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

by Bart D. Ehrman

That’s when I started attending meetings of a Campus Life Youth for Christ club; they took place at kids’ houses—the first I went to was a yard party at the home of a kid who was pretty popular, and that made me think the group must be okay. The leader of the group was a twenty-something-year-old named Bruce who did this sort of thing for a living—organized Youth for Christ clubs locally, tried to convert high school kids to be “born again” and then get them involved in serious Bible studies, prayer meetings, and the like. Bruce was a completely winsome personality—younger than our parents but older and more experienced than we—with a powerful message, that the void we felt inside (We were teenagers! All of us felt a void!) was from not having Christ in our hearts. If we would only ask Christ in, he would enter and fill us with the joy and happiness that only the “saved” could know.

Some, I suppose, would call this brainwashing. For me, it was an enormous “step up” from the milquetoast view of the Bible I had had as a socializing Episcopalian in my younger youth. This was hard-core Christianity, for the fully committed.

As we learned at Moody in one of the first courses in the curriculum, 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. One of the most pressing of all tasks, therefore, was to ascertain what the originals of the Bible said, given the circumstances that (1) they were inspired and (2) we don’t have them.

At Moody, I learned the basics of the field known as textual criticism—a technical term for the science of restoring the “original” words of a text from manuscripts that have altered them. But I wasn’t yet equipped to engage in this study: first I had to learn Greek, the original language of the New Testament, and possibly other ancient languages such as Hebrew (the language of the Christian Old Testament) and Latin, not to mention modern European languages like German and French, in order to see what other scholars had said about such things.

I kept reverting to my basic question: how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.

He wrote: “Maybe Mark just made a mistake.” I started thinking about it, considering all the work I had put into the paper, realizing that I had had to do some pretty fancy exegetical footwork to get around the problem, and that my solution was in fact a bit of a stretch. I finally concluded, “Hmm…maybe Mark did make a mistake.” Once I made that admission, the floodgates opened. For if there could be one little, picayune mistake in Mark 2, maybe there could be mistakes in other places as well. Maybe, when Jesus says later in Mark 4 that the mustard seed is “the smallest of all seeds on the earth,” maybe I don’t need to come up with a fancy explanation for how the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds when I know full well it isn’t. And maybe these “mistakes” apply to bigger issues.

This kind of realization coincided with the problems I was encountering the more closely I studied the surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. It is one thing to say that the originals were inspired, but the reality is that we don’t have the originals—so saying they were inspired doesn’t help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals. Moreover, the vast majority of Christians for the entire history of the church have not had access to the originals, making their inspiration something of a moot point. Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later.

there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. Most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant. A good portion of them simply show us that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most people can today (and they didn’t even have dictionaries, let alone spell check). Even so, what is one to make of all these differences? If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture?

If he wanted his people to have his words, surely he would have given them to them (and possibly even given them the words in a language they could understand, rather than Greek and Hebrew). The fact that we don’t have the words surely must show, I reasoned, that he did not preserve them for us. And if he didn’t perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words.

This was a seismic change for me. Before this—starting with my born-again experience in high school, through my fundamentalist days at Moody, and on through my evangelical days at Wheaton—my faith had been based completely on a certain view of the Bible as the fully inspired, inerrant word of God. Now I no longer saw the Bible that way. The Bible began to appear to me as a very human book.

What if the Bible doesn’t give a foolproof answer to the questions of the modern age—abortion, women’s rights, gay rights, religious supremacy, Western-style democracy, and the like? What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting up the Bible as a false idol—or an oracle that gives us a direct line of communication with the Almighty?

One of the things that made Judaism unique among the religions of the Roman Empire was that these instructions, along with the other ancestral traditions, were written down in sacred books.

it may be hard to imagine, but books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world. These religions were almost exclusively concerned with honoring the gods through ritual acts of sacrifice. There were no doctrines to be learned, as explained in books, and almost no ethical principles to be followed, as laid out in books.

Scholars have long suspected that some of the letters found in the New Testament under Paul’s name were in fact written by his later followers, pseudonymously.

