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

by Bart D. Ehrman

Scholars have long suspected that some of the letters found in the New Testament under Paul’s name were in fact written by his later followers, pseudonymously.

My point is that letters were important to the lives of the early Christian communities.

the various Christian communities, unified by this common literature that was being shared back and forth (cf. Col. 4:16), were adhering to instructions found in written documents or “books.”

numerous Gospels were written, which recorded the traditions associated with the life of Jesus. Four such Gospels became most widely used—those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the New Testament—but many others were written.

One of these earlier accounts may have been the source that scholars have designated Q, which was probably a written account, principally of Jesus’s sayings, used by both Luke and Matthew for many of their distinctive teachings of Jesus (e.g., the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes).

both the Pentateuch and other Jewish writings, such as the Prophets and Psalms—were in wide use among Christians, who explored them to see what they could reveal about God’s will, especially as it had been fulfilled in Christ.

accounts of the apostles—their adventures and missionary exploits, especially after the death and resurrection of Jesus—came to occupy an important place for Christians interested in knowing more about their religion. One such account, the Acts of the Apostles, eventually made it into the New Testament.

Some Christian authors produced prophetic accounts of what would happen at this cataclysmic end of the world as we know it.

one eventually came to be included in the New Testament: the Apocalypse of John. Others, including the Apocalypse of Peter and The Shepherd of Hermas, were also popular reading in a number of Christian communities in the early centuries of the church.

Soon documents started being produced that indicated how the churches were to be ordered and structured. These so-called church orders became increasingly important in the second and third Christian centuries, but already by about 100 C.E. the first (to our knowledge) had been written and widely disseminated, a book called The Didache [Teaching] of the Twelve Apostles. Soon it had numerous successors.

As Christianity grew, it eventually converted intellectuals to the faith, who were well equipped to discuss and dismiss the charges typically raised against the Christians. The writings of these intellectuals are sometimes called apologies, from the Greek word for “defense” (apologia). The apologists wrote intellectual defenses of the new faith, trying to show that far from being a threat to the social structure of the empire, it was a religion that preached moral behavior; and far from being a dangerous superstition, it represented the ultimate truth in its worship of the one true God. These

By the second half of the second century, apologies had become a popular form of Christian writing.

about the same time that apologies began to be written, Christians started producing accounts of their persecutions and the martyrdoms that happened as a result of them.

Later, in the second century, martyrologies (accounts of the martyrs) began to appear. The first of them is the Martyrdom of Polycarp, who was an important Christian leader who served as bishop of the church of Smyrna, in Asia Minor, for almost the entire first half of the second century.

Soon afterward, accounts of other martyrs began to appear.

From the earliest times, Christians were aware that a variety of interpretations of the “truth” of the religion existed within their own ranks.

They were Christians who understood the religion in fundamentally different ways. To deal with this problem, Christian leaders began to write tractates that opposed “heretics” (those who chose the wrong way to understand the faith); in a sense, some of Paul’s letters are the earliest representations of this kind of tractate.

the “true teaching” (the literal meaning of “orthodoxy”) and to oppose those who advocated false teaching.

What is interesting is that even groups of “false teachers” wrote tractates against “false teachers,” so that the group that established once and for all what Christians were to believe (those responsible, for example, for the creeds that have come down to us today) are sometimes polemicized against by Christians who take the positions eventually decreed as false.

good deal of the debate over right belief and false belief involved the interpretation of Christian texts, including the “Old Testament,” which Christians claimed as part of their own Bible. This shows yet again how central

Eventually, Christian authors began to write interpretations of these texts, not necessarily with the direct purpose of refuting false interpretations (although that was often in view as well), but sometimes simply to unpack the meaning of these texts and to show their relevance to Christian life and practice.

Eventually commentaries, interpretive glosses, practical expositions, and homilies on texts became common among the Christian communities of the third and fourth centuries.

