The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

by Bart D. Ehrman

  They might have realized why, had they more fully appreciated what happens to a text that is copied and recopied by hand—especially by scribes who are not trained professionals but simply literate persons with the time and money to do the job. Copyists, even if they are skilled specialists, inevitably make mistakes. (Anyone who doubts this should copy a long document by hand and see how well he or she does.) Moreover, whenever a copyist makes a copy from a copy that has already been copied, the mistakes that have accrued with each reproduction multiply; scribes not only introduce their own mistakes but also, necessarily, reproduce mistakes found in the copy being copied—unless they try to "correct" the mistake, which more often than not leads to an "incorrect" correction.

  The first chapter of the book of Hebrews in one of the oldest and best surviving manuscripts of the New Testament, Codex Vaticanus (Vatican). Notice the marginal note between the first and second columns. A corrector to the text had erased a word in verse 3 and substituted another word in its place,- a second corrector came along, erased the correction, reinserted the original word, and wrote a note in the margin to castigate the first corrector. The note reads, "Fool and knave, leave the old reading, don't change it!"

  We do not have the original of Thessalonians (i.e., the text that Paul actually wrote) or of any other New Testament book. Nor do we have copies made directly from the originals, nor copies made from the copies of the originals, nor copies made from the copies of the copies. Our earliest "manuscripts" (handwritten copies) of Paul's letters date from around 200 ce, that is, nearly 150 years after he wrote them. The earliest full manuscripts of the Gospels come from about the same time, although we have some fragments of manuscripts Most changes are careless errors that are easily recognized and corrected. Christian scribes often made mistakes simply because they were tired or inattentive or, sometimes, inept. Indeed, the single most common mistake in our manuscripts involves "orthography," significant for little more than showing that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most of us can today. In addition, we have numerous manuscripts in which scribes have left out entire words, verses, or even pages of a book, presumably by accident. Sometimes scribes rearranged the words on the page, for example, by leaving out a word and then reinserting it later in the sentence. And sometimes they found a marginal note scribbled by an earlier scribe and thought that it was to be included in the text, and so inserted it as an additional verse. These kinds of accidental changes were facilitated, in part, by the fact that ancient scribes did not use punctuation and paragraph divisions, and did not in fact separate the words on the pagebutprintedthemalltogethermakingmistakesinreadingfairlycommon.

  Other kinds of changes are both more important and harder for modern scholars to detect. These are changes that scribes appear to have made in their texts intentionally. I say that they "appear" to have made such changes intentionally simply because the scribes are no longer around for us to interview about their intentions. But some of the changes in our manuscripts can scarcely be attributed to fatigue, carelessness, or ineptitude; instead, they suggest intention and forethought.

  It is sometimes difficult to know what might have motivated a scribe to change his text, but it often appears to have been some kind of problem in the text itself that he found disturbing. Sometimes, for example, scribes ran across a statement that appeared to be mistaken. This happens, for instance, in Mark 1:2, where a citation from the book of Malachi is quoted as coming from Isaiah. At other times, scribes thought that a passage they were copying contradicted another one. For example, Mark 2:25 indicates that Abiathar was the high priest when David entered the Temple to eat the showbread, whereas the story in the Hebrew Bible itself (1 Sam. 21:1-7) indicates that it was not Abiathar but his father, Ahimelech. In all such cases, scribes appear to have had little compunction about changing their texts so as to "correct" them: Both Mark 1:2 and 2:25 were commonly altered.

  And so a verse found in some manuscripts will appear to embody a mistake, a contradiction, or an awkward construction, but in others it will be worded differently in such a way as to avoid the problem. Scholars have to decide then which form of the verse was probably original and which represents the change made by a scribe.

  Some textual changes can be important for interpretation. For example, the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark end at 16:8 with the report that the women fled Jesus' empty tomb in fear and told no one what they had seen or heard. But later manuscripts append an additional twelve verses in which the resurrected Jesus appears before his disciples and delivers a remarkable speech in which he says, among other things, that those who believe in him will be able to handle venomous snakes and drink deadly poison without suffering harm. Are these verses original, or did scribes add them to a text that otherwise seemed to end too abruptly? It is important to remember that this is not a question of whether scribes changed the text. Some of them must have changed it, because the manuscripts differ from one another. The only question is whether a scribe omitted the twelve verses or whether a different scribe added them. Most scholars think the Gospel originally ended at 16:8.

  Did the author of the Fourth Gospel write the famous story of the woman taken in adultery, or was this a later addition to the Gospel by a well-meaning scribe? The story is found in many of our later manuscripts between chapters 7 and 8 but not in the earliest ones; moreover, the writing style is significantly different from the rest of the Gospel. Almost all scholars acknowledge that the story was added to manuscripts of John's Gospel many years after it had first been circulated.

