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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  In sum, a number of passages in our surviving manuscripts appear to embody the apologetic concerns of the early Christians, especially as these relate to the founder of their faith, Jesus himself. Just as with theological conflicts in the early church, the question of the role of women, and the controversies with Jews, so too with the disputes raging between Christians and their cultured despisers among the pagans: all of these controversies came to affect the texts that were eventually to become part of the book that we now call the New Testament, as this book—or rather this set of books—was copied by nonprofessional scribes in the second and third centuries, and occasionally came to be altered in light of the contexts of their day.

 

  Conclusion: Changing Scripture - Scribes, Authors, and Readers

  I began this book on a personal note by describing how I became interested in the question of the New Testament text and why it took on so much importance for me. I think what has held my interest over the years has been the mystery of it all. In many ways, being a textual critic is like doing detective work. There is a puzzle to be solved and evidence to be uncovered. The evidence is often ambiguous, capable of being interpreted in various ways, and a case has to be made for one solution of the problem over another.

  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, who were not only conserving scripture but also changing it. To be sure, of all the hundreds of thousands of textual changes found among our manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial, of no real importance for anything other than showing that scribes could not spell or keep focused any better than the rest of us. It would be wrong, however, to say—as people sometimes do—that the changes in our text have no real bearing on what the texts mean or on the theological conclusions that one draws from them. We have seen, in fact, that just the opposite is the case. In some instances, the very meaning of the text is at stake, depending on how one resolves a textual problem: 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, and all of them are related to how one resolves difficulties in the manuscript tradition as it has come down to us.

  It bears repeating that the decisions that have to be made are by no means obvious, and that competent, well-meaning, highly intelligent scholars often come to opposite conclusions when looking at the same evidence. These scholars are not just a group of odd, elderly, basically irrelevant academics holed up in a few libraries around the world; some of them are, and always have been, highly influential on society and culture. The Bible is, by all counts, the most significant book in the history of Western civilization. And how do you think we have access to the Bible? Hardly any of us actually read it in the original language, and even among those of us who do, there are very few who ever look at a manuscript—let alone a group of manuscripts. How then do we know what was originally in the Bible? A few people have gone to the trouble of learning the ancient languages (Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, etc.) and have spent their professional lives examining our manuscripts, deciding what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote. In other words, someone has gone to the trouble of doing textual criticism, reconstructing the "original" text based on the wide array of manuscripts that differ from one another in thousands of places. Then someone else has taken that reconstructed Greek text, in which textual decisions have been made (what was the original form of Mark 1:2? of Matt. 24:36? of John 1:18? of Luke 22:43-44? and so on), and translated it into English. What you read is that English translation—and not just you, but millions of people like you. How do these millions of people know what is in the New Testament? They "know" because scholars with unknown names, identities, backgrounds, qualifications, predilections, theologies, and personal opinions have told them what is in the New Testament. But what if the translators have translated the wrong text? It has happened before. The King James Version is filled with places in which the translators rendered a Greek text derived ultimately from Erasmus's edition, which was based on a single twelfth-century manuscript that is one of the worst of the manuscripts that we now have available to us! It's no wonder that modern translations often differ from the King James, and no wonder that some Bible-believing Christians prefer to pretend there's never been a problem, since God inspired the King James Bible instead of the original Greek! (As the old saw goes, If the King James was good enough for Saint Paul, it's good enough for me.)

  Reality is never that neat, however, and in this case we need to face up to the facts. The King James was not given by God but was a translation by a group of scholars in the early seventeenth century who based their rendition on a faulty Greek text.1 Later translators based their translations on Greek texts that were better, but not perfect. Even the translation you hold in your hands is affected by these textual problems we have been discussing, whether you are a reader of the New International Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, the New American Standard Version, the New King James, the Jerusalem Bible, the Good News Bible, or something else. They are all based on texts that have been changed in places. And there are some places in which modern translations continue to transmit what is probably not the original text (so I've argued for Mark 1:41; Luke 22:43-44; and Heb. 2:9, for example; there are other instances as well). There are some places where we don't even know what the original text was, places, for example, about which highly intelligent and impressively trained textual critics continue to dispute. A number of scholars—for reasons we saw in chapter 2—have even given up thinking that it makes sense to talk about the "original" text.

