Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
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As we have seen, outside the Christian communities, in the Roman world at large, texts were typically copied either by professional scribes or by literate slaves who were assigned to do such work within a household. That means, among other things, that the people reproducing texts throughout the empire were not, as a rule, the people who wanted the texts. The copyists were by and large reproducing the texts for others. One of the important recent findings of scholars who study the early Christian scribes, on the other hand, is that just the opposite was the case with them. It appears that the Christians copying the texts were the ones who wanted the texts—that is, they were copying the texts either for their own personal and/or communal use or they were making them for the sake of others in their community.7 In short, the people copying the early Christian texts were not, for the most part, if at all, professionals who copied texts for a living (cf. Hermas, above); they were simply the literate people in the Christian congregation who could make copies (since they were literate) and wanted to do so.
Some of these people—or most of them?—may have been the leaders of the communities. We have reason to think that the earliest Christian leaders were among the wealthier members of the church, in that the churches typically met in the homes of their members (there were no church buildings, that we know of, during the first two centuries of the church) and only the homes of the wealthier members would have been sufficiently large to accommodate very many people, since most people in ancient urban settings lived in tiny apartments. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the person who provided the home also provided the leadership of the church, as is assumed in a number of the Christian letters that have come down to us, in which an author will greet so-and-so and "the church that meets in his home." These wealthier homeowners would probably have been more educated, and so it is no surprise that they are sometimes exhorted to "read" Christian literature to their congregations, as we have seen, for example, in 1 Tim. 4:13: "Until I come, pay special heed to [public] reading, to exhortation, and to teaching." Is it possible, then, that church leaders were responsible, at least a good bit of the time, for the copying of the Christian literature being read to the congregation?
Problems with Copying Early Christian Texts
Because the early Christian texts were not being copied by professional scribes,8 at least in the first two or three centuries of the church, but simply by educated members of the Christian congregations who could do the job and were willing to do so, we can expect that in the earliest copies, especially, mistakes were commonly made in transcription. Indeed, we have solid evidence that this was the case, as it was a matter of occasional complaint by Christians reading those texts and trying to uncover the original words of their authors. The third-century church father Origen, for example, once registered the following complaint about the copies of the Gospels at his disposal:
The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of othe rs; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please?
Origen was not the only one to notice the problem. His pagan opponent Celsus had, as well, some seventy years earlier. In his attack on Christianity and its literature, Celsus had maligned the Christian copyists for their transgressive copying practices:
Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over, and they change its character to enable them to deny difficulties in face of criticism. (Against Celsus 2.2j)
What is striking in this particular instance is that Origen, when confronted with an outsider's allegation of poor copying practices among Christians, actually denies that Christians changed the text, despite the fact that he himself decried the circumstance in his other writings. The one exception he names in his reply to Celsus involves several groups of heretics, who, Origen claims, maliciously altered the sacred texts.10
We have already seen this charge that heretics sometimes modified the texts they copied in order to make them stand in closer conformity with their own views, for this was the accusation leveled against the second-century philosopher-theologian Marcion, who presented his canon of eleven scriptural books only after excising those portions that contradicted his notion that, for Paul, the God of the Old Testament was not the true God. Marcion's "orthodox" opponent Irenaeus claimed that Marcion did the following: dismembered the epistles of Paul, removing all that is said by the apostle respecting that God who made the world, to the effect that He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and also those passages from the prophetical writings which the apostle quotes, in order to teach us that they announced beforehand the coming of the Lord. (Against Heresies 1.27 .2)
Marcion was not the only culprit. Living roughly at the same time as Irenaeus was an orthodox bishop of Corinth named Dionysius who complained that false believers had unscrupulously modified his own writings, just as they had done with more sacred texts.
When my fellow-Christians invited me to write letters to them I did so. These the devil's apostles have filled with tares, taking away some things and adding others. For them the woe is reserved. Small wonder then if some have dared to tamper even with the word of the Lord himself, when they have conspired to mutilate my own humble efforts.
Charges of this kind against "heretics"—that they altered the texts of scripture to make them say what they wanted them to mean—are very common among early Christian writers. What is noteworthy, however, is that recent studies have shown that the evidence of our surviving manuscripts points the finger in the opposite direction. Scribes who were associated with the orthodox tradition not infrequently changed their texts, sometimes in order to eliminate the possibility of their "misuse" by Christians affirming heretical beliefs and sometimes to make them more amenable to the doctrines being espoused by Christians of their own persuasion."