  In spite of the remarkable differences among our manuscripts, scholars are convinced that we can reconstruct the oldest form of the words of the New Testament with reasonable (though not 100 percent) accuracy. Scholars tend to look to see which textual readings are supported (a) by the oldest manuscripts, on the assumption that the older the manuscript, the fewer the scribal hands between it and the original, and so the fewer opportunities for changing the text; (b) by the manuscripts that are most geographically diverse, so that a text is not just some kind of localized variant; and (c) by the manuscripts, that tend to preserve the superior reading whenever the judgment is obvious, on the assumption that manuscripts that are known to contain lots of mistakes cannot be trusted as much as those known not to contain so many mistakes. Moreover, scholars take into account such issues as whether a form of the text coincides with an author's literary style, vocabulary, and theology (that would speak in its favor) and whether readings coincide with the agenda of scribes (that might suggest the scribes created the readings). Making these decisions is obviously a complicated business; as a result, there are numerous places of textual variation where scholars continue to disagree concerning the "original" form of the text.

  We may now return to our original question: Given the enormous number of changes in our manuscripts of the New Testament, is there any evidence that the surviving texts were ever modified in light of the doctrinal controversies of the second and third centuries? Yes, there is abundant evidence, sometimes in just the places you might look for it. As I have indicated, almost all of this evidence involves proto-orthodox changes of the text.

  Possibly the easiest way to illustrate the point is by giving several examples, classifying them according to the heretical views that appear to have motivated the change.

  Antiadoptionistic Alterations

  I'll begin with textual alterations that appear to have been motivated by an opposition to adoptionistic Christologies, for example, those of the Ebionites or the Roman Theodotians, which maintained that Jesus was completely human, not divine, born of the sexual union of Joseph and Mary.

  After Jesus is born in Luke's Gospel, his parents take him to the Temple "to present him to the Lord" (Luke 2:22). They are met there by a prophet, Simeon, who recognizes Jesus as "the Lord's Christ," and praises Jesus as the one who will be "a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel" (2:32). This high praise elicits the expected
response: "And his father and his mother marveled at what was said about him" (Luke 2:33). But the response caused some consternation among proto-orthodox scribes, because it appears to assume that Joseph was the father of Jesus. That, of course, is exactly what adoptionists said about him—Joseph and Mary were Jesus' actual parents. Recognizing the problem, some scribes changed the text. In these altered manuscripts we are told that "Joseph and his mother marveled at what was said about him." Now there is no problem: Joseph is not called Jesus' father. And no one who thinks he was can use the text to prove the point. This, then, is a proto-orthodox "correction" that involved a textual alteration.

  So, too, in the account of Jesus as a twelve-year-old in the Temple. Jesus has gone to Jerusalem with his parents to celebrate the Passover feast. When it is over, they all return home; but Jesus, unbeknownst to them, remains behind. When they realize he is not with them, they return to Jerusalem and, after three days, find him in the Temple, discussing matters of the Law with the Jewish teachers there. His mother is miffed with her precocious child and says, "Son, why have you treated us like this? See, your father and I have been anxiously looking for you!" (Luke 2:48). Your father and I? Once again there is a problem. And once again, some scribes changed the text, this time to read "We have been anxiously looking for you!"

  Take a different kind of alteration, although similarly motivated. Adoptionists, of course, believed that Jesus was divine not by nature but by adoption. Many of them believed that this happened at his baptism, that it was at this point that God made him his son. As it turns out, there is an interesting textual variant in Luke's account of Jesus' baptism. In all three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there is a similar sequence of events: The heavens open up, the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of a dove, and a voice speaks from heaven. But what does the voice say? In both Mark and Matthew it appears to allude to Isaiah 42. In Mark it says, "You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," and in Matthew, where the voice speaks to the crowds rather than directly to Jesus, it says, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." In the oldest surviving witnesses to Luke's Gospel, however, the voice instead quotes the words of Psalm 2:7 "You are my Son, today I have begotten you" (Luke 3:22).

  For our purposes here, I am interested not in the question of what the voice really said (as if we could ever decide that on historical grounds), but in what it is reported to have said in Luke. "Today I have begotten you"? That is exactly what the adoptionists were saying, that it was at the baptism of Jesus that God made Jesus his son. No surprise then that the text came to be widely changed in the manuscripts of the New Testament. It would have been difficult for scribes to change the text into the form found in Matthew, since there the voice speaks to the crowds rather than to Jesus. The easier way to prevent the text from being (mis)used by adoptionists was to harmonize it with the text found in Mark. And so most of our manuscripts of Luke also now read, "You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." This is one proto-orthodox alteration that proved remarkably successful. Even though the potentially dangerous ("heretical") form of the text is found in virtually all our oldest witnesses and is less easy to explain as a scribal alteration, it is the altered form of the text that is found in the majority of surviving manuscripts and reproduced in most of our English translations.

  As we have seen, the key debate between the proto-orthodox and Ebionites, Theodotians, and the like was over the nature of Christ, whether he was divine or simply a man adopted, as an adult, to be in a special relationship with God. The proto-orthodox insisted that he was himself God. The original writings of the New Testament, though, rarely come out with anything so bold as a statement, "Jesus is God." And so proto-orthodox scribes copying their manuscripts occasionally modified them to clarify Jesus' divine character. A striking instance occurs in the opening lines of the Gospel of John, which speak of the "Word" of God which was in the beginning, was with God, and was itself God (1:1-2). This Word, through whom God created all things (1:3), became a human being (1:14), and was, then, of course, Jesus Christ himself, God's Word become flesh. This open hymn of praise to Christ concludes with the familiar words, "No one has seen God at any time; but the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, that one has made him known" (John 1:18).

