Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

by Bart D. Ehrman

  The second, historical, reason that one cannot simply look at what the oldest manuscript reads, with no other considerations, is that, as we have seen, the earliest period of textual transmission was also the least controlled. This is when nonprofessional scribes, for the most part, were copying our texts—and making lots of mistakes in their copies.

  And so, age does matter, but it cannot be an absolute criterion. This is why most textual critics are rational eclecticists. They believe that they have to look at a range of arguments for one reading or another, not simply count the manuscripts or consider only the verifiably oldest ones. Still, at the end of the day, if the majority of our earliest manuscripts support one reading over another, surely that combination of factors should be seen as carrying some weight in making a textual decision. Another feature of the external evidence is the geographical range of manuscripts in support of one reading over another. Suppose a reading is found in a number of manuscripts, but all these manuscripts can be shown to have originated, say, in Rome, whereas a wide range of other manuscripts from, say, Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor, and Gaul all represent some other reading. In that case, the textual critic might suspect that the one reading was a "local" variant (the copies in Rome all having the same mistake) and that the other reading is the one that is older and more likely to preserve the original text.

  Probably the most important external criterion that scholars follow is this: for a reading to be considered "original," it normally should be found in the best manuscripts and the best groups of manuscripts. This is a rather tricky assessment, but it works this way: some manuscripts can be shown, on a variety of grounds, to be superior to others. For example, whenever internal evidence (discussed below) is virtually decisive for a reading, these manuscripts almost always have that reading, whereas other manuscripts (usually, as it turns out, the later manuscripts) have the alternative reading. The principle involved here states that if some manuscripts are known to be superior in readings when the oldest form is obvious, they are more likely to be superior also in readings for which internal evidence is not as clear. In a way, it is like having witnesses in a court of law or knowing friends whose word you can trust. When you k now that a person is prone to lying, then you can never be sure that he or she is to be trusted; but if you know that a person is completely reliable, then you can trust that person even when he or she is telling you something you can't otherwise verify.

  The same applies to groups of witnesses. We saw in chapter 4 that Westcott and Hort developed Bengel's idea that manuscripts could be grouped into textual families. Some of these textual groupings, as it turns out, are more to be trusted than others, in that they preserve the oldest and best of our surviving witnesses and, when tested, are shown to provide superior readings. In particular, most rational eclecticists think that the so-called Alexandrian text (this includes Hort's "Neutral" text), originally associated with the careful copying practices of the Christian scribes in Alexandria, Egypt, is the superior form of text available, and in most cases provides us with the oldest or "original" text, wherever there is variation. The "Byzantine" and "Western" texts, on the other hand, are less likely to preserve the best readings, when they are not also supported by Alexandrian manuscripts.

  Internal Evidence

  Textual critics who consider themselves rational eclecticists choose from a range of readings based on a number of pieces of evidence. In addition to the external evidence provided by the manuscripts, two kinds of internal evidence are typically used. The first involves what are called intrinsic probabilities—probabilities based on what the author of the text was himself most likely to have written. We are able to study, of course, the writing style, the vocabulary, and the theology of an author. When two or more variant readings are preserved among our manuscripts, and one of them uses words or stylistic features otherwise not found in that author's work, or if it represents a point of view that is at variance with what the author otherwise embraces, then it is unlikely that that is what the author wrote—especially if another attested reading coincides perfectly well with the author's writing elsewhere.

  The second kind of internal evidence is called transcriptional probability. This asks, not which reading an author was likely to have written, but which reading a scribe was likely to have created. Ultimately, this kind of evidence goes back to Bengel's idea that the "more difficult" reading is more likely to be original. This is premised on the idea that scribes are more likely to try to correct what they take to be mistakes, to harmonize passages that they regard as contradictory, and to bring the theology of a text more into line with their own theology. Readings that might seem, on the surface, to contain a "mistake," or lack of harmony, or peculiar theology, are therefore more likely to have been changed by a scribe than are "easier" readings. This criterion is sometimes expressed as: The reading that best explains the existence of the others is more lively to be original .3

  I have been laying out the various external and internal forms of evidence that textual critics consider, not because I expect everyone reading these pages to master these principles and start applying them to the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, but because it is important to recognize that, when we try to decide what the original text was, a range of considerations must be taken into account and a lot of judgment calls have to be made. There are times when the various pieces of evidence are at odds with one another, for example, when the more difficult reading (transcriptional probabilities) is not well attested in the early manuscripts (external evidence), or when the more difficult reading does not coincide with the writing style of the author otherwise (intrinsic probabilities).

  In short, determining the original text is neither simple nor straightforward! It requires a lot of thought and careful sifting of the evidence, and different scholars invariably come to different conclusions—not only about minor matters that have no bearing on the meaning of a passage (such as the spelling of a word or a change of word order in Greek that can't even be replicated in English translation), but also about matters of major importance, matters that affect the interpretation of an entire book of the New Testament.

