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

by Bart D. Ehrman

It is not unreasonable to conclude that the person who provided the home also provided the leadership of the church, as is assumed in a number of the Christian letters that have come down to us, in which an author wil...

These wealthier homeowners would probably have been more educated, and so it is no surprise that they are sometimes exhorted to “read” Chris...

Because the early Christian texts were not being copied by professional scribes,8 at least in the first two or three centuries of the church, but simply by educated members of the Christian congregations who could do the job and were willing to do so, we can expect that in the earliest copies, especially, mistakes were commonly made in transcription.

The third-century church father Origen, for example, once registered the following complaint about the copies of the Gospels at his disposal:

The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.

In his attack on Christianity and its literature, Celsus had maligned the Christian copyists for their transgressive copying practices: Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over, and they change its character to enable them to deny difficulties in face of criticism. (Against

Origen, when confronted with an outsider’s allegation of poor copying practices among Christians, actually denies that Christians changed the text, despite the fact that he himself decried the circumstance in his other writings. The one exception he names in his reply to Celsus involves several groups of heretics, who, Origen claims, maliciously altered the sacred texts.

We have already seen this charge that heretics sometimes modified the texts they copied in order to make them stand in closer conformity with their own views,

Marcion’s “orthodox” opponent Irenaeus claimed that Marcion did the following: dismembered the epistles of Paul, removing all that is said by the apostle respecting that God who made the world, to the effect that He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and also those passages from the prophetical writings which the apostle quotes, in order to teach us that they announced beforehand the coming of the Lord.

an orthodox bishop of Corinth named Dionysius who complained that false believers had unscrupulously modified his own writings, just as they had done with more sacred texts. When my fellow-Christians invited me to write letters to them I did so. These the devil’s apostles have filled with tares, taking away some things and adding others.

some have dared to tamper even with the word of the Lord himself, when they have conspired to mutilate my own humble efforts.

Charges of this kind against “heretics”—that they altered the texts of scripture to make them say what they wanted them to mean—are very common among early Christian writers. What

recent studies have shown that the evidence of our surviving manuscripts points the finger in the opposite direction. Scribes who were associated with the orthodox tradition not infrequently changed their texts, sometimes in order to eliminate the possibility of their “misuse” by Christians affirming heretical beliefs and sometimes to make them more amenable to the doctrines being espoused by Christians of their own persuasion.

We need always to remember that the copyists of the early Christian writings were reproducing their texts in a world in which there were not only no printing presses or publishing houses but also no such thing as copyright law. How could authors guarantee that their texts were not modified once put into circulation? The short answer is that they could not.

(Rev. 22:18–19) This is not a threat that the reader has to accept or believe everything written in this book of prophecy, as it is sometimes interpreted; rather, it is a typical threat to copyists of the book, that they are not to add to or remove any of its words.

Consider the rather severe threats uttered by the Latin Christian scholar Rufinus with respect to his translation of one of Origen’s works:

I adjure and beseech everyone who may either transcribe or read these books,

he add nothing to what is written and take nothing away from it, and make no insertion or alteration, but that he compare his transcription with the copies from which he made it.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the only changes being made were by copyists with a personal stake in the wording of the text. In fact, most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes,

slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.

At all times the task could be drudgery, as is indicated in notes occasionally added to manuscripts in which a scribe would pen a kind of sigh of relief, such as “The End of the Manuscript. Thanks Be to God!”

Sometimes, though, as we have seen, they changed the text because they thought it was supposed to be changed. This was not just for certain theological reasons, however. There were other reasons for scribes to make an intentional change—for example, when they came across a passage that appeared to embody a mistake that needed to be corrected, possibly a contradiction found in the text, or a mistaken geographical reference, or a misplaced scriptural allusion.

the changes were made nonetheless, and the author’s original words, as a result, may have become altered and eventually lost.

some centuries later, a third scribe read the manuscript and noticed the alteration his predecessor had made; he, in turn, erased the word bears and rewrote the word manifests. He then added a scribal note in the margin to indicate what he thought of the earlier, second scribe. The note says: “Fool and knave! Leave the old reading, don’t change it!”

It matters because the only way to understand what an author wants to say is to know what his words—all his words—actually were.

it is enough to know that the changes were made, and that they were made widely, especially in the first two hundred years in which the texts were being copied,

One of the leading questions that textual critics must deal with is how to get back to the original text—

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that once a mistake was made, it could become firmly embedded in the textual tradition, more firmly embedded, in fact, than the original.

The only way mistakes get corrected is when a scribe recognizes that a predecessor has made an error and tries to resolve it. There is no guarantee, however, that a scribe who tries to correct a mistake corrects it correctly. That is, by changing what he thinks is an error, he may in fact change it incorrectly, so now there are three forms of the text: the original, the error, and the incorrect attempt to resolve the error.

And so it goes. For centuries.

Sometimes, of course, a scribe may have more than one manuscript at hand, and can correct the mistakes in one manuscript by the correct readings of the other manuscript. This

it is also possible that a scribe will sometimes correct the correct manuscript in light of the wording of the incorrect o...

Given these problems, how can we hope to get back to anything like the original text, the text th...

a number of textual critics have started to claim that we may as well suspend any discussion of the “original” text, beca...

For the first example, let’s take Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

Galatia was not a single town with a single church; it was a region in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in which Paul had established churches. When he writes to the Galatians, is he writing to one of the churches or to all of them?

Does that mean that he made multiple copies of the same letter, or that he wanted the one letter to circulate to all the churches of the region? We don’t know.

To begin with, it appears that this letter, like others by Paul, was not written by his hand but was dictated to a secretarial scribe.

Now, if Paul dictated the letter, did he dictate it word for word? Or did he spell out the basic points and allow the scribe to fill in the rest? Both methods were commonly used by letter writers in antiquity.

If

do we actually have Paul’s words, or are they the words of some unknown scribe?

Is it possible that in some places the scribe wrote down the wrong words?

happened. If so, then the autograph of the letter (i.e., the original) would already have a “mistake” in it, so that all subsequent copies would not be of Paul’s words (...

Suppose, though, that the scribe got all the words 100 percent correct. If multiple copies of the letter went out, can we be sure that all th...

what if only one of the copies served as the copy from which all subsequent copies were made—

In that case, the oldest copy that provided the basis for all subsequent copies of the letter was not exactly what Paul wrote, or wanted to write.

Once the copy is in circulation—that is, once it arrives at its destination in one of the towns of Galatia—it, of course, ...

These mistake-ridden copies get copied; and the mistake-ridden copies of the copies get copie...

At some point, it is no longer possible to compare a copy with the original to make sure it is “correct,” even if someone has the bright idea of doing so.

The first reasonably complete copy we have of Galatians (this manuscript is fragmentary; i.e., it has a number of missing parts) is a papyrus called P46 (since it was the forty-sixth New Testament papyrus to be catalogued), which dates to about 200 C.E.