Like you, I found the variant reading in Hebrews 2.9 to be spiritually significant. How painful the work on the cross must truly have been if God’s very being had to be split in order that Jesus might “become sin.”

Thanks for reading; keep persevering.

I was happy to find your article on the variant in Hebrews 2:9. Thanks for your work on this. Personally, I never understood what it would mean that Jesus tasted death ‘by the grace of God’ and was excited to see that there was a variant here. I too was not satisfied with Metzger’s explanation. This variant was brought to my attention by Antony Snell in his commentary on Hebrews called A New and Living Way. I noticed that you mentioned Montefiore as one of the few proponents of the ‘apart from God’ reading but I thought I might email you and see if you had read what Snell wrote regarding this topic. If you hadn’t, I thought you might be interested if not happy to see that he pretty well agrees with your conclusion. He says, “There is a difficult alternative reading here: most texts read ‘by the grace of God,’ which gives an apparently simple sense, at least until you try to think it out exactly. But a few manuscripts and many of the early Fathers read ‘apart from God,’ a reading so very likely to give offence that its alteration into something else was almost unavoidable. An alteration the other way round seems inconceivable, so this hard reading ‘apart from’ must be right. The evidence from Greek MSS. is weak, but some versions have it; so does a very wide selection of the Fathers, both Eastern and Western. Moreover (a) it fits the view this epistle takes of the Passion: cf. 1:3 ‘when he had by himself made purification of sins’ (a correct reading in that passage, though not adopted by the R.V.); 5:7ff.; 12:2, and 13:12 all support this line of thought. It agrees with S.Paul’s thought in Gal 3:13 ['Christ...being made a curse for us'], and above all with the cry of dereliction in Mark 15:34. (b) This word for ‘apart from’ is a favourite one with the writer: he uses it thirteen times elsewhere. But the word for ‘grace,’ though used in more than one sense, does not mean anything that would make sense here. The only sense that would fit here is ‘according to the divine provision.”

On a more practical note, this specific verse has really helped me see some things that God has been teaching me from His Word recently that I thought I might share with you, too. I’ve been studying Romans and God has been teaching me about how great and significant the work of Jesus Christ truly was for me and for all mankind. In particular, Rom 3:25 and that Jesus Christ was set forth as a propitiation and that this was a vindication of God’s righteousness because He had passed over the sins of Old Testament believers. God being just could not legally/justly overlook sin without a payment for that sin. He’d be unjust! And, we know He can’t compromise His own righteous character. The Old Testament believers had a temporary covering for their sins but the blood of bulls and goats could not legitimately and eternally pay for the sins of a man. God, in a sense, was building up a credit card debt that he would have to pay for one day. And, of course, God knew that He would have His perfect Son pay for sins one day. God, at the cross of Christ, payed off that credit card debt that he had been accumulating when he reckoned/imputed righteousness to people based on the blood of a bull or a goat. I’ve been seeing that when Jesus Christ died on the cross he was paying for more than the sins of Christians but also the sins of all those Old Testament believers, David, Abraham, Noah, and others. And, truly, he is the propitiation for the sins of the whole world (I John 2:2)! God maintained his own justice and He was able in His love to provide a way for us sinners to be reconciled legimitately and legally.

Seeing this verse of Hebrews 2:9 as “that he apart from God should taste death for every man,” it really drives this point home again for me. (So, again, thanks for your work on this.) Jesus became sin for us and experienced the wrath of God and the separation from God that are the consequences of sin. For him to truly/justly bear my sin, he had to experience the full wrath of God against that sin which included separation from his heavenly Father. Wow! That makes my heart so thankful for what he bore for me. I’m sure thankful that he went through what he went through so I could say today with Paul that “…I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Thanks again!
Josh T.