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

by Bart D. Ehrman

I chose a passage in Mark 2, where Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees because his disciples had been walking through a grain field, eating the grain on the Sabbath. Jesus wants to show the Pharisees that “Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath” and so reminds them of what the great King David had done when he and his men were hungry, how they went into the Temple “when Abiathar was the high priest” and ate the show bread, which was only for the priests to eat. One of the well-known problems of the passage is that when one looks at the Old Testament passage that Jesus is citing (1 Sam. 21:1–6), it turns out that David did this not when Abiathar was the high priest, but, in fact, when Abiathar’s father Ahimelech was. In other words, this is one of those passages that have been pointed to in order to show that the Bible is not inerrant at all but contains mistakes.

For if there could be one little, picayune mistake in Mark 2, maybe there could be mistakes in other places as well. Maybe, when Jesus says later in Mark 4 that the mustard seed is “the smallest of all seeds on the earth,” maybe I don’t need to come up with a fancy explanation for how the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds when I know full well it isn’t. And maybe these “mistakes” apply to bigger issues. Maybe when Mark says that Jesus was crucified the day after the Passover meal was eaten (Mark 14:12; 15:25) and John says he died the day before it was eaten (John 19:14)—maybe that is a genuine difference. Or when Luke indicates in his account of Jesus’s birth that Joseph and Mary returned to Nazareth just over a month after they had come to Bethlehem (and performed the rites of purification; Luke 2:39), whereas Matthew indicates they instead fled to Egypt (Matt. 2:19–22)—maybe that is a difference. Or when Paul says that after he converted on the way to Damascus he did not go to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before him (Gal. 1:16–17), whereas the book of Acts says that that was the first thing he did after leaving Damascus (Acts 9:26)—maybe that is a difference.

These traditions involved both stories about God’s interaction with the ancestors of the people of Israel—the patriarchs and matriarchs of the faith, as it were: Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rachel, Jacob, Rebecca, Joseph, Moses, David, and so on—and detailed instructions concerning how this people was to worship and live. One of the things that made Judaism unique among the religions of the Roman Empire was that these instructions, along with the other ancestral traditions, were written down in sacred books. For modern people intimately familiar with any of the major contemporary Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), it may be hard to imagine, but books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world. These religions were almost exclusively concerned with honoring the gods through ritual acts of sacrifice. There were no doctrines to be learned, as explained in books, and almost no ethical principles to be followed, as laid out in books.

This is not to say that adherents of the various polytheistic religions had no beliefs about their gods or that they had no ethics, but beliefs and ethics—strange as this sounds to modern ears—played almost no role in religion per se. These were instead matters of personal philosophy, and philosophies, of course, could be bookish. Since ancient religions themselves did not require any particular sets of “right doctrines” or, for the most part, “ethical codes,” books played almost no role in them. Judaism was unique in that it stressed its ancestral traditions, customs, and laws, and maintained that these had been recorded in sacred books, which had the status, therefore, of “scripture” for the Jewish people.

After Paul had converted a number of people in a given locale, he would move to another and try, usually with some success, to convert people there as well. But he would sometimes (often?) hear news from one of the other communities of believers he had earlier established, and sometimes (often?) the news would not be good: members of the community had started to behave badly, problems of immorality had arisen, “false teachers” had arrived teaching notions contrary to his own, some of the community members had started to hold to false doctrines, and so on. Upon hearing the news, Paul would write a letter back to the community, dealing with the problems. These letters were very important to the lives of the community, and a number of them eventually came to be regarded as scripture. Some thirteen letters written in Paul’s name are included in the New Testament. 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. Paul ends the letter by saying, “Greet all the brothers and sisters with a holy kiss; I strongly adjure you in the name of the Lord that you have this letter read to all the brothers and sisters” (1 Thess. 5:26–27). This was not a casual letter to be read simply by anyone who was mildly inte...

Christianity depended on social media

As it turns out, we are able to pinpoint the first time that any Christian of record listed the twenty-seven books of our New Testament as the books of the New Testament—neither more nor fewer. Surprising as it may seem, this Christian was writing in the second half of the fourth century, nearly three hundred years after the books of the New Testament had themselves been written. The author was the powerful bishop of Alexandria named Athanasius. 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 best and most influential study of literacy in ancient times, by Columbia University professor William Harris, indicates that at the very best of times and places—for example, Athens at the height of the classical period in the fifth century B.C.E.—literacy rates were rarely higher than 10–15 percent of the population. To reverse the numbers, this means that under the best of conditions, 85–90 percent of the population could not read or write. In the first Christian century, throughout the Roman Empire, the literacy rates may well have been lower.14

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

How could authors guarantee that their texts were not modified once put into circulation? The short answer is that they could not. 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.

