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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  It is important to recognize that Erasmus's edition was the editio princeps of the Greek New Testament not simply because it makes for an interesting historical tale, but even more so because, as the history of the text developed, Erasmus's editions (he made five, all based ultimately on this first rather hastily assembled one) became the standard form of the Greek text to be published by Western European printers for more than three hundred years. Numerous Greek editions followed, produced by publishers whose names are well known to scholars in this field: Stephanus (Robert Estienne), Theodore Beza, and Bonaventure and Abraham Elzevir. All these texts, however, relied more or less on the texts of their predecessors, and all those go back to the text of Erasmus, with all its faults, based on just a handful of manuscripts (sometimes just two or even one-or in parts of Revelation, none!) that had been produced relatively late in the medieval period. Printers for the most part did not search out new manuscripts that might be older and better in order to base their texts on them. Instead, they simply printed and reprinted the same text, making only minor changes. 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. There's an amusing anecdote associated with how Stephanus did his work for this edition. His son later reported that Stephanus had decided on his verse divisions (most of which are retained for us in our English translations) while making a journey on horseback. Undoubtedly he meant that his father was "working on the road"—that is, that he entered verse numbers in the evenings at the inns in which he was staying. But since his son literally says that Stephanus made these changes "while on horseback," some wry observers have suggested that he actually did his work in transit, so that whenever his horse hit an unexpected bump, Stephanus's pen jumped, accounting for some of the rather odd verse placements that we still find in our English translations of the New Testament.

  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.

  Indeed, as it turns out, these manuscripts were not of the best quality: they were, after all, produced some eleven hundred years after the originals! For example, the main manuscript that Erasmus used for the Gospels contained both the story of the woman taken in adultery in John and the last twelve verses of Mark, passages that did not originally form part of the Gospels, as we learned in the preceding chapter.

  There was one key passage of scripture that Erasmus's source manuscripts did not contain, however. This is the account of 1 John 5:7-8, which scholars have called the Johannine Comma, found in the manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate but not in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts, a passage that had long been a favorite among Christian theologians, since it is the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly delineates the doctrine of the Trinity, that there are three persons in the godhead, but that the three all constitute just one God. In the Vulgate, the passage reads:

  There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one; and there are three that bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one.

  It is a mysterious passage, but unequivocal in its support of the traditional teachings of the church on the "triune God who is one." Without this verse, the doctrine of the Trinity must be inferred from a range of passages combined to show that Christ is God, as is the Spirit and the Father, and that there is, nonetheless, only one God. This passage, in contrast, states the doctrine directly and succinctly.

  But Erasmus did not find it in his Greek manuscripts, which instead simply read: "There are three that bear witness: the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one." Where did the "Father, the Word, and the Spirit" go? They were not in Erasmus's primary manuscript, or in any of the others that he consulted, and so, naturally, he left them out of his first edition of the Greek text.

  More than anything else, it was this that outraged the theologians of his day, who accused Erasmus of tampering with the text in an attempt to eliminate the doctrine of the Trinity and to devalue its corollary, the doctrine of the full divinity of Christ. In particular, Stunica, one of the chief editors of the Complutensian Polyglot, went public with his defamation of Erasmus and insisted that in future editions he return the verse to its rightful place.

  As the story goes, Erasmus—possibly in an unguarded moment— agreed that he would insert the verse in a future edition of his Greek 82

  New Testament on one condition: that his opponents produce a Gree k manuscript in which the verse could be found (finding it in Latin manuscripts was not enough). And so a Greek manuscript was produced. In fact, it was produced for the occasion. It appears that someone copied out the Greek text of the Epistles, and when he came to the passage in question, he translated the Latin text into Greek, giving the Johannine Comma in its familiar, theologically useful form. The manuscript provided to Erasmus, in other words, was a sixteenth-century production, made to order.

  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.

  The various Greek editions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were so much alike that eventually printers could claim that they were the text that was universally accepted by all scholars and readers of the Greek New Testament—as indeed they were, since there were no competitors! The most-quoted claim is found in an edition produced in 1633 by Abraham and Bonaventure Elzevir (who were uncle and nephew), in which they told their readers, in words that have since become famous among scholars, that "You now have the text that is received by all, in which we have given nothing changed or corrupted."8 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.

  Mill's Apparatus of the Greek New Testament

  The text of the Greek New Testament, then, appeared to be on solid footing to most schol
ars who could avail themselves of the printed editions throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After all, nearly all the editions were the same in their wording. Occasionally, though, scholarship was devoted to finding and noting that the Greek manuscripts varied from the text as it was familiarly printed. We have seen that Stephanus, in his edition of 1550, included marginal notes identifying places of variation among several manuscripts he had looked at (fourteen altogether). Somewhat later, in the seventeenth century, editions were published by English scholars such as Brian Walton and John Fell who took the variations in the surviving (and available) manuscripts more seriously. But almost no one recognized the enormity of the problem of textual variation until the groundbreaking publication in 1707 of one of the classics in the field of New Testament textual criticism, a book that had a cataclysmic effect on the study of the transmission of the Greek New Testament, opening the floodgates that compelled scholars to take the textual situation of our New Testament manuscripts seriously.9

  This was an edition of the Greek New Testament by John Mill, fellow of Queens College, Oxford. Mill had invested thirty years of hard work amassing the materials for his edition. The text that he printed was simply the 1550 edition of Stephanus; what mattered for Mill's publication was not the text he used, but the variant readings/row that text that he cited in a critical apparatus. Mill had access to the readings of some one hundred Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. In addition, he carefully examined the writings of the early church fathers to see how they quoted the text—on the assumption that one could reconstruct the manuscripts available to those fathers by examining their quotations. Moreover, even though he could not read many of the other ancient languages, except for Latin, he used an earlier edition published by Walton to see where the early versions in languages such as Syriac and Coptic differed from the Greek.

