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A promise whose whole meaning has been made to hang on a comma that no Greek manuscript of the period contains.
Luke 23:39–43 · Majority Standard Bible
One of the criminals who hung there heaped abuse on Him. “If You are the Christ,” he said, “save Yourself and us!”
But the other one rebuked him, saying, “Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same judgment?
We are punished justly, for we are receiving what our actions deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”
Then he said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom!”
And Jesus said to him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.”
The gist
Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise. Move the comma one word to the right and the sentence changes completely: Truly I tell you today, you will be with Me in Paradise — the saying is today and the promise is undated. The Greek manuscripts of this period carry no punctuation at all, so the comma is an editor’s. So this book went and counted the editors. Seven of the nine printed Greek editions put a comma immediately before today. Two print no comma anywhere in the clause. And not one of the nine puts any mark after it. The alternative reading has no printed Greek edition behind it.
Going deeper
The range first, because it was changed.
This week began as verses 42 and 43, and this entry prints 39 to 43. The reason is the MSB’s own paragraphing: verse 42 binds backwards. The printed paragraphs are 39 / 40–42 / 43, so a range of 42–43 would cut a printed paragraph at its last verse — the thief’s request is set as the end of his rebuke to the other man, not as the beginning of the exchange with Christ.
And nobody makes a unit of 42–43. The Catena Aurea’s lemma is 38 to 43. St Cyril of Alexandria’s sermon is 32 to 43. Ellicott, the Cambridge Bible, the Pulpit and Alford all head verses 42 and 43 separately. 39 to 43 is three whole printed paragraphs, every quotation in it opens and closes, and it gives the scene both criminals, which is what it is actually about.
What it costs is length, and the other criminal is a second subject the entry has to carry.
Now the comma, which is the week.
The manuscripts do not settle it, because they cannot. Greek was written without word-division or punctuation. Every comma in every printed Greek New Testament is an editorial decision made centuries later — which is exactly why counting them is worth doing.
Seven of the nine editions punctuate before today. The two that do not punctuate at all are the SBL edition of 2010 and Stephanus of 1550 — the newest eclectic text and the oldest Received text, agreeing by both declining to decide. Not one edition of the nine punctuates after the word.
Four commentators address the alternative reading directly and all four reject it. Bengel’s objection is the shortest and it is about usage: Jesus never uses the expression I say to you today. Gill supplies a piece of manuscript evidence that cannot be repunctuated at all — he reports one of Beza’s copies reading a conjunction before today, which fixes the word to what follows and makes the alternative impossible in that copy. And the Expositor’s ties the comma to the variant in the previous verse, so that the two problems in this range turn out to be one problem.
But the case for the other reading is real and the entry will not pretend otherwise. There is a Hebrew formula behind it, and it is in the Greek Old Testament: in Deuteronomy, Moses twice says I declare to you today and I testify to you today, with the adverb attached backwards to the speaking. That is a genuine idiom and it is genuinely available.
What answers it is Luke himself. When Luke writes that formula — in Acts, on Paul’s lips — he writes it differently, in three separate respects, in one verse. And Luke’s other sayings using this adverb attach it forward: today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing; today salvation has come to this house. Same author, same word, same habit.
And there is a larger variant in this range that the book’s own Bible does not flag at all.
The MSB prints when You come into Your kingdom. Its own Byzantine base reads in Your kingdom. Six commentators say the English should be in, and Alford calls into a sad mistake. There is no footnote. (The difference is not small. On one reading the thief asks to be remembered at a future arrival; on the other he asks to be remembered by a king who is already reigning — from a cross, with a notice over His head naming Him one.)
The one footnote the range does carry is compressed to the point of ambiguity. It records that the critical text reads Then he said, “Lord — which naturally reads as though the critical text simply lacks the words to Jesus. What the printed editions actually show is that the critical editions have no word for Lord at all, and read a vocative Jesus inside the speech instead. The note is not false; it is squeezed, and a reader would not guess what is behind it.
Then the word that decides how the whole promise is heard.
Paradise occurs three times in the New Testament, and Thayer numbers four senses and files the three occurrences in two different ones. He puts this verse under the sense of that part of the unseen world where the souls of the righteous await the resurrection. He puts St Paul’s third heaven and the Revelation’s tree of life under a different sense — an upper region in the heavens. He records the dissent in the same line and does not pretend the question is closed.
That distinction is exactly the one an Orthodox reader needs kept, because the tradition does not treat the state of a soul before the general resurrection as the final state. The commentators divide four ways to two to two on whether Paradise here is simply heaven. And Theophylact, through the Catena, states the Eastern position in one sentence: the thief and the saints have not yet obtained all the promises, and are nevertheless in the kingdom of heaven and in Paradise.