Then come the last twelve verses of Mark in many modern English translations, verses that continue the story. Jesus himself is said to appear to Mary Magdalene, who goes and tells the disciples; but they do not believe her (vv. 9–11). He then appears to two others (vv. 12–14), and finally to the eleven disciples (the Twelve, not including Judas Iscariot) who are gathered together at table. Jesus upbraids them for failing to believe, and then commissions them to go forth and proclaim his gospel “to the whole creation.” Those who believe and are baptized “will be saved,” but those who do not “will be condemned.” And then come two of the most intriguing verses of the passage: And these are the signs that will accompany those who believe: they will cast out demons in my name; they will speak in new tongues; and they will take up snakes in their hands; and if they drink any poison, it will not harm them; they will place their hands upon the sick and heal them. (vv. 17–18) Jesus is then taken up into heaven, and seated at the right hand of God. And the disciples go forth into the world proclaiming the gospel, their words being confirmed by the signs that accompany them (vv. 19–20). It is a terrific passage, mysterious, moving, and powerful. It is one of the passages used by Pentecostal Christians to show that Jesus’s followers will be able to speak in unknown “tongues,” as happens in their own services of worship; and it is the principal passage used by groups of “Appalachian sn...

I would like to end this chapter simply with an observation about a particularly acute irony that we seem to have discovered. 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 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.

Erasmus had studied the New Testament, along with other great works of antiquity, on and off for many years, and had considered at some point putting together an edition for printing. But it was only when he visited Basel in August 1514 that he was persuaded by a publisher named Johann Froben to move forward. Both Erasmus and Froben knew that the Complutensian Polyglot was in the works, and so they made haste to publish a Greek text as quickly as possible, although other obligations prevented Erasmus from taking up the task seriously until July of 1515. At that time he went to Basel in search of suitable manuscripts that he could use as the basis of his text. He did not uncover a great wealth of manuscripts, but what he found was sufficient for the task. For the most part, he relied on a mere handful of late medieval manuscripts, which he marked up as if he were copyediting a handwritten copy for the printer; the printer took the manuscripts so marked and set his type directly from them. It appears that Erasmus relied heavily on just one twelfth-century manuscript for the Gospels and another, also of the twelfth century, for the book of Acts and the Epistles—although he was able to consult several other manuscripts and make corrections based on their readings. For the book of Revelation he had to borrow a manuscript from his friend the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin; unfortunately, this manuscript was almost impossible to read in places, and it had lost its last page, w...

Cool origin story for the first Greek bible print

Despite his misgivings, Erasmus was true to his word and included the Johannine Comma in his next edition, and in all his subsequent editions. These editions, as I have already noted, became the basis for the editions of the Greek New Testament that were then reproduced time and again by the likes of Stephanus, Beza, and the Elzevirs. 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 occasion the “error” that a scribe attempted to correct was not factual, but interpretive. 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.19

Simon’s theological agenda for such observations is clear throughout his long treatise. At one point he asks rhetorically: Is it possible…that God hath given to his church Books to serve her for a Rule, and that he hath at the same time permitted that the first Originals of these Books should be lost ever since the beginning of the Christian Religion?4 His answer, of course, is no. 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, as found in the apostolic tradition handed down through the (Catholic) church. Although the Scriptures are a sure Rule on which our Faith is founded, yet this Rule is not altogether sufficient of itself; it is necessary to know, besides this, what are the Apostolical Traditions; and we cannot learn them but from the Apostolical Churches, who have preserved the true Sense of Scriptures.5

Don't just follow the text

And so Bengel spent a good deal of his research time exploring the many thousands of variant readings available in our manuscripts, and in his attempt to get beyond the alterations of later scribes back to the texts of the original authors, he came up with several breakthroughs in methodology. The first is a criterion he devised that more or less summed up his approach to establishing the original text whenever the wording was in doubt. Scholars before him, such Simon and Bentley, had tried to devise criteria of evaluation for variant readings. Some others, whom we have not discussed here, devised long lists of criteria that might prove helpful. After intense study of the matter (Bengel studied everything intensely), Bengel found that he could summarize the vast majority of proposed criteria in a simple four-word phrase: “Proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua”—the more difficult reading is preferable to the easier one. The logic is this: when scribes changed their texts, they were more likely to try to improve them. If they saw what they took to be a mistake, they corrected it; if they saw two accounts of the same story told differently, they harmonized them; if they encountered a text that stood at odds with their own theological opinions, they altered it. In every instance, to know what the oldest (or even “original”) text said, preference should be given not to the reading that has corrected the mistake, harmonized the account, or improved its theology, but to just the opp...

