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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  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.

  Sometimes scribes were influenced not by parallel passages but by oral traditions then in circulation about Jesus and the stories told about him. We have already seen this in a big way in the case of the woman taken in adultery and the last twelve verses of Mark. In smaller cases as well, we can see how oral traditions affected the written texts of the Gospels. One outstanding example is the memorable story in John 5 of Jesus healing an invalid by the pool of Bethzatha. We are told at the beginning of the story that a number of people—invalids, blind, lame, and paralyzed—lay beside this pool, and that Jesus singled out one man, who had been there for thirty-eight years, for healing. When he asks the man if he would like to be healed, the man replies that there is no one who can place him in the pool, so that "when the water is troubled" someone always beats him into it.

  In our oldest and best manuscripts there is no explanation for why this man would want to enter the pool once the waters became disturbed, but the oral tradition supplied the lack in an addition to verses 3-4 found in many of our later manuscripts. There we are told that "an angel would at times descend into the pool and disturb the water; and the first to descend after the water was disturbed would be healed."21 A nice touch to an already intriguing story.

  Conclusion

  We could go on nearly forever talking about specific places in which the texts of the New Testament came to be changed, either accidentally or intentionally. As I have indicated, the examples are not just in the hundreds but in the thousands. The examples given are enough to convey the general point, however: there are lots of differences among our manuscripts, differences created by scribes who were reproducing their sacred texts. In the early Christian centuries, scribes were amateurs and as such were more inclined to alter the texts they copied—or more prone to alter them accidentally—than were scribes in the later periods who, starting in the fourth century, began to be professionals.

  It is important to see what kinds of changes, both accidental and intentional, scribes were susceptible of making, because then it is easier to spot the changes and we can eliminate some of the guesswork involved in determining which form of the text represents an alteration and which represents its earliest form. It is also important to see how modern scholars have devised methods for making this kind of determination. In the next chapter we will trace some of that story, starting from the time of John Mill and carrying it down to the present, seeing the methods that have developed for reconstructing the text of the New Testament and for recognizing the ways that it came to be changed in the process of its transmission.

  < The final page of the Gospel of John in the famous Codex Sinaiticus, found in the nineteenth century by the determined discoverer of manuscripts, Tischendorf in St. Catherine's monastery on Mount Sinai.>

  CHAPTER 4 The Quest for Origins - Methods and Discoveries

  As we have seen, long before Mill published his edition of the Greek New Testament with its notation of thirty thousand places of variation among the surviving witnesses, some (few) scholars had recognized that there was a problem with the New Testament text. 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.

  The problem lay dormant, however, through the Middle Ages and down to the seventeenth century, when Mill and others started to deal with it seriously.1 While Mill was in the process of compiling the data for his landmark edition of 1707, 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 French author who pursued these thoughts in a series of significant publications was Richard Simon (1638-1712).

  Richard Simon

  Although Simon was principally a Hebrew scholar, he worked on the textual tradition of both the Old and the New Testaments. His magisterial study, A Critical History of the Text of the New Testament, appeared in 1689 while Mill was still laboring to uncover variants in the textual tradition; Mill had access to this work and, in the opening discussion of his 1707 edition, acknowledges its erudition and importance for his own investigations even while disagreeing with its theological conclusions.

  Simon's book is devoted not to uncovering every available variant reading but to discussing textual differences in the tradition, in order to show the uncertainty of the text in places and to argue, at times, for the superiority of the Latin Bible, still held to be the authoritative text by Catholic theologians. He is all too familiar with key textual problems. He discusses at length, for example, a number of the ones we have examined ourselves to this point: the woman taken in adultery, the last twelve verses of Mark, and the Johannine Comma (which explicitly affirms the doctrine of the Trinity). Throughout his discussion he strives to show that it was Jerome who provided the church with a text that could be used as the basis for theological reflection. As he says in the preface to part 1 of his work:

  St. Jerome has done the Church no small Service, in Correcting and Reviewing the ancient Latin Copies, according to the strictest Rules of Criticism. This we endeavor to demonstrate in this wor k, and that the most ancient Greek Exemplars of the New Testament are not the best, since they are suited to those Latin Copies, which St. Jerome found so degenerous as to need an Alteration.2

  This is at heart a clever argument, which we will meet again: the oldest Greek manuscripts are unreliable because they are precisely the degenerate copies that Jerome had to revise in order to establish the superior text; surviving Greek copies produced before Jerome's day, even though they may be our earliest copies, are not to be trusted.

