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

by Bart D. Ehrman

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, which contained the final six verses of the book. 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.

That is... Shocking. Why didn't the KJV team use the Complutensian Polygot?

Some of these editions, to be sure, are significant. For example, Stephanus’s third edition of 1550 is notable as the first edition ever to include notes documenting differences among some of the manuscripts consulted; his fourth edition (1551) is possibly even more significant, as it is the first edition of the Greek New Testament that divides the text into verses. Until then, the text had been printed all together, with no indication of verse division.

Verses first emerged in the mid-16th century.

The larger point I am trying to make, however, is that 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—the ones he happened to find in Basel and the one he borrowed from his friend Reuchlin. There would be no reason to suspect that these manuscripts were particularly high in quality. They were simply the ones he could lay his hands on.

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.

How different would modern Christianity be without the codified doctrine of the Trinity? Would Protestantism even be the same religion without the enforcement of the Trinity as tradition?

The phrasing of this line, especially the words “text that is received by all,” provides us with the common phrase Textus Receptus (abbreviated T.R.), a term used by textual critics to refer to that form of the Greek text that is based, not on the oldest and best manuscripts, but on the form of text originally published by Erasmus and handed down to printers for more than three hundred years, until textual scholars began insisting that the Greek New Testament should be established on scientific principles based on our oldest and best manuscripts, not simply reprinted according to custom. It was the inferior textual form of the Textus Receptus that stood at the base of the earliest English translations, including the King James Bible, and other editions until near the end of the nineteenth century.

I have never been so grateful for the NRSV. There are many problems with the current translations, but it is clear that the ones we have now are the best and most thorough productions of the Bible since the first copies were made going into the 2nd century.

On the basis of this intense thirty-year effort to accumulate materials, Mill published his text with apparatus, in which he indicated places of variation among all the surviving materials available to him. To the shock and dismay of many of his readers, Mill’s apparatus isolated some thirty thousand places of variation among the surviving witnesses, thirty thousand places where different manuscripts, Patristic (= church father) citations, and versions had different readings for passages of the New Testament. Mill was not exhaustive in his presentation of the data he had collected. He had, in fact, found far more than thirty thousand places of variation. He did not cite everything he discovered, leaving out variations such as those involving changes of word order. Still, the places he noted were enough to startle the reading public away from the complacency into which it had fallen based on the constant republication of the Textus Receptus and the natural assumption that in the T.R. one had the “original” Greek of the New Testament. Now the status of the original text was thrown wide open to dispute. If one did not know which words were original to the Greek New Testament, how could one use these words in deciding correct Christian doctrine and teaching?

I cannot imagine how disorienting this must have been for believers worldwide.

The impact of Mill’s publication was immediately felt, although he himself did not live to see the drama play out. He died, the victim of a stroke, just two weeks after his massive work was published. His untimely death (said by one observer to have been brought on by “drinking too much coffee”!) did not prevent detractors from coming to the fore, however.

Saved by the bell.

Whitby was a conservative Protestant theologian whose basic view was that even though God certainly would not prevent errors from creeping into scribal copies of the New Testament, at the same time he would never allow the text to be corrupted (i.e., altered) to the point that it could not adequately achieve its divine aim and purpose. And so he laments, “I GRIEVE therefore and am vexed that I have found so much in Mill’s Prolegomena which seems quite plainly to render the standard of faith insecure, or at best to give others too good a handle for doubting.”

This contemporary reaction to Mill's Apparatus is notably similar to the modern Apologetic thinking on Biblical criticism. Essentially, it is a belief that God breathed new life into the 16th-century Erasmus and Stephanus versions of the NT, correcting the tens of thousands of human errors of the early church.

Dr Mill did not make and coin them, he only exhibited them to our View. If Religion therefore was true before, though such Various Readings were in being: it will be as true and consequently as safe still, though every body sees them. Depend on’t; no Truth, no matter of Fact fairly laid open, can ever subvert true Religion.

This nails the heart of the matter, I think. Scholars are no more capable of disproving a faith than they are of proving one.

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. Perhaps, as I indicated earlier, it is best simply to leave the matter in comparative terms. There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Scholars typically differentiate today between changes that appear to have been made accidentally through scribal mistakes and those made intentionally, through some forethought. These are not hard and fast boundaries, of course, but they still seem appropriate: one can see how a scribe might inadvertently leave out a word when copying a text (an accidental change), but it is hard to see how the last twelve verses of Mark could have been added by a slip of the pen.

