For some scribes of this persuasion, the parable that Jesus tells of new wine and old wineskins may have seemed problematic. No one places new wine in old wineskins…. But new wine must be placed in new wineskins. And no one who drinks the old wine wishes for the new, for they say, “The old is better.” (Luke 5:38–39) How could Jesus indicate that the old is better than the new? Isn’t the salvation he brings superior to anything Judaism (or any other religion) had to offer? Scribes who found the saying puzzling simply eliminated the last sentence, so that now Jesus says nothing about the old
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Neither does the text inform doctrine, or the doctrine inform text. It seems the two were in constant conversation through the first 15 centuries of the faith, and today still through denomination-specific translatiolns, and apologetic litergical reading guides.
