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

by Bart D. Ehrman

If the full meaning of the words of scripture can be grasped only by studying them in Greek (and Hebrew), doesn’t this mean that most Christians, who don’t read ancient languages, will never have complete access to what God wants them to know?

Each author is a human author and needs to be read for what he (assuming they were all men) has to say, not assuming that what he says is the same, or conformable to, or consistent with what every other author has to say. The Bible, at the end of the day, is a very human book.

1 Peter (3:15: “always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you to give an account of the hope that is in you”)

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the only changes being made were by copyists with a personal stake in the wording of the text. In fact, most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple—slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.

The scriptures do provide a foundation for the faith, but it is not the books themselves that ultimately matter (since they have, after all, been changed over time), but the interpretation of these books,

Luke’s Passion narrative, as has long been recognized, is a story of Jesus’s martyrdom, a martyrdom that functions, as do many others, to set an example to the faithful of how to remain firm in the face of death. Luke’s martyrology shows that only prayer can prepare one to die.

readers typically mistake unusual words for common ones and simplify what is complex, especially when their minds have partially strayed.

Textual criticism involves more than simply determining the original text. It also entails seeing how that text came to be modified over time, both through scribal slips and as scribes made deliberate modifications. The latter, the intentional changes, can be highly significant, not because they necessarily help us understand what the original authors were trying to say, but because they can show us something about how the authors’ texts came to be interpreted by the scribes who reproduced them.

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. Since this included anyone who was neither Jewish nor Christian, we are talking about something like 90–93 percent of the population of the empire.

The New Testament as we actually have it, I knew, was the product of human hands, the hands of the scribes who transmitted it.

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

Texts do not simply reveal their own meanings to honest inquirers. Texts are interpreted, and they are interpreted (just as they were written) by living, breathing human beings, who can make sense of the texts only by explaining them in light of their other knowledge, explicating their meaning, putting the words of the texts “in other words.”