Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus

It was a great question. “What do you think of Emmaus in the story?”

This was Jarrod McKenna, asking the question of me on the InVerse podcast he hosts with Drew Hart. We were doing some creative reflection on Luke’s road to Emmaus story in Luke 24.

“I haven’t thought much about the significance of Emmaus itself,” I said, “but I’d be tempted to draw some significance from Emmaus being seven miles from Jerusalem. You know, seven being the number of divine completion or perfection. The two disciples are on a journey toward complete understanding of Jesus, accompanied by the risen Jesus himself.”

Or something like that, is what I said. A wonderful creative reflection, maybe even a brilliant insight.

And completely, utterly wrong.

You don’t need a PhD in New Testament (as I have) to know that the NRSV’s “about seven miles” is a translation of a phrase that is literally “sixty stadia,” an ancient distance which the NRSV has converted to “about seven miles.” All you have to do is look at the NRSV’s note in the margin, and it will tell you.

So lesson one from this story of me on a podcast: “Don’t make a brilliant creative insight about some fine point in the text based on an English version of the Bible.” (And, I suppose, part two of lesson one: especially don’t do this on a podcast that is potentially listened to by thousands of people.)

But there’s another lesson in this story of me on a podcast, and you get a hint of it in that same marginal note in the NRSV. The NRSV Updated Edition has this note on its phrase, “about seven miles,” in Luke 24:13: “Gk sixty stadia; other ancient authorities read a hundred sixty stadia.”

This note is worth exploring, because it points to several challenges with any kind of a simple reading of this verse.

One challenge is that no one can say for sure how long “sixty stadia” was. A stadion was a Greek unit of measurement 600 feet long. But that’s ancient Greek feet, not our modern unit of measurement called the foot, and the length of that ancient foot varied throughout the Hellenized world of the day. Best guess? A single stadion was between 150 and 200 metres. Sixty stadia, then? Somewhere between 9 and 12 kilometres—or “about seven miles.”

But you’ll notice in the marginal note that “other ancient authorities read a hundred sixty stadia.” What’s going on there?

Well, this highlights the simple fact that we don’t have the original copies of our biblical writings. We don’t have The One document first written by the author or authorized by them for publication, for any of the biblical writings. What we have are copies of copies of copies of these original manuscripts. And as those copies were made, changes were introduced into the text. There are thousands of these variants, as they’re known, and most of them are like this one—relatively insignificant, at least in terms of conveying the gist of the passage.

But still profoundly interesting, nonetheless. This particular variant could have been a simple accident: the scribe thought he heard “a hundred sixty” and so wrote that in. But it could also have been because there is a location for Emmaus that makes better sense, and this one happens to be a hundred sixty stadia from Jerusalem.

Because this is another challenge with this verse: we don’t know for sure where this Emmaus was. There are some options which are 60 stadia or “about seven miles” from Jerusalem, but, interestingly, the most common option historically is more like 160 stadia from Jerusalem, called Emmaus Nicopolis. So, it’s at least possible that a later scribe “corrected” the manuscript he was working on, changing it from “sixty stadia” to “a hundred sixty stadia” because he “knew” that Emmaus was in fact 160 stadia from Jerusalem.

But this gets even more interesting, because there is in fact a variant in another ancient manuscript that writes this as “seven stadia.” Here we are, back to my ingenious speculation about the significance of the number seven. What’s going on now?

Well, 60 stadia is not only roughly seven modern miles. It’s also roughly seven ancient Roman miles. It’s possible, then, perhaps even likely, that you had a scribe who tried to convert the “sixty stadia” to Roman miles, but forgot to change the unit of measurement in the conversion and so came up with “seven stadia.”

What’s the second lesson in all this? If the first lesson is, “Don’t make a brilliant creative insight about some fine point in the text based on an English version of the Bible,” the second is like it: “Don’t make a brilliant creative insight about some fine point in the text without first checking for textual variants.”

After all, you might find an ancient scribal error that supports your original brilliant insight—and still be wrong.

© Michael W. Pahl