Where the manuscripts differ · Mark 1:41
Compassion or anger? Jesus and the leper
Nearly every manuscript says Jesus was moved with compassion toward the leper; a few say he was moved with anger — and the rule that the harder reading is usually original points, uncomfortably, toward anger.
A man with leprosy kneels in front of Jesus and says, if you are willing, you can make me clean. Mark tells us what Jesus felt before he answered. In almost every manuscript the word is *splanchnistheis* — moved with compassion, a gut-level word, literally something turning over inside him. In a handful of manuscripts the word is *orgistheis* — moved with anger.
This is the most interesting textual variant in the Gospels, and it is interesting because the two main tools of the discipline point in opposite directions. Count the manuscripts and compassion wins overwhelmingly. Ask which reading better explains the other, and anger wins, because it is very easy to imagine a copyist softening "angry" to "compassionate" and very hard to imagine anyone doing the reverse.
Before anyone panics: if the word is anger, it is not anger at the man. Mark's next sentences already carry heat. Jesus "sternly charged" him with a word that elsewhere means to snort with indignation, and "sent him away" with a verb Mark normally uses for driving out demons. Something in this scene is fierce in every manuscript we have. The variant is about whether Mark named that fierceness at the start or only at the end.
What the manuscripts actually show
| Witness | Date | What it reads here |
|---|---|---|
| Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, and the Byzantine majority | 4th–15th centuries | *splanchnistheis* — "moved with compassion." |
| Codex Bezae and a small group of Old Latin manuscripts | 5th century and later, reflecting an older Western text | *orgistheis* — "moved with anger" or "indignant." |
| Matthew 8:3 and Luke 5:13, telling the same story | All periods | No emotion word at all. Both later Gospels drop whatever Mark had — which is easier to explain if Mark's word was startling than if it was tender. |
| Later Greek and Syriac tradition | 5th century onward | Compassion, essentially without exception. |
The case each way
That it belongs in the text
Compassion has overwhelming manuscript support — the earliest complete Greek Bibles, the great majority of later copies, and nearly all the ancient translations. Numbers on this scale are not nothing.
Compassion fits the immediate scene: Jesus reaches out and touches a man no one had touched in years, which is the gesture of tenderness, not of rage.
Some scholars propose a translation slip behind the anger reading. In Aramaic the words for "he had pity" and "he was enraged" are very close, and if an early Aramaic source or an early translator was involved, one could be mistaken for the other.
A single Western witness plus a few Latin copies is a narrow base. The Western text is known for bold, sometimes eccentric readings, and this could be one of them.
That it came later
The harder reading principle bites hard here. Copyists smoothed difficulties; they did not manufacture them. No scribe changes "compassion" to "anger" in a story about Jesus healing a desperate man. The reverse change is entirely natural.
Mark's own next verse uses two harsh words — a stern snort of indignation and a verb of driving out — which sit far more comfortably after "angry" than after "compassionate."
Matthew and Luke both delete Mark's emotion word entirely. They frequently soften Mark's blunt descriptions of Jesus' feelings, and a word they both found worth removing is more likely to have been the difficult one.
If anger is original, its object is not the leper. Plausible readings include anger at the disease itself, at the ruin sin has made of the world, or at a system that left this man outside the camp — the same anger Mark records at the hard hearts in the synagogue in chapter 3.