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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  These manuscripts range in date from the early second century (a small fragment called P52, which has several verses from John 18) down to the sixteenth century.14 They vary greatly in size: some are small copies that could fit in the hand, such as Coptic copy of Matthew's Gospel, called the Scheide Codex, which measures 4x5 inches; others are very large and impressive copies, among them the previously mentioned Codex Sinaiticus, which measures 15 x 13.5 inches, making an impressive spread when opened up completely. Some of these manuscripts are inexpensive, hastily produced copies; some were actually copied onto reused pages (a document was erased and the text of the New Testament was written over the top of the erased pages); others are enormously lavish and expensive copies, including some written on purple-dyed parchment with silver or gold ink.

  As a rule, scholars speak of four kinds of Greek manuscripts.15 (1) The oldest are papyrus manuscripts, written on material manufactured from the papyrus reed, a valuable but inexpensive and efficient writing material in the ancient world; they date from the second to the seventh centuries. (2) The majuscule (= large-lettered) manuscripts are made of parchment (= animal skins; sometimes called vellum) and are named after the large letters, somewhat like our capital letters, that are used; these date, for the most part, from the fourth to the ninth centuries. (3) Minuscule (= small-lettered) manuscripts are also made of parchment but are written in smaller letters that are frequently combined (without the pen leaving the page) into what looks something like the Greek equivalent of cursive writing; these date from the ninth century onward. (4) Lectionaries are usually minuscule in form as well, but instead of consisting of the books of the New Testament, they contain, in a set order, "readings" taken from the New Testament to be used in church each week or on each holiday (like the lectionaries used in churches today).

  In addition to these Greek manuscripts, we know of about ten thousand manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate, not to mention the manuscripts of other versions, such as the Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Old Georgian, Church Slavonic, and the like (recall that Mill had access to only a few of the ancient versions, and these he knew only through their Latin translations). In addition, we have the writings of church fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius among the Greeks and Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine among the Latins—all of them quoting the texts of the New Testament in places, making it possible to reconstruct what their manuscripts (now lost, for the most part) must have looked like.

  With this abundance of evidence, what can we say about the total number of variants known today? 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.

  Kinds of Changes in Our Manuscripts

  If we have trouble talking about the numbers of changes that still survive, what can we say about the kinds of changes found in these manuscripts? 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.

  And so, it might be worthwhile to end this chapter with a few examples of each kind of change. I will start by pointing out some kinds of "accidental" variants.

  Accidental Changes

  Accidental slips of the pen16 no doubt were exacerbated, as we have seen, by the fact that Greek manuscripts were all written in scriptuo continua —with no punctuation, for the most part, or even spaces between words. This means that words that looked alike were often mistaken for one another. 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 PONERAS in Greek, which, it turns out, looks a lot like the word for "sexual immorality," PORNEIAS. The difference in meaning may not be overwhelming, but it is striking that in a couple of surviving manuscripts, Paul explicitly warns not against evil in general, but against sexual vice in particular.

  This kind of spelling mistake was made even more likely by the circumstance that scribes sometimes abbreviated certain words to save time or space. The Greek word for "and," for example, is KAI, for which some scribes simply wrote the initial letter K, with a kind of downstroke at the end to indicate that it was an abbreviation. Other common abbreviations involved what scholars have called the nomina sacra (= sacred names), a group of words such as God, Christ, Lord, Jesus, and Spirit that were abbreviated either because they occurred so frequently or else to show that they were being paid special attention. These various abbreviations sometimes led to confusion for later scribes, who mistook one abbreviation for another or misread an abbreviation as a full word. So, for example, in Rom. 12:11, Paul urges his reader to "serve the Lord." But the word Lord, KURIW, was typically abbreviated in manuscripts as KW (with a line drawn over the top), which some early scribes misread as an abbreviation for KAIRW, which means "time." And so in those manuscripts, Paul exhorts his readers to "serve the time."

  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. This kind of mistake is called periblepsis (an "eye-skip") occasioned by homoeoteleuton (the "same endings"). I teach my students that they can lay claim to a university education when they can speak intelligently about periblepsis occasioned by homoeoteleuton.

  How this works can be illustrated by the text of Luke 12:8-9, which reads:

  Whoever confesses me before humans, the son of man will confess before the angels of God 9But whoever denies me before humans will be denied before the angels of God

  Our earliest papyrus manuscript of the passage leaves off all of verse 9; and it is not difficult to see how the mistake was made. The scribe copied the words "before the angels of God" in verse 8, and when his eye returned to the page, he picked up the same words in verse 9 and assumed those were the words just copied—and so he proceeded to copy verse 10, leaving out verse 9 altogether.

  Sometimes this kind of error can be even more disastrous to the meaning of a text. In John 17:15, for example, Jesus says in his prayer to God about his followers:

  I do not as k 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"!

