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

by Bart D. Ehrman

In this passage, which no one doubts Paul wrote, it is clear that Paul understands that women both can and do speak in church. 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.

One occurs in a passage I have already mentioned, Romans 16, in which Paul

speaks of a woman, Junia, and a man who was presumably her husband, Andronicus, both of whom he calls “foremost among the apostles” (v. 7). This is a significant verse, because it is the only place in the New Testament in which a woman is referred to as an apostle. Interpreters have been so impressed by the passage that a large number of them have insisted that it cannot mean what it says, and so have translated the verse as referring not to a woman named Junia but to a man named Junias, who along with his companion Andronicus is praised as an apostle. The problem with this translation is that whereas Junia was a common name for a woman, there is no evidence in the ancient world for “Junias” as a man’s name. Paul is referring to a woman named Junia, even though in some modern English Bibles (you may want to check your own!) translators continue to refer to this female apostle as if she were a man named Junias.5

“And some of them were persuaded and joined with Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the pious Greeks, along with a large number of prominent women.”

The idea of women being prominent—let alone prominent converts—was too much for some scribes, and so the text came to be changed in some manuscripts, so that now we are told: “And some of them were persuaded and joined with Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the pious Greeks, along with a large number of wives of prominent men.”

Among Paul’s companions in the book of Acts were a husband and wife named Aquila and Priscilla; sometimes when they are mentioned, the author gives the wife’s name first, as if she had some kind of special prominence either in the relationship or in the Christian mission (as happens in Rom. 16:3 as well, where she is called Prisca). Not surprisingly, scribes occasionally took umbrage at this sequencing and reversed it, so that the man was given his due by having his name mentioned first: Aquila and Priscilla rather than Priscilla and Aquila.6

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.

The one thing that nearly all scholars agree upon, however, is that no matter how one understands the major thrust of Jesus’s mission, he must be situated in his own context as a first-century Palestinian Jew.

What were Christians to do with the fact that they had trouble convincing most Jews of their claims about Jesus? They could not, of course, admit that they themselves were wrong. And if they weren’t wrong, who was? It had to be the Jews. Early on in their history, Christians began to insist that Jews who rejected their message were recalcitrant and blind, that in rejecting the message about Jesus, they were rejecting the salvation provided by the Jewish God himself.

Eventually, though, it became widely held that Christians were distinct from Jews, that following the Jewish law could have no bearing on salvation, and that joining the Jewish people would mean identifying with the people who had rejected their own messiah, who had, in fact, rejected their own God.

As we move into the second century we find that Christianity and Judaism had become two distinct religions, which nonetheless had a lot to say to each other.

But was not the Jewish Bible for Jews? Christians began to insist that Jews had not only spurned their own messiah, and thereby rejected their own God, they had also misinterpreted their own scriptures. And so we find Christian writings such as the so-called Letter of Barnabas, a book that some early Christians considered to be part of the New Testament canon, which asserts that Judaism is and always has been a false religion, that Jews were misled by an evil angel into interpreting the laws given to Moses as literal prescriptions of how to live, when in fact they were to be interpreted allegorically.8

Now it becomes clear why some scribes would have wanted to omit the verse. Jesus prayed for the forgiveness of the Jews? How could that be? For early Christians there were, in fact, two problems with the verse, taken in this way. First, they reasoned, why would Jesus pray for forgiveness for this recalcitrant people who had willfully rejected God himself?

What were scribes to do with this text, then, in which Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing”? They dealt with the problem simply by excising the text, so that Jesus no longer asked that they be forgiven.

That makes it all the more striking that in some early witnesses—including one of the scribal corrections in Codex Sinaitius—the text is changed to heighten even further the Jewish culpability in Jesus’s death. According to these manuscripts, Pilate “handed him over to them [i.e., to the Jews] in order that they might crucify him.”

Now the Jewish responsibility for Jesus’s execution is absolute, a change motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment among the early Christians.

“You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, because salvation comes from the Jews” (v. 22). In some Syriac and Latin manuscripts, however, the text has been

changed, so that now Jesus declares that “salvation comes from Judea.” In other words, it is not the Jewish people who have brought salvation to the world; it is Jesus’s death in the country of Judea that has done so. Once again we might suspect that it was anti-Jewish sentiment that prompted the scribal alteration.

