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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  In sum, it is extremely difficult to account for the phrase apart from God if the phrase by the grace of God was the original reading of Heb. 2:9. At the same time, whereas a scribe could scarcely be expected to have said that Christ died "apart from God," there is every reason to think that this is precisely what the author of Hebrews said. For this less-attested reading is also more consistent with the theology of Hebrews ("intrinsic probabilities"). Never in this entire Epistle does the word grace (CHARIS) refer to Jesus's death or to the benefits of salvation that accrue as a result of it. Instead, it is consistently connected with the gift of salvation that is yet to be bestowed upon the believer by the goodness of God (see especially Heb. 4:16; also 10:29; 12:15; 13:25). To be sure, Christians historically have been more influenced by other New Testament authors, notably Paul, who saw Jesus's sacrifice on the cross as the supreme manifestation of the grace of God. But Hebrews does not use the term in this way, even though scribes who thought that this author was Paul may not have realized that.

  On the other hand, the statement that Jesus died "apart from God"—enigmatic when taken in isolation—makes compelling sense in its broader literary context in the book of Hebrews. Whereas this author never refers to Jesus's death as a manifestation of divine "grace," he repeatedly emphasizes that Jesus died a fully human, shameful death, totally removed from the realm whence he came, the realm 148 of God; his sacrifice, as a result, was accepted as the perfect expiation for sin. Moreover, God did not intervene in Jesus's passion and did nothing to minimize his pain. Thus, for example, Heb. 5:7 speaks of Jesus, in the face of death, beseeching God with loud cries and tears. In 12:2 he is said to endure the "shame" of his death, not because God sustained him, but because he hoped for vindication. Throughout this Epistle, Jesus is said to experience human pain and death, like other human beings "in every respect." His was not an agony attenuated by special dispensation.

  Yet more significant, this is a major theme of the immediate context of Heb. 2:9, which emphasizes that Christ lowered himself below the angels to share fully in blood and flesh, experience human sufferings, and die a human death. To be sure, his death is known to bring salvation, but the passage says not a word about God's grace as manifest in Christ's work of atonement. It focuses instead on Christology, on Christ's condescension into the transitory realm of suffering and death. It is as a full human being that Jesus experiences his passion, apart from any succor that might have been his as an exalted being. The work he began at his condescension he completes in his death, a death that had to be "apart from God."

  How is it that the reading "apart from God," which can scarcely be explained as a scribal alteration, conforms to the linguistic preferences, style, and theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews, while the alternative reading "by the grace of God," which would have caused scribes no difficulties at all, stands at odds both with what Hebrews says about the death of Christ and with the way it says it? Heb. 2:9 appears originally to have said that Jesus died "apart from God," forsaken, much as he is portrayed in the Passion narrative of Mark's Gospel.

  Conclusion

  In each of the three cases we have considered, there is an important textual variant that plays a significant role in how the passage in question is interpreted. It is obviously important to know whether Jesus was said to feel compassion or anger in Mark 1:41; whether he was calm and collected or in deep distress in Luke 22:43-44; and whether he was said to die by God's grace or "apart from God" in Heb. 2:9. We could easily look at other passages as well, to get the sense of how important it is to know the words of an author if we want to interpret his message.

  But there is far more to the textual tradition of the New Testament than merely establishing what its authors actually wrote. There is also the question of why these words came to be changed, and how these changes affect the meanings of their writings. This question of the modification of scripture in the early Christian church will be the subject of the next two chapters, as I try to show how scribes who were not altogether satisfied with what the New Testament books said modified their words to make them more clearly support orthodox Christianity and more vigorously oppose heretics, women, Jews, and pagans.

  < A page from the Gospel of John from one of the most extravagant biblical manuscripts of the tenth century: written on purple vellum with silver ink.>

  CHAPTER 6 Theologically Motivated Alterations of the Text

  Textual criticism involves more than simply determining the original text. It also entails seeing how that text came to be modified over time, both through scribal slips and as scribes made deliberate modifications. The latter, the intentional changes, can be highly significant, not because they necessarily help us understand what the original authors were trying to say, but because they can show us something about how the authors' texts came to be interpreted by the scribes who reproduced them. By seeing how scribes altered their texts, we can discover clues about what these scribes thought was important in the text, and so we can learn more about the history of the texts as they came to be copied and recopied over the centuries.

  The thesis of this chapter is that sometimes the texts of the New Testament were modified for theological reasons. This happened whenever the scribes copying the texts were concerned to ensure that the texts said what they wanted them to say; sometimes this was because of theological disputes raging in the scribes' own day. To make sense of this kind of change, we need to understand something about theological disputes in the early centuries of Christianity—the centuries in which most alterations of scripture were made, before the widespread appearance of "professional" scribes.