  Quite an exalted view of Christ. He, the only Son of God, is the one who resides in God the Father's own bosom and is the one who explains God. But as exalted as the view was, it was not exalted enough for some scribes, who made a remarkable alteration of the text, so that now it says, "No one has seen God at any time; but the only God, who is in the bosom of the Father, that one has made him known." In the manuscripts that embody this change, Jesus is not simply the unique Son of God. He himself is the unique God. No ambiguity here about Jesus' divine character. This appears to be a proto-orthodox change directed against a "low" adoptionistic Christology that was not sufficiently impressed with his status as God.

  Antiseparationist Alterations

  A second kind of proto-orthodox alteration of the texts they considered Scripture is directed not against adoptionists but against Gnostics who differentiated between the man Jesus and the divine Christ. This kind of Christology could be called "separationist," in that it saw two clear and separate persons, the human being Jesus and the divine aeon Christ who temporarily dwelled in him. According to some forms of these Gnostic views, the Christ descended into Jesus at his baptism, empowering him for his ministry, and then left him prior to his death. Thus it was that the divine Christ escaped suffering. Jesus, in this view, suffered alone.

  This Gnostic understanding appears to have affected proto-orthodox scribes who occasionally altered their texts in light of the controversy. One rather peculiar example occurs in the letter of John, where the author is attacking some false teachers of his own day: "Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the Antichrist" (1 John 4:3). It may be that the author of this letter was himself counteracting some kind of "docetic" Christology, in which Jesus was understood to be so much divine that he was not at all human, that he did not really have a flesh-and-blood body ("come in the flesh"). But there is an interesting textual variant for the verse, rarely attested but evidently dating back to the second century. In this altered form of the text, we are told, "Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that looses Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the Antichrist." Every spirit that looses Jesus? What does that mean? In fact, it is a bit hard to know what it means, outside of the Gnostic controversies raging when the text first came to be altered. But within those controversies the change makes good sense. Those who "loose" Jesus are those who separate him from the Christ, claiming that there were in fact two distinct beings instead of the "one Lord Jesus Christ." The change, then, appears to be a falsification designed to attack a Gnostic kind of Christology.

  Another example of this kind of alteration occurs exactly where one might expect it, in the crucifixion scene of Mark's Gospel. We are told by Irenaeus that Mark was the Gospel of choice for those who "separate Jesus from the Christ" (Against Heresies 3.11.7). This comes as no wonder to those who know Mark's Gospel well, for in this account, at the baptism scene, the Spirit (the divine element) is actually said to enter "into" Jesus (in the Greek; Mark 1:10); and at the end of his life, on the cross, Jesus is said to cry out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"—or more literally, "Why have you left me behind?" (Mark 15:34). We know that some Gnostics interpreted the verse to indicate that the Christ had abandoned Jesus to face his death alone. The Gnostic Gospel of Philip, for example, interprets the words as follows: "It was on the cross that he said these words, for it was there that he was divided" (v. 68). Recognizing the Gnostic interpretation of the verse can help explain why it came to be changed in some manuscripts, where instead of crying out, "Why have you forsaken me?" Jesus cries, "My G
od, my God, why have you mocked me?"

  It is a fascinating change, in part because it fits so well with what has happened in Mark's passage otherwise, in that everyone else has mocked Jesus: the soldiers, the two criminals being crucified with him, those passing by. And here at the end, even God has mocked him. Still, that is not what the original text said. Almost all our manuscripts preserve the more familiar text, which is, by the way, the correct translation of the Aramaic words that are quoted in the preceding verse: "Eloi, Eloi, lema sebachthani?" Why, then, was the verse changed? Evidently because the original form of the text had proved so useful for the Gnostic interpretation of the crucifixion. And so the textual variant may have been a proto-orthodox falsification of the text.

  The change of Mark 15:34 did not make a huge impact on the manuscript tradition, since, as I have indicated, most witnesses retain the original reading. The same cannot be said of the final example I will cite, which comes not from the Gospels but from Hebrews. In a very interesting passage in this letter, the author indicates that Jesus died for all people "by the grace of God" (Heb. 2:9). Or is that what the author said? In several manuscripts, the text instead says that Jesus died "apart from God." But what would it mean to say that Jesus died "apart from God"? In Hebrews, in fact, the statement makes perfect sense, since elsewhere as well it emphasizes that Jesus experienced his suffering as a full human being without any divine succor that might have been his as God's son. He suffered just like the rest of us, apart from any divine intervention or supernatural painkiller (cf. Heb. 5:7, 12:2-3).

  But at a later time, in the second and third centuries, this kind of statement could be highly problematic, since Gnostics were saying that Jesus literally died "apart from God," in that the divine element within him had left him. Evidently, for that reason, scribes in the period modified the text to the more familiar phrase, which is common in the writings of Paul but not in this particular letter, that Jesus died by the "grace of God." Their change in this instance was remarkably successful; it is the wording you will find still in most English translations.