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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  In short, Mark may well have intended to bring his reader up short with this abrupt ending—a clever way to make the reader stop, take a faltering breath, and ask: What?

  Conclusion

  The passages discussed above represent just two out of thousands of places in which the manuscripts of the New Testament came to be changed by scribes. In both of the examples, we are dealing with additions that scribes made to the text, additions of sizable length.

  Although most of the changes are not of this magnitude, there are lots of significant changes (and lots more insignificant ones) in our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. In the chapters that follow we will want to see how scholars began to discover these changes and how they developed methods for figuring out what the oldest form of the text (or the "original" text) is; we will especially like to see more examples of where this text has been changed—and how these changes affected our English translations of the Bible.

  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.

  This is obviously a crucial task, since we can't interpret the words of the New Testament if we don't know what the words were. Moreover, as I hope should be clear by now, knowing the words is important not just for those who consider the words divinely inspired. It is important for anyone who thinks of the New Testament as a significant book. And surely everyone interested in the history, society, and culture of Western civilization thinks so, because the New Testament, if nothing else, is an enormous cultural artifact, a book that is revered by millions and that lies at the foundation of the largest religion of the world today.

  < Early sixteenth century engraving of Albrecht Duerer depicting Desiderus Erasmus, the famous humanist of Rotterdam who produced the first published edition of the Greek New Testament. >

  CHAPTER 3 Texts of the New Testament: Editions, Manuscripts, and Differences

  The copying practices we have considered thus far have been principally those of the first three centuries of Christianity, when most of the copyists of the Christian texts were not professionals trained for the job but simply literate Christians of this or that congregation, able to read and write and so called upon to reproduce the texts of the community in their spare time.1 Because they were not highly trained to perform this kind of work, they were more prone to make mistakes than professional scribes would have been. This explains why our earliest copies of the early Christian writings tend to vary more frequently from one another and from later copies than do the later copies (say, of the high Middle Ages) from one another. Eventually a kind of professional scribal class came to be a part of the Christian intellectual landscape, and with the advent of professional scribes came more controlled copying practices, in which mistakes were made much less frequently. Before that happened, during the early centuries of the church, Christian texts were copied in whatever location they were written or taken to. Since texts were copied locally, it is no surprise that different localities developed different kinds of textual tradition. That is to say, the manuscripts in Rome had many of the same errors, because they were for the most part "in-house" documents, copied from one another; they were not influenced much by manuscripts being copied in Palestine; and those in Palestine took on their own characteristics, which were not the same as those found in a place like Alexandria, Egypt. Moreover, in the early centuries of the church, some locales had better scribes than others. Modern scholars have come to recognize that the scribes in Alexandria—which was a major intellectual center in the ancient world—were particularly scrupulous, even in these early centuries, and that there, in Alexandria, a very pure form of the text of the early Christian writings was preserved, decade after decade, by dedicated and relatively skilled Christian scribes.

  Professional Christian Scribes

  When did the church begin to use professional scribes to copy its texts? There are good reasons for thinking that this happened sometime near the beginning of the fourth century. Until then, Christianity was a small, minority religion in the Roman Empire, often opposed, sometimes persecuted. But a cataclysmic change occurred when the emperor of Rome, Constantine, converted to the faith about 312 C.E. Suddenly Christianity shifted from being a religion of social outcasts, persecuted by local mobs and imperial authorities alike, to being a major player in the religious scene of the empire. Not only were persecutions halted, but favors began to pour out upon the church from the greatest power in the Western world. Massive conversions resulted, as it became a popular thing to be a follower of Christ in an age in which the emperor himself publicly proclaimed his allegiance to Christianity.

  More and more highly educated and trained persons converted to the faith. They, naturally, were the ones most suited to copy the texts of the Christian tradition. There are reasons to suppose that about this time Christian scriptoria arose in major urban areas.2 A scriptorium is a place for the professional copying of manuscripts. We have hints of Christian scriptoria functioning by the early part of the fourth century. In 331 C.E. the emperor Constantine, wanting magnificent Bibles to be made available to major churches he was having built, wrote a request to the bishop of Caesarea, Eusebius,3 to have fifty Bibles produced at imperial expense. Eusebius treated this request with all the pomp and respect it deserved, and saw that it was carried out. Obviously, an accomplishment of this magnitude required a professional scriptorium, not to mention the materials needed for making lavish copies of the Christian scriptures. We are clearly in a different age from just a century or two earlier when local churches would simply request that one of their members cobble together enough free time to make a copy of a text.