Marcion was the first Christian that we know of who produced an actual “canon” of scripture—that is, a collection of books that, he argued, constituted the sacred texts of the faith.

Paul had taught that a right standing before God came only by faith in Christ, not by doing any of the works prescribed by the Jewish law. 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. So distinct were the law and the gospel, in fact, that both could not possibly have come from the same God. Marcion concluded that the God of Jesus (and Paul) was not, therefore, the God of the Old Testament. 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.

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.

some intellectuals converted to the faith, but most Christians were from the lower classes and uneducated.

We 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.

for a book to be distributed broadly, it had to be copied.

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. This kind of continuous writing is called scriptuo continua, and it obviously could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand, a text.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.17 That’s approximately 150 years after Paul wrote the letter. 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.

In short, the evidence is sufficient to convince nearly all textual scholars that these verses are an addition to Mark. Without them, though, the story ends rather abruptly. Notice what happens when these verses are taken away. The women are told to inform the disciples that Jesus will precede them to Galilee and meet them there; but they, the women, flee the tomb and say nothing to anyone, “for they were afraid.” And that’s where the Gospel ends. Obviously, scribes thought the ending was too abrupt. The women told no one? Then, did the disciples never learn of the resurrection? And didn’t Jesus himself ever appear to them? How could that be the ending! To resolve the problem, scribes added an ending.19

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.

But a 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.

The great mass of our surviving Greek manuscripts come from the pens of these medieval Christian scribes who lived and worked in the East (for example, in areas that are now Turkey and Greece), known as the Byzantine Empire. For this reason, Greek manuscripts from the seventh century onward are sometimes labeled “Byzantine” manuscripts.

It 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.

Stephanus’s third edition of 1550 is notable as the first edition ever to include notes documenting differences among some of the manuscripts consulted; his fourth edition (1551) is possibly even more significant, as it is the first edition of the Greek New Testament that divides the text into verses.

the main manuscript that Erasmus used for the Gospels contained both the story of the woman taken in adultery in John and the last twelve verses of Mark, passages that did not originally form part of the Gospels, as we learned in the preceding chapter.

And so familiar passages to readers of the English Bible—from the King James in 1611 onward, up until modern editions of the twentieth century—include the woman taken in adultery, the last twelve verses of Mark, and the Johannine Comma, even though none of these passages can be found in the oldest and superior manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. They entered into the English stream of consciousness merely by a chance of history, based on manuscripts that Erasmus just happened to have handy to him, and one that was manufactured for his benefit.

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

In other words, rather than being the abbreviation (theta–sigma) for “God” (ΘΣ), the word was actually an omicron and a sigma (OΣ), a different word altogether, which simply means “who.” The original reading of the manuscript thus did not speak of Christ as “God made manifest in the flesh” but of Christ “who was made manifest in the flesh.” According to the ancient testimony of the Codex Alexandrinus, Christ is no longer explicitly called God in this passage.

Bengel’s idea that the “more difficult” reading is more likely to be original. This is premised on the idea that scribes are more likely to try to correct what they take to be mistakes, to harmonize passages that they regard as contradictory, and to bring the theology of a text more into line with their own theology. Readings that might seem, on the surface, to contain a “mistake,” or lack of harmony, or peculiar theology, are therefore more likely to have been changed by a scribe than are “easier” readings. This criterion is sometimes expressed as: The reading that best explains the existence of the others is more likely to be original.3

Scholars have long recognized that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, and that both Matthew and Luke used Mark’s account as a source for their own stories about Jesus.6 It is possible, then, to examine Matthew and Luke to see how they changed Mark, wherever they tell the same story but in a (more or less) different way.

Matthew and Luke have no qualms about describing Jesus as compassionate, but they never describe him as angry. Whenever one of their sources (Mark) did so, they both independently rewrote the term out of their stories.

