT editors are a peculiarly timid lot, and know what howls of protest would greet even the smallest change.
It’s a general rule that interpolations tend to spread (as manuscripts are compared with one another), while omissions are quickly made good.
I don’t think it should surprIse if quotations in early authorities occasionally offer a more pristine text than our manuscripts. They are earlier, after all.
W. Willker covers this:
An Online Textual Commentary
on the Greek Gospels
http://www.willker.de/wie/TCG/TC-John.pdf
SEARCH for: “163*, 1634, 2206”
RE: Patristic Evidence
Look for this in the Graduate Theological Union[1] Lib Berkeley:
GTU BS2325 .T48 2013 AVAILABLE
The Use of the Greek Fathers for New Testament Textual Criticism
The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research Authors: Gordon D. Fee and Roderic L. Mullen Source: The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, pp 351-373 Subjects: Biblical Studies Publication Year : 2012
[1] The GTU Library is in Joel’s neighborhood.
Nestle—Aland has
vs > 1634 > pc
in its apparatus, and that refers to the whole verse, as it is in its totality between the signs □ and . That means that the whole verse is missing in whatever is in the apparatus. This is plausible enough, as earlier in John we have basically the same twice (in 2,13 and 5,1), as NA notes in the margin (adding an exclamation mark in the margin after both of these loci).
NA 28 removes even that, I’m afraid. But some searching on the web confirms that NA 27 gives the same as you quote, originally 472, but 1634 in the update.
For confirmation:
Yes, I have the 27th edition.
It’s a standard cliche, but still true enough, that whenever someone uses “obviously” in an assertion the assertion is automatically suspect. A text which has near universal manuscript support bears a great weight of prejudice in favor of it’s authenticity. Since it’s not obvious to everyone, why don’t you support your assertion?
Because it should be obvious to everyone, and would be if they had more extensive textual experience.
You are free (obviously) to regard everything I say as automatically suspect. It seems you do.
The more interesting question is the status of the sentence itself. το πασχα may be a secondary intrusion.
What mwh means, is that if the text originally had ἦν δὲ έγγύς ἡ ἑορτὴ τῶν Ἰουδαίων, someone would have added τὸ πάσχα in the margin as an explanatory gloss. The person who made the next copy of the text would have then thought that the word in the margin was a correction for a word that had accidentally dropped out, and would have incorporated it in the main text when making his copy. I’ve seen this kind of thing many, many times in apparatuses and commentaries to other classical texts. What’s more, since people who made copies of manuscripts knew that there were mistakes, they compared different manuscripts when making their copies, and when they noticed something that seemed to be missing in one text, they would complement the new text they were writing with what they found in the text that seemed more complete. For this reason, traditions tend to be accretive – texts tend to accumulate material as time goes by; something dropping out of a tradition is much more unlikely and (as far as I understand) only happens if there are few manuscripts (so either in the beginning or a “bottleneck” of a tradition). Interpolations that appeared early on can very well contaminate the whole medieval tradition (I’ve seen that kind of thing many times with Homer at least). Here we apparently we have evidence that the church fathers had a different text, and, as Timothée and mwh point out, we have manuscripts that don’t have the whole verse at all – which might mean that we’re dealing with an interpolation within an interpolation.
I’m over in Wisconsin nowadays. Paul might appreciate knowing that where I’m at, it’s 30 degrees (Fahrenheit) colder than Helsinki today. The lakes all froze over last week. But in California there was an earthquake this morning, centered under my old apartment, which I missed.
The absence of the entire verse would also explain the patristic evidence. It might even explain it better. Here is Origen on 5:1 (mentioned by Hort):
Ἐὰν δὲ αὕτη ἡ ἑορτὴ <ἡ> τοῦ πάσχα ᾖ—οὐ <γὰρ> πρόσκειται τὸ ὄνομα αὐτῆς—, στενοχωρεῖται τὸ ἀκόλουθον τῆς ἱστορίας, καὶ μάλιστα ἐπεὶ μετ’ ὀλίγα ἐπιφέρεται ὅτι «Ἦν ἐγγὺς ἡ ἑορτὴ τῶν Ἰουδαίων, ἡ σκηνοπηγία.»
So Origen passes over 6:4 completely, looking ahead to 7:2.
Just looking at the text, I would say that 6:4 is less motivated by the surrounding text than 5:1 or 7:2. It is very similar to 7:2.
As an interpolation, ἦν δὲ ἐγγὺς ἡ ἑορτὴ τῶν Ἰουδαίων makes sense. A scribe adding it as a marginal note might be saying: “John 7:2 explains the crowds.” Though in my opinion, the festival of booths is not a very good explanation for crowds on a mountain. Still, I can imagine someone thinking that it was.
I don’t see how the full ἦν δὲ ἐγγὺς τὸ πάσχα, ἡ ἑορτὴ τῶν Ἰουδαίων could be an independent interpolation all at once. It makes far less sense as a marginal note. So if 6:4 was originally not present, I think there would have to be a two step process, with ἦν δὲ ἐγγὺς ἡ ἑορτὴ τῶν Ἰουδαίων coming in first, and then τὸ πάσχα.
On the other hand, I don’t see any way to say that ἦν δὲ ἐγγὺς ἡ ἑορτὴ τῶν Ἰουδαίων couldn’t have been John himself. The manuscript evidence against it seems late, and perhaps the verse dropped out as a mechanical mistake? I imagine that someone would have to know more about the characteristics of 472 and 1634 (and whatever others are meant by “pc”) to make a determination.