For example, in 1 Cor. 5:8, Paul tells his readers that they should partake of Christ, the Passover lamb, and should not eat the “old leaven, the leaven of wickedness and evil.” The final word, evil, is spelled PONĒRAS in Greek, which, it turns out, looks a lot like the word for “sexual immorality,” PORNEIAS.

This is actually really funny.

Similarly, in 1 Cor. 12:13, Paul points out that everyone in Christ has been “baptized into one body” and they have all “drunk of one Spirit.” The word Spirit (PNEUMA) would have been abbreviated in most manuscripts as PMA, which understandably could be—and was—misread by some scribes as the Greek word for “drink” (POMA); and so in these witnesses Paul is said to indicate that all have “drunk of one drink.”

One common type of mistake in Greek manuscripts occurred when two lines of the text being copied ended with the same letters or the same words. A scribe might copy the first line of text, and then when his eye went back to the page, it might pick up on the same words on the next line, instead of the line he had just copied; he would continue copying from there and, as a result, leave out the intervening words and/or lines.

I am so glad I am not the only person who has done this.

John 17:15, for example, Jesus says in his prayer to God about his followers: I do not ask that you keep them from the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. In one of our best manuscripts (the fourth-century Codex Vaticanus), however, the words “world…from the” are omitted, so that now Jesus utters the unfortunate prayer “I do not ask that you keep them from the evil one”!

Intentional changes tend to be a bit more difficult. Precisely because they were (evidently) made deliberately, these changes tend to make sense. And since they make sense, there will always be critics who argue that they make the best sense—that is, that they are original. 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. Here scholars sometimes disagree.

For some scribes of this persuasion, the parable that Jesus tells of new wine and old wineskins may have seemed problematic. No one places new wine in old wineskins…. But new wine must be placed in new wineskins. And no one who drinks the old wine wishes for the new, for they say, “The old is better.” (Luke 5:38–39) How could Jesus indicate that the old is better than the new? Isn’t the salvation he brings superior to anything Judaism (or any other religion) had to offer? Scribes who found the saying puzzling simply eliminated the last sentence, so that now Jesus says nothing about the old being better than the new.

Neither does the text inform doctrine, or the doctrine inform text. It seems the two were in constant conversation through the first 15 centuries of the faith, and today still through denomination-specific translatiolns, and apologetic litergical reading guides.

We find this, for example, in the account of Jesus’s genealogy in Matthew’s Gospel, which starts with the father of the Jews, Abraham, and traces Jesus’s line from father to son all the way down to “Jacob, who was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, from whom was born Jesus, who is called the Christ” (Matt. 1:16). As it stands, the genealogy already treats Jesus as an exceptional case in that he is not said to be the “son” of Joseph. For some scribes, however, that was not enough, and so they changed the text to read “Jacob, who was the father of Joseph, to whom being betrothed the virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus, who is called the Christ.” Now Joseph is not even called Mary’s husband, but only her betrothed, and she is clearly stated to be a virgin—an important point for many early scribes!

An interesting schism between those who wish to emphasize semitic prophecy and those who emphasize the perpetual virginity of Mary.

One of the best-known liturgical changes to the text is found in Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. The prayer is also found in Matthew, of course, and it is that longer, Matthean form that was, and is, most familiar to Christians.20 By comparison, Luke’s version sounds hopelessly truncated. Father, hallowed be your name. May your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive our sins, for we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation. (Luke 11:2–4) Scribes resolved the problem of Luke’s shortened version by adding the petitions known from the parallel passage in Matt. 6:9–13, so that now, as in Matthew, the prayer reads: Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. May your kingdom come and your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. This scribal tendency to “harmonize” passages in the Gospels is ubiquitous. Whenever the same story is told in different Gospels, one scribe or another is likely to have made sure that the accounts are perfectly in harmony, eliminating differences by strokes of their pens.

Already in the second century, the pagan critic Celsus had argued that Christians changed the text at will, as if drunk from a drinking bout; his opponent Origen speaks of the “great” number of differences among the manuscripts of the Gospels; more than a century later Pope Damasus was so concerned about the varieties of Latin manuscripts that he commissioned Jerome to produced a standardized translation; and Jerome himself had to compare numerous copies of the text, both Greek and Latin, to decide on the text that he thought was originally penned by its authors.

It is disturbing how progress of thought can halt for a millenia. The modern myth is of a world always progressing towards truth, knowledge, and equity, though I suppose those things quickly fall to the wayside when the world is faced with sickness, political instability, and war, as it was during much of the Middle Ages in the Western world. People look for questions when all they have are answers, and look for answers when all they have are questions.

another scholar was also assiduously working on the problem of the New Testament text; this scholar was not English, however, but French, and he was not a Protestant but a Catholic. Moreover, his view was precisely the one that many English Protestants feared would result from a careful analysis of the New Testament text, namely that the wide-ranging variations in the tradition showed that Christian faith could not be based solely on scripture (the Protestant Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura), since the text was unstable and unreliable. Instead, according to this view, the Catholics must be right that faith required the apostolic tradition preserved in the (Catholic) church.