  The Theological Context of the Transmission of the Texts

  We know a good deal about Christianity during the second and third centuries—the time, say, between the completion of the writing of the New Testament books and the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine to the religion, which, as we have seen, changed everything.1 These two centuries were particularly rich in theological diversity among the early Christians. In fact, the theological diversity was so extensive that groups calling themselves Christian adhered to beliefs and practices that most Christians today would insist were not Christian at all.2

  In the second and third centuries there were, of course, Christians who believed that there was only one God, the Creator of all there is. Other people who called themselves Christian, however, insisted that there were two different gods—one of the Old Testament (a God of wrath) and one of the New Testament (a God of love and mercy). These were not simply two different facets of the same God: they were actually two different gods. Strikingly, the groups that made these claims—including the followers of Marcion, whom we have already met—insisted that their views were the true teachings of Jesus and his apostles. Other groups, for example, of Gnostic Christians, insisted that there were not just two gods, but twelve. Others said thirty. Others still said 365. All these groups claimed to be Christian, insisting that their views were true and had been taught by Jesus and his followers.

  Why didn't these other groups simply read their New Testaments to see that their views were wrong? It is because there was no New

  Testament. To be sure, all the books of the New Testament had been written by this time, but there were lots of other books as well, also claiming to be by Jesus's own apostles—other gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses having very different perspectives from those found in the books that eventually came to be called the New Testament. The New Testament itself emerged out of these conflicts over God (or the gods), as one group of believers acquired more converts than all the others and decided which books should be included in the canon of scripture. During the second and third centuries, however, there was no agreed-upon canon—and no agreed-upon theology. Instead, there was a wide range of diversity: diverse groups asserting diverse theologies based on diverse written texts, all claiming to be written by apostles of Jesus.<
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  Some of these Christian groups insisted that God had created this world; others maintained that the true God had not created this world (which is, after all, an evil place), but that it was the result of a cosmic disaster. Some of these groups insisted that the Jewish scriptures were given by the one true God; others claimed that the Jewish scriptures belong to the inferior God of the Jews, who was not the one true God. Some of these groups insisted that Jesus Christ was the one Son of God who was both completely human and completely divine; other groups insisted that Christ was completely human and not at all divine; others maintained that he was completely divine and not at all human; and yet others asserted that Jesus Christ was two things—a divine being (Christ) and a human being (Jesus). Some of these groups believed that Christ's death brought about the salvation of the world; others maintained that Christ's death had nothing to do with the salvation of this world; yet other groups insisted that Christ had never actually died.

  Each and every one of these viewpoints—and many others besides—were topics of constant discussion, dialogue, and debate in the early centuries of the church, while Christians of various persuasions tried to convince others of the truth of their own claims. Only one group eventually "won out" in these debates. It was this group that decided what the Christian creeds would be: the creeds would affirm that there is only one God, the Creator; that Jesus his Son is both human and divine; and that salvation came by his death and resurrection. This was also the group that decided which books would be included in the canon of scripture. By the end of the fourth century, most Christians agreed that the canon was to include the four Gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul, and a group of other letters such as i John and i Peter, along with the Apocalypse of John. And who had been copying these texts? Christians from the congregations themselves, Christians who were intimately aware of and even involved in the debates over the identity of God, the status of the Jewish scriptures, the nature of Christ, and the effects of his death.

  The group that established itself as "orthodox" (meaning that it held what it considered to be the "right belief) then determined what future Christian generations would believe and read as scripture. What should we call the "orthodox" views before they became the majority opinion of all Christians? Possibly it is best to call them proto-orthodox. That is to say, they represented the views of the "orthodox" Christians before this group had won its disputes by the early fourth century or so.

  Did these disputes affect the scribes as they reproduced their scriptures? In this chapter I will be arguing that they did. To make the point, I will restrict myself to just one aspect of the ongoing theological disputes in the second and third centuries, the question over the nature of Christ. Was he human? Was he divine? Was he both? If he was both, was he two separate beings, one divine and one human? Or was he one being who was simultaneously human and divine? These are questions that were eventually resolved in the creeds that were formulated and then handed down even till today, creeds that insist that there is "one Lord Jesus Christ" who is both fully God and fully man. Before these determinations came to be made, there were widespread disagreements, and these disputes affected our texts of scripture.5

  To illustrate this point I will consider three areas of the dispute over Christ's nature, looking at ways in which the texts of the books that were to become the New Testament came to be changed by (no doubt) well-meaning scribes, who intentionally altered their texts in order to make them more amenable to their own theological views, and less amenable to the views of their theological opponents. The first area I will consider involves the claim made by some Christians that Jesus was so fully human that he could not be divine. This was the view of a group of Christians that scholars today call the adoptionists. My contention is that Christian scribes who opposed adoptionistic views of Jesus modified their texts in places in order to stress their view that Jesus was not just human, but also divine. We might call these modifications antiadoptionistic alterations of scripture.