  To illustrate the importance of some textual decisions, I turn now to three textual variants of the latter sort, where the determination of the original text has a significant bearing on how one understands the message of some of the New Testament authors.4 As it turns out, in each of these cases I think most English translators have chosen the wrong reading and so present a translation not of the original text but of the text that scribes created when they altered the original. The first of these texts comes from Mark and has to do with Jesus's becoming angry when a poor leper pleads with him to be healed.

  Mark and an Angry Jesus

  The textual problem of Mark 1:41 occurs in the story of Jesus healing a man with a skin disease.5 The surviving manuscripts preserve verse 41 in two different forms; both readings are shown here, in brackets.

  19 And he came preaching in their synagogues in all of Galilee and casting out the demons. 40 And a leper came to him beseeching him and saying to him, "If you wish, you are able to cleanse me." And feeling compassion (Greek: SPLANGNISTHEIS)/becoming angry (Greek: ORGISTHEIS)/, reaching out his hand, he touched him an d said, "I wish, be cleansed." And immediately the leprosy went out from him, and he was cleansed. And rebuking him severely, immediately he cast him out; and said to him, "See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing that which Moses commanded as a witness to them." But when he went out he began to preach many things and to spread the word, so that he [Jesus] was no longer able to enter publicly into a city.

  Most English translations render the beginning of verse 41 so as to emphasize Jesus's love for this poor outcast leper: "feeling compassion" (or the word could be translated "moved with pity") for him. In doing so, these translations are following the Greek text foun
d in most of our manuscripts. It is certainly easy to see why compassion might be called for in the situation. We don't know the precise nature of the man's disease—many commentators prefer to think of it as a scaly skin disorder rather than the kind of rotting flesh that we commonly associate with leprosy. In any event, he may well have fallen under the injunctions of the Torah that forbade "lepers" of any sort to live normal lives; they were to be isolated, cut off from the public, considered unclean (Leviticus 13-14). Moved with pity for such a one, Jesus reaches out a tender hand, touches his diseased flesh, and heals him.

  The simple pathos and unproblematic emotion of the scene may well account for translators and interpreters, as a rule, not considering the alternative text found in some of our manuscripts. For the wording of one of our oldest witnesses, called Codex Bezae, which is supported by three Latin manuscripts, is at first puzzling and wrenching. Here, rather than saying that Jesus felt compassion for the man, the text indicates that he became angry. In Greek it is a difference between the words SPLANGNISTHEIS and ORGISTHEIS. Because of its attestation in both Greek and Latin witnesses, this other reading is generally conceded by textual specialists to go back at least to the second century. Is it possible, though, that this is what Mark himself wrote?

  As we have already seen, we are never completely safe in saying that when the vast majority of manuscripts have one reading and only a couple have another, the majority are right. Sometimes a few manuscripts appear to be right even when all the others disagree. In part, this is because the vast majority of our manuscripts were produced hundreds and hundreds of years after the originals, and they themselves were copied not from the originals but from other, much later copies. Once a change made its way into the manuscript tradition, it could be perpetuated until it became more commonly transmitted than the original wording. In this case, both readings we are considering appear to be very ancient. Which one is original?

  If Christian readers today were given the choice between these two readings, no doubt almost everyone would choose the one more commonly attested in our manuscripts: Jesus felt pity for this man, and so he healed him. The other reading is hard to figure out: what would it mean to say that Jesus felt angry? Isn't this in itself sufficient ground for assuming that Mark must have written that Jesus felt compassion ?

  On the contrary, the fact that one of the readings makes such good sense and is easy to understand is precisely what makes some scholars suspect that it is wrong. For, as we have seen, scribes also would have preferred the text to be nonproblematic and simple to understand. The question to be asked is this: which is more likely, that a scribe copying this text would change it to say that Jesus became wrathful instead of compassionate, or to say that Jesus became compassionate instead of wrathful? Which reading better explains the existence of the other? When seen from this perspective, the latter is obviously more likely. The reading that indicates Jesus became angry is the "more difficult" reading and therefore more likely to be "original."

  There is even better evidence than this speculative question of which reading the scribes were more likely to invent. As it turns out, we don't have any Greek manuscripts of Mark that contain this passage until the end of the fourth century, nearly three hundred years after the book was produced. But we do have two authors who copied this story within twenty years of its first production.

  Scholars have long recognized that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, and that both Matthew and Luke used Mark's account as a source for their own stories about Jesus.6 It is possible, then, to examine Matthew and Luke to see how they changed Mark, wherever they tell the same story but in a (more or less) different way. When we do this, we find that Matthew and Luke have both taken over this story from Mark, their common source. It is striking that Matthew and Luke are almost word for word the same as Mark in the leper's request and in Jesus's response in verses 40-41. Which word, then, do they use to describe Jesus's reaction? Does he become compassionate or angry? Oddly enough, Matthew and Luke both omit the word altogether.