  Starting in the fourth century, then, copies of scripture began to be made by professionals; this naturally curtailed significantly the number of errors that crept into the text. Eventually, as the decades grew into centuries, the copying of the Greek scriptures became the charge of monks working out of monasteries, who spent their days copying the sacred texts carefully and conscientiously. This practice continued on down through the Middle Ages, right up to the time of the invention of printing with moveable type in the fifteenth century. The great mass of our surviving Greek manuscripts come from the pens of these medieval Christian scribes who lived and worked in the East (for example, in areas that are now Turkey and Greece), known as the Byzantine Empire. For this reason, Greek manuscripts from the seventh century onward are sometimes labeled "Byzantine" manuscripts.

  As I have pointed out, anyone familiar with the manuscript tradition of the New Testament knows that these Byzantine copies of the text tend to be very similar to one another, whereas the earliest copies vary significantly both among themselves and from the form of text found in these later copies. The reason for this should now be clear: it had to do with who was copying the texts (professionals) and where they were working (in a relatively constricted area). It would be a grave mistake, though, to think that because later manuscripts agree so extensively with one another, they are therefore our superior witnesses to the "original" text of the New Testament. For one must always ask: where did these medieval scribes get the texts they copied in so professional a manner? They got them from earlier texts, which were copies of yet earlier texts, which were themselves copies of still earlier texts. Therefore, the texts that are closest in form to the originals are, perhaps unexpectedly, the more variable and amateurish copies of early times, not the more standardized professional copies of later times.

  The Latin Vulgate

  The copying practi
ces I have been summarizing principally involve the eastern part of the Roman Empire, where Greek was, and continued to be, the principal language. It was not long, however, before Christians in non-Greek-speaking regions wanted the Christian sacred texts in their own, local languages. Latin, of course, was the language of much of the western part of the empire; Syriac was spoken in Syria; Coptic in Egypt. In each of these areas, the books of the New Testament came to be translated into the indigenous languages, probably sometime in the mid to late second century. And then these translated texts were themselves copied by scribes in their locales.4

  Particularly important for the history of the text were the translations into Latin, because a very large number of Christians in the West had this as their principal language. Problems emerged very soon, however, with the Latin translations of scripture, because there were so many of them and these translations differed broadly from one another. The problem came to a head near the end of the fourth Christian century, when Pope Damasus commissioned the greatest scholar of his day, Jerome, to produce an "official" Latin translation that could be accepted by all Latin-speaking Christians, in Rome and elsewhere, as an authoritative text. Jerome himself speaks of the plethora of available translations, and set himself to resolving the problem. Choosing one of the best Latin translations available, and comparing its text with the superior Greek manuscripts at his disposal, Jerome created a new edition of the Gospels in Latin. It may be that he, or one of his followers, was also responsible for the new edition of the other books of the New Testament in Latin.5

  This form of the Bible in Latin—Jerome's translation—came to be known as the Vulgate (= Common) Bible of Latin-speaking Christendom. This was the Bible for the Western church, itself copied and recopied many times over. It was the book that Christians read, scholars studied, and theologians used for centuries, down to the modern period. Today there are nearly twice as many copies of the Latin Vulgate as there are Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.

  The First Printed Edition of the Greek New Testament

  As I have indicated, the text of the New Testament was copied in a fairly standardized form throughout the centuries of the Middle Ages, both in the East (the Byzantine text) and in the West (the Latin Vulgate). It was the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century by Johannes Gutenberg (1400-1468) that changed everything for the reproduction of books in general and the books of the Bible in particular. By printing books with moveable type, one could guarantee that every page looked exactly like every other page, with no variations of any kind in the wording. Gone were the days when transcribers would each produce different copies of the same text by means of accidental and intentional alterations. What was set in print was set in stone. Moreover, books could be made far more rapidly: no longer did they need to be copied one letter at a time. And, as a result, they could be made much more cheaply. Scarcely anything has made a more revolutionary impact on the modern world than the printing press; the next closest thing (which may, eventually, surpass it in significance) is the advent of the personal computer.

