The Case for the Real Jesus

by Lee Strobel

  CHALLENGE #2

  “THE BIBLE’S PORTRAIT OF JESUS CAN’T BE TRUSTED BECAUSE THE CHURCH TAMPERED WITH THE TEXT”

  The more I studied the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, the more I realized just how radically the text had been altered over the years at the hands of scribes…. In some instances, the very meaning of the text is at stake.

  Bart D. Ehrman1

  There is…an endless record of persistent ideological doctoring of the canonical texts from the earliest dates.

  Atheist Richard C. Carrier 2

  When I was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, a college student from a small Midwestern town was hired as a summer intern. Her parents were nervous about her working in such a big and volatile city, so her mother made a habit of regularly calling to check up on her.

  One day the phone rang on the intern’s desk, and a passing reporter picked up the phone. When the intern’s mother asked if she could speak to her daughter, the reporter replied: “Oh, I’m sorry—she’s in the morgue.”

  The shriek through the phone line instantly sensitized the reporter to the fact that not everyone was familiar with newspaper jargon. He wasn’t referring to the county morgue, where dead bodies are temporarily stored and autopsied; in journalism lingo, the morgue is the newspaper library where old articles are filed.

  The term morgue is still in use today, but technology has radically transformed how newspapers handle their archives. When I was at the Tribune, librarians would meticulously clip articles from the newspaper, neatly fold them, and file them in yellow envelopes—one each for the topic of the article, every person mentioned in the story, and the name of the reporter. Outside researchers were rarely granted access to the morgue because of concerns about protecting this valuable repository of history.

  Today many newspaper archives can be electronically searched through the Internet. In 2006, the New York Times announced it was giving its home subscribers free access to every article published in the newspaper since 1851—a treasure trove of historical nuggets that offer on-the-spot accounts of times gone by.3

  Most historians today don’t get to handle the original newspaper clippings on yellowing and brittle newsprint. Instead, they get an electronic copy of the story—one that easily could have been altered by someone intent on rewriting history. For example, the New York Times, to its unending embarrassment, was repeatedly scooped by its rival, the Washington Post, during the Watergate investigation in the 1970s. What if someone in the Times’s library simply doctored the texts of some Watergate articles to make it appear that the Times had actually beaten the Post to the punch?

  When a researcher accessed those altered articles, how would he be able to figure out what had been part of the original stories and what had been added later? There would be numerous clues: later additions would be self-serving to the Times. Their writing style may differ subtly from the rest of the story. Instead of fitting into the smooth narrative of the article, they may seem awkwardly out of place. Most importantly, researchers could visit municipal libraries around the country and check micofilm copies of the same Times articles. These versions would predate the counterfeit articles, and a comparison would quickly unmask alterations to the electronic copy.

  This is roughly analogous to the way scholars try to reconstruct the original text of the New Testament. The earliest papyrus copies have long ago been reduced to dust. Up until the first Greek New Testament was produced on a printing press in the early sixteenth century, scribes would make handwritten copies of New Testament manuscripts. Errors were inevitable in this very human process—so how can we be sure that the text we have today hasn’t been altered in significant ways?

  Scholars trained in “textual criticism” use a variety of techniques to try to determine the wording of an original text. They meticulously comb through manuscripts in a painstaking search for anomalies. They carefully compare copies of ancient manuscripts from different dates and various regions to see where they agree and where they differ. This was considered a fairly arcane endeavor—until one of the world’s leading textual critics, Bart D. Ehrman, penned the first general-interest book on the topic, Misquoting Jesus, which exploded onto the bestsellers list in 2006. For months, it was the top religion book in America.

  Actually, the book’s title is a misnomer. There’s almost nothing in its 242 pages about the words of Jesus having been misquoted.4The book’s underlying message, however, was that readers can’t really trust the text of their Bible—and that the common portrait of Jesus gleaned from the New Testament might not be reliable after all.

  “WE DON’T HAVE THE ORIGINALS!”

  Ehrman’s book immediately set off alarm bells among the public. Ehrman, head of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reported that the number of variants, or differences, between various handwritten manuscripts, total between 200,000 and perhaps 400,000—more variants among the manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament!5

  “How does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly?” Ehrman asked. “We don’t have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.”6

  Even more troubling, Ehrman said that some scribes through the centuries intentionally tampered with the text for theological and other reasons. “In some instances,” he said, “the very meaning of the text is at stake, depending on how one resolves a textual problem.”7 For example:

  Was Jesus an angry man? Was he completely distraught in the face of death? Did he tell his disciples that they could drink poison without being harmed? Did he let an adulteress off the hook with nothing but a mild warning? Is the doctrine of the Trinity explicitly taught in the New Testament? Is Jesus actually called the “unique God” there? Does the New Testament indicate that even the Son of God himself does not know when the end will come? The questions go on and on….8

  Many readers were stunned when Ehrman dismissed the authenticity of one of the most beloved passages in the Bible—the moving story of a compassionate Jesus forgiving an adulterous woman. What’s more, he said, the ending of the Gospel of Mark, which reports Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances, and the Bible’s most unambiguous passage describing the Trinity also are later additions that don’t really belong in the New Testament.