  I personally think that opinion may be going too far. I do not mean to deny that there are difficulties that may be insurmountable in reconstructing the originals: for example, if Paul dictated his letter to the Galatians and the secretarial scribe writing down what he said misheard a word because someone in the room coughed, then the "original" copy would already have a mistake in it! Stranger things have happened. Even so—despite the imponderable difficulties—we do have manuscripts of every book of the New Testament; all of these manuscripts were copied from other, earlier manuscripts, which were themselves copied from earlier manuscripts; and the chain of transmission has to end somewhere, ultimately at a manuscript produced either by an author or by a secretarial scribe who was producing the "autograph"—the first in the long line of manuscripts that were copied for nearly fifteen centuries until the invention of printing. So at least it is not "non"-sense to talk about an original text.

  When I was a student just beginning to think about those fifteen centuries of copying and the vicissitudes of the text, I kept reverting to the fact that whatever else we may say about the Christian scribes— whether of the early centuries or of the Middle Ages—we have to admit that in addition to copying scripture, they were changing scripture. Sometimes they didn't mean to—they were simply tired, or inattentive, or, on occasion, inept. At other times, though, they did mean to make changes, as when they wanted the text to emphasize precisely what they themselves believed, for example about the nature of Christ, or about the role of women in the church, or about the wicked character of their Jewish opponents.

  This conviction that scribes had changed scripture became an increasing certitude for me as I studied the text more and more. And this certitude changed the way I understood the text, in m
ore ways than one.

  In particular, as I said at the outset, I began seeing the New Testament as a very human book. The New Testament as we actually have it, I knew, was the product of human hands, the hands of the scribes who transmitted it. Then I began to see that not just the scribal text but the original text itself was a very human book. This stood very much at odds with how I had regarded the text in my late teens as a newly minted "born-again" Christian, convinced that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God and that the biblical words themselves had come to us by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As I realized already in graduate school, even if God had inspired the original words, we don't have the original words. So the doctrine of inspiration was in a sense irrelevant to the Bible as we have it, since the words God reputedly inspired had been changed and, in some cases, lost. Moreover, I came to think that my earlier views of inspiration were not only irrelevant, they were probably wrong. For the only reason (I came to think) for God to inspire the Bible would be so that his people would have his actual words; but if he really wanted people to have his actual words, surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he had miraculously inspired them in the first place. Given the circumstance that he didn't preserve the words, the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn't gone to the trouble of inspiring them.

  The more I reflected on these matters, the more I began to see that the authors of the New Testament were very much like the scribes who would later transmit those authors' writings. The authors too were human beings with needs, beliefs, worldviews, opinions, loves, hates, longings, desires, situations, problems—and surely all these things affected what they wrote. Moreover, in an even more tangible way these authors were like the later scribes. They too were Christians who had inherited traditions about Jesus and his teachings, who had learned about the Christian message of salvation, who had come to believe in the truth of the gospel—and they too passed along the traditions in their writings. What is striking, once one sees them for the human beings they were, with their own beliefs, worldviews, situations, and so on, is that all these authors passed along the traditions they inherited in different words. Matthew, in fact, is not exactly like Mark; Mark is not the same as Luke; or Luke as John; or John as Paul; or Paul as James. Just as scribes modified the words of the tradition, by sometimes putting these words "in other words," so too had the authors of the New Testament itself, telling their stories, giving their instructions, and recording their recollections by using their own words (not just the words they had heard), words that they came up with to pass along their message in ways that seemed most appropriate for the audience and the time and place for which they were writing.

  And so I began to see that since each of these authors is different, it was not appropriate to think that any one of them meant the same thing as some other author meant—any more than it is fair to say that what I mean in this book must be the same as what some other author writing about textual criticism means in his or her book. We might mean different things. How can you tell? Only by reading each of us carefully and seeing what each of us has to say—not by pretending that we are both saying the same thing. We're often saying very different things.

  The same is true of the authors of the New Testament. This can be seen in a very tangible way. As I pointed out earlier in this book, it has been clear to most scholars since the nineteenth century that Mark was the first Gospel written, and that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as one of the sources for their stories about Jesus. On the one hand, there's nothing particularly radical about this claim. Authors have to get their stories somewhere, and Luke himself indicates that he had read and used earlier accounts in coming up with his own (1:1-4). On the other hand, this means that it is possible to compare what Mark says with what Matthew and/or Luke say, in any story shared between them; and by doing so, one can see how Mark was changed by these later authors.

  Engaging in this different kind of detective work can also be interesting and enlightening. For these later authors sometimes borrowed Mark's sentences wholesale, but on other occasions they changed what he had to say, sometimes radically. In that sense, they, like the scribes, were changing scripture. We have seen some examples in the course of our study. Mark, for example, portrays Jesus as in deep agony in the face of death, telling his disciples that his soul was "sorrowful unto death," falling on his face in prayer, and beseeching God three times to take away the cup of his suffering; on his way to be crucified he is silent the entire time, and he says nothing on the cross when mocked by everyone, including both robbers, until the very end when he calls out in anguish, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He then utters a loud cry and dies.