In the modern world
Look at what the man asks for and what he is given, because they are not the same.
He asks to be remembered — later, at some arrival, in a kingdom that is evidently not yet. He is promised presence, and a date: today, and with Me. He asks for a mention and receives company.
And notice what he does not do. He does not repent in any form a modern Christian would recognise. He makes no confession of sin beyond a statement of fact about the sentence being just; he asks for no forgiveness; he undertakes nothing, because he has nothing left to undertake with. He is a condemned criminal with both arms fixed and a few hours to live, and what he does in that state is defend a stranger’s innocence out loud and ask to be remembered.
Which is why the passage has been argued over for sixteen centuries by people asking what it proves. It is the standing objection to the necessity of baptism, and it was already being used that way in the third century — St Augustine answers it, and his answer is worth having because it is neither of the two modern ones. He does not say the sacrament is optional. He says that faith and conversion of heart may supply what baptism would have supplied, where there is no time — a concession made narrow on purpose, and made about a man who had hours.
Which lands somewhere most of us will recognise better than we would like.
Almost nobody reading this is in the thief’s position, and almost everybody has had a version of his hour. The night when there was nothing left to offer. The stretch when the prayer life consisted of one sentence said badly. The point at which you understood that you could not fix what you had done and stopped trying to.
The thief’s prayer is six words long and it contains no promises. It is the shortest prayer in the Gospels that gets an answer, and the answer is longer than the request.
The tidbit
The Orthodox Church has put the thief’s sentence into the mouth of every communicant.
In the prayers before Communion the words come back almost unchanged — remember me, O Lord, in Thy Kingdom — and the Church says in. Not into.
Which is worth noticing, because that is precisely the word the book’s own English Bible does not print, and does not footnote. The MSB says into Your kingdom; the Byzantine Greek behind it says in Your kingdom; six commentators say the English is wrong; and the Church’s own prayer, said aloud before the chalice, has been saying in all along.
(There is no conspiracy in this and no scandal. Translators make choices and this is a defensible one. But it is a strange and rather beautiful fact that a reader who has said that prayer a thousand times is already holding the reading the printed page does not give him.)
This week
The practice is the shortest in this book, and it is the thief’s.
Six words, once a day: Lord, remember me in Your kingdom.
On the first day, say it and add nothing. You will want to add something — a reason, a qualification, an account of yourself, a promise about what you will do differently. The man who first said it had no room for any of that, and that is the whole point of the practice. Say the six words and stop.
Then, each day, say it at the moment you would ordinarily be justifying yourself. In the queue when you are rehearsing what you should have said. In the car after the conversation went badly. At the point in the evening when you are totting up whether the day was good enough. The prayer belongs exactly there, because that is where the thief was: out of time, out of options, and unable to improve his position by a single act.
It might look like this. Wednesday, in the car, after the call with the bank went badly and you are already three sentences into what you should have said — and instead you say Lord, remember me in Your kingdom, and stop. Then on the Friday, for somebody else: your cousin, who has made a mess of most of it and whom the family has quietly written off. The same six words, with his name in them.
And once this week, say it for somebody else. Somebody whose life would not, on the evidence, be described as a success — the relative who made a mess of it, the friend who is drinking, the person everybody has quietly written off. Six words, with their name in it. The man in this passage was written off by the law, by the crowd and by the other criminal, and the promise came anyway.
And the limit. This week is not an argument that nothing you do matters, and it is not a licence to postpone anything. The thief had no time. You almost certainly do, and the passage is an account of mercy at the end, not a strategy for the middle. Nor does it settle any question about the sacraments — Augustine’s answer is about a man with hours left, and he made it narrow deliberately. And if the prayer for somebody else is about a person whose situation is dangerous or urgent, pray it and then also do the practical thing: a phone call, a doctor, a word to someone who can help. Where a week and the safety note in How to Use This Book seem to disagree, the safety note governs.