  Ehrman isn’t the only scholar questioning the fidelity with which the New Testament has been transmitted. “Even careful copyists make some mistakes, as every proofreader knows. So we will never be able to claim certain knowledge of exactly what the original text of any biblical writing was,” wrote members of the Jesus Seminar.9 Said atheist Richard C. Carrier: “Many of these conflicting readings cannot be explained as mere scribal errors, but are ideological in nature.”10

  Nevertheless, it was Ehrman’s book—readable, witty, and seemingly highly credible—that really stoked the controversy. Part of the reason for the book’s widespread success was the way Ehrman winsomely recounted how supposed errors in the text of the New Testament launched him on a personal journey from Christianity to agnosticism.

  He described having “a bona fide born-again experience” through a Christian student group in high school, later graduating from conservative Moody Bible Institute (“a kind of Christian boot camp”) and evangelical Wheaton College, the alma mater of Billy Graham. He came to a turning point while studying at the more liberal Princeton Theological Seminary, where he wrote a paper to offer ways to explain away an apparent discrepancy in the Gospel of Mark. He said he “had to do some pretty fancy exegetical footwork to get around the problem,” but he thought his professor, “a good Christian scholar,” would appreciate his effort. Instead, the professor simply wrote on the paper: “Maybe Mark just made a mistake.
”11

  That comment, Ehrman said, “went straight through me.” He concluded, well, yes, perhaps Mark did err—and then “the floodgates opened.”12 Maybe, he said, there were other mistakes in the Bible as well. This eventually resulted in “a seismic change,” prompting him to conclude that the Bible “was a human book from beginning to end.”13 Today, he describes himself as a “happy agnostic,” who believes that when the end of his life comes, he will “just cease to exist, like the mosquito you swatted yesterday.”14

  The issues he raises in his book are now challenging the faith of others. Here’s the text of an email that I received:

  Please help me. I have just read Bart Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus. I was raised in the church and I’m now 26 years old. This book has devastated my faith. I don’t want to be kept in the dark; I want to know what really is going on in the Bible and what I should believe, even if it goes against what I’ve believed since I was a little boy. Is Ehrman correct?15

  That’s the question that prompted me to jump on a jet for Dallas to seek out another renowned textual critic whose scholarly credentials rival Ehrman’s. At stake was nothing less than whether the New Testament can be trusted to provide a reliable picture of the real Jesus.

  INTERVIEW #2: DANIEL B. WALLACE, PH.D.

  Chilling escapes from death, amazing coincidences, weird twists of fate, oddball occurrences—sooner or later, all reporters get pressed by their editors into writing a short item about some sort of wacky circumstance that belongs in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. I’ve covered my share through the years. People read them with wide eyes, then put down the paper and exclaim, “Wow, that’s really strange!” These are the type of articles that get forwarded all over the Internet.

  Daniel B. Wallace could be one of those stories. How’s this for bizarre: Wallace, though he hardly knew the Greek language, taught himself to become a world’s leading expert in ancient Greek—and he did it by studying textbooks about Greek that he himself had written!

  Okay, that calls for an explanation. First, some background: Wallace is a professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and one of the world’s foremost authorities on textual criticism. The title of his doctoral dissertation suggests how specialized the study of New Testament Greek can be: The Article with Multiple Substantives Connected by kai in the New Testament: Semantics and Significance. Wallace has done postdoctoral study at Tyndale House, Cambridge, as well as at Tübingen University and the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung, both in Germany.

  Currently, he’s executive director of a new institute for textual criticism, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, whose objective is to digitally preserve New Testament manuscripts so scholars and others can examine them via enhancement software on the Internet.16 Between 2002 and 2006, the center took more than 35,000 high-resolution digital photographs of Greek New Testament manuscripts, including several recently discovered texts.

  Wallace has traveled the world so he could personally study ancient manuscripts, visiting the Vatican, Cambridge University, Mt. Sinai, Istanbul, Florence, Berlin, Dresden, Münster, Cologne, Patmos, Jerusalem, and other sites.

  He was the senior New Testament editor of the New English Translation of the Bible (NET), which has more explanatory footnotes than any other one-volume Bible translation ever published, and is a member of the prestigious Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas. His articles have appeared in New Testament Studies, Novum Testamentum, Biblica, Westminster Theological Journal, and the Bulletin for Biblical Research. In addition, he contributed forty articles to Nelson’s Illustrated Bible Dictionary and has over 150 essays on biblical studies posted on the Biblical Studies Foundation website.17

  Among the several books he has coauthored is the popular-level Reinventing Jesus, in which he critiques Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus. But Wallace is most famous among seminarians for his textbook Greek Grammar beyond the Basics, which is used by more than two-thirds of the schools that teach intermediate Greek, including Yale Divinity School, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Cambridge University.

