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

by Bart D. Ehrman

If learning the “truth” meant no longer being able to identify with the born-again Christians I knew in high school, so be it.

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.

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

for I came to realize that it would have been no more difficult for God to preserve the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire them in the first place. If he wanted his people to have his words, surely he would have given them to them

As we saw in chapter 1, 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

In his haste to have the job done, in those places Erasmus simply took the Latin Vulgate and translated its text back into Greek, thereby creating some textual readings found today in no surviving Greek manuscript. And this, as we will see, is the edition of the Greek New Testament that for all practical purposes was used by the translators of the King James Bible nearly a century later.

all these subsequent editions—those of Stephanus included—ultimately go back to Erasmus’s editio princeps, which was based on some rather late, and not necessarily reliable, Greek manuscripts

There was one key passage of scripture that Erasmus’s source manuscripts did not contain, however. This is the account of 1 John 5:7–8, which scholars have called the Johannine Comma, found in the manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate but not in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts, a passage that had long been a favorite among Christian theologians, since it is the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly delineates the doctrine of the Trinity, that there are three persons in the godhead, but that the three all constitute just one God.

But Erasmus did not find it in his Greek manuscripts, which instead simply read: “There are three that bear witness: the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one.” Where did the “Father, the Word, and the Spirit” go?

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.

Scholars differ significantly in their estimates—some say there are 200,000 variants known, some say 300,000, some say 400,000 or more! We do not know for sure because, despite impressive developments in computer technology, no one has yet been able to count them all.

Greek manuscripts were all written in scriptuo continua—with no punctuation, for the most part, or even spaces between words. This means that words that looked alike were often mistaken for one another.

This is not a dispute between scholars who think the text has been altered and those who think it has not. Everyone knows that the text has been changed; the only question is which reading represents the alteration and which represents the earliest attainable form of the text.

A well-known example comes in Matt. 24:36, where Jesus is predicting the end of the age and says that “concerning that day and hour, no one knows—not the angels in heaven, nor even the Son, but only the Father.” Scribes found this passage difficult: the Son of God, Jesus himself, does not know when the end will come? How could that be? Isn’t he all-knowing? To resolve the problem, some scribes simply modified the text by taking out the words “nor even the Son.” Now the angels may be ignorant, but the Son of God isn’t.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

but if he really wanted people to have his actual words, surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he had miraculously inspired them in the first place.