The very real danger that texts could be modified at will, by scribes who did not approve of their wording, is evident in other ways as well. We need always to remember that the copyists of the early Christian writings were reproducing their texts in a world in which there were not only no printing presses or publishing houses but also no such thing as copyright law. How could authors guarantee that their texts were not modified once put into circulation? The short answer is that they could not. That explains why authors would sometimes call curses down on any copyists who modified their texts without permission. We find this kind of imprecation already in one early Christian writing that made it into the New Testament, the book of Revelation, whose author, near the end of his text, utters a dire warning:
I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book; and if anyone removes any of the words of the book of this prophecy, God will remove his share from the tree of life and from the holy city, as described in this book. (Rev. 22:18-19)
This is not a threat that the reader has to accept or believe everything written in this book of prophecy, as it is sometimes interpreted; rather, it is a typical threat to copyists of the book, that they are not to add to or remove any of its words. Similar imprecations can be found scattered throughout the range of early Christian writings. Consider the rather severe threats uttered by the Latin Christian scholar Rufinus with respect to his translation of one of Origen's works:
Truly in the presence of God the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, I adjure and beseech everyone who may either transcribe or read these books, by his belief in the kingdom to come, by the mystery of the resurrection from the dead, and by that everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels, that, as he would not possess for an eternal inheritance that place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth and where their fire is not quenched and their spirit doe
s not die, he add nothing to what is written and take nothing away from it, and make no insertion or alteration, but that he compare his transcription with the copies from which he made it. 12
These are dire threats—hellfire and brimstone—for simply changing some words of a text. Some authors, though, were fully determined to make sure their words were transmitted intact, and no threat could be serious enough in the face of copyists who could change texts at will, in a world that had no copyright laws.
Changes of the Text
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the only changes being made were by copyists with a personal stake in the wording of the text. In fact, most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple—slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another. Scribes could be incompetent: it is important to recall that most of the copyists in the early centuries were not trained to do this kind of work but were simply the literate members of their congregations who were (more or less) able and willing. Even later, starting in the fourth and fifth centuries, when Christian scribes emerged as a professional class within the church,15 and later still when most manuscripts were copied by monks devoted to this kind of work in monasteries—even then, some scribes were less skilled than others. At all times the task could be drudgery, as is indicated in notes occasionally added to manuscripts in which a scribe would pen a kind of sigh of relief, such as "The End of the Manuscript. Thanks Be to God!"14 Sometimes scribes grew inattentive; sometimes they were hungry or sleepy; sometimes they just couldn't be bothered to give their best effort.
Even scribes who were competent, trained, and alert sometimes made mistakes. Sometimes, though, as we have seen, they changed the text because they thought it was supposed to be changed. This was not just for certain theological reasons, however. There were other reasons for scribes to make an intentional change—for example, when they came across a passage that appeared to embody a mistake that needed to be corrected, possibly a contradiction found in the text, or a mistaken geographical reference, or a misplaced scriptural allusion. Thus, when scribes made intentional changes, sometimes their motives were as pure as the driven snow. But the changes were made nonetheless, and the author's original words, as a result, may have become altered and eventually lost.
An interesting illustration of the intentional change of a text is found in one of our finest old manuscripts, Codex Vaticanus (so named because it was found in the Vatican library), made in the fourth century. In the opening of the book of Hebrews there is a passage in which, according to most manuscripts, we are told that "Christ bears [Greek: PHERON] all things by the word of his power" (Heb. 1:3). In Codex Vaticanus, however, the original scribe produced a slightly different text, with a verb that sounded similar in Greek; here the text instead reads: "Christ manifests [Greek: PHANERON] all things by the word of his power." Some centuries later, a second scribe read this passage in the manuscript and decided to change the unusual word manifests to the more common reading bears —erasing the one word and writing in the other. Then, again some centuries later, a third scribe read the manuscript and noticed the alteration his predecessor had made; he, in turn, erased the word bears and rewrote the word manifests. He then added a scribal note in the margin to indicate what he thought of the earlier, second scribe. The note says: "Fool and knave! Leave the old reading, don't change it!"