Paul, thanks for your response, very helpful. This is supposed to be a teaching and discussion forum, and no, not everyone has the extensive experience with manuscripts that you and apparently MWH have had, so it’s not obvious to everyone and further explication is very helpful. So, the facts are:
There is near universal manuscript support for the reading.
There is no internal evidence to indicate that the reading is suspect.
The reading is missing from a number of 2-3 century writers who quote the text, which suggests that the early transmission history of the text may have been more complicated than the current manuscript evidence indicates.
Would you consider that a fair summary?
472 is Lambeth 1177. Scrivener describes it here: https://archive.org/stream/afullandexactco01scrigoog#page/n33/mode/1up
The collation of this strange and troublesome manuscript was commenced by Burney, and at the end of the third chapter abandoned in despair: “mendis erratisque ita scatet, ut scriptorum imperitiae et oscitantiae luculentissimum fiat argumentum” is his emphatic sentence of condemnation. I certainly never met with a copy of the Gospels written with such irreverent and scandalous negligence, but this is only one instance out of a thousand of the danger of judging hastily from first appearances. Had Dr Burney patience or leisure to have completed the examination of Codex c, he would have found it abound, far beyond any other in the whole collection, with novel and remarkable readings, which (in spite of its unpromising appearance) would have amply repaid all the diligence he could have bestowed upon it.
EDIT:
Reading further:
Two disputed passages are obelized in the margin, Luke xxiii. 39-41; John vi. 4.
Just to make it clear, I have zero actual experience on manuscripts. Greek is my hobby and textual transmission is one of the subject I’ve studied, especially as far as it concerns Homer (Was there a Homer?! Who, why, when wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey!? That sort of thing…). Mwh is the real expert here and a large part of what I’ve learnt comes from him.
For those of you who live in warmer climates than me, I can tell you that I’d really prefer if it were just a bit colder in winter. Every time it snows the snow melts and that means your feet are wet, which is much worse than just being cold. Besides it’s very dark here and the snow would make evenings much brighter. I’m told we’re one of the regions most affected by climate change, and I can believe that since we’ve lately had several winters almost without snow, which just didn’t happen when I was a kid (I know this is anecdotal, but still).
I don’t see how the full ἦν δὲ ἐγγὺς τὸ πάσχα, ἡ ἑορτὴ τῶν Ἰουδαίων could be an independent interpolation all at once. It makes far less sense as a marginal note. So if 6:4 was originally not present, I think there would have to be a two step process, with ἦν δὲ ἐγγὺς ἡ ἑορτὴ τῶν Ἰουδαίων coming in first, and then τὸ πάσχα.
Looks quite likely to me. We can never be sure with this kind thing, of course.
pc means pauci, “a few manuscripts”.
Textual criticism of the New Testament is a whole different ballgame. For anyone sufficiently interested to do some reading, it might be worth tracking down a library copy Bruce Metzger’s Second edition.[1] The fourth edition[2] revised by Bart Ehrman is both late and corrupt. 
Textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible[3] perhaps has a little more in common with classical authors. The main point of similarity is the distance between the “original” and the earliest extant manuscripts. Beyond that there isn’t much similarity. The text of the so-called Septuagint presents a completely different set of problems.
Attitudes, assumptions, methods, and procedures such as we have seen in this thread, might be (?) common working with classical manuscripts separated by 1,500 years from the author. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was common for New Testament textual critics to be classical philologists. R. H. Charles ICC commentary on the Apocalypse of John is a prime example. Nobody pays any attention nowadays to his fanciful reconstruction of the text. There’s nothing wrong with reading Victorian authors like B.F. Westcott. I have his commentary on John’s Gospel in my hands. I was unable to find any reference to a hypothetical “gloss” in John 6:4. Westcott discusses important variant readings. The book that Joel is reading was intended for a different audience than Westcott’s commentary.
Contemporary New Testament textual criticism is vastly removed from Westcott and Hort.[4]
[1]The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (2nd Edition), Bruce M. Metzger.
[2]The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (4th Edition) (9780195161229): Bruce M. Metzger, Bart D. Ehrman
[3] Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Emanuel Tov, 2nd ed. 2001.
[4] A Critical Examination of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method in New Testament Textual Criticism
Peter J. Gurry, Brill, 2017.
http://www.brill.com/products/book/critical-examination-coherence-based-genealogical-method-new-testament-textual-criticism
6,4 doesn’t quite fit into the story, and we have almost the same twice earlier in John. (Of course John could have repeated it himself.) 6,4 may easily have been (it seems even likely) a post-Johannine explanation into the text. It cannot, of course, be proven, but that’s not the aim of philological scholarship anyway.
The delicate balance is to serve people of all the levels of learning, ideally from the basics all the way to the highest levels of academia. Not everything can be explained everywhere, unfortunately—it just wouldn’t work. But the purpose is not to keep readers in the darkness, either. I think mwh may have thought that people partaking in this discussion on NT text-criticism know the basic mechanisms of it.
I should hope that the texts of the New Testament could be discussed like any other ancients texts on these forums, but it’s a vain hope, I fear.
It also opens up a chronology difference between John and the synoptics. However, is that something that John would have cared very much about? Perhaps not, given the chronology of his Passion account.