  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?

  The Controversy Created by Mill's Apparatus

  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. The most scathing attack came three years later in a learned volume by a controversialist named Daniel Whitby, who in 1710 published a set of notes on the interpretation of the New Testament, to which he added an appendix of one hundred pages examining, in great detail, the variants cited by Mill in his apparatus. 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."10

  Whitby goes on to suggest that Roman Catholic scholars—whom he calls "the Papists"—would be all too happy to be able to show, on the basis of the insecure foundations of the Greek text of the New Testament, that scripture was not a sufficient authority for the faith— that is, that the authority of the church instead is paramount. As he states: "Morinus [a Catholic scholar] argued for a depravation of the Greek Text which would render its authority insecure from the variety of readings which he found in the Greek Testament of R. Stephens [= Stephanus]; what triumphs then will the Papists have over the same text when they see the variations quadrupled by Mill after sweating for thirty years at the work?"11 Whitby proceeds to argue that, in fact, the text of the New Testament is secure, since scarcely any variant cited by 86

  Mill involves an article of faith or question of conduct, and the vast majority of Mill's variants have no claim to authenticity.

  Whitby may have intended his refutation to have its effect without anyone actually reading it; it is a turgid, dense, unappealing one hundred pages of close argumentation, which tries to make its point simply through the accumulated mass of its refutation.

  Whitby's defense might well have settled the issue had it not been taken up by those who used Mill's thirty thousand places of variation precisely to the end that Whitby feared, to argue that the text of scripture could not be trusted because it was in itself so insecure. Chief among those who argued the point was the English deist Anthony Collins, a friend and follower of John Locke, who in 1713 wrote a pamphlet called Discourse on Free Thinking. The work was typical of early-eighteenth-century deistic thought: it urged the primacy of logic and evidence over revelation (e.g., in the Bible) and claims of the miraculous. In section 2 of the work, which deals with "Religious Questions," Collins notes, in the midst of a myriad of other things, that even the Christian clergy (i.e., Mill) have been "owning and labouring to prove the Text of the Scripture to be precarious," making reference then to Mill's thirty thousand variants.

  Collins's pamphlet, which was widely read and influential, provoked a number of pointed responses, many of them dull and laborious, some of them learned and indignant. Arguably its most significant result was that it drew into the fray a scholar of enormous international reputation, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Richard Bentley. Bentley is renowned for his work on classical authors such as Homer, Horace, and Terence. In a reply to both Whitby and Collins, written under the pseudonym Phileleutherus Lipsiensis (which means something like "the lover of freedom from Leipzig"—an obvious allusion to Collins's urging of "free thinking"), Bentley made the obvious point that the variant readings that Mill had accumulated could not render the foundation of the Protestant faith insecure, since the readings existed even before Mill had noticed them. He didn't invent them; he only pointed them out!

  [I ]f we are to believe not only this wise Author [Collins] but a wiser Doctor of your own [Whitby], He [Mill] was labouring all that while, to prove the Text of the Scripture precarious.... For what is it, that your Whitbyus so inveighs and exclaims at? The Doctor's Labours, says he, make the whole Text precarious; and expose both the Reformation to the Papists, and Religion itself to the Atheists. God forbid! We'll still hope better things. For sure those Various Readings existed before in the several Exemplars; 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 e very body sees them. Depend on't; no Truth, no matter of Fact fairly laid open, can ever subvert true Religion.12

  Bentley, an expert in the textual traditions of the classics, goes on to point out that one would expect to find a multitude of textual variants whenever one unco
vers a large number of manuscripts. If there were only one manuscript of a work, there would be no textual variants. Once a second manuscript is located, however, it will differ from the first in a number of places. This is not a bad thing, however, as a number of these variant readings will show where the first manuscript has preserved an error. Add a third manuscript, and you will find additional variant readings, but also additional places, as a result, where the original text is preserved (i.e., where the first two manuscripts agree in an error). And so it goes—the more manuscripts one discovers, the more the variant readings; but also the more the likelihood that somewhere among those variant readings one will be able to uncover the original text. Therefore, the thirty thousand variants uncovered by Mill do not detract from the integrity of the New Testament; they simply provide the data that scholars need to work on to establish the text, a text that is more amply documented than any other from the ancient world.

  As we will see in the next chapter, this controversy over Mill's publication eventually induced Bentley to turn his remarkable powers of intellect to the problem of establishing the oldest available text of the New Testament. Before moving to that discussion, however, perhaps we should take a step back and consider where we are today vis-à-vis Mill's astonishing discovery of thirty thousand variations in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.

  Our Current Situation

  Whereas Mill knew of or examined some one hundred Greek manuscripts to uncover his thirty thousand variations, today we know of far, far more. At last count, more than fifty-seven hundred Greek manuscripts have been discovered and catalogued. That's fifty-seven times as many as Mill knew about in 1707. These fifty-seven hundred include everything from the smallest fragments of manuscripts—the size of a credit card—to very large and magnificent productions, preserved in their entirety. Some of them contain only one book of the New Testament; others contain a small collection (for example, the four Gospels or the letters of Paul); a very few contain the entire New Testament.13 There are, in addition, many manuscripts of the various early versions (= translations) of the New Testament.