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

by Bart D. Ehrman

Eventually a kind of professional scribal class came to be a part of the Christian intellectual landscape, and with the advent of professional scribes came more controlled copying practices, in which mistakes were made much less frequently.

different localities developed different kinds of textual tradition.

the manuscripts in Rome had many of the same errors, because they were for the most part “in-house” documents, copied from one another;

in the early centuries of the church, some locales had better scribes than others. Modern scholars have come to recognize that the scribes in Alexandria—which was a major intellectual center in the ancient world—

in Alexandria, a very pure form of the text of the early Christian writings was preserved, decade after decade, by dedicated and relatively skilled Christian scribes.

When did the church begin to use professional scribes to copy its texts? There are good reasons for thinking that this happened sometime near the beginning of the fourth century.

cataclysmic change occurred when the emperor of Rome, Constantine, converted to the faith about 312 C.E. Suddenly Christianity shifted from being a religion of social outcasts, persecuted by local mobs and imperial authorities alike, to being a major player in the religious scene of the empire.

More and more highly educated and trained persons converted to the faith. They, naturally, were the ones most suited to copy the texts of the Christian tradition. There are reasons to suppose that about this time Christian scriptoria arose in major urban areas.

A scriptorium is a place for the professional copying of manuscripts.

In 331 C.E. the emperor Constantine, wanting magnificent Bibles to be made available to major churches he was having built, wrote a request to the bishop of Caesarea, Eusebius,3 t...

Obviously, an accomplishment of this magnitude required a professional scriptorium, not to mention the materials needed for making lavish copies of the Christian scriptures.

Starting in the fourth century, then, copies of scripture began to be made by professionals; this naturally curtailed significantly the number of errors that crept into the text.

the copying of the Greek scriptures became the charge of monks working out of monasteries,

This practice continued on down through the Middle Ages, right up to the time of the invention of printing with moveable type in the fifteenth century. The great mass of our surviving Greek manuscripts come from the pens of thes...

Greek manuscripts from the seventh century onward are sometimes labeled “Byzantine” manuscripts.

Byzantine copies of the text tend to be very similar to one another, whereas the earliest copies vary significantly both among themselves and from the form of text found in these later copies. The

clear: it had to do with who was copying the texts (professionals)

where did these medieval scribes get the texts they copied in so professional a manner? They got them from earlier texts, which were copies of yet earlier texts, which were themselves copies of still earlier texts.

the texts that are closest in form to the originals are, perhaps unexpectedly, the more variable and amateurish copies of early times, not the more standardized professional copies of later times.

It was not long, however, before Christians in non-Greek-speaking regions wanted the Christian sacred texts in their own, local languages.

In each of these areas, the books of the New Testament came to be translated into the indigenous languages, probably sometime in the mid to late second century. And then these translated texts were themselves copied by scribes in their locales.

Particularly important for the history of the text were the translations into Latin,

Problems emerged very soon, however, with the Latin translations of scripture, because there were so many of them and these translations differed broadly from one another.

Jerome himself speaks of the plethora of available translations, and set himself to resolving the problem. Choosing one of the best Latin translations available, and comparing its text with the superior Greek manuscripts at his disposal, Jerome created a new edition of the Gospels in Latin.

This form of the Bible in Latin—Jerome’s translation—came to be known as the Vulgate (= Common) Bible of Latin-speaking Christendom. This was the Bible for the Western church, itself copied and recopied many times over. It

there are nearly twice as many copies of the Latin Vulgate as there are Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.

the text of the New Testament was copied in a fairly standardized form throughout the centuries of the Middle Ages,

was the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century by Johannes Gutenberg (1400–1468) that changed everything for the reproduction of books in general and the books of the Bible in particular.

By printing books with moveable type, one could guarantee that every page looked exactly like every other page, with no variati...

And, as a result, they could be made much more cheaply.

The first major work to be printed on Gutenberg’s press was a magnificent edition of the Latin (Vulgate) Bible, which took all of 1450–56 to produce.

It may seem odd that there was no impulse to produce a copy of the Greek New Testament in those early years of printing. But the reason is not hard to find: it is the one already alluded to. Scholars throughout Europe—including biblical scholars—had been accustomed for nearly a thousand years to thinking that Jerome’s Vulgate was the Bible of the church (somewhat

The Greek Bible was thought of as foreign to theology and learning; in the Latin West, it was thought of as belonging to the Greek Orthodox Christians, who were considered to be schismatics who had branched off from the true church.

The first Western scholar to conceive the idea of producing a version of the Greek New Testament was a Spanish cardinal named Ximenes de Cisneros (1437–

Diego Lopez de Zuñiga (Stunica), undertook a multivolume edition of the Bible. This was a polyglot edition; that is, it reproduced the text of the Bible in a variety of languages. And

The work was printed in a town called Alcalá,

For this reason, Ximenes’s edition is known as the Complutensian Polyglot.

Even though the Complutensian Polyglot was the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament, it was not the first published version.

the Complutum had been printed by 1514, but it did not see the light of published day until 1522. Between those two dates an enterprising Dutch scholar, the humanist intellectual Desiderius Erasmus, both produced and published an edition of the Greek New Testament, receiving the honor, then, of editing the so-called editio princeps (= first published edition). Erasmus

Erasmus from taking up the task seriously until July of 1515. At that time he went to Basel in search of suitable manuscripts that he could use as the basis of his text. He did not uncover a great wealth of manuscripts, but what he found was sufficient for the task. For the most part, he relied on a mere handful of late medieval manuscripts, which

It appears that Erasmus relied heavily on just one twelfth-century manuscript for the Gospels and another, also of the twelfth century, for the book of Acts and the Epistles—although he was able to consult several other manuscripts and make corrections based on their readings. For the book of Revelation he had to borrow a manuscript from his friend the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin;

In his haste to have the job done, in those places Erasmus simply took the Latin Vulgate and translated its text back into Greek, thereby creating some textual readings found today in no surviving Greek manuscript. And this, as we will see, is the edition of the Greek New Testament that for all practical purposes was used by the translators of the King James Bible nearly a century later.

Even so, as Erasmus himself later said, it was “rushed out rather than edited” (in his Latin phrasing: praecipitatum verius quam editum).

Erasmus’s editions (he made five, all based ultimately on this first rather hastily assembled one) became the standard form of the Greek text to be published by Western European printers for more than three hundred years.

Numerous Greek editions followed,

All these texts, however, relied more or less on the texts of their predecessors, and all those go back to the text of Erasmus, with all its faults, based on just a handful of manuscripts (sometimes just two or even one—or in parts of Revelation, none!) that had been produced relatively late in the medieval period.

The larger point I am trying to make, however, is that all these subsequent editions—those of Stephanus included—ultimately go back to Erasmus’s editio princeps, which was based on some rather late, and not necessarily reliable, Greek manuscripts—

There would be no reason to suspect that these manuscripts were particularly high in quality. They were simply the ones he could lay his hands on.

these manuscripts were not of the best quality: they were, after all, produced some eleven hundred y...

This is the account of 1 John 5:7–8, which scholars have called the Johannine Comma, found in the manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate but not in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts, a passage that had long been a favorite among Christian theologians, since it is the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly delineates the doctrine of the Trinity, that there are three persons in the godhead, but that the three all constitute just one God. In