My wife gathered the family together to go over the 1st lesson of the new Home Study program earlier this week. (Note my previous post expressing mixed feelings about the 2 hours block cutting out half the lessons.) Anyway, for Christmas this year I got a copy of Thomas Wayment’s New Testament Study Bible for Latter-day Saints, and decided to read all the verses and footnotes out of his Bible.

WOW!

Seriously, if you don’t own this, go out and buy it right now!!! It’s amazing.  Thomas is a New Testament scholar at BYU, and has translated the entire New Testament into modern English, and added lots of AMAZING footnotes.  Seriously, I want this to be the standard for studying the New Testament.  We were reading the verse that should be very familiar to you, but Thomas adds an amazing footnote.  It comes from Luke 23:34.  I’ll quote Thomas’s rendering of the book, which you should clearly recognize, but the footnote is what caught my attention.

[[But Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.]]

You’ve all heard this verse countless times, right?  Here’s the footnote!

Quotation comes from Psalm 22:18.  The portion of the verse set off in double brackets may not have been original.  Some early and good manuscripts omit it, but it has some significant textual support.

Are you freaking kidding me?  This verse may not have been in the original manuscripts?   How can that be?

Stephen Marsh at Wheat and Tares found another gem about a possible female deacon!  I mean this is real biblical scholarship in a highly readable form!  What say you?  Are you familiar with this study Bible?