Counterintuitive

The passage in question, 1 Tim. 3:16, had long been used by advocates of orthodox theology to support the view that the New Testament itself calls Jesus God. For the text, in most manuscripts, refers to Christ as “God made manifest in the flesh, and justified in the Spirit.” As I pointed out in chapter 3, most manuscripts abbreviate sacred names (the so-called nomina sacra), and that is the case here as well, where the Greek word God (ΘEOΣ) is abbreviated in two letters, theta and sigma (ΘΣ), with a line drawn over the top to indicate that it is an abbreviation. What Wettstein noticed in examining Codex Alexandrinus was that the line over the top had been drawn in a different ink from the surrounding words, and so appeared to be from a later hand (i.e., written by a later scribe). Moreover, the horizontal line in the middle of the first letter, Θ, was not actually a part of the letter but was a line that had bled through from the other side of the old vellum. In other words, rather than being the abbreviation (theta–sigma) for “God” (ΘΣ), the word was actually an omicron and a sigma (OΣ), a different word altogether, which simply means “who.” The original reading of the manuscript thus did not speak of Christ as “God made manifest in the flesh” but of Christ “who was made manifest in the flesh.” According to the ancient testimony of the Codex Alexandrinus, Christ is no longer explicitly called God in this passage.

Example

(1793–1851).19 Early on in his work, Lachmann decided that the textual evidence was simply not adequate to determine what the original authors wrote. The earliest manuscripts that he had access to were those of the fourth or fifth centuries—hundreds of years after the originals had been produced. Who could predict the vicissitudes of transmission that had occurred between the penning of the autographs and the production of the earliest surviving witnesses some centuries later? Lachmann therefore set for himself a simpler task. The Textus Receptus, he knew, was based on the manuscript tradition of the twelfth century. He could improve upon that—by eight hundred years—by producing an edition of the New Testament as it would have appeared at about the end of the fourth century. The surviving manuscripts in Greek, along with the manuscripts of Jerome’s Vulgate and the quotations of the text in such writers as Irenaeus, Origen, and Cyprian, would at the very least allow that. And so that is what he did. Relying on a handful of early majuscule manuscripts plus the oldest Latin manuscripts and the patristic quotations of the text, he chose not simply to edit the Textus Receptus wherever necessary (the tack followed by his predecessors who were dissatisfied with the T.R.), but to abandon the T.R. completely and to establish the text anew, on his own principles. Thus, in 1831 he produced a new version of the text, not based on the T.R. This was the first time anyone had dared to do...

Strange that it took that long

In reality, though, Lachmann had broken through the unhelpful custom established among printers and scholars alike of giving favored status to the T.R., a status it surely did not deserve, since it was printed and reprinted not because anyone felt that it rested on a secure textual basis but only because its text was both customary and familiar.

Crazy that one text became the source for everything for centuries simply out of convenience

Both Matthew and Luke have the story, often verbally the same, but both delete the reference to Jesus’s anger (Matt. 19:14; Luke 18:16). In sum, Matthew and Luke have no qualms about describing Jesus as compassionate, but they never describe him as angry. Whenever one of their sources (Mark) did so, they both independently rewrote the term out of their stories. Thus, whereas it is difficult to understand why they would have removed “feeling compassion” from the account of Jesus’s healing of the leper, it is altogether easy to see why they might have wanted to remove “feeling anger.” Combined with the circumstance that the latter term is attested in a very ancient stream of our manuscript tradition and that scribes would have been unlikely to create it out of the much more readily comprehensible “feeling compassion,” it is becoming increasingly evident that Mark, in fact, described Jesus as angry when approached by the leper to be healed.