Scripture. Luke 23:39–43, Majority Standard Bible (Byzantine Majority Text). The range began as 42–43 and was widened on evidence. The MSB’s own printed paragraphs are 39 / 40–42 / 43, so verse 42 binds backwards and a range of 42–43 would cut a printed paragraph at its last verse. No consulted authority makes a unit of 42–43: the Catena Aurea’s lemma is 38–43, St Cyril of Alexandria’s sermon is 32–43, and Ellicott, the Cambridge Bible, the Pulpit Commentary and Alford all head the two verses separately. The printed range is three whole paragraphs and every quotation in it opens and closes. The printed unit is the whole crucifixion, verses 26–43, which this week shares with Week 28. Two footnote markers inside the range have been stripped, as the book’s convention requires. biblehub.com/msb/luke/23.htm
Text. Nine printed Greek editions were collated at verses 42 and 43, each page fetched twice with different prompts. On the punctuation: seven of the nine print a comma immediately before the adverb, two print no comma in the clause at all — the SBL edition of 2010 and Stephanus of 1550 — and not one of the nine prints any mark after it. No edition brackets anything. The larger finding is an unflagged variant: the MSB prints into Your kingdom where its own Byzantine base reads in Your kingdom; six commentators say the English should be in and one calls into a sad mistake; the MSB carries no note. The one note the range does carry is compressed: it records the critical reading in a form that naturally suggests the critical text merely lacks two words, where the printed editions show that the critical editions have no word for Lord at all and read a vocative Jesus inside the speech. The entry reports the note as printed and reports what the editions show, and does not assert that the MSB has erred — the compression is the finding. And the footnote at verse 39, inside the widened range, marks a whole-clause divergence in the other criminal’s speech. biblehub.com/texts/luke/23-42.htm biblehub.com/texts/luke/23-43.htm
Greek. Strong’s 3857, Paradise: three occurrences in the New Testament, and Thayer numbers four senses and files them under two. Luke 23:43 goes under the sense of that part of the unseen world where the souls of the righteous await the resurrection; 2 Corinthians 12:4 and Revelation 2:7 go under a different sense, an upper region in the heavens. He records the dissent from that division in the same line and does not close the question, and neither does the entry. The distinction matters for an Orthodox reader and the entry says why, without importing a doctrinal account the sources do not supply. The commentators divide four to two to two on whether Paradise here simply means heaven. On the adverb at the heart of the week, the Deuteronomy formula behind the alternative reading was verified in the Greek Old Testament at two verses, and Luke’s own version of the same formula, in Acts, differs from it in three respects in one verse; his other sayings using the adverb attach it forward. That is the entry’s answer and it is Luke’s, not a commentator’s. biblehub.com/thayers/3857.htm biblehub.com/greek/4594.htm
Commentators. Ellicott, the Cambridge Bible, the Pulpit Commentary, the Expositor’s Greek Testament, Alford, Bengel, Vincent, Barnes, Gill and Jamieson-Fausset-Brown were consulted; Meyer could not be reached on this passage. Four commentators address the alternative punctuation and all four reject it, on three different grounds — usage, a manuscript that cannot be repunctuated, and the variant in the preceding verse. The entry reports the case for the alternative at its real strength before answering it, because a book that answers a straw man has answered nothing. Six commentators correct the preposition at verse 42 and the entry follows them. biblehub.com/commentaries/luke/23-43.htm biblehub.com/commentaries/luke/23-42.htm
Fathers. St Cyril of Alexandria’s sermon covering this passage was located in the volume on Luke and its number verified from the file’s own printed sermon list with both neighbours. His exposition breaks off in the middle of a sentence at verse 42 — the surviving Syriac stops there — so he never expounds the promise at all, which is reported as a fact about the manuscript and not as an argument about anything. St Augustine on the question of the thief and baptism was reached in his own text, and his answer is quoted in substance rather than by chapter, because two fetches of the same work returned contradictory chapter numbers and only the section numbers could be relied on. Theophylact reaches this page only through the Catena Aurea and is attributed that way; he is an eleventh-century Byzantine archbishop and not a Father of the patristic age. St John Chrysostom wrote no homilies on Luke, and no homily number for him is printed here: the Catena cites one, this project’s standing rule forbids taking a homily number from that compiler, and the primary page could not be reached. The homily on the cross and the good thief that is often attributed to him belongs to another writer. www.tertullian.org/fathers/cyril_on_luke_15_sermo… www.ecatholic2000.com/catena/untitled-84.shtml
Refusals. The entry does not claim the comma is textually settled, because it cannot be: the manuscripts of the period are unpunctuated and every comma in every printed edition is an editor’s. What it reports is the count of the editors, the unanimity of the four commentators who engage the question, and the evidence from Luke’s own usage — and it states the case for the other reading fairly first. It does not say the thief repented in any developed sense; the text records what he said and no more. It does not settle the question of baptism from this passage, and it does not present St Augustine’s answer as either a dismissal of the sacrament or a general rule. It does not say the thief was the first person to enter heaven, which no consulted source supports. It prints no feast day for him: the date usually given is a Western martyrology’s and not a Byzantine one. What could not be established: Meyer on this passage; St Chrysostom’s treatment of it; the Revelation parallel in its own entry; and the extent of Cyril’s exposition beyond the point at which his text gives out. www.newadvent.org/fathers/14084.htm biblehub.com/commentaries/luke/23-39.htm
Fifty-one more like it
If one week changed how you read that passage, Abide in Me has fifty-one others, each given the same treatment.