  Antiadoptionistic Alterations of the Text

  Early Christian Adoptionists

  We know of a number of Christian groups from the second and third centuries that had an "adoptionistic" view of Christ. This view is called adoptionist because its adherents maintained that Jesus was not divine but a full flesh-and-blood human being whom God had "adopted" to be his son, usually at his baptism.4

  One of the best-known early Christian groups who held to an adoptionistic Christology was a sect of Jewish-Christians known as the Ebionites. We aren't sure why they were given this name. It may have originated as a self-designation based on the Hebrew term Ebyon, which means "poor." These followers of Jesus may have imitated the original band of Jesus's disciples in giving up everything because of their faith, and so taking upon themselves voluntary poverty for the sake of others.

  Wherever their name came from, the views of this group are clearly reported in our early records, principally written by their enemies who saw them as heretics. These followers of Jesus were, like him, Jews; where they differed from other Christians was in their insistence that to follow Jesus one had to be a Jew. For men, this meant becoming circumcised. For men and women, it meant following the Jewish law given by Moses, including kosher food laws and the observance of Sabbath and Jewish festivals.

  In particular, it was their understanding of Jesus as the Jewish messiah that set these Christians apart from others. For since they were strict monotheists—believing that only One could be God— they insisted that Jesus was not himself divine, but was a human being no different in "nature" from the rest of us. He was born from the sexual union of his parents, Joseph and Mary, born like everyone else (his mother was not a virgin), and reared, then, in a Jewish home. What made Jesus different from all others was that he was more righteous in following the Jewish law; and because of his great righteousness, God adopted him to be his son at his baptism, when a voice came from heaven announcing that he was God's son. From that moment on, Jesus felt called to fulfill the mission God had allotted him—dying on the cross, as a righteous sacrifice for the sins of others. This he did in faithful obedience to his calling; God then honored this sacrifice by raising Jesus from the dead and exalting him up to heaven, where he still waits before returning as the judge of the earth.

  According to the Ebionites, then, Jesus did not preexist; he was not born of a virgin; he was not himself divine. He was a special, righteous man, whom God had chosen and placed in a special relationship to himself.

  In response to these adoptionistic views, proto-orthodox Christians insisted that Jesus was not "merely" human, but that he was actually divine, in some sense God himself. He was born of a virgin, he was more righteous than anyone else because he was different by nature, and at his baptism God did not make him his son (via adoption) but merely affirmed that he was his son, as he had been from eternity past.

  How did these disputes affect the texts of scripture that were in circulation in the second and third centuries, texts being copied by nonprofessional scribes who were themselves involved to a greater or lesser degree in the controversies? There are very few, if any, variant readings that appear to have been created by scribes who held to an adoptionistic point of view. The reason for this lack of evidence should not be surprising. If an adoptionistic Christian had inserted his views into the texts of scripture, surely they would have been corrected by later scribes who took a more orthodox line. What we do find, however, are instances in which texts have been altered in such a way as to oppose an adoptionistic Christology. These changes emphasize that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he was not adopted at his baptism, and that he was himself God.

  Antiadoptionist Changes of the Text

  We have, in fact, already seen one textual variation related to this christological controversy, in our discussion in chapter 4 of the textual researches of J. J. Wettstein. Wettstein examined the Codex Alexandrinus, n
ow in the British Library, and determined that in 1 Tim. 3:16, where most later manuscripts speak of Christ as "God made manifest in the flesh," this early manuscript originally spoke, instead, of Christ "who was made manifest in the flesh." The change is very slight in Greek—it is the difference between a theta and an omicron, which look very much alike (02 and OS). A later scribe had altered the original reading, so that it no longer read "who" but "God" (made manifest in the flesh). In other words, this later corrector changed the text in such a way as to stress Christ's divinity. It is striking to realize that the same correction occurred in four of our other early manuscripts of 1 Timothy, all of which have had correctors change the text in the same way, so that it now explicitly calls Jesus "God." This became the text of the vast majority of later Byzantine (i.e., medieval) manuscripts—and then became the text of most of the early English translations.

  Our earliest and best manuscripts, however, speak of Christ "who" was made manifest in the flesh, without calling Jesus, explicitly, God. The change that came to dominate the medieval manuscripts, then, was made in order to emphasize Jesus's divinity in a text that was ambiguous about it, at best. This would be an example of an antiadoptionistic change, a textual alteration made to counter a claim that Jesus was fully human but not himself divine.

  Other antiadoptionistic changes took place in the manuscripts that record Jesus's early life in the Gospel of Luke. In one place we are told that when Joseph and Mary took Jesus to the Temple and the holy man Simeon blessed him, "his father and mother were marveling at what was said to him" (Luke 2:33). His father? How could the text call Joseph Jesus's father if Jesus had been born of a virgin? Not surprisingly, a large number of scribes changed the text to eliminate the potential problem, by saying "Joseph and his mother were marveling...." Now the text could not be used by an adoptionist Christian in support of the claim that Joseph was the child's father.