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

by Bart D. Ehrman

Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

In some places, as we will see, we simply cannot be sure that we have reconstructed the original text accurately. It’s a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don’t even know what the words are!

It was written by different human authors at different times and in different places to address different needs. Many of these authors no doubt felt they were inspired by God to say what they did, but they had their own perspectives, their own beliefs, their own views, their own needs, their own desires, their own understandings, their own theologies; and these perspectives, beliefs, views, needs, desires, understandings, and theologies informed everything they said.

Many Christians today may think that the canon of the New Testament simply appeared on the scene one day, soon after the death of Jesus, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

In the year 367 C.E., Athanasius wrote his annual pastoral letter to the Egyptian churches under his jurisdiction, and in it he included advice concerning which books should be read as scripture in the churches. He lists our twenty-seven books, excluding all others. This is the first surviving instance of anyone affirming our set of books as the New Testament. And even Athanasius did not settle the matter. Debates continued for decades, even centuries. 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.

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

Celsus had maligned the Christian copyists for their transgressive copying practices: Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over, and they change its character to enable them to deny difficulties in face of criticism. (Against Celsus 2.27)

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.

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 amenable to the doctrines being espoused by Christians of their own persuasion.11

That explains why authors would sometimes call curses down on any copyists who modified their texts without permission. We find this kind of imprecation already in one early Christian writing that made it into the New Testament, the book of Revelation, whose author, near the end of his text, utters a dire warning: I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book; and if anyone removes any of the words of the book of this prophecy, God will remove his share from the tree of life and from the holy city, as described in this book. (Rev. 22:18–19) 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.

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. The task of the textual critic is to try to recover the oldest form of these texts.

Until then, Christianity was a small, minority religion in the Roman Empire, often opposed, sometimes persecuted. 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. Not only were persecutions halted, but favors began to pour out upon the church from the greatest power in the Western world. Massive conversions resulted, as it became a popular thing to be a follower of Christ

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. By printing books with moveable type, one could guarantee that every page looked exactly like every other page, with no variations of any kind in the wording.

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.

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

So, for example, in Rom. 12:11, Paul urges his reader to “serve the Lord.” But the word Lord, KURIW, was typically abbreviated in manuscripts as KW (with a line drawn over the top), which some early scribes misread as an abbreviation for KAIRW, which means “time.” And so in those manuscripts, Paul exhorts his readers to “serve the time.”

Its peculiar error occurs in Luke, chapter 3, in the account of Jesus’s genealogy. The scribe was evidently copying a manuscript that gave the genealogy in two columns. For some reason, he did not copy one column at a time, but copied across the two columns. As a result, the names of the genealogy are thrown out of whack, with most people being called the sons of the wrong father. Worse still, the second column of the text the scribe was copying did not have as many lines as the first, so that now, in the copy he made, the father of the human race (i.e., the last one mentioned) is not God but an Israelite named Phares; and God himself is said to be the son of a man named Aram!

That is to say, in my judgment the translations available to most English readers are based on the wrong text, and having the wrong text makes a real difference for the interpretation of these books.

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.

The story line is familiar: Joseph, Mary, and Jesus attend a festival in Jerusalem, but then when the rest of the family heads home in the caravan, Jesus remains behind, unbeknownst to them. As the text says, “his parents did not know about it.” But why does the text speak of his parents when Joseph is not really his father? A number of textual witnesses “correct” the problem by having the text read, “Joseph and his mother did not know it.” And again, some verses later, after they return to Jerusalem to hunt high and low for Jesus, Mary finds him,

three days later, in the Temple. She upbraids him: “Your father and I have been looking for you!” Once again, some scribes solved the problem—this time by simply altering the text to read “We have been looking for you!”

According to most of our manuscripts, it spoke the same words one finds in Mark’s account: “You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11; Luke 3:23). In one early Greek manuscript and several Latin ones, however,

the voice says something strikingly different: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.” Today I have begotten you! Doesn’t that suggest that his day of baptism is the day on which Jesus has become the Son of God?

These arguments suggest that the less-attested reading—“Today I have begotten you”—is indeed the original, and that it came to be changed by scribes who feared its adoptionistic overtones.

The Gospel of John uses this phrase “the unique Son” (sometimes

mistranslated as “only begotten Son”) on several other occasions (see John 3:16, 18); nowhere else does it speak of Christ as “the unique God.”

Originally the verses appear not to have been part of Luke’s Gospel. Why, then, were they added? In a later dispute with Marcion, Tertullian emphasized:

Jesus declared plainly enough what he meant by the bread, when he called the bread his own body. He likewise, when mentioning the cup and making the new testament to be sealed in his blood, affirms the reality of his body. For no blood can belong to a body which is not a body of flesh. Thus from the evidence of the flesh we get a proof of the body, and a proof of the flesh from the evidence of the blood. (Against Marcion 4, 40) It appears that the verses were added to stress Jesus’s real body and flesh, which he really sacrificed for the sake of others.