  As clever as the argument is, it has never won widespread support among textual critics. In effect, it is simply a declaration that our oldest surviving manuscripts cannot be trusted, but the revision of those manuscripts can. On what grounds, though, did Jerome revise his text? On the grounds of earlier manuscripts. Even he trusted the earlier record of the text. For us not to do likewise would be a giant step backward—even given the diversity of the textual tradition in the early centuries.

  In any event, in pursuing his case, Simon argues that all manuscripts embody textual alterations, but especially the Greek ones (here we may have more polemic against "Greek schismatics" from the "true" church).

  There would not be at this day any Copy even of the New Testament, either Gree k, Latin, Syriack, or Arabick, that might be truly called authentic, because there is not one, in whatsoever Language it be written, that is absolutely exempt from Additions. I might also avouch,

  that the Gree k Transcribers have taken a very great liberty in writing their Copies, as shall be proved in another place?

  Simon's theological agenda for such observations is clear throughout his long treatise. At one point he asks rhetorically:

 
Is it possible... that God hath given to his church Boo ks to serve her for a Rule, and that he hath at the same time permitted that the first Originals of these Books should be lost ever since the beginning of the Christian Religion?1'

  His answer, of course, is no. The scriptures do provide a foundation for the faith, but it is not the books themselves that ultimately matter (since they have, after all, been changed over time), but the interpretation of these books, as found in the apostolic tradition handed down through the (Catholic) church.

  Although the Scriptures are a sure Rule on which our Faith is founded, yet this Rule is not altogether sufficient of itself; it is necessary to know, besides this, what are the Apostolical Traditions; and we cannot learn them but from the Apostolical Churches, who have preserved the true Sense of Scriptures.5

  Simon's anti-Protestant conclusions become even clearer in some of his other writings. For example, in a work dealing with the "principal commentators on the New Testament," he is forthright in stating:

  The great changes that have ta ken 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 booths that have been subjected to so many changes and that in so many matters were dependent on the will of the copyists?

  This kind of intellectually rigorous attack on the Protestant understanding of scripture was taken quite seriously in the halls of academe.

  Once Mill's edition appeared in 1707, Protestant biblical scholars were driven by the nature of their materials to reconsider and defend their understanding of the faith. They could not, of course, simply do away with the notion of sola scriptura. For them, the words of the Bible continued to convey the authority of the Word of God. But how does one deal with the circumstance that in many instances we don't know what those words were? One solution was to develop methods of textual criticism that would enable modern scholars to reconstruct the original words, so that the foundation of faith might once again prove to be secure. It was this theological agenda that lay behind much of the effort, principally in England and Germany, to devise competent and reliable methods of reconstructing the original words of the New Testament from the numerous, error-ridden copies of it that happened to survive.

  Richard Bentley

  As we have seen, Richard Bentley, the classical scholar and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, turned his renowned intellect to the problems of the New Testament textual tradition in response to the negative reactions elicited by the publication of Mill's Greek New Testament with its massive collection of textual variation among the manuscripts.7 Bentley's response to the deist Collins, A Reply to a Treatise of Free-Thinking, proved to be very popular and went through eight editions. His overarching view was that thirty thousand variations in the Greek New Testament were not too many to expect from a textual tradition endowed with such a wealth of materials, and that Mill could scarcely be faulted for undermining the truth of the Christian religion when he had not invented these places of variation but simply observed them.

  Eventually Bentley himself became interested in working on the New Testament textual tradition, and once he turned his mind to it, he concluded that he could in fact make significant progress in establishing the original text in the majority of places where textual variation existed. 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), which would have been the form of the text promulgated in the preceding centuries by the great textual scholar of antiquity, Origen, many centuries before the vast majority of textual variations (Bentley believed) had come to corrupt the tradition.

