Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
Page 24
Hulbert-Powell, John James Wettstein, 43.
Lachmann is famous in the annals of scholarship as one who, more than any other, devised a method for establishing the genealogical relationship among manuscripts in the textual tradition of the classical authors. His primary professional interest was not, in fact, the writings of the New Testament, but he did see these writings as posing a unique and interesting challenge to textual scholars.
Cited in Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, 172.
Constantine von Tischendorf, When Were Our Gospels Written? (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1866), 23.
Tischendorf, When Were Our Gospels Written?, 29.
To this day the monks of Saint Catherine's monastery maintain that Tischendorf was not "given" the manuscript but absconded with it.
Since Tischendorf's day, even more significant manuscripts have been discovered. In particular, throughout the twentieth century archaeologists unearthed numerous papyrus manuscripts, which predate Codex Sinaiticus by up to 150 years. Most of these papyri are fragmentary, but some are extensive. To date, some 116 papyri are known and catalogued; they contain portions of most of the books of the New Testament.
Caspar R. Gregory, "Tischendorf," Bibliotheca Sacra 33 (1876): 153-93.
Arthur Fenton Hort, ed., Life and Letters of Fenton John Anthony Hort (London: Macmillan, 1896), 211.
Hort, Life and Letters, 250.
Hort, Life and Letters, 264.
Hort, Life and Letters, 455.
For a summary of the text-critical principles that Westcott and Hort used in establishing their text, see Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, 174-81.
See n. 24., above.
Chapter 5
For further explanation of these methods, see Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, 300-15.
Among other things, this means that the readings in the "Byzantine" majority text are not necessarily the best readings. They simply have the most manuscript support in terms of sheer numbers. As an old text-critical adage says, however: Manuscripts are to be weighed, not counted.
Some scholars take this to be the most basic and reliable text-critical principle of all.
Much of what follows is taken from my article "Text and Tradition: The Role of New Testament Manuscripts in Early Christian Studies," found in TC: A Journal of Textual Criticism [http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/TC.html] 5 (2000).
For a fuller discussion of this variant, and its significance for interpretation, sec my article "A Sinner in the Hands of an Angry Jesus," in New Testament Greek and Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Gerald F. Hawthorne, ed. Amy M. Donaldson and Timothy B. Sailors (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). I have relied on this article for much of the following discussion.
See Ehrman, The New Testament, chap. 6.
On only two other occasions in Mark's Gospel is Jesus explicitly described as compassionate: in Mark 6:34, at the feeding of the five thousand, and in Mark 8:2, at the feeding of the four thousand. Luke tells the first story completely differently, and he does not include the second. Matthew, however, has both stories and retains Mark's description of Jesus's being compassionate on both occasions (Matt. 14:14 [and 9:30]; 15:32). On three additional occasions in Matthew, and yet one other occasion in Luke, Jesus is explicitly described as compassionate, with this term (SPLANGNIZO) used. It is difficult to imagine, then, why they both, independently of each other, would have omitted the term from the account we are discussing if they had found it in Mark.
For these various interpretations, sec Ehrman, "A Sinner in the Hands of an Angry Jesus."
For a more detailed discussion of why scribes changed the original account, see pp. 200—01, below.
For a fuller discussion of this variant, see Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 187-94. My first treatment of this passage was co-written with Mark Plunkett.
For a discussion of why scribes added the verses to Luke's account, see pp. 164-65, below.
For a fuller discussion of this variant reading, see Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 146-50.
Chapter 6
For primary texts from this period, sec Bart D. Ehrman, After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999). A nice introduction to the period can be found in Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (New York: Penguin, 1967).
For a fuller discussion of the material covered in the following paragraphs, see especially Ehrman, Lost Christianities, chapter 1.
For a full discussion, see Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
For a fuller discussion of adoptionistic views, and of those who held them, see Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 47—54.
For a fuller discussion of docetism and docetic Christologies, see Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 181-87.
See pp. 33-34, above.
He also accepted ten letters of Paul as scripture (all those in the New Testament except 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus); he rejected the entire Old Testament, since it was the book of the Creator God, not of the God of Jesus.
The quotations come from Justin's Dialogue with Trypho, 103.
For further demonstration that these verses were not original to Luke but were added as an antidocetic polemic, see Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 198-209.
For another textual addition, and a fuller discussion of this one, see Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 227-32.
For further information on separationist Christologies, and the Gnostic groups that held them, see Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 119-24.
For additional discussion of Gnosticism, see Ehrman, Lost Christianities, chap. 6.
Against Heresies 3, 11, 7.
Chapter 7
1. See Ehrman, The New Testament, chap. 24. I have depended on this chapter for much of the following discussion. For fuller discussion and documentation, see Ross Kraemer and Mary Rose D'Angelo, Women and Christian Origins (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999). See also R. Kraemer, Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions Among Jews, Pagans, and Christians in the Graeco-Roman World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), and Karen J. Torjesen, When Women Were Priests: Women's Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).
2. For further elaboration, see Ehrman, Jesus, 188-91. 3. See Ehrman, The New Testament, chap. 23.
For a fuller discussion that shows that Paul did not write verses 34-35, see especially the commentary by Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).
The fullest recent discussion is by Eldon Jay Epp, "Text-critical, Exegetical, and Sociocultural Factors Affecting the Junia/Junias Variation in Rom 16:7," in A. Denaux, New Testament Textual Criticism and Exegesis (Leuven: Univ. Press, 2002), 227-92.
For other changes of this sort in Acts, see Ben Witherington, "The Anti-Feminist Tendencies of the 'Western' Text of Acts," Journal of Biblical Literature 103 (1984): 82-84.
For two standard treatments in the field, see Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury, 1974), and John Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes Toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983). A more recent study is Miriam Taylor's Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus (Leiden: Brill, 1995).
See Ehrman , Apostolic Fathers, 2:3-83.
Translation of Gerald Hawthorne; the entire translation of the homily may be found in Bart D. Ehrman , After the New Testament, 115-28.
See especially David Daube, "For They Know Not What They Do," in Studia Patristica, vol. 4, ed. by F L. Cross (Berlin: Akademie-V
erlag, 1961), 58-70, and Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of L etters, 119-23.
Translations of Against Celsus are taken from Henry Chadwick's edition; Origin: Contra Celsum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953).
See Krnst Bammel, "The Cambridge Pericope: The Addition to Luke 6.4 in Codex Bezae," New Testament Studies 32 (1986): 404-26.
The classic study of early Christian persecution is W.H.C. Frend's Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965). See also Robert Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984).
Moreover, before 70 C.E. (when the Temple was destroyed), Jews were known to perform sacrifices on behalf of the emperor, a sign of their loyalty to the state.
For a fuller discussion, see the recent book by Wayne Kannaday, Apologetic Discourse of the Scribal Tradition (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2004), esp. chap. 2.
Translation of R. Joseph Hoffman (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1994).
The fullest study is that of Wayne Kannaday, cited in n. 15 above.
See Robert M. Grant, Gree k Apologists of the Second Century (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1988).
See, especially, Eugene Gallagher, Divine Man or Magician: Celsus and Origen on Jesus (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982).
See Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2005).
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 88.
There is a hole in the manuscript P45 at this point, but it is clear by counting the number of letters that could fill this gap that this was its original reading.
Conclusion
1. For a recent discussion, see Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).