Luke’s portrayal of Jesus stands in contrast not only to that of Mark, but also to that of other New Testament authors, including the unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who appears to presuppose knowledge of passion traditions in which Jesus was terrified in the face of death and died with no divine succor or support, as can be seen in the resolution of one of the most interesting textual problems of the New Testament.12 The problem occurs in a context that describes the eventual subjugation of all things to Jesus, the Son of Man. Again, I have placed in brackets the textual variants in question. For when [God] subjects to him all things, he leaves nothing that is not subjected to him. But we do not yet see all things subjected to him. But we do see Jesus, who, having been made for a little while lower than the angels, was crowned with glory and honor on account of his suffering of death, so that [ by the grace of God/apart from God] he might taste death for everyone. (Heb. 2:8–9) Although almost all the surviving manuscripts state that Jesus died for all people “by the grace of God” (CHARITI THEOU), a couple of others state, instead, that he died “apart from God” (CHŌRIS THEOU). There are good reasons for thinking that the latter, however, was the original reading of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

I don’t need to go into the intricacies of the manuscript support for the reading “apart from God” except to say that even though it occurs in only two documents of the tenth century, one of these (Ms. 1739) is known to have been produced from a copy that was at least as ancient as our earliest manuscripts. Of yet greater interest, the early-third-century scholar Origen tells us that this was the reading of the majority of manuscripts of his own day. Other evidence also suggests its early popularity: it was found in manuscripts known to Ambrose and Jerome in the Latin West, and it is quoted by a range of church writers down to the eleventh century. And so, despite the fact that it is not widely attested among our surviving manuscripts, the reading was at one time supported by strong external evidence.

How history changes

In the second and third centuries there were, of course, Christians who believed that there was only one God, the Creator of all there is. Other people who called themselves Christian, however, insisted that there were two different gods—one of the Old Testament (a God of wrath) and one of the New Testament (a God of love and mercy). These were not simply two different facets of the same God: they were actually two different gods. Strikingly, the groups that made these claims—including the followers of Marcion, whom we have already met—insisted that their views were the true teachings of Jesus and his apostles. Other groups, for example, of Gnostic Christians, insisted that there were not just two gods, but twelve. Others said thirty. Others still said 365. All these groups claimed to be Christian, insisting that their views were true and had been taught by Jesus and his followers. Why didn’t these other groups simply read their New Testaments to see that their views were wrong? It is because there was no New Testament. To be sure, all the books of the New Testament had been written by this time, but there were lots of other books as well, also claiming to be by Jesus’s own apostles—other gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses having very different perspectives from those found in the books that eventually came to be called the New Testament. The New Testament itself emerged out of these conflicts over God (or the gods), as one group of believers acquired more converts t...

Interesting

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.

Other antiadoptionistic changes took place in the manuscripts that record Jesus’s early life in the Gospel of Luke. 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.

Consider, for example, what Luke says about Jesus as the “Messiah” (which is the Hebrew word for the Greek term Christ).

Christ = Messiah

It appears, then, that originally in Luke’s account of Jesus’s baptism, the voice came from heaven to declare “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.” Luke probably did not mean that to be interpreted adoptionistically, since, after all, he had already narrated an account of Jesus’s virgin birth (in chapters 1–2). But later Christians reading Luke 3:22 may have been taken aback by its potential implications, as it seems open to an adoptionistic interpretation. To prevent anyone from taking the text that way, some proto-orthodox scribes changed the text to make it stand in complete conformity with the text of Mark 1:11. Now, rather than being said to have been begotten by God, Jesus is simply affirmed: “You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” This is, in other words, another antiadoptionistic change of the text.

This separationist Christology was most commonly advocated by groups of Christians that scholars have called Gnostic.12 The term Gnosticism comes from the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis. It is applied to a wide range of groups of early Christians who stressed the importance of secret knowledge for salvation. According to most of these groups, the material world we live in was not the creation of the one true God. It came about as a result of a disaster in the divine realm, in which one of the (many) divine beings was for some mysterious reason excluded from the heavenly places; as a result of her fall from divinity the material world came to be created by a lesser deity, who captured her and imprisoned her in human bodies here on earth. Some human beings thus have a spark of the divine within them, and they need to learn the truth of who they are, where they came from, how they got here, and how they can return. Learning this truth will lead to their salvation. This truth consists of secret teachings, mysterious “knowledge” (gnosis), which can only be imparted by a divine being from the heavenly realm. For Christian Gnostics, Christ is this divine revealer of the truths of salvation; in many Gnostic systems, the Christ came into the man Jesus at his baptism, empowered him for his ministry, and then at the end left him to die on the cross. That is why Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” For these Gnostics, the Christ literally had forsaken Jesus (...

