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

by Bart D. Ehrman

  A similar phenomenon happens a few verses later in the account of Jesus as a twelve-year-old in the Temple. The story line is familiar: Joseph, Mary, and Jesus attend a festival in Jerusalem, but then when the rest of the family heads home in the caravan, Jesus remains behind, unbeknownst to them. As the text says, "his parents did not know about it." But why does the text speak of his parents when Joseph is not really his father? A number of textual witnesses "correct" the problem by having the text read, "Joseph and his mother did not know it." And again, some verses later, after they return to Jerusalem to hunt high and low for Jesus, Mary finds him, three days later, in the Temple. She upbraids him: "Your father and I have been looking for you!" Once again, some scribes solved the problem—this time by simply altering the text to read "We have been looking for you!"

  One of the most intriguing antiadoptionist variants among our manuscripts occurs just where one might expect it, in an account of Jesus's baptism by John, the point at which many adoptionists insisted Jesus had been chosen by God to be his adopted son. In Luke's Gospel, as in Mark, when Jesus is baptized, the heavens open up, the Spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of a dove, and a voice comes from heaven. But the manuscripts of Luke's Gospel are divided concerning what exactly the voice said. According to most of our manuscripts, it spoke the same words one finds in Mark's account: "You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased" (Mark 1:11; Luke 3:23). In one early Greek manuscript and several Latin ones, however, the voice says something strikingly different: "You are my Son, today I have begotten you." Today I have begotten you! Doesn't that suggest that his day of baptism is the day on which Jesus has become the Son of God? Couldn't this text be used by an adoptionist Christian to make the point that Jesus became the Son of God at this time? As this is such an interesting variant, we might do well to give it a more extended consideration, as a further illustration of the complexities of the problems that textual critics face.

  The first issue to resolve is this: which of these two forms of the text is original, and which represents the alteration? The vast majority of Greek manuscripts have the first reading ("You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased"); and so one might be tempted to see the other reading as the alteration. The problem in this case is that the verse was quoted a lot by early church fathers in the period before most of our manuscripts were produced. It is quoted in the second and third centuries everywhere from Rome, to Alexandria, to North Africa, to Palestine, to Gaul, to Spain. And in almost every instance, it is the other form of the text that is quoted ("Today I have begotten you").

  Moreover, this is the form of text that is more unlike what is found in the parallel passage in Mark. As we have seen, scribes typically try to harmonize texts rather than take them out of harmony; it is therefore the form of the text that differs from Mark that is more likely to be original to Luke. These arguments suggest that the less-attested reading—"Today I have begotten you"—is indeed the original, and that it came to be changed by scribes who feared its adoptionistic overtones.

  Some scholars have taken the opposite view, however, by arguing that Luke could not have had the voice at the baptism say "Today I have begotten you" because it is already clear before this point in Luke's narrative that Jesus is the Son of God. Thus, in Luke 1:35, before Jesus's birth, the angel Gabriel announces to Jesus's mother that "the Holy Spirit shall come upon you and the Power of the Most High will overshadow you, therefore the one who is to be born of you shall be called holy, the Son of God." For Luke himself, in other words, Jesus already was the Son of God at his birth. According to this argument, Jesus could not be said to have become the Son of God at his baptism—and so the more widely attested reading, "You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased," is probably original.

  The difficulty with this line of thinking—as persuasive as it is at first glance—is that it overlooks how Luke generally uses designations of Jesus throughout his work (including not just the Gospel but also the second volume of his writing, the book of Acts). Consider, for example, what Luke says about Jesus as the "Messiah" (which is the Hebrew word for the Greek term Christ). According to Luke 2:11, Jesus was born as the Christ, but in one of the speeches in Acts, Jesus is said to have become the Christ at his baptism (Acts 10:37-38); in another passage Luke states that Jesus became the Christ at his resurrection (Acts 2:38). How can all these things be true? It appears that for Luke, it was important to emphasize the key moments of Jesus's existence, and to stress these as vital for Jesus's identity (e.g., as Christ). The same applies to Luke's understanding of Jesus as the "Lord." He is said to have been born the Lord in Luke 2:11; and he is called the Lord while living, in Luke 10:1; but Acts 2:38 indicates that he became the Lord at his resurrection.

  For Luke, Jesus's identity as Lord, Christ, and Son of God is important. But the time at which it happened, evidently, is not. Jesus is all these things at crucial points of his life—birth, baptism, and resurrection, for example.