As I hope can be seen, the phenomenon of writing was of uppermost importance to these churches and the Christians within them. Books were at the very heart of the Christian religion—unlike other religions of the empire—from the very beginning. Books

Books were completely central to the life of the early Christians.

Eventually, some of these Christian books came to be seen not only as worthy of reading but as absolutely authoritative for the beliefs and practices of Christians. They became Scripture.

For the writers of the New Testament, including our earliest author, Paul, the “scriptures” referred to the Jewish Bible, the collection of books that God had given his people and that predicted the coming of the Messiah, Jesus.

was not long, however, before Christians began accepting other writings as standing on a par with the Jewish scriptures.

This acceptance may have had its roots in the authoritative teaching of Jesus himself, as his followers took his interpretation of scripture to be equal in ...

Jesus’s teachings were soon seen to be as authoritative as the pronouncements of Moses—that is, those of the Torah itself. This

Nor was it just Jesus’s teachings that were being considered scriptural by these second-or third-generation Christians. So too were the writings of his apostles.

Soon after the New Testament period, certain Christian writings were being quoted as authoritative texts for the life and beliefs of the church.

Christians were hearing the Jewish scriptures read during their worship services.

letters by Christians were being read to the gathered community as well.

a good portion of the Christian worship services involved the public reading of scripture. In

We can trace the formation of the Christian canon of scripture a bit more closely still, from the surviving evidence.

Marcion was the first Christian that we know of who produced an actual “canon” of scripture—that is, a collection of books that, he argued, constituted the sacred texts of the faith.

Marcion concluded that the God of Jesus (and Paul) was not, therefore, the God of the Old Testament. There were, in fact, two different Gods: the God of the Jews, who created the world, called Israel to be his people, and gave them his harsh law; and the God of Jesus, who sent Christ into the world to save people from the wrathful vengeance of the Jewish creator God.

Marcion’s canon consisted of eleven books: there was no Old Testament, only one Gospel, and ten Epistles. But not only that: Marcion had come to believe that false believers, who did not have his understanding of the faith, had transmitted these eleven books by copying them, and by adding bits and pieces here and there in order to accommodate their own beliefs, including the “false” notion that the God of the Old Testament was also the God of Jesus.

Marcion “corrected” the eleven books of his canon by editing out references to the Old Testament God, or to the creation as the work of the true God, or to the Law as something that should be followed.

Both before and after him, copyists of the early Christian literature occasionally changed their texts to make them say what they were already thought to mean.

Many scholars are convinced that it was precisely in opposition to Marcion that other Christians became more concerned to establish the contours of what was to become the New Testament canon.

some thirty years later another Christian writer, who equally opposed Marcion, took a far more authoritative stand. This was the bishop of Lyons in Gaul (modern France), Irenaeus, who wrote a five-volume work against heretics such as Marcion and the Gnostics, and who had very clear ideas about which books should be considered among the canonical Gospels.

Irenaeus says that not just Marcion, but also other “heretics,” had mistakenly assumed that only one or another of the Gospels was to be accepted as scripture:

All these groups were in error, however, because it is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout the world, and the pillar and ground of the Church is the Gospel…it is fitting that she should have four pillars…

so, near the end of the second century there were Christians who were insisting that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were the Gospels; there were neither more nor fewer.

It appears that Christians by and large were concerned to know which books to accept as authoritative so that they would (1) know which books should be read in their services of worship and, relatedly, (2) know which books could be trusted as reliable guides for what to believe and how to behave.

The decisions about which books should finally be considered canonical were not automatic or problem-free; the debates were long and drawn out, and sometimes harsh.

we are able to pinpoint the first time that any Christian of record listed the twenty-seven books of our New Testament as the books of the New Testament—neither more nor fewer.

this Christian was writing in the second half of the fourth century,

The author was the powerful bishop of Alexandria named Athanasius. In the year 367 C.E., Athanasius wrote his annual pastoral letter to the Egyptian churches under his jurisdiction, and in it he included advice concerni...