2 Peter 3:13 – New or Empty?
Our translation of 2 Peter 3:13, from the Codex Sinaiticus, reads:
‘But we’re also awaiting fresh skies and [an] empty land, according to His promises, in which righteousness dwells!’
Most Bibles would read ‘a new earth’ here. Earth and land are the same word, and we tend to translate it as ‘land’ in our translation, because the ancients didn’t really think of our planet earth in the same we that we do.
However, why do we say ‘empty’ here instead of ‘new’?
It’s because that’s what the Codex Sinaiticus says! It uses the word kenen (κενην), which literally means ‘empty’. You can see it in our interlinear.
Other manuscripts, however, instead use the word ‘new’. It’s a similar-looking word, kainen (καινην).
So we have:
- κενην = empty (the Codex Sinaiticus)
- καινην = new (other manuscripts)
This prompts us to ask if the Codex Sinaiticus doesn’t just have a bad scribal error! Indeed, it may do.
However, the Codex Sinaiticus is perhaps the oldest copy of this verse or one of the oldest copies. It’s possible that this text is correct, and the other manuscripts are the ones that copied an error.
Normally, we’d look at the Church Fathers to see if they quoted the verse, as that usually settles the matter. However, if we only look at their quotes from the time before the Codex Sinaiticus was written, we only have one reference, and that might just be a paraphrase.
Unfortunately, 2 Peter is quite a late book, and it wasn’t widely accepted as scripture at first. Christians in the east took centuries to accept it!
That one pre-Sinaiticus quote is by Origen in his Commentary on the Gospel of John, written around AD 230 — however, is he really quoting it? It reads much more like a paraphrase, used as part of an argument about the resurrection rescuing all of Israel:
‘For the third day will rise on the new heaven and the new earth, when these bones, the whole house of Israel, will rise in the great Lord’s day, death having been overcome.’
Could he have viewed ‘empty’ as just another way of describing a ‘new’ earth? Well, if he considered a new earth to be a fresh start, with all wickedness removed, then ‘new’ and ‘empty’ could well be a similar thing in his mind, hence him using ‘new’ twice in his paraphrase.
Especially if some copies did indeed say ‘new’!
Although the vast majority of Bible manuscripts use ‘new’, these are all later copies. And the Codex Sinaiticus might, for all we know, be the very oldest copy we have of this verse. Therefore, it’s not relevant if hundreds of later medieval manuscripts use ‘new’. They could all have copied an error!
So, ‘new’ may be correct, ‘empty’ may be correct, with the other being a scribal error. Or they may have seemed like similar concepts to them because new things are unused, and therefore, must be empty by definition, and are therefore synonyms in this context.
We don’t know; but our translation uses ‘empty’ because:
- Rightly or wrongly, that’s what the Codex Sinaiticus says, and
- We wish to bring it to your attention.
The Codex Sinaiticus uses the exact same word in Revelation 3:12, where it (literally) talks about a ‘empty JeruSalem’, where usually it’s called ‘New JeruSalem’. We translate it as ‘freshly new’ to convey the idea that it’s so newly built that it’s not yet inhabited. See our translation note on Revelation 3:12.