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

by Bart D. Ehrman

It had been in circulation, being copied sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly, for fifteen decades before any copy was made that has survived down to the present day.

Was it an accurate copy? If so, how accurate? It surely had mistakes of some kind, as did the copy from which it was copied, and the copy from which that copy was copied, and so on. In short, it is a very complicated business talking about the “original” text of Galatians. We don’t have it.

The best we can do is get back to an early stage of its transmission, and simply hope that what we reconstruct abo...

reasonably reflects what Paul himself actually wrote, or at least what he intended to write when he dictated the letter.

let’s take the Gospel of John. This Gospel is quite different from the other three Gospels of the New Testament, telling a range of stories that differ from theirs and employing a very different style of writing.

John no doubt had sources for his account—

He put these sources together into his own flowing narrative of Jesus’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection. It is possible, though, that John actually produced several different versions of his Gospel.

The Gospel certainly seems to come to an end in 20:30–31; and the events of chapter 21 seem to be a kind of afterthought,

Other passages of the Gospel also do not cohere completely with the rest. Even the opening verses 1:1–18, which form a kind of prologue to the Gospel, appear to be different from the rest.

The passage is written in a highly poetic style not found in the rest of the Gospel; moreover, while its central themes are repeated in the rest of the narrative, some of its most important vocabulary is not. Thus,

Is it possible that this opening passage came from a different source than the rest of the account, and that it was added as an appropriate beginning by the author after an earlier edition of the book had already been published?

What does that do for the textual critic who wants to reconstruct the “original” text? Which original is being constructed? All our Greek manuscripts contain the passages in question.

And if one wants to reconstruct that earlier form, is it fair to stop there, with reconstructing, say, the first edition of John’s Gospel? Why not go even further and try to reconstruct the sources that lie behind the Gospel, such as the signs sources and the discourse sources, or even the oral traditions that lie behind them?

For my part, however, I continue to think that even if we cannot be 100 percent certain about what we can attain to, we can at least be certain that all the surviving manuscripts were copied from other manuscripts, which were themselves copied from other manuscripts, and that it is at least possible to get back to the oldest and earliest stage of the manuscript tradition for each of the books of the New Testament.

we must rest content knowing that getting back to the earliest attainable version is the best we can do, whether or not we have reached back to the “original” text. This oldest form of the text is no doubt closely (very closely) related to what the author originally wrote, and so it is the basis for our interpretation of his teaching.

The task of the textual critic is to determine what the earliest form of the text is for all these writings.

But it’s not an easy task. The results, on the other hand, can be extremely enlightening, interesting, and even exciting.

I will discuss two such passages—passages from the Gospels, in this case, that we are now fairly certain did not originally belong in the New Testament, even though they became popular parts of the Bible for Christians down through the centuries and remain so today.

The Woman Taken in Adultery

The story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery is arguably the best-known story about Jesus in the Bible;

Despite its popularity, the account is found in only one passage of the New Testament, in John 7:53–8:12, and it appears not to have been original even there.

As it turns out, it was not originally in the Gospel of John. In fact, it was not originally part of any of the Gospels. It was added by later scribes.

Here I can simply point out a few basic facts that have proved convincing to nearly all scholars of every persuasion: the story is not found in our oldest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of John;18 its writing style is very different from what we find in the rest of John (including the stories immediately before and after); and it includes a large number of words and phrases that are otherwise alien to the Gospel. The conclusion is unavoidable: this passage was not originally part of the Gospel.

Most scholars think that it was probably a well-known story circulating in the oral tradition about Jesus, which at some point was added in the margin of a manuscript. From there some scribe or other thought that the marginal note was meant to be part of the text and so inserted it immediately after the account that ends in John 7:52.

In any event, whoever wrote the account, it was not John.

That naturally leaves readers with a dilemma: if this story was not originally part of John, should it be considered part of the Bible? Not everyone will respond to this question in the same way, but for most textual critics, the answer is no.

The Last Twelve Verse...

This example comes from the Gospel of Mark and concerns its ending.

Once again, this passage was not originally in the Gospel of Mark. It was added by a later scribe.

In some ways this textual problem is more disputed than the passage about the woman taken in adultery, because without these final verses Mark has a very different, and hard to understand, ending.

indisputable. But scholars debate what the genuine ending of Mark actually was, given the circumstance that this ending found in many English translations (though usually marked as inauthentic) and in later Greek manuscripts is not the original.

The verses are absent from our two oldest and best manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel, along with other important witnesses; the writing style varies from what we find elsewhere in Mark; the transition between this passage and the one preceding it is hard to understand (e.g., Mary Magdalene is introduced in verse 9 as if she hadn’t been mentioned yet, even though she is discussed in the preceding verses; there is another problem with the Greek that makes the transition even more awkward); and there are a large number of words and phrases in the passage that are not found elsewhere in Mark. In short, the evidence is sufficient to convince nearly all textual scholars that these verses are an addition to Mark.

Obviously, scribes thought the ending was too abrupt.

How could that be the ending! To resolve the problem, scribes added an ending.

scribes in thinking that 16:8 is too abrupt an ending for a Gospel.

they think that, possibly, the last page of Mark’s Gospel, one in which Jesus actually did meet the disciples in Galilee, was somehow lost, and that all our copies of the Gospel go back to this one truncated manuscript, without the last page.

That explanation is entirely possible. It is also possible, in the opinion of yet other scholars, that Mark did indeed mean to end his Gospel with 16:8.20

One reason for thinking that this could be how Mark ended his Gospel is that some such ending coincides so well with other motifs throughout his Gospel. As students of Mark have long noticed, the disciples never do seem to “get it” in this Gospel (unlike

Maybe, in fact, they never did come to understand

Also, it is interesting to note that throughout Mark, when someone comes to understand something about Jesus, Jesus orders that person to silence—and yet often the person ignores the order and spreads the news

How ironic that when the women at the tomb are told not to be silent but to speak, they also igno...

In short, Mark may well have intended to bring his reader up short with this abrupt ending—a clever way to make the reader stop, ta...

The passages discussed above represent just two out of thousands of places in which the manuscripts of the New Testament came to be changed by scribes.

Although most of the changes are not of this magnitude, there are lots of significant changes (and lots more insignificant ones) in our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. In

Christianity from the outset was a bookish religion that stressed certain texts as authoritative scripture. As we have seen in this chapter, however, we don’t actually have these authoritative texts. This is a textually oriented religion whose texts have been changed, surviving only in copies that vary from one another, sometimes in highly significant ways. The task of the textual critic is to try to recover the oldest form of these texts.

we can’t interpret the words of the New Testament if we don’t know what the words were.

the words is important not just for those who consider the words divinely inspired. It is important for anyone who thinks of the New Testament as a significant book.

the New Testament, if nothing else, is an enormous cultural artifact, a book that is revered by millions and that lies at the foundation of the largest religion of the world today.

the first three centuries of Christianity, when most of the copyists of the Christian texts were not professionals trained for the job but simply literate Christians of this or that congregation, able to read and write and so called upon to reproduce the texts of the community in their spare time.

This explains why our earliest copies of the early Christian writings tend to vary more frequently from one another and from later copies than do the later copies (say, of the high Middle Ages) from one another.