Some of Jesus’s women followers go to the tomb, find that he is not there, and are told that he has been raised. They go back to tell the disciples, who refuse to believe them because it strikes them as a “silly tale.” Then, in many manuscripts, occurs the account of 24:12: “But Peter, rising up, ran to the tomb, and stooping down he saw the linen cloths alone, and he returned home marveling at what had happened.” There are excellent reasons for thinking that this verse was not originally part of Luke’s Gospel.

Thus, rather than letting the story of the empty tomb remain a “silly tale” of some untrustworthy women, the text now shows that the story was not just believable but true: as verified by none other than Peter (a trustworthy man, one might suppose).

Christian scribes of the second and third centuries were involved with the debates and disputes of their day, and occasionally these disputes affected the reproduction of the texts over which

the debates raged. That is, scribes occasionally altered their texts to make them say what they were already believed to mean.

Among the reasons for these alterations were the theological disputes of the second and third centuries, as scribes sometimes modified their texts in light of the adoptionistic, docetic, and separationist Christologies that were vying for attention in the period.

Scribes would sometimes—lots of times—make accidental mistakes, by misspelling a word, leaving out a line, or simply bungling the sentences they were supposed to be copying; and on occasion they changed the text deliberately, making a “correction” to the text, which in fact turned out to be an alteration of what the text’s author had originally written.

It is true that Jesus’s closest followers—the twelve disciples—were all men, as would be expected of a Jewish teacher in first-century Palestine. But our earliest Gospels indicate that Jesus was also accompanied by women on his travels, and that some of these women provided for him and his disciples financially, serving as patrons for his itinerant preaching ministry (see Mark 15:40–51; Luke 8:1–

We might consider, for example, Paul’s letter to the Romans, at the end of which he sends greetings to various members of the Roman congregation (chapter 16). Although Paul names more men than women here, it is clear that women were seen as in no way inferior to their male counterparts in the church. Paul mentions Phoebe, for example, who is a deacon (or minister) in the church of Cenchreae, and Paul’s own patron, whom he entrusts with the task of carrying his letter to Rome (vv. 1–2). And there is Prisca, who along with her husband, Aquila, is responsible for missionary work among the Gentiles and who supports a Christian congregation in her home (vv. 3–4: notice that she is mentioned first, ahead of her husband). Then there is Mary, a colleague of Paul’s who works among the Romans (v. 6); there are also

Tryphaena, Tryphosa, and Persis, women whom Paul calls his “co-workers” in the gospel (vv. 6, 12). And there are Julia and the mother of Rufus and the sister of Nereus, all of whom appear to have a high profile in the community (vv. 13, 15). Most impressive of all, there is Junia, a woman whom Paul calls “foremost among the apostles” (v. 7). The apostolic band was evidently larger than the list of twelve men with whom most people are familiar.

Rather than being silent “hearers of the word,” women appear to have been actively involved in the weekly fellowship meetings, participating, for example, by praying and prophesying, much as the men did (1 Corinthians 11).

He did require, for example, that when women prayed and prophesied in church they do so with their heads covered, to show that they were “under authority” (1 Cor. 11:3–16, esp. v. 10). In other words, Paul did not urge a social revolution in the relationship of men and women—just as he did not urge the abolition of slavery,

At best, then, this can be seen as an ambivalent attitude toward the role of women: they were equal in Christ and were allowed to participate in the life of the community, but as women, not as men (they were, for example, not to remove their veils and so appear as men, without an “authority” on their head). This ambivalence on Paul’s part had an interesting effect on the role of women in the churches after his day. In some churches it was the equality in Christ that was emphasized; in others it was the need for women to remain subservient to men.

Scholars today are by and large convinced that 1 Timothy was not written by Paul but by one of his later, second-generation followers.3 Here, in one of the (in)famous passages dealing with women in the New Testament, we are told that women must not be allowed to teach men because they were created inferior,

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty. (1 Tim. 2:11–15)

This makes me physically nauseous. But learning that this was not originally in the bible is insane. I have the urge to shout this information in the middle of a sermon.

And on occasion the debates made an impact on the text being copied, as passages were changed to reflect the views of the scribes who were reproducing them. In almost every instance in which a change of this sort occurs, the text is changed in order to limit the role of women and to minimize their importance to the Christian movement.

33For God is not a God of confusion but of peace. As in all the churches of the saints, 34let the women

keep silent. For it is not permitted for them to speak, but to be in subjection, just as the law says. 35But if they wish to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. 36What! Did the word go forth only from you, or has it reached you alone?

Disgusting. Modern US christians are not learning gods words, they are learning debates of the times when the scribes inserted these passages. I have been taught my whole christian childhood that i am inferior. Learning this is empowering and enraging.