  Bentley was never one given over to false modesty. As he claims in this letter:

  I find I am able (what some thought impossible) to give an edition of the Gree k Testament exactly as it was in the best exemplars at the time of the Council of Nice; so that there shall not be twenty words, nor even particles, difference... so that that book which, by the present management, is thought the most uncertain, shall have a testimony of certainty above all other books whatever, and an end be put at once to all Various Lections [i.e., variant readings] now and hereafter.8

  Bentley's method of proceeding was rather straightforward. He had decided to collate (i.e., to compare in detail) the text of the most important Greek manuscript of the New Testament in England, the early-fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus, with the oldest available copies of the Latin Vulgate. What he found was a wide range of remarkable coincidences of readings, in which these manuscripts agreed time and again with each other but against the bulk of Greek manuscripts transcribed in the Middle Ages. The agreements extended even to such matters as word order, where the various manuscripts differed. Bentley was convinced, then, that he could edit both the Latin Vulgate and the Greek New Testament to arrive at the most ancient forms of these texts, so that there would be scarcely any doubt concerning their earliest reading. Mill's thirty thousand places of variation would thereby become a near irrelevancy to those invested in the authority of the text. The logic behind the method was simple: if, in fact, Jerome used the best Greek manuscripts available for editing his text, then by comparing the oldest manuscripts of the Vulgate (to ascertain Jerome's original text) with the oldest manuscripts of the Greek New Testament (to ascertain which were the ones used by Jerome), one could determine what the best texts of Jerome's day had looked like—and skip over more than a thousand years of textual transmission in which the text came to be repeatedly changed. Moreover, since Jerome's text would have been that of his predecessor Origen, one could rest assured that this was the very best text available in the earliest centuries of Christianity. And so, Bentley draws what for him was the ineluctable conclusion:

  By taking two thousand errors out of the Pope's Vulgate, and as many out of the Protestant Pope Stephens' [i.e., the edition of Stephanus— the T.R.] I can set out an edition of each in columns, without using any book under nine hundred years old, that shall so exactly agree word for word, and, what at first amazed me, order for order, that no two tallies nor two indentures can agree better.9

  Spending further time in collating manuscripts, and in examining the collations made by others, only increased Bentley's confidence in his ability to do the job, to do it right, and to do it once and for all. In 1720 he published a pamphlet entitled Proposals for Printing designed to bring in support for his project by acquiring a number of financial subscribers. In it he lays out his proposed method of reconstructing the text and argues for its incomparable accuracy.

  The author believes that he has retrieved (except in very few places) the true exemplar of Origen.... And he is sure, that the Gree k and Latin MSS., by their mutual assistance, do so settle the original text to the smallest nicety, as cannot be performed now in any Classic author whatever: and that out of a labyrinth of thirty thousand various readings, that crowd the pages of our present best editions, all put upon equal credit to the offence of many good persons; this clue so leads and extricates us, that there will scarce be two hundred out of so many thousands that can deserve the least consideration.10

  Paring down the significant variants from Mill's thirty thousand to a mere two hundred is obviously a major advance. Not everyone, however, was sure that Bentley could produce the goods. 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 on
e 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. Such controversial pamphlets are a marvel to behold in our own day of subtle polemics; there was nothing subtle about personal grievance in those days. Bentley remarks that "We need go no further than this paragraph for a specimen of the greatest malice and impudence, that any scribbler out of the dark committed to paper."12 And throughout his reply he provides a smattering of rather graphic terms of abuse, calling Colbatch (who in fact had nothing to do with the pamphlet in question) a cabbage-head, insect, worm, maggot, vermin, gnawing rat, snarling dog, ignorant thief, and mountebank.13 Ah, those were the days.

  Once Bentley was alerted to the real identity of his opponent, he was naturally a bit embarrassed about barking up the wrong tree, but he continued his self-defense, and both sides had more than one volley left in the exchange. These defenses hampered the work itself, of course, as did other factors, including Bentley's onerous obligations as an administrator of his college at Cambridge, his other writing projects, and certain disheartening setbacks, which included his failure to obtain an exemption on import duties for the paper he wanted to use for the edition. 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.