I have a copy of the page framed and hanging on the wall above my desk as a constant reminder about scribes and their proclivities to change, and rechange, their texts. Obviously it is the change of a single word: so why does it matter? It matters because the only way to understand what an author wants to say is to know what his words— all his words—actually were. (Think of all the sermons preached on the basis of a single word in a text: what if the word is one the author didn't actually write?) Saying that Christ reveals all things by his word of power is quite different from saying that he keeps the universe together by his word!
Complications in Knowing the "Original Text"
And so, all kinds of changes were made in manuscripts by the scribes who copied them. We will be looking at the types of changes in greater depth in a later chapter. For the moment, it is enough to know that the changes were made, and that they were made widely, especially in the first two hundred years in which the texts were being copied, when most of the copyists were amateurs. One of the leading questions that textual critics must deal with is how to get back to the original text—the text as the author first wrote it—given the circumstance that our manuscripts are so full of mistakes. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that once a mistake was made, it could become firmly embedded in the textual tradition, more firmly embedded, in fact, than the original.
That is to say, once a scribe changes a text—whether accidentally or intentionally—then those changes are permanent in his manuscript (unless, of course, another scribe comes along to correct the mistake). The next scribe who copies that manuscript copies those mistakes (thinking they are what the text said), and he adds mistakes of his own. The next scribe who then copies that manuscript copies the mistakes of both his predecessors and adds mistakes of his own, and so on. The only way mistakes get corrected is when a scribe recognizes that a predecessor has made an error and tries to resolve it. There is no guarantee, however, that a scribe who tries to correct a mistake corrects it correctly. That is, by changing what he thinks is an error, he may in fact change it incorrectly, so now there are three forms of the text: the original, the error, and the incorrect attempt to resolve the error. Mistakes multiply and get repeated; sometimes they get corrected and sometimes they get compounded. And so it goes. For centuries.
Sometimes, of course, a scribe may have more than one manuscript at hand, and can correct the mistakes in one manuscript by the correct readings of the other manuscript. This does, in fact, improve the situation significantly. On the other hand, it is also possible that a scribe will sometimes correct the correct manuscript in light of the wording of the incorrect one. The possibilities seem endless.
Given these problems, how can we hope to get back to anything like the original text, the text that an author actually wrote? It is an enormous problem. In fact, it is such an enormous problem that a number of textual critics have started to claim that we may as well suspend any discussion of the "original" text, because it is inaccessible to us. This may be going too far, but a concrete example or two taken from the New Testament writings can show the problems.
Examples of the Problems
For the first example, let's take Paul's letter to the Galatians. Even at the point of the original penning of the letter, we have numerous difficulties to consider, which may well make us sympathetic with those who want to give up on the notion of knowing what the "original" text was. Galatia was not a single town with a single church; it was a region in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in which Paul had established churches. When he writes to the Galatians, is he writing to one of the churches or to all of them? Presumably, since he doesn't single out any particular town, he means for the letter to go to all of them. Does that mean that he made multiple copies of the same letter, or that he wanted the one letter to circulate to all the churches of the region? We don't know.
Suppose he made multiple copies. How did he do it? To begin with, it appears that this letter, like others by Paul, was not written by his hand but was dictated to a secretarial scribe. Evidence for this comes at the end of the letter, where Paul added a postscript in his own handwriting, so that the recipients would know that it was he who was responsible for the letter (a common technique for dictated letters in antiquity): "See with what large letters I am writing you with my own hand" (Gal. 6:11). His handwriting, in other words, was larger and probably less professional in appearance than that of the scribe to whom he had dictated the letter.15
Suppose, though, that the scribe got all the words 100 percent correct. If multiple copies of the letter went out, can we be sure that all the copies were also 100 percent correct? It is possible, at least, that even if they were all copied in Paul's presence, a word or two here or there got changed in one or the other of the copies. If so, what if only one of the copies served as the copy from which all subsequent copies were made—then in the first century, into the second century and the third century, and so on? In that case, the oldest copy that provided the basis for all subsequent copies of the letter was not exactly what Paul wrote, or wanted to write.
Once the copy is in circulation—that is, once it arrives at its destination in one of the towns of Galatia—it, of course, gets copied, and mistakes get made. Sometimes scribes might intentionally change the text; sometimes accidents happen. These mistake-ridden copies get copied; and the mistake-ridden copies of the copies get copied; and so on, down the line. Somewhere in the midst of all this, the original copy (or each of the original copies) ends up getting lost, or worn out, or destroyed. At some point, it is no longer possible to compare a copy with the original to make sure it is "correct," even if someone has the bright idea of doing so.