Modern scholars have come to recognize that disputes over the role of women in the early church occurred precisely because women had a role—often a significant and publicly high profile role. Moreover, this was the case from the very beginning, starting with the ministry of Jesus himself. 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 8:1–3). Jesus is said to have engaged in public dialogue with women and to have ministered to them in public (Mark 7:24–30; John 4:1–42). In particular, we are told that women accompanied Jesus during his final trip to Jerusalem, where they were present at his crucifixion and where they alone remained faithful to him at the end, when the male disciples had fled (Matt. 27:55; Mark 15:40–41). Most significant of all, each of our Gospels indicates that it was women—Mary Magdalene alone, or with several companions—who discovered his empty tomb and so were the first to know about and testify to Jesus’s resurrection from the dead (Matt. 28:1–10; Mark 16:1–8; Luke 23:55–24:10; John 20:1–2).

Women

Some of Christianity’s early opponents among the pagans, including, for example, the late-second-century critic Celsus, whom we have met before, denigrated the religion on the grounds that it was made up largely of children, slaves, and women (i.e., those of no social standing in society at large). Strikingly, Origen, who wrote the Christian response to Celsus, did not deny the charge but tried to turn it against Celsus in an attempt to show that God can take what is weak and invest it with strength.

Women, in short, appear to have played a significant role in the churches of Paul’s day. To some extent, this high profile was unusual in the Greco-Roman world. And it may have been rooted, as I have argued, in Jesus’s proclamation that in the coming Kingdom there would be equality of men and women. This appears to have been Paul’s message as well, as can be seen, for example, in his famous declaration in Galatians: For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free; there is not male and female; for all of you are one in Jesus Christ. (Gal. 3:27–28) The equality in Christ may have manifested itself in the actual worship services of the Pauline communities. 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). At the same time, to modern interpreters it may appear that Paul did not take his view of the relationship of men and women in Christ to what could be thought of as its logical conclusion. 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, even though he mainta...

Ambivalent

This becomes evident in a letter that was written in Paul’s name. 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, as indicated by God himself in the Law; God created Eve second, for the sake of man; and a woman (related to Eve) must not therefore lord it over a man (related to Adam) through her teaching. Furthermore, according to this author, everyone knows what happens when a woman does assume the role of teacher: she is easily duped (by the devil) and leads the man astray. So, women are to stay at home and maintain the virtues appropriate to women, bearing children for their husbands and preserving their modesty.

Not from Paul

The scribes who were copying the texts that later became scripture were obviously involved in these debates. 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.

Role of women

A similar change was made by some scribes who copied the book of Acts. In chapter 17 we learn that Paul and his missionary companion Silas spent time in Thessalonica preaching the gospel of Christ to the Jews of the local synagogue. We are told in verse 4 that the pair made some important converts: “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.”

The last twenty years have seen an explosion of research into the historical Jesus. As a result, there is now an enormous range of opinion about how Jesus is best understood—as a rabbi, a social revolutionary, a political insurgent, a cynic philosopher, an apocalyptic prophet: the options go on and on. 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. Whatever else he was, Jesus was thoroughly Jewish, in every way—as were his disciples. At some point—probably before his death, but certainly afterward—Jesus’s followers came to think of him as the Jewish messiah.

Paul came to believe that Jews rejected Jesus because they understood that their own special standing before God was related to the fact that they both had and kept the Law that God had given them (Rom. 10:3–4). For Paul, however, salvation came to the Jews, as well as to the Gentiles, not through the Law but through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus (Rom. 3:21–22). Thus, keeping the Law could have no role in salvation; Gentiles who became followers of Jesus were instructed, therefore, not to think they could improve their standing before God by keeping the Law. They were to remain as they were—and not convert to become Jews (Gal. 2:15–16).

Why Christianity came to split from Judaism

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. Christians, in fact, found themselves in a bit of a bind. For they acknowledged that Jesus was the messiah anticipated by the Jewish scriptures; and to gain credibility in a world that cherished what was ancient but suspected anything “recent” as a dubious novelty, Christians continued to point to the scriptures—those ancient texts of the Jews—as the foundation for their own beliefs. This meant that Christians laid claim to the Jewish Bible as their own. 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 Eventually we find Christians castigating Jews in the harshest terms possible for rejecting Jesus as the messiah, with authors such as the second-century Justin Martyr claiming that the reason God commanded the Jews to be circumcised was to mark them off as a special pe...