The word pagan in this context, when used by historians, does not carry negative connotations. It simply refers to anyone in the ancient world who subscribed to any of the numerous polytheistic religions of the day.

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. And yet Christians were sometimes persecuted. Why was that?

To make sense of Christian persecution, it is important to know something about pagan religions in the Roman Empire.

When things did not go well, when there were threats of war, or drought, or famine, or disease, this could be taken as a sign that the gods were not satisfied with how they were being honored. At such times, who would be blamed for this failure

to honor the gods? Obviously, those who refused to worship them. Enter the Christians.

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. When disasters hit, or when people were afraid they might hit, who more likely as the culprits than the Christians?

As we saw in chapter 5, Mark 1:41 originally indicated that when Jesus was approached by a leper who wanted to be healed, he became angry, reached out his hand to touch him, and said “Be cleansed.” Scribes found it difficult to ascribe the emotion of anger to Jesus in this context, and so modified the

text to say, instead, that Jesus felt “compassion” for the man.

“Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon, and aren’t his sisters here with us?” (Mark 6:3). How, they wondered, could someone who grew up as one of them, whose family they all knew, be able to do such things? This is the one and only passage in the New Testament in which Jesus is called a carpenter. The word

used, TEKTŌN, is typically applied in other Greek texts to anyone who makes things with his hands; in later Christian writings, for example, Jesus is said to have made “yokes and gates.”21 We should not think of him as someone who made fine cabinetry. Probably the best way to get a “feel” for this term is to liken it to something more in our experience; it would be like calling Jesus a construction worker.

And as it turns out, we have manuscripts with just such an alternative version. In our earliest manuscript of Mark’s Gospel, called P45, which dates to the early third century (the time of Origen), and in several later witnesses, the verse reads differently. Here Jesus’s townsfolk ask, “Is this not the son of the carpenter?” Now rather than being a carpenter himself, Jesus is merely the carpenter’s son.22

The translation of the verse in the New Revised Standard Version of the New Testament reads: “Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him.” But the way the verse is worded in the Greek, it could also be translated “Two others, who were also criminals, were led away to be put to death with him.” Given the ambiguity of the Greek, it is not surprising that some scribes found it necessary, for apologetic reasons, to rearrange the word order, so that it unambiguously reports that it was the two others, not Jesus as well, who were criminals.

It may have been this that led to the change we have already discussed in Matthew 24:36, where Jesus explicitly states that no one knows the day or the hour in which the end will come, “not even the angels of heaven nor even the Son, but the Father alone.” A significant number of our manuscripts omit “nor even the Son.” The reason is not hard to postulate; if Jesus does not know the future, the Christian claim that he is a divine being is more than a little compromised.

It is interesting to note that at the Last Supper, in Matt. 26:29, after distributing the cup of wine to his disciples, Jesus explicitly states that he will not drink wine again until he does so in the kingdom of the Father. Was the change of 27:34 from wine to vinegar meant to safeguard that prediction, so that he in fact did not taste wine after claiming that he would not?

I think what has held my interest over the years has been the mystery of it all. In many

ways, being a textual critic is like doing detective work. There is a puzzle to be solved and evidence to be uncovered.

The more I studied the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, the more I realized just how radically the text had been altered over the years at the hands of scribes, who were not only conserving scripture but also changing it.

And how do you think we have access to the Bible? Hardly any of us actually read it in the original language, and even among those of us who do, there are very few who ever look at a manuscript—let alone a group of manuscripts. How then do we know what was originally in the Bible? A few people have gone to the trouble of learning the ancient languages (Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, etc.) and have spent their professional lives examining our manuscripts, deciding what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote. In other words, someone has gone to the trouble of doing textual criticism, reconstructing the “original” text based on the wide array of manuscripts that differ from one another in thousands of places.

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!

In particular, as I said at the outset, I began seeing the New Testament as a very human book. The New Testament as we actually have it, I knew, was the product of human hands, the hands of the scribes who transmitted it. Then I began to see that not just the scribal text but the original text itself was a very human book. This stood very much at odds with how I had regarded the text in my late teens as a newly minted “born-again” Christian, convinced that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God and that the biblical words themselves had come to us by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As I realized already in graduate school, even if God had inspired the original words, we don’t have the original words.

it has been

clear to most scholars since the nineteenth century that Mark was the first Gospel written, and that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as one of the sources for their stories about Jesus.