The great changes that have taken place in the manuscripts of the Bible…since the first originals were lost, completely destroy the principle of the Protestants…, who only consult these same manuscripts of the Bible in the form they are today. If the truth of religion had not lived on in the Church, it would not be safe to look for it now in books that have been subjected to so many changes and that in so many matters were dependent on the will of the copyists.

This is in harmony with my immediate reaction to much of what I've read in the last 5 years, though immediate reactions are often just that. Protestantism seems to often depend on post hoc ergo propter hoc.

In a 1716 letter to a patron, Archbishop Wake, he stated the premise of a proposed new edition of the Greek Testament: he would be able, by careful analysis, to restore the text of the New Testament to its state at the time of the Council of Nicea (early fourth century),

If possible, I would think this version to be justifiable and spiritually sufficent for the vast majority of living Christians, whose faith is rooted in the foundations established in Nicea.

In an anonymous tractate written in response to the Proposals (this was an age of controversialists and pamphleteers), which discussed the pamphlet paragraph by paragraph, Bentley was attacked for his program and was said, by his anonymous opponent, to have “neither talents nor materials proper for the work he had undertaken.”11 Bentley took this, as one can imagine, as a slur on his (self-acknowledged) great talents and responded in kind. Unfortunately, he mistook the identity of his opponent, who was actually a Cambridge scholar named Conyers Middleton, for another, John Colbatch, and wrote a vitriolic reply, naming Colbatch and, as was the style in those days, calling him names.

Not a great testament to Bentley's skill for attribution.

In the end, his proposals for printing the Greek New Testament, with the text not of late corrupted Greek manuscripts (like those lying behind the Textus Receptus) but of the earliest possible attainable text, came to naught. After his death, his nephew was forced to return the sums that had been collected by subscription, bringing closure to the entire affair.

At the heart of this work of exegesis was a trust in the words of scripture. This trust went so far that it took Bengel in directions that today might seem a shade bizarre. Thinking that all the words of scripture were inspired—including the words of the prophets and the book of Revelation—Bengel became convinced that God’s great involvement with human affairs was nearing a climax, and that biblical prophecy indicated that his own generation was living near the end of days. He, in fact, believed he knew when the end would come: it would be about a century in the future, in 1836.

Bengel points out that here Jesus speaks in the present tense: in his own day Jesus could say “no one knows,” but that doesn’t mean that at a later time no one would know. By studying the biblical prophecies, in fact, later Christians could come to know. The papacy was the Antichrist, the freemasons may have represented the false “prophet” of Revelation, and the end was but a century away (he was writing in the 1730s).

In fairness to Bengel, what is a prophesy if not a puzzle to be solved?

Clearly, the predictors of doom in our own age—the Hal Lindseys (author of The Late Great Planet Earth) and the Tim LaHaye (co-author of the Left Behind series)—have had their predecessors, just as they will have their successors, world without end.

This is not unique to Christianity. I think it is human nature to struggle imagining time continuing after our own death. It can be more comfortable to imagine we are in the end times than it is to accept that the world will move on from us.

Among other things, the Protestant Wettstein argued that variant readings “can have no weakening effect on the trustworthiness or integrity of the Scriptures.” The reason: God has “bestowed this book once and for all on the world as an instrument for the perfection of human character. It contains all that is necessary to salvation both for belief and conduct.” Thus, variant readings may affect minor points in scripture, but the basic message remains intact no matter which readings one notices.

I would guess this is the belief of many of the Southern Baptist believers I encountered in childhood. Many were devoutly committed to their personal relationship with Christ, but mostly uninterested in Christian lore and Church tradition.

As Wettstein continued his investigations, he found other passages typically used to affirm the doctrine of the divinity of Christ that in fact represented textual problems; when these problems are resolved on text-critical grounds, in most instances references to Jesus’s divinity are taken away. This happens, for example, when the famous Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7–8) is removed from the text. And it happens in a passage in Acts 20:28, which in many manuscripts speaks of “the Church of God, which he obtained by his own blood.” Here again, Jesus appears to be spoken of as God. But in Codex Alexandrinus and some other manuscripts, the text instead speaks of “the Church of the Lord, which he obtained by his own blood.” Now Jesus is called the Lord, but he is not explicitly identified as God.