Clearly we have come a long way from Jesus, a Palestinian Jew who kept Jewish customs, preached to his Jewish compatriots, and taught his Jewish disciples the true meaning of the Jewish law. By the second century, though, when Christian scribes were reproducing the texts that eventually became part of the New Testament, most Christians were former pagans, non-Jews who had converted to the faith and who understood that even though this religion was based, ultimately, on faith in the Jewish God as described in the Jewish Bible, it was nonetheless completely anti-Jewish in its orientation.

One of the most significant passages for the eventual rise of anti-Semitism is the scene of Jesus’s trial in the Gospel of Matthew. According to this account, Pilate declares Jesus innocent, washing his hands to show that “I am innocent of this man’s blood! You see to it!” The Jewish crowd then utters a cry that was to play such a horrendous role in the violence manifest against the Jews down through the Middle Ages, in which they appear to claim responsibility for the death of Jesus: “His blood be upon us and our children” (Matt. 27:24–25). The textual variant we are concerned with occurs in the next verse. Pilate is said to have flogged Jesus and then “handed him over to be crucified.” Anyone reading the text would naturally assume that he handed Jesus over to his own (Roman) soldiers for crucifixion. 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.

Anti-semitism

In fact, most of the pagan opposition to Christians during the church’s first two centuries happened on the grassroots level rather than as a result of organized, official Roman persecution. Contrary to what many people appear to think, there was nothing “illegal” about Christianity, per se, in those early years. 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.

To make sense of Christian persecution, it is important to know something about pagan religions in the Roman Empire. All these religions—and there were hundreds of them—were polytheistic, worshiping many gods; all of them emphasized the need to worship these gods through acts of prayer and sacrifice. For the most part, the gods were not worshiped to secure for the worshiper a happy afterlife; by and large, people were more concerned about the present life, which for most people was harsh and precarious at best. The gods could provide what was impossible for people to secure for themselves—for the crops to grow, for the livestock to be fed, for enough rain to fall, for personal health and well-being, for the ability to reproduce, for victory in war, for prosperity in peace. The gods protected the state and made it great; the gods could intervene in life to make it livable, long, and happy. And they did this in exchange for simple acts of worship—worship on the state level during civic ceremonies honoring the gods, and worship on the local level, in communities and families.

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. Of course, Jews would not worship the pagan gods either, but they were widely seen as an exception to the need for all people to worship the gods, since Jews were a distinctive people with their own ancestral traditions that they faithfully followed.14 When Christians came on the scene, however, they were not recognized as a distinctive people—they were converts from Judaism and from an entire range of pagan religions, with no blood ties to one another or any other connections except their peculiar set of religious beliefs and practices. Moreover, they were known to be antisocial, gathering together in their own communities, abandoning their own families and deserting their former friends, not participating in communal festivals of worship. 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? Only rarely did the Roman governors of the various provin...

Why Christian prosecution

By the middle of the second century, pagan intellectuals began taking note of the Christians and attacking them in tractates written against them. These works not only portrayed the Christians themselves in negative ways. They also attacked the Christians’ beliefs as ludicrous (they claimed to worship the God of the Jews, for example, and yet refused to follow the Jewish law!) and maligned their practices as scandalous. On the latter point, it was sometimes noted that Christians gathered together under the cloak of darkness, calling one another “brother” and “sister” and greeting one another with kisses; they were said to worship their god by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of God. What was one to make of such practices? If you can imagine the worst, you won’t be far off. Pagan opponents claimed that Christians engaged in ritual incest (sexual acts with brothers and sisters), infanticide (killing the Son), and cannibalism (eating his flesh and drinking his blood). These charges may seem incredible today, but in a society that respected decency and openness, they were widely accepted. Christians were perceived as a nefarious lot.

Interesting

These writings were sometimes held up to ridicule, as in the words of the pagan Porphry: The evangelists were fiction-writers—not observers or eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus. Each of the four contradicts the other in writing his account of the events of his suffering and crucifixion. (Against the Christians 2, 12–15)16 In response to these kinds of attacks, claims the pagan Celsus, Christian scribes altered their texts in order to rid them of the problems so obvious to well-trained outsiders: 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 change its character to enable them to deny difficulties in the face of criticism. (Against Celsus 2, 27) As it turns out, we do not need to rely on pagan opponents of Christianity to find evidence of scribes occasionally changing their texts in light of pagan opposition to the faith. There are places within our surviving manuscript tradition of the New Testament that show this kind of scribal tendency at work.17

Early doubts

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!