  Sometimes accidental mistakes were made not because words looked alike, but because they sounded alike. This could happen, for example, when a scribe was copying a text by dictation—when one scribe would be reading from a manuscript and one or more other scribes would be copying the words into
new manuscripts, as sometimes happened in scriptoria after the fourth century. If two words were pronounced the same, then the scribe doing the copying might inadvertently use the wrong one in his copy, especially if it made perfectly good (but wrong) sense. This appears to be what happened, for example, in Rev. 1:5, where the author prays to "the one who released us from our sins." The word for "released" (LUSANTI) sounds exactly like the word for "washed" (LOUSANTI), and so it is no surprise that in a number of medieval manuscripts the author prays to the one "who washed us from our sins."

  Another example occurs in Paul's letter to the Romans, where Paul states that "since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God" (Rom. 5:1). Or is that what he said? The word for "we have peace," a statement of fact, sounded exactly like the word "let us have peace," an exhortation. And so in a large number of manuscripts, including some of our earliest, Paul doesn't rest assured that he and his followers have peace with God, he urges himself and others to seek peace. This is a passage for which textual scholars have difficulty deciding which reading is the correct one.17

  In other cases there is little ambiguity, because the textual change, while understandable, actually makes for nonsense instead of sense. This happens a lot, and often for some of the reasons we have been discussing. As an example, in John 5:39, Jesus tells his opponents to "search the scriptures ... for they bear witness to me." In one early manuscript, the final verb was changed to one that sounds similar but makes no sense in the context. In that manuscript Jesus says to "search the scriptures ... for they are sinning against me"! A second example comes from the book of Revelation, where the prophet has a vision of the throne of God, around which there "was a rainbow that looked like an emerald" (1:3). In some of our earliest manuscripts there is a change, in which, odd as it might seem, we are told that around the throne "were priests that looked like an emerald"!

  Of all the many thousands of accidental mistakes made in our manuscripts, probably the most bizarre is one that occurs in a minuscule manuscript of the four Gospels officially numbered 109, which was produced in the fourteenth century.18 Its peculiar error occurs in Luke, chapter 3, in the account of Jesus's genealogy. The scribe was evidently copying a manuscript that gave the genealogy in two columns.

  For some reason, he did not copy one column at a time, but copied across the two columns. As a result, the names of the genealogy are thrown out of whack, with most people being called the sons of the wrong father. Worse still, the second column of the text the scribe was copying did not have as many lines as the first, so that now, in the copy he made, the father of the human race (i.e., the last one mentioned) is not God but an Israelite named Phares; and God himself is said to be the son of a man named Aram!

  Intentional Changes

  In some respects, the changes we have been looking at are the easiest to spot and eliminate when trying to establish the earliest form of the text. 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.

  In a remarkable number of instances—most of them, actually— scholars by and large agree. It is perhaps useful for us here to consider an array of the kinds of intentional changes one finds among our manuscripts, as these can show us the reasons scribes had for making alterations.

  Sometimes scribes changed their texts because they thought the text contained a factual error. This appears to be the case at the very beginning of Mark, where the author introduces his Gospel by saying, "fust as is written in Isaiah the prophet, 'Behold I am sending a messenger before your face.... Make straight his paths.'" The problem is that the beginning of the quotation is not from Isaiah at all but represents a combination of a passage from Exod. 23:20 and one from

  Mal. 3:1. Scribes recognized that this was a difficulty and so changed the text, making it say, "Just as is written in the prophets.... " Now there is no problem with a misattribution of the quotation. But there can be little doubt concerning what Mark originally wrote: the attribution to Isaiah is found in our earliest and best manuscripts.

  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

  In other cases scribes changed a text not because they thought that it contained a mistake but because they wanted to circumvent a misunderstanding of it. An example is Matt. 17:12-13, in which Jesus identifies John the Baptist as Elijah, the prophet to come at the end of time:

  "I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but did to him as much as they wished. Thus also the Son of Man is about to suffer by them." Then his disciples realized that he was speaking to them about John the Baptist.

  The potential problem is that, as it reads, the text could be interpreted to mean not that John the Baptist was Elijah, but that he was the Son of Man. Scribes knew full well this was not the case, and so some of them switched the text around, making the statement "his disciples realized that he was speaking to them about John the Baptist" occur before the statement about the Son of Man.

  Sometimes scribes changed their text for more patently theological reasons, to make sure that the text could not be used by "heretics" or to ensure that it said what it was already supposed (by the scribes) to mean. There are numerous instances of this kind of change, which we will consider at greater length in a later chapter. For now I will simply point out a couple of brief examples.

  In the second century there were Christians who firmly believed that the salvation brought by Christ was a completely new thing, superior to anything the world had ever seen and certainly superior to the religion of Judaism from which Christianity had emerged. Some Christians went so far as to insist that Judaism, the old religion of the Jews, had been completely circumvented by the appearance of Christ. 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.

  Sometimes scribes altered their text to ensure that a favorite doctrine was duly emphasized. 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 t
he 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!

  On occasion scribes modified their texts not because of theology but for liturgical reasons. As the ascetic tradition strengthened in early Christianity, it is not surprising to find this having an impact on scribal changes to the text. For example, in Mark 9, when Jesus casts out a demon that his disciples had been unable to budge, he tells them, "This kind comes out only by prayer" (Mark 9:29). Later scribes made the appropriate addition, in view of their own practices, so that now Jesus indicates that "This kind comes out only by prayer and fasting."

  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.