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

by Bart D. Ehrman

we don’t actually have the original writings of the New Testament. What we have are copies of these writings, made years later—in most cases, many years later. Moreover, none of these copies is completely accurate, since the scribes who produced them inadvertently and/or intentionally changed them in places.

One of the most pressing of all tasks, therefore, was to ascertain what the originals of the Bible said, given the circumstances that (1) they were inspired and (2) we don’t have them.

I learned the basics of the field known as textual criticism—a technical term for the science of restoring the “original” words of a text from manuscripts that have altered them.

he was not afraid of asking questions of his faith.

eventually I saw it as a real commitment to truth and as being willing to open oneself up to the possibility that one’s views need to be revised in light of further knowledge and life experience.

the full meaning and nuance of the Greek text of the New Testament could be grasped only when it is read and studied in the original language

The more I studied Greek, the more I became interested in the manuscripts that preserve the New Testament for us, and in the science of textual criticism, which can supposedly help us reconstruct what the original words of the New Testament were.

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?

If learning the “truth” meant no longer being able to identify with the born-again Christians I knew in high school, so be it. I was intent on pursuing my quest for truth wherever it might take me, trusting that any truth I learned was no less true for being unexpected or difficult to fit into the pigeonholes provided by my evangelical background.

they went into the Temple “when Abiathar was the high priest”

when one looks at the Old Testament passage that Jesus is citing (1 Sam. 21:1–6), it turns out that David did this not when Abiathar was the high priest, but, in fact, when Abiathar’s father Ahimelech was. In other words, this is one of those passages that have been pointed to in order to show that the Bible is not inerrant at all but contains mistakes.

“Maybe Mark just made a mistake.”

finally concluded, “Hmm…maybe Mark did make a mistake.” Once I made that admission, the floodgates opened. For if there could be one little, picayune mistake in Mark 2, maybe there could be mistakes in other places as well.

Maybe

when Mark says that Jesus was crucified the day after the Passover meal was eaten (Mark 14:12; 15:25) and John says he died the day before it was eaten (John 19:14)—maybe that is a genuine difference.

Or when Luke indicates in his account of Jesus’s birth that Joseph and Mary returned to Nazareth just over a month after they had come to Bethlehem (and performed the rites of purification; Luke 2:39), whereas Matthew indicates they instead fled to Egypt (Matt. 2:19–22)—maybe that is a difference. Or when Paul says that after he converted on the way to Damascus he did not go to Jerusalem to see those w...

did after leaving Damascus (Acts 9:26)—maybe that...

Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals.

What we have are copies made later—much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places.

there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant.

In some places, as we will see, we simply cannot be sure that we have reconstructed the original text accurately. It’s

it would have been no more difficult for God to preserve the words of scripture than it

would have been for him to inspire them in the first place.

And if he didn’t perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words.

my faith had been based completely on a certain view of the Bible as the fully inspired, inerrant word of God. Now I no longer saw the Bible that way. The Bible began to appear to me as a very human book. Just

Many of these authors no doubt felt they were inspired by God to say what they did, but they had their own perspectives, their own beliefs, their own views, their own needs, their own desires, their own understandings, their own theologies; and these perspectives, beliefs, views, needs, desires, understandings, and theologies informed everything they said.

In all these ways they differed from one another.

Each author is a human author and needs to be read for what he (assuming they were all men) has to say, not assuming that what he says is the same, or conformable to, or consistent with what every other author has to say.

It is a radical shift from reading the Bible as an inerrant blueprint for our faith, life, and future to seeing it as a very human book, with very human points of view, many of which differ from one another and none of which provides the inerrant guide to how we should live.

What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting up the Bible as a false idol—or an oracle that gives us a direct line of communication with the Almighty?

All of these authors are trying to understand the world and their place in it, and all of them have valuable things to teach us. It is important to know what the words of these authors were, so that we can see what they had to say and judge, then, for ourselves what to think and how to live in light of those words.

That is the kind of book this is—to my knowledge, the first of its kind. It is written for people who know nothing about textual criticism but who might like to learn something about how scribes were changing scripture and about how we can recognize where they did so.

one of the unusual features of Christianity in the Greco-Roman world: its bookish character.

we need to start before the beginnings of Christianity with the religion from which Christianity sprang, Judaism.

Judaism, which was the first “religion of the book” in We...

One of the things that made Judaism unique among the religions of the Roman Empire was that these instructions, along with the other ancestral traditions, were written down in sacred books.

stressed its ancestral traditions, customs, and laws, and maintained that these had been recorded in sacred books, which had the status, therefore, of “scripture” for the Jewish people.

Eventually, some time after Christianity began, a group of these Hebrew books—twenty-two of them altogether—came to be regarded as a sacred canon of scripture, the Jewish Bible of today, accepted by Christians as the first part of the Christian canon, the “Old Testament.”

they set the backdrop for Christianity, which was also, from the very beginning, a “bookish” religion.

Like other rabbis of his day, Jesus maintained that God’s will could be found in the sacred texts, especially the Law of Moses.

His followers were, from the beginning, Jews who placed a high premium on the books of their tradition. And

Christianity at its beginning was a religion of the book.

The first thing to notice is that many different kinds of writing were significant for the burgeoning Christian communities of the first century after Jesus’s death.

one of his key summaries of his preaching he indicates that what he preached was that “Christ died, in accordance with the scriptures…and that he was raised, in accordance with the scriptures”

These letters were very important to the lives of the community, and a number of them eventually came to be regarded as scripture. Some thirteen letters written in Paul’s name are included in the New Testament.

Letters thus circulated throughout the Christian communities from the earliest of times. These letters bound together communities that lived in different places; they unified the faith and the practices of the Christians; they indicated what the Christians were supposed to believe and how they were supposed to behave.

A number of these letters came to be included in the New Testament. In fact, the New Testament is largely made up of letters written by Paul and other Christian leaders to Christian communities

Moreover, the letters that survive—there are twenty-one in the New Testament—are only a fraction of those written.

None of these letters survives.