  It appears, then, that originally in Luke's account of Jesus's baptism, the voice came from heaven to declare "You are my Son, today I have begotten you." Luke probably did not mean that to be interpreted adoptionistically, since, after all, he had already narrated an account of Jesus's virgin birth (in chapters 1-2). But later Christians reading Luke 3:22 may have been taken aback by its potential implications, as it seems open to an adoptionistic interpretation. To prevent anyone from taking the text that way, some proto-orthodox scribes changed the text to make it stand in complete conformity with the text of Mark 1:11. Now, rather than being said to have been begotten by God, Jesus is simply affirmed: "You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." This is, in other words, another antiadoptionistic change of the text.

  We will conclude this part of the discussion by looking at one other such change. Like i Tim. 3:16, this one involves a text in which a scribe has made an alteration to affirm in very strong terms that Jesus is to be understood completely as God. The text occurs in the Gospel of John, a Gospel that more than any of the others that made it into the New Testament already goes a long way toward identifying Jesus himself as divine (see, e.g., John 8:58; 10:30; 20:28). This identification is made in a particularly striking way in a passage in which the original text is hotly disputed.

  The first eighteen verses of John are sometimes called its Prologue. Here is where John speaks of the "Word of God" who was "in the beginning with God" and who "was God" (vv. 1-3). This Word of God made all things that exist. Moreover, it is God's mode of communication to the world; the Word is how God manifests himself to others. And we are told that at one point the "Word became flesh and dwelt among us." In other words, God's own Word became a human being (v. 14). This human being was "Jesus Christ" (v. 17). According to this understanding of things, then, Jesus Christ represents the "incarnation" of God's own Word, who was with God in the beginning and was himself God, through whom God made all things.

  The Prologue then ends with some striking words, which come in two variant forms: "No one has seen God at any time, but the unique Son/the unique God who is in the bosom of Father, that one has made him known" (v. 18).

  The textual problem has to do with the identification of this "unique" one. Is he to be identified as the "unique God in the bosom of the Father" or as the "unique Son in the bosom of the Father"? It must be acknowledged that the first reading is the one found in the manuscripts that are the oldest and generally considered to be the best—those of the Alexandrian textual family. But it is striking that it is rarely found in manuscripts not associated with Alexandria. Could it be a textual variant created by a scribe in Alexandria and popularized there? If so, that would explain why the vast majority of manuscripts from everywhere else have the other reading, in which Jesus is not called the unique God, but the unique Son.

  There are other reasons for thinking that the latter reading is, in fact, the correct one. The Gospel of John uses this phrase "the unique
Son" (sometimes mistranslated as "only begotten Son") on several other occasions (see John 3:16, 18); nowhere else does it speak of Christ as "the unique God." Moreover, what would it even mean to call Christ that? The term unique in Greek means "one of a kind." There can be only one who is one of a kind. The term unique God must refer to God the Father himself—otherwise he is not unique. But if the term refers to the Father, how can it be used of the Son? Given the fact that the more common (and understandable) phrase in the Gospel of John is "the unique Son," it appears that that was the text originally written in John 1:18. This itself is still a highly exalted view of Christ— he is the "unique Son who is in the bosom of the Father." And he is the one who explains God to everyone else.

  It appears, though, that some scribes—probably located in Alexandria—were not content even with this exalted view of Christ, and so they made it even more exalted, by transforming the text. Now Christ is not merely God's unique Son, he is the unique God himself! This too, then, appears to be an antiadoptionistic change of the text made by proto-orthodox scribes of the second century.

  Antidocetic Alterations of the Text

  Early Christian Docetists

  Standing at the opposite end of the theological spectrum from the Jewish-Christian Ebionites and their adoptionistic Christology were groups of Christians known as docetists.5 The name comes from the Greek word DOKEO, which means "to seem" or "to appear." Docetists maintained that Jesus was not a full flesh-and-blood human being. He was instead completely (and only) divine; he only "seemed" or "appeared" to be a human being, to feel hunger, thirst, and pain, to bleed, to die. Since Jesus was God, he could not really be a man. He simply came to earth in the "appearance" of human flesh.

  Probably the best-known docetist from the early centuries of Christianity was the philosopher-teacher Marcion. We know a good deal about Marcion because proto-orthodox church fathers such as Irenaeus and Tertullian considered his views a real threat, and so wrote extensively about them. In particular, we still have a five-volume work by Tertullian called Against Marcion in which Marcion's understanding of the faith is detailed and attacked. From this polemical tractate we are able to discern the major features of Marcion's thought.

