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

by Bart D. Ehrman

with a powerful message, that the void we felt inside (We were teenagers! All of us felt a void!)

Those of us who had these born-again experiences considered ourselves to be “real” Christians—as opposed to those who simply went to church as a matter of course, who did not really have Christ in their hearts and were therefore simply going through the motions with none of the reality.

we don’t actually have the original writings of the New Testament. What we have are copies of these writings, made years later—in most cases, many years later. Moreover, none of these copies is completely accurate, since the scribes who produced them inadvertently and/or intentionally changed them in places. All scribes did this. So rather than actually having the inspired words of the autographs (i.e., the originals) of the Bible, what we have are the error-ridden copies of the autographs.

But he was not afraid of asking questions of his faith. At the time, I took this as a sign of weakness (in fact, I thought I had nearly all the answers to the questions he asked); eventually I saw it as a real commitment to truth and as being willing to open oneself up to the possibility that one’s views need to be revised in light of further knowledge and life experience.

If the full meaning of the words of scripture can be grasped only by studying them in Greek (and Hebrew), doesn’t this mean that most Christians, who don’t read ancient languages, will never have complete access to what God wants them to know?

there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

The Bible began to appear to me as a very human book.

It is important to know what the words of these authors were, so that we can see what they had to say and judge, then, for ourselves what to think and how to live in light of those words.

Since ancient religions themselves did not require any particular sets of “right doctrines” or, for the most part, “ethical codes,” books played almost no role in them.

“gift” (Greek: charisma) of the Spirit to assist the community in its ongoing life: for example, there were gifts of teaching, administration, almsgiving, healing, and prophecy.

1 Peter (3:15: “always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you to give an account of the hope that is in you”)

From the earliest times, Christians were aware that a variety of interpretations of the “truth” of the religion existed within their own ranks. Already the apostle Paul rails against “false teachers”—for example, in his letter to the Galatians.

This we have learned by relatively recent discoveries of “heretical” literature, in which the so-called heretics maintain that their views are correct and those of the “orthodox” church leaders are false.8 Early Christian Commentaries

the first Christian commentary on any text of scripture that we know about came from a so-called heretic, a second-century Gnostic named Heracleon, who wrote a commentary on the Gospel of John.

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.

laws given by God to Moses, and then giving his own more radical interpretation of them, indicating that his interpretation is authoritative. This

On some occasions these authoritative interpretations of scripture appear, in effect, to countermand the laws of scripture themselves.

In any event, Jesus’s teachings were soon seen to be as authoritative as the pronouncements of Moses—that is, those of the Torah itself. This becomes even more clear later in the New Testament period, in the book of 1 Timothy, allegedly by Paul but frequently taken by scholars to have been written in his name by a later follower.

2 Peter, a book that most critical scholars believe was not actually written by Peter but by one of his followers, pseudonymously.

On the day called Sunday,

Marcion took this differentiation between the law of the Jews and faith in Christ to what he saw as its logical conclusion, that there was an absolute distinction between the law on the one hand and the gospel on the other.

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 attempt to make his sacred texts conform more closely to his teaching by actually changing them was not unprecedented.

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.

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…

In other words, four corners of the earth, four winds, four pillars—and necessarily, then, four Gospels.

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

I.e., they needed an authority to tell them how to think, behave, and live.

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.

There were other gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses; there were records of persecution, accounts of martyrdom, apologies for the faith, church orders, attacks on heretics, letters of exhortation and instruction, expositions of scripture—an entire range of literature that helped define Christianity and make it the religion it came to be.

It was only when nations could see an economic benefit in having virtually everyone able to read that they were willing to devote the massive resources—especially time, money, and human resources—needed to ensure that everyone had a basic education in literacy.

Many people can read but are unable to compose a sentence, for example. And what does it mean to read? Are people literate if they can manage to make sense of the comic strips but not the editorial page? Can people be said to be able to write if they can sign their name but cannot copy a page of text?

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: tax receipts, legal contracts, licenses, personal letters, and the like.

He evidently couldn’t read even the simple words he was putting on the page. And he was the official local scribe!15

Christians, especially early on in the movement, came for the most part from the lower, uneducated classes.

most Christians were from the lower classes and uneducated.

Have today's evangelicals returned to this state?

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.

One could be said to have read a book when in fact one had heard it read by others.

Despite the fact that early Christianity was by and large made up of illiterate believers, it was a highly literary religion.

an elderly woman, a kind of angelic figure symbolizing the Christian church,

(there were no church buildings, that we know of, during the first two centuries of the church) and only the homes of the wealthier members

which an author will greet so-and-so and “the church that meets in his home.”

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

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.

Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple—slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.

In the opening of the book of Hebrews there is a passage in which, according to most manuscripts, we are told that “Christ bears [Greek: PHERŌN] all things by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). In Codex Vaticanus, however, the original scribe produced a slightly different text, with a verb that sounded similar in Greek; here the text instead reads: “Christ manifests [Greek: PHANERŌN] all things by the word of his power.” Some centuries later, a second scribe read this passage in the manuscript and decided to change the unusual word manifests to the more common reading bears—erasing the one word and writing in the other.

chapter 21 appears to be a later add-on.

to explain that when the “beloved disciple” responsible for narrating the traditions in the Gospel had died, this was not unforeseen (cf. 21:22–23).

This highly celebrated poem speaks of the “Word” of God, who existed with God from the beginning and was himself God, and who “became flesh” in Jesus Christ.

And so 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.

Textual critics have been able to determine with relative certainty a number of places in which manuscripts that survive do not represent the original text of the New Testament.