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

by Bart D. Ehrman

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

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?

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.

We can get a sense of how important these letters were at the earliest stages of the Christian movement from the very first Christian writing we have, Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, usually dated to about 49 C.E.,4 some twenty years after Jesus’s death and some twenty years before any of the Gospel accounts of his life.

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.

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. The words godisnowhere could mean quite different things to a theist (God is now here) and an atheist (God is nowhere);5 and what would it mean to say lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable? Was this a normal or a supernormal event?

The third-century church father Origen, for example, once registered the following complaint about the copies of the Gospels at his disposal: The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.9

These editions provided the form of the text that the translators of the King James Bible eventually used. 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.

On the basis of this intense thirty-year effort to accumulate materials, Mill published his text with apparatus, in which he indicated places of variation among all the surviving materials available to him. To the shock and dismay of many of his readers, Mill’s apparatus isolated some thirty thousand places of variation among the surviving witnesses, thirty thousand places where different manuscripts, Patristic (= church father) citations, and versions had different readings for passages of the New Testament.

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

In each of the three cases we have considered, there is an important textual variant that plays a significant role in how the passage in question is interpreted. It is obviously important to know whether Jesus was said to feel compassion or anger in Mark 1:41; whether he was calm and collected or in deep distress in Luke 22:43–44; and whether he was said to die by God’s grace or “apart from God” in Heb. 2:9.

There is also the question of why these words came to be changed, and how these changes affect the meanings of their writings. This question of the modification of scripture in the early Christian church will be the subject of the next two chapters, as I try to show how 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.

Wettstein examined the Codex Alexandrinus, now in the British Library, and determined that in 1 Tim. 3:16, where most later manuscripts speak of Christ as “God made manifest in the flesh,” this early manuscript originally spoke, instead, of Christ “who was made manifest in the flesh.” The change is very slight in Greek—it is the difference between a theta and an omicron, which look very much alike (ΘΣ and ΟΣ). A later scribe had altered the original reading, so that it no longer read “who” but “God” (made manifest in the flesh). In other words, this later corrector changed the text in such a way as to stress Christ’s divinity. It is striking to realize that the same correction occurred in four of our other early manuscripts of 1 Timothy, all of which have had correctors change the text in the same way, so that it now explicitly calls Jesus “God.” This became the text of the vast majority of later Byzantine (i.e., medieval) manuscripts—and then became the text of most of the early English translations. Our earliest and best manuscripts, however, speak of Christ “who” was made manifest in the flesh, without calling Jesus, explicitly, God.

In one place we are told that when Joseph and Mary took Jesus to the Temple and the holy man Simeon blessed him, “his father and mother were marveling at what was said to him” (Luke 2:33). His father? How could the text call Joseph Jesus’s father if Jesus had been born of a virgin? Not surprisingly, a large number of scribes changed the text to eliminate the potential problem, by saying “Joseph and his mother were marveling….” Now the text could not be used by an adoptionist Christian in support of the claim that Joseph was the child’s father.

And taking a cup, giving thanks, he said, “Take this and divide it among yourselves, for I say to you that I will not drink from the fruit of the vine from now on, until the kingdom of God comes.” And taking bread, giving thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body. But behold, the hand of the one who betrays me is with me at the table.” (Luke 22:17–19) In most of our manuscripts, however, there is an addition to the text, an addition that will sound familiar to many readers of the English Bible, since it has made its way into most modern translations. Here, after Jesus says “This is my body,” he continues with the words “‘which has been given for you; do this in remembrance of me’; And the cup likewise after supper, saying ‘this cup is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for you.’”

In none of these speeches, though, do the apostles indicate that Jesus’s death brings atonement for sins (e.g., in chapters 3, 4, 13). It is not that Jesus’s death is unimportant. It is extremely important for Luke—but not as an atonement. Instead, Jesus’s death is what makes people realize their guilt before God (since he died even though he was innocent). Once people recognize their guilt, they turn to God in repentance, and then he forgives their sins. Jesus’s death for Luke, in other words, drives people to repentance, and it is this repentance that brings salvation.

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!

even if God had inspired the original words, we don’t have the original words.