  Luke had this version of the story available to him, but he modified it significantly. He removed Mark's comment that Jesus was highly distraught, as well as Jesus's own comment that he was sorrowful unto death. Rather than falling on his face, Jesus simply kneels, and instead of pleading three times to have the cup removed, he asks only once, prefacing his prayer with "if it be your will." He is not at all silent on the way to his crucifixion but speaks to a group of weeping women, telling them to grieve not for him but for the fate to befall themselves. While being crucified he is not silent but asks God to forgive those responsible, "for they don't know what they're doing." While on the cross he is not silent: when one of the robbers mocks him (not both, as in Mark), the other asks for his help, and Jesus replies in full assurance of what was happening, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise." And at the end, rather than asking God why he had been forsaken—there is no cry of dereliction here—he instead prays in full confidence of God's support and care: "Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit."

  Luke has changed the account, and if we wish to understand what Luke wanted to emphasize, we need to take his changes seriously. People don't take his changes seriously, I came to see, when they pretend that Luke is saying the same thing as Mark. Mark wanted to emphasize the utter forsakenness and near-despair of Jesus in the face of death. Interpreters differ in their explanations of why this is what Mark wanted to emphasize; one interpretation is that Mark wanted to stress that God works in highly mysterious ways, and that seemingly inexplicable suffering (Jesus at the end seems to be in the throes of doubt: "Why have you forsaken me?") can in fact be the way of redemption. Luke wanted to teach a different lesson. For him, Jesus was not in despair. He was calm and in control, knowing what was happening to him, why it was happening, and what would occur later ("today you will be with me in paradise"). Again interpreters are divided on why Luke portrayed Jesus this way in the face of death, but it may be that Luke wanted to give an example to persecuted Christians about how they themselves should face death, in full assurance that God is on their side despite their torments ("into your hands I commend my spirit").

  The point is that Luke changed the tradition he inherited. Readers completely misinterpret Luke if they fail to realize this—as happens, for example, when they assume that Mark and Luke are in fact saying the same thing about Jesus. If they are not saying the same thing, it is not legitimate to assume they are—for example, by taking what Mark says, and taking what Luke says, then taking what Matthew and John say and melding them all together, so that Jesus says and does all the things that each of the Gospel writers indicates. Anyone who interprets the Gospels this way is not letting each author have his own say; anyone who does this is not reading what the author wrote in order to understand his message; anyone who does this is not reading the Gospels themselves—he or she is making up a new Gospel consisting of the four in the New Testament, a new Gospel that is not like any of the ones that have come down to us.

  The idea that Luke changed the text before him—in this case the Gospel of Mark—does not put him in a unique situation among the early Christian authors. This, in fact, is what all the writers of the New Testament did—along with all the writers of all the Christian literature outside
the New Testament, indeed writers of every kind everywhere. They modified their tradition and put the words of the tradition in their own words. John's Gospel is quite different from each of the other three (he never has Jesus tell a parable, for example, or cast out a demon; and in his account, unlike theirs, Jesus gives long discourses about his identity and does "signs" in order to prove that what he says about himself is true). The message of Paul is both like and unlike what we find in the Gospels (he doesn't say much about Jesus's words or deeds, for example, but focuses on what for Paul were the critical issues, that Christ died on the cross and was raised from the dead). The message of James differs from the message of Paul; the message of Paul differs from the message of Acts; the message of the Revelation of John differs from the message of the Gospel of John; and so forth. Each of these authors was human, each of them had a different message, each of them was putting the tradition he inherited into his own words. Each of them, in a sense, was changing the "texts" he inherited.

  This, of course, is also what the scribes were doing. On one level, ironically perhaps, the scribes were changing scripture much less radically than the authors of the New Testament themselves were. When Luke prepared his Gospel and used Mark as his source, it was not his intention simply to copy Mark for posterity. He planned to alter Mark in light of other traditions that he had read and heard about Jesus. Later scribes who were producing our manuscripts, on the other hand, were principally interested in copying the texts before them. They, for the most part, did not see themselves as authors who were writing new books; they were scribes reproducing the old books. The changes they made—at least the intentional ones—were no doubt seen as improvements of the text, possibly made because the scribes were convinced that the copyists before them had themselves mistakenly altered the words of the text. For the most part, their intention was to conserve the tradition, not to change it.