  If the text of Mark available to Matthew and Luke had described Jesus as feeling compassion, why would each of them have omitted the word? Both Matthew and Luke describe Jesus as compassionate elsewhere, and whenever Mark has a story in which Jesus's compassion is explicitly mentioned, one or the other of them retains this description in his own account.

  What about the other option? What if both Matthew and Luke read in Mark's Gospel that Jesus became angry? Would they have been inclined to eliminate that emotion? There are, in fact, other occasions on which Jesus becomes angry in Mark. In each instance, Matthew and Luke have modified the accounts. In Mark 3:5 Jesus looks around "with anger" at those in the synagogue who are watching to see if he will heal the man with the withered hand. Luke has the verse almost the same as Mark, but he removes the reference to Jesus's anger. Matthew completely rewrites this section of the story and says nothing of Jesus's wrath. Similarly, in Mark 10:14 Jesus is aggravated at his disciples (a different Greek word is used) for not allowing people to bring their children to be blessed. Both Matthew and Luke have the story, often verbally the same, but both delete the reference to Jesus's anger (Matt. 19:14; Luke 18:16).

  In sum, Matthew and Luke have no qualms about describing Jesus as compassionate, but they never describe him as angry. Whenever one of their sources (Mark) did so, they both independently rewrote the term out of their stories. Thus, whereas it is difficult to understand why they would have removed "feeling compassion" from the account of Jesus's healing of the leper, it is altogether easy to see why they might have wanted to remove "feeling anger." Combined with the circumstance that the latter term is attested in a very ancient stream of our manuscript tradition and that scribes would have been unlikely to create it out of the much more readily comprehensible "feeling compassion," it is becoming increasingly evident that Mark, in fact, described Jesus as angry when approached by the leper to be healed.

  One other point must be emphasized before we move on. I have indicated that whereas Matthew and Luke have difficulty ascribing anger to Jesus, Mark has no problem doing so. Even in the story under consideration, apart from the textual problem of verse 41, Jesus does not treat this poor leper with kid gloves. After he heals him, he "severely rebukes him" and "throws him out." These are literal renderings of the Greek words, which are usually softened in translation. They are harsh terms, used elsewhere in Mark always in contexts of violent conflict and aggression (e.g., when Jesus casts out demons). It is difficult to see why Jesus would harshly upbraid this person and cast him out if he feels compassion for him; but if he is angry, perhaps it makes better sense.

  At what, though, would Jesus be angry? This is where the relationship of text and interpretation becomes critical. Some scholars who have preferred the text that indicates that Jesus "became angry" in this passage have come up with highly improbable interpretations. Their goal in doing so appears to be to exonerate the emotion by making Jesus look compassionate even though they realize that the text says he became angry.8 One commentator, for example, argues that Jesus is angry with the state of the world that is full of disease; in other words, he loves the sick but hates the sickness. There is no textual basis for the interpretation, but it does have the virtue of making Jesus look good. Another interpreter argues that Jesus is angry because this leprous person had been alienated from society, overlooking the facts that the text says nothing about the man being an outsider and that, and even if it assumes he was, it would not have been the fault of Jesus's society but of the Law of God (specifically the book of Leviticus). Another argues that, in fact, that is what Jesus was angry about, that the Law of Moses forces this kind of alienation. This interpretation ignores the fact that at the conclusion of the passage (v. 44) Jesus affirms the Law of Moses and urges the former leper to observe it.

  All these interpretations have in common the desire to exonerate Jesus's anger and the decision to bypas
s the text in order to do so. Should we opt to do otherwise, what might we conclude? It seems to me that there are two options, one that focuses on the immediate literary context of the passage and the other, on its broader context.

  First, in terms of the more immediate context, how is one struck by the portrayal of Jesus in the opening part of Mark's Gospel? Bracketing for a moment our own preconceptions of who Jesus was and simply reading this particular text, we have to admit that Jesus does not come off as the meek-and-mild, soft-featured, good shepherd of the stain-glassed window. Mark begins his Gospel by portraying Jesus as a physically and charismatically powerful authority figure who is not to be messed with. He is introduced by a wild-man prophet in the wilderness; he is cast out from society to do battle in the wilderness with Satan and the wild beasts; he returns to call for urgent repentance in the face of the imminent coming of God's judgment; he rips his followers away from their families; he overwhelms his audiences with his authority; he rebukes and overpowers demonic forces that can completely subdue mere mortals; he refuses to accede to popular demand, ignoring people who plead for an audience with him. The only story in this opening chapter of Mark that hints at personal compassion is the healing of Simon Peter's mother-in-law, sick in bed. But even that compassionate interpretation may be open to question. Some wry observers have noted that after Jesus dispels her fever, she rises to serve them, presumably bringing them their evening meal.

  Is it possible that Jesus is being portrayed in the opening scenes of Mark's Gospel as a powerful figure with a strong will and an agenda of his own, a charismatic authority who doesn't like to be disturbed? It would certainly make sense of his response to the healed leper, whom he harshly rebukes and then casts out.