  It was after Wallace completed this textbook that he was stricken with a crippling bout of viral encephalitis, which confined him to a wheelchair for more than a year and wreaked havoc with his memory. At one point, he had difficulty remembering his wife’s name. Eventually, he lost his knowledge of Greek almost completely—which is what prompted him to use his own book and others to actually relearn the difficult ancient language. And that, as radio commentator Paul Harvey likes to say, is the rest of the story.

  In the world of textual critics, Wallace’s name is one of the few that can be appropriately uttered alongside of Ehrman’s. That’s what brought me knocking on the door of his suburban Dallas home one Friday evening, which happens to be pizza night in the Wallace household. We sat around his kitchen table, enjoying dinner and a casual conversation, and then adjourned to his office, a two-story dark-wood library with a capacity of six thousand books.

  Wallace, with unruly dark gray hair and a graying goatee, couldn’t resist showing me his prized possession. Carefully removing a thick volume from the bookshelf, he slowly opened it on his desk. It was one of only 450 modern reproductions of Codex Vaticanus, a manuscript dating less than 250 years after the New Testament was written. Some say the original codex was among the fifty Bibles that Emperor Constantine ordered to be produced after the Council of Nicea.

  Wallace gently turned the vellum pages to show me the columns of Greek neatly written in uncial (or capital) letters, stealing a glance at my reaction to see if I registered appropriate appreciation for the manuscript’s beauty, history, and significance. The truth was that I was awestruck. So detailed was this copy, meticulously handmade at the Vatican, that it even features holes in the pages at the same spots where the actual manuscript is worn through.

  We retired to two facing leather chairs for our chat. Wearing a dark green T-shirt, blue jeans, and white socks, and with gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, Wallace was animated and focused even as the hour began turning late. He was a fascinating blend: a former California surfer who once prowled the churning waters off Newport Beach and who now relishes the countless hours he spends in austere monasteries and dusty libraries around Europe and the Middle East, painstakingly photographing ancient manuscripts to preserve them for scholars.

  My plan was to steer our discussion to whether we can really trust the description of Jesus found in the texts we’ve inherited through the centuries—but inevitably, that meant bringing up Ehrman.

  POSSIBILITY, PROBABILITY, CERTAINTY

  “One conservative scholar wrote that Ehrman ‘has a strong ax to grind, and the fact that he grinds it well in fluid prose makes it all the more beguiling,’”18 I said. “But doesn’t this cut both ways? Scholars who are arguing for the reliability of the New Testament might also be accused of bias.”

  “You can’t interpret the text without certain biases, but we should challenge our biases as much as possible,” Wallace replied, leaning back precariously in his swivel chair until it creaked in protest.

  “One way to do that is to look for viewpoints that are shared by more than one group of people. The fact is that scholars across the theological spectrum say that in all essentials—not in every particular, but in all essentials—our New Testament manuscripts go back to the originals. Ehrman is part of a very small minority of textual critics in what he’s saying. Frankly, I don’t think he has challenged his biases; instead, I think he has fed them.”

  “On one level,” I observed, “it seems Ehrman has merely told a general audience about the kind of issues that textual critics have grappled with for centuries.”

  “That’s right. He peeled back the curtain on scholarly work, and that revelation alarmed many Christians, who weren’t equipped to fully understand the issues,” said Wallace. “On another level, though, he tries to create strong doubt as to what the original text said, using more innuendo than subs
tance. Readers end up having far more doubts about what the Bible says than any textual critic today would ever have. I think Ehrman has simply overstated his case. Gordon Fee, the highly respected New Testament scholar, put it this way: ‘Unfortunately, Ehrman too often turns mere possibility into probability, and probability into certainty, where other equally viable reasons for [textual] corruption exist.’”19

  I looked down at my notes. “How would you answer Robert Funk, who wrote with his Jesus Seminar coauthors: ‘Why, if God took such pains to preserve an inerrant text for posterity, did the spirit not provide for the preservation of original copies of the Gospels?’”20

  Wallace chuckled. “Judging by how the medieval church worshiped all sorts of relics, it’s a good thing God didn’t do that!” he said. “Enough pieces of Jesus’ cross have been found to build the Rose Bowl. What kind of chaos would we have if people claimed to have an original of a particular book? Or if we actually did have the originals intact, what would happen? My guess is that those manuscripts would be venerated but not examined. They would be worshiped but not studied.”

  Leaning forward in his chair for emphasis, Wallace added: “God doesn’t want anyone—or anything—to be worshiped before him. That includes his Word. Frankly, Funk’s question strikes me as naive and even arrogant. Who is he to set terms for how God should act? And again, his view presupposes that we can’t possibly recover the original. Essentially, scholars do not have to come up with conjecture about what the wording of the original text might be. We have the wording of the original in the manuscripts somewhere. Pragmatically, we could say that the wording of the original can be found in the text of our published Greek New Testaments or in their footnotes.”

  I pointed out that Mark D. Roberts, who holds a doctorate from Harvard in the study of religion, said that even if God did preserve the original copies of the New Testament, skeptics would probably say, “Well, that’s great. But this still doesn’t prove that what’s in them is divinely inspired. The Bible is a human book, whether or not you have the original manuscripts.”