Bracketing for a moment our own preconceptions of who Jesus was and simply reading this particular text, we have to admit that Jesus does not come off as the meek-and-mild, soft-featured, good shepherd of the stain-glassed window. Mark begins his Gospel by portraying Jesus as a physically and charismatically powerful authority figure who is not to be messed with. He is introduced by a wild-man prophet in the wilderness; he is cast out from society to do battle in the wilderness with Satan and the wild beasts; he returns to call for urgent repentance in the face of the imminent coming of God’s judgment; he rips his followers away from their families; he overwhelms his audiences with his authority; he rebukes and overpowers demonic forces that can completely subdue mere mortals; he refuses to accede to popular demand, ignoring people who plead for an audience with him. The only story in this opening chapter of Mark that hints at personal compassion is the healing of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, sick in bed. But even that compassionate interpretation may be open to question. Some wry observers have noted that after Jesus dispels her fever, she rises to serve them, presumably bringing them their evening meal.

What is striking in these stories is that Jesus’s evident anger erupts when someone doubts his willingness, ability, or divine authority to heal.

scribes who were not altogether satisfied with what the New Testament books said modified their words to make them more clearly support orthodox Christianity and more vigorously oppose heretics, women, Jews, and pagans.

Each and every one of these viewpoints—and many others besides—were topics of constant discussion, dialogue, and debate in the early centuries of the church, while Christians of various persuasions tried to convince others of the truth of their own claims. Only one group eventually “won out” in these debates. It was this group that decided what the Christian creeds would be: the creeds would affirm that there is only one God, the Creator; that Jesus his Son is both human and divine; and that salvation came by his death and resurrection. This was also the group that decided which books would be included in the canon of scripture.

For it is a striking feature of Luke’s portrayal of Jesus’s death—this may sound strange at first—that he never, anywhere else, indicates that the death itself is what brings salvation from sin.

For Christian Gnostics, Christ is this divine revealer of the truths of salvation; in many Gnostic systems, the Christ came into the man Jesus at his baptism, empowered him for his ministry, and then at the end left him to die on the cross. That is why Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” For these Gnostics, the Christ literally had forsaken Jesus (or “left him behind”). After Jesus’s death, though, he raised him from the dead as a reward for his faithfulness, and continued through him to teach his disciples the secret truths that can lead to salvation. Proto-orthodox Christians found this teaching offensive on just about every level. For them, the material world is not an evil place that resulted from a cosmic disaster, but is the good creation of the one true God. For them, salvation comes by faith in Christ’s death and resurrection, not by learning the secret gnosis that can illuminate the truth of the human condition. And most important for our purposes here, for them, Jesus Christ is not two beings, but one being, both divine and human, at one and the same time.

The reality, though, is that once they altered their texts, the words of the texts quite literally became different words, and these altered words necessarily affected the interpretations of the words by later readers.

In the disputed passage of chapter 14, however, it is equally clear that “Paul” forbids women from speaking at all. It is difficult to reconcile these two views—either Paul allowed women to speak (with covered heads, chapter 11) or not (chapter 14). As it seems unreasonable to think that Paul would flat out contradict himself within the short space of three chapters, it appears that the verses in question do not derive from Paul.

Contrary to what many people appear to think, there was nothing “illegal” about Christianity, per se, in those early years. Christianity itself was not outlawed, and Christians for the most part did not need to go into hiding. The idea that they had to stay in the Roman catacombs in order to avoid persecution, and greeted one another through secret signs such as the symbol of the fish, is nothing but the stuff of legend. It was not illegal to follow Jesus, it was not illegal to worship the Jewish God, it was not illegal to call Jesus God, it was not illegal (in most places) to hold separate meetings of fellowship and worship, it was not illegal to convince others of one’s faith in Christ as the Son of God.

Christians were persecuted, then, because they were regarded as detrimental to the health of society, both because they refrained from worshiping the gods who protected society and because they lived together in ways that seemed antisocial.

But what if the translators have translated the wrong text? It has happened before. The King James Version is filled with places in which the translators rendered a Greek text derived ultimately from Erasmus’s edition, which was based on a single twelfth-century manuscript that is one of the worst of the manuscripts that we now have available to us! It’s no wonder that modern translations often differ from the King James, and no wonder that some Bible-believing Christians prefer to pretend there’s never been a problem, since God inspired the King James Bible instead of the original Greek!