  The first major work to be printed on Gutenberg's press was a magnificent edition of the Latin (Vulgate) Bible, which took all of 1450-56 to produce.6 In the half century that followed, some fifty editions of the Vulgate were produced at various printing houses in Europe. It may seem odd that there was no impulse to produce a copy of the Gree k New Testament in those early years of printing. But the reason is not hard to find: it is the one already alluded to. Scholars throughout Europe—including biblical scholars—had been accustomed for nearly a thousand years to thinking that Jerome's Vulgate was the Bible of the church (somewhat like some modern churches assume that the King James Version is the "true" Bible). The Greek Bible was thought of as foreign to theology and learning; in the Latin West, it was thought of as belonging to the Greek Orthodox Christians, who were considered to be schismatics who had branched off from the true church. Few scholars in Western Europe could even read Greek. And so, at first, no one felt compelled to put the Greek Bible in print.

  The first Western scholar to conceive the idea of producing a version of the Greek New Testament was a Spanish cardinal named Ximenes de Cisneros (1437-1517). Under his leadership, a group of scholars, including one named Diego Lopez de Zuniga (Stunica), undertook a multivolume edition of the Bible. This was a polyglot edition; that is, it reproduced the text of the Bible in a variety of languages. And so, the Old Testament was represented by the original Hebrew, the Latin Vulgate, and the Greek Septuagint, side by side in columns. (What these editors thought of the superiority of the Vulgate can be seen in their comments on this arrangement in their preface: they likened it to Christ—represented by the Vulgate—being crucified between two criminals, the false Jews represented by the Hebrew and the schismatic Greeks represented by the Septuagint.)

  The work was printed in a town called Alcala, whose Latin name is Complutum. For this reason, Ximenes's edition is known as the Complutensian Polyglot. The New Testament volume was the first to be printed (volume 5, completed in 1514); it contained the Greek text and included a Greek dictionary with Latin equivalents. But there was no plan to publish this volume separately—all six volumes (the sixth included a Hebrew grammar and dictionary, to assist in the reading of volumes 1-4) were to be published together, and this took considerable time. The entire work was finished, evidently, by 1517; but as this was a Catholic production, it needed the sanction of the pope, Leo X, before it could appear. This was finally obtained in 1520, but because of other complications, the book did not come to be distributed until 1522, some five years after Ximenes himself had died.

  As we have seen, by this time there were many hundreds of Greek manuscripts (i.e., handwritten copies) available to Christian churches and scholars in the East. How did Stunica and his fellow editors decide which of these manuscripts to use, and which manuscripts were actually available to them? Unfortunately, these are questions that scholars have never been able to answer with confidence. In the Dedication of the work, Ximenes expresses his gratitude to Pope Leo X for Greek copies lent "from the Apostolical Library." And so the manuscripts for the edition may have come from the Vatican's holdings. Some scholars, however, have suspected that manuscripts available locally were used. About 250 years after the production of the Complutum, a Danish scholar named Moldenhawer visited Alcala to survey their library resources in order to answer the question, but he could find no manuscripts of the Greek New Testament at all. Suspecting that the library must have had some such manuscripts at some point, he made persistent inquiries until he was finally told by the librarian that the library had indeed previously contained ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, but that in 1749 all of them had been sold to a rocket maker named Toryo "as useless parchments" (but suitable for making fireworks).

  Later scholars have tried to discredit this account.7 At the very least, though, it shows that the study of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament is not rocket science.

  The First Published Edition of the Greek New Testament

  Even though the Complutensian Polyglot was the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament, it was not the first published version. As we have seen, the Complutum had been printed by 1514, but it did not see the light of published day until 1522. Between those two dates an enterprising Dutch scholar, the humanist intellectual Desiderius Erasmus, both produced and published an edition of the Greek New Testament, receiving the honor, then, of editing the so-called editio princeps (= first published edition). 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, a
lthough 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, 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.

  The printing of Erasmus's edition began in October 1515 and was finished in just five months. The edition included the rather hastily gathered Greek text and a revised version of the Latin Vulgate, side by side (in the second and later editions, Erasmus included his own Latin translation of the text in lieu of the Vulgate, much to the consternation of many theologians of the day, who still considered the Vulgate to be "the" Bible of the church). The book was a large one, nearly a thousand pages. Even so, as Erasmus himself later said, it was "rushed out rather than edited" (in his Latin phrasing: praecipitatum verius quam editum).