This shoudn't be a shock, since Christianity spread for nearly 400 years before the trinity doctrine was established. If it were obvious, the creed wouldn't be needed.

Alerted to such difficulties, Wettstein began thinking seriously about his own theological convictions, and became attuned to the problem that the New Testament rarely, if ever, actually calls Jesus God. And he began to be annoyed with his fellow pastors and teachers in his home city of Basel, who would sometimes confuse language about God and Christ—for example, when talking of the Son of God as if he were the Father, or addressing God the Father in prayer and speaking of “your sacred wounds.” Wettstein thought that more precision was needed when speaking about the Father and the Son, since they were not the same.

He was about a thousand years too late for that cause.

Called to account for his views before the university senate, he was found to have “rationalistic” views that denied the plenary inspiration of scripture and the existence of the devil and demons, and that focused attention on scriptural obscurities. He was removed from the Christian diaconate and compelled to leave Basel; and so he set up residence in Amsterdam, where he continued his work. He later claimed that all the controversy had forced a delay of twenty years in the publication of his edition of the Greek New Testament (1751–52). Even so, this was a magnificent edition, still of value to scholars today, more than 250 years later.

that attest variation, scholars such as J. Semler and J. J. Griesbach. In some ways, though, the major breakthrough in the field did not come for another eighty years, with the inauspicious-looking but revolutionary publication of a comparatively thin edition of the Greek New Testament by the German philologist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851).19

Philologists are always the true heroes of academia.

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 so. It had taken more than three hundred years, but finally the world was given an edition of the Greek New Testament that was based exclusively on ancient evidence.

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.

Everyone's first Bible is the "true" Bible.

Tischendorf was an inordinately ardent scholar who saw his work on the text of the New Testament as a sacred, divinely ordained task. As he once wrote his fiancée, while still in his early twenties: “I am confronted with a sacred task, the struggle to regain the original form of the New Testament.”20 This sacred task he sought to fulfill by locating every manuscript tucked away in every library and monastery that he could find.

My kind of guy.

For Westcott and Hort there were four major families of witnesses: (1) the Syrian text (what other scholars have called the Byzantine text), which comprises most of the late medieval manuscripts; these are numerous but not particularly close in wording to the original text; (2) the Western text, made up of manuscripts that could be dated very early—the archetypes must have been around sometime in the second century at the latest; these manuscripts, however, embody the wild copying practices of scribes in that period before the transcription of texts had become the business of professionals; (3) the Alexandrian text, which was derived from Alexandria, where the scribes were trained and careful but occasionally altered their texts to make them grammatically and stylistically more acceptable, thereby changing the wording of the originals; and (4) the Neutral text, which consisted of manuscripts that had not undergone any serious change or revision in the course of their transmission but represented most accurately the texts of the originals.

Many things have changed in nomenclature since Westcott and Hort’s day: scholars no longer talk about a Neutral text, and most realize that Western text is a misnomer, since wild copying practices were found in the East as well as in the West. Moreover, Westcott and Hort’s system has been overhauled by subsequent scholars. Most modern scholars, for example, think that the Neutral and Alexandrian texts are the same: it is just that some manuscripts are better representatives of this text than are others.

Suppose that after the original manuscript of a text was produced, two copies were made of it, which we may call A and B. These two copies, of course, will differ from each other in some ways—possibly major and probably minor. Now suppose that A was copied by one other scribe, but B was copied by fifty scribes. Then the original manuscript, along with copies A and B, were lost, so that all that remains in the textual tradition are the fifty-one second-generation copies, one made from A and fifty made from B. If a reading found in the fifty manuscripts (from B) differs from a reading found in the one (from A), is the former necessarily more likely to be the original reading? No, not at all—even though by counting noses, it is found in fifty times as many witnesses. In fact, the ultimate difference in support for that reading is not fifty manuscripts to one. It is a difference of one to one (A against B). The mere question of numbers of manuscripts supporting one reading over another, therefore, is not particularly germane to the question of which reading in our surviving manuscripts represents the original (or oldest) form of the text.

In terms of logic, suppose a manuscript of the fifth century has one reading, but a manuscript of the eighth century has a different one. Is the reading found in the fifth-century manuscript necessarily the older form of the text? No, not necessarily. What if the fifth-century manuscript had been produced from a copy of the fourth century, but the eighth-century manuscript had been produced from one of the third century? In that case, the eighth-century manuscript would preserve the older reading.

Still, at the end of the day, if the majority of our earliest manuscripts support one reading over another, surely that combination of factors should be seen as carrying some weight in making a textual decision.