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

by Bart D. Ehrman

And even Athanasius did not settle the matter. Debates continued for decades, even centuries. The books we call the New Testament were not gathered together into one canon and considered scripture, finally and ultimately, until hundreds of years after the books themselves had first been produced.

an entire range of literature that helped define Christianity and make it the religion it came to be. It would be helpful at this stage of our discussion to ask a basic question about all this literature. Who, actually, was reading it?

When asked about the ancient world, however, the question has special poignancy because, in the ancient world, most people could not read.

Literacy is a way of life for those of us in the modern West.

our facility with written language today has little to do with reading practices and realities in antiquity.

what we might think of as mass literacy is a modern phenomenon, one that appeared only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

It was only when nations could see an economic benefit in having virtually everyone able to read that they were willin...

needed to ensure that everyone had a basic educat...

until the modern period, almost all societies contained only a small minority of people who could read and write.

This applies even to ancient societies that we might associate with reading and writing—

at the very best of times and places—for example, Athens at the height of the classical period in the fifth century B.C.E.—literacy rates were rarely higher than 10–15 percent of the population.

85–90 percent of the population could not read or write. In the first Christian century, throughout the Roman Empire, the literacy rates may well have been lower.

As it turns out, even defining what it means to read and write is a very complicated business.

The problem of definition is even more pronounced when we turn to the ancient world, where the ancients themselves had difficulty defining what it meant to be literate.

Throughout most of antiquity, since most people could not write, there were local “readers” and “writers” who hired out their services to people who needed to conduct business that required written texts:

These assignments as local (or village) scribes were not usually sought after: as with many “official” administrative posts, the people who were required to take them were responsible for paying for the job out-of-pocket. These jobs, in other words, went to the wealthier members of the society and carried a kind of status with them, but they required the expenditure of personal funds.

In dealing with the dispute Petaus argued that Ischyrion wasn’t illiterate at all, because he had actually signed his name to a range of official documents. In other words, for Petaus “literacy” meant simply the ability to sign one’s name.

If we count Petaus among the “literate” people in antiquity, how many people could actually read texts and make sense of what they said? It

There are reasons for thinking that within the Christian communities, the numbers would have been even lower than in the population at large. This is because it appears that Christians, especially early on in the movement, came for the most part from the lower, uneducated classes.

for the most part, Christians came from the ranks of the illiterate. This is certainly true of the very earliest Christians, who would have been the apostles of Jesus.

As we move into the second Christian century, things do not seem to change much. As I have indicated, some intellectuals converted to the faith, but most Christians were from the lower classes and uneducated.

Origen replies that the true Christian believers are in fact wise (and some, in fact, are well educated), but they are wise with respect to God, not with respect to things in this world. He does not deny, in other words, that the Christian community is largely made up of the lower, uneducated classes.

appear, then, to have a paradoxical situation in early Christianity. This was a bookish religion, with writings of all kinds proving to be of uppermost importance to almost every aspect of the faith. Yet most people could not read these writings. How do we account for this paradox?

communities of all kinds throughout antiquity generally used the services of the literate for the sake of the illiterate.

For in the ancient world “reading” a book did not mean, usually, reading it to oneself; it meant reading it aloud, to others. One could be said to have read a book when in fact one had heard it read by others.

books—as important as they were to the early Christian movement—were almost always read aloud in social settings,...

the books that were of paramount importance in early Christianity were for the most part read out loud by those who were able to read, so that the illiterate could hear, understand, and even study them.

If books were so important to early Christianity, if they were being read to Christian communities around the Mediterranean, how did the communities actually get those books? How were they put in circulation?

type. If communities of believers obtained copies of various Christian books in circulation, how did they acquire those copies? Who was doing the copying? And most important for the ultimate subject of our investigation, how can we (or how could they) know that the copies they obtained were accurate, that they hadn’t been modified in the process of reproduction?

How, then, was this Christian literature placed in circulation and distributed? The answer, of course, is that for a book to be distributed broadly, it had to be copied.

The only way to copy a book in the ancient world was to do it by hand, letter by letter, one word at a time.

Just as books could not easily be distributed en masse (no trucks or planes or railroads), they could not be produced en masse (no printing presses). And since they had to be copied by hand, one at a time, slowly, painstakingly, most books were not mass produced. Those few that were produced in multiple copies were not all alike, for the scribes who copied texts inevitably made alterations in those texts—changing the words they copied either by accident (via a slip of the pen or other carelessness) or by design (when the scribe intentionally altered the words he copied).

Anyone reading a book in antiquity could never be completely sure that he or she was reading what the author had written. The words could have been altered. In fact, they probably had been, if only just a little.

when the author was finished with the book, he or she would have copies made for a few friends and acquaintances. This, then, was the act of publication, when the book was no longer solely in the author’s control but in the hands of others. If these others wanted extra copies—possibly to give to other family members or friends—they would have to arrange to have copies made, say, by a local scribe who made copies for a living, or by a literate slave who copied texts as part of his household duties.

Copying texts allowed for the possibilities of manual error; and the problem was widely recognized throughout antiquity.

The Shepherd of Hermas. This book was widely read during the second to fourth Christian centuries; some Christians believed that it should be considered part of the canon of scripture. It

I copied the whole thing, letter by letter, for I could not distinguish between the syllables.

One of the problems with ancient Greek texts (which would include all the earliest Christian writings, including those of the New Testament) is that when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction made between lowercase and uppercase letters, and, even more bizarre to modern readers, no spaces used to separate words.

scriptuo continua, and it obviously could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand, a text. The

he could not read the text fluently but could recognize the letters, and so copied them one at a time. Obviously,

Presumably the situation was similar in various churches scattered throughout the Mediterranean region,

A select few members were scribes for the church. Some of these scribes were more skilled than others:

The copies of texts that are reproduced by these literate members of the congregation (some of them more literate than others) are then read to the community as a whole.

Since only educated people, obviously, could be literate, and since getting educated normally meant having the leisure and money needed to do so (unless one was trained in literacy as a slave), it appears that the early Christian scribes were the wealthier, more highly educated members of the Christian communities in which they lived.

in the Roman world at large, texts were typically copied either by professional scribes or by literate slaves who were assigned to do such work within a household.

the people reproducing texts throughout the empire were not, as a rule, the people who wanted the texts. The copyists were by and large reproducing the texts for others.

the early Christian scribes, on the other hand, is that just the opposite was the case with them. It appears that the Christians copying the texts were the ones who wanted the texts—that is, they were copying the texts either for their own personal and/or communal ...

the people copying the early Christian texts were not, for the most part, if at all, professionals who copied texts for a living (cf. Hermas, above); they were simply the literate people in the Christian congregation who coul...

the earliest Christian leaders were among the wealthier members of the church, in that the churches typically met in the homes of their members

and only the homes of the wealthier members would have been sufficiently large to accommodate very many people,