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

by Bart D. Ehrman

Against Heresies, Irenaeus says that not just Marcion, but also other “heretics,” had mistakenly assumed that only one or another of the Gospels was to be accepted as scripture: Jewish Christians who held to the ongoing validity of the Law used only Matthew; certain groups who argued that Jesus was not really the Christ accepted only the Gospel of Mark; Marcion and his followers accepted only (a form of ) Luke; and a group of Gnostics called the Valentinians accepted only John.

near the end of the second century there were Christians who were insisting that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were the Gospels;

In short, the people copying the early Christian texts were not, for the most part, if at all, professionals who copied texts for a living

One of the ironies of early Christianity is that Jesus himself was a Jew who worshiped the Jewish God, kept Jewish customs, interpreted the Jewish law, and acquired Jewish disciples, who accepted him as the Jewish messiah. Yet, within just a few decades of his death, Jesus’s followers had formed a religion that stood over-against Judaism. How did Christianity move so quickly from being a Jewish sect to being an anti-Jewish religion?

This term messiah was understood in different ways by different Jews in the first century, but one thing that all Jews appear to have had in common when thinking about the messiah was that he was to be a figure of grandeur and power, who in some way—for example, through raising a Jewish army or by leading the heavenly angels—would overcome Israel’s enemies and establish Israel as a sovereign state that could be ruled by God himself (possibly through human agency). Christians who called Jesus the messiah obviously had a difficult time convincing others of this claim, since rather than being a powerful warrior or a heavenly judge, Jesus was widely known to have been an itinerant preacher who had gotten on the wrong side of the law and had been crucified as a low-life criminal.

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.