  As we have seen,6 Marcion appears to have taken his cues from the apostle Paul, whom he considered to be the one true follower of Jesus. In some of his letters Paul differentiates between the Law and the gospel, insisting that a person is made right with God by faith in Christ (the gospel), not by performing the works of the Jewish law. For Marcion, this contrast between the gospel of Christ and the Law of Moses was absolute, so much so that the God who gave the Law obviously could not be the one who gave the salvation of Christ. They were, in other words, two different gods. The God of the Old Testament was the one who created this world, chose Israel to be his people, and gave them his harsh Law. When they break his Law (as they all do), he punishes them with death. Jesus came from a greater God, sent to save people from the wrathful God of the Jews. Since he did not belong to this other God, who created the material world, Jesus himself obviously could not be part of this material world. That means, then, that he could not actually have been born, that he did not have a material body, that he did not really bleed, that he did not really die. All these things were an appearance. But since Jesus appeared to die—an apparently perfect sacrifice—the God of the Jews accepted this death as payment for sins. Anyone who believes in it will be saved from this God.

  Proto-orthodox authors such as Tertullian objected strenuously to this theology, insisting that if Christ was not an actual human being, he could not save other human beings, that if he did not actually shed blood, his blood could not bring salvation, that if he did not actually die, his "apparent" death would do nobody any good. Tertullian and others, then, took a strong stand that Jesus—while still divine (despite what the Ebionites and other adoptionists said)—was nonetheless fully human. He had flesh and blood; he could feel pain; he really bled; he really died; he really, physically, was raised from the dead; and he really, physically, ascended to heaven, where he is now waiting to return, physically, in glory.

  Antidocetic Changes of the Text

  The debate over docetic Christologies affected the scribes who copied the books that eventually became the New Testament. To illustrate this point I will examine four textual variants in the final chapters of the Gospel of Luke, which, as we have seen, was the one Gospel that Marcion accepted as canonical scripture.7

  The first involves a passage we also considered in chapter 5—the account of Jesus's "sweating blood." As we saw there, the verses in question were probably not original to Luke's Gospel. Recall that the passage describes events that take place immediately before Jesus's arrest, when he leaves his disciples to go off by himself to pray, asking that the cup of his suffering be removed from him, but praying that God's "will be done." Then, in some manuscripts, we read the disputed verses: "And an angel from heaven appeared to him, strengthening him. And being in agony he began to pray yet more fervently, and his sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground" (vv. 43-44).

  I argued in chapter 5 that verses 43-44 disrupt the structure of this passage in Luke, which is otherwise a chiasmus that focuses attention on Jesus's prayer for God's will to be done. I also suggested that the verses contain a theology completely unlike that otherwise found in

  Luke's Passion narrative. Everywhere else, Jesus is calm and in control of his situation. Luke, in fact, has gone out of his way to remove any indication of Jesus's agony from the account. These verses, then, not only are missing from important and early witnesses, they also run counter to the portrayal of Jesus facing his death otherwise found in Luke's Gospel.

  Why, though, did scribes add them to the account? We are now in a position to answer that question. It is notable that these verses are alluded to three times by proto-orthodox authors of the mid to late second century (Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Gaul, and Hippolytus of Rome); and what is more intriguing still, each time they are mentioned it is in order to counter the view that Jesus was not a real human being. That is, the deep anguish that Jesus experiences according to these verses was taken to show that he really was a human being, that he really could suffer like the rest of us. Thus, for example, the early Christian apologist Justin, after observing that "his sweat fell down like drops of blood while he was praying," claims that this showed "that the Father wished his Son really to undergo such sufferings for our sakes," so that we "may not say that he, being the Son of God, did not feel what was happening to him and inflicted on him."8

  In other words, Justin and his proto-orthodox colleagues understood that the verses showed in graphic form that Jesus did not merely "appear" to be human: he really was human, in every way. It seems likely, then, that since, as we have seen, these verses were not originally part of the Gospel of Luke, they were added for an antidocetic purpose, because they portrayed so well the real humanity of Jesus.

  For proto-orthodox Christians, it was important to emphasize that Christ was a real man of flesh and blood because it was precisely the sacrifice of his flesh and the shedding of his blood that brought salvation—not in appearance but in reality. Another textual variant in Luke's account of Jesus's final hours emphasizes this reality. It occurs in the account of Jesus's last supper with his disciples. In one of our oldest Greek manuscripts, as well as in several Latin witnesses, we are told: 166

  And taking a cup, giving thanks, he said, "Take this and divide it among yourselves, for I say to you that I will not drink from the fruit of the vine from now on, until the kingdom of God comes." And taking bread, giving thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body. But behold, the hand of the one who betrays me is with me at the table." (Luke 22:1*7-19)

  In most of our manuscripts, however, there is an addition to the text, an addition that will sound familiar to many readers of the English Bi
ble, since it has made its way into most modern translations. Here, after Jesus says "This is my body," he continues with the words '"which has been given for you; do this in remembrance of me'; And the cup likewise after supper, saying 'this cup is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for you.'"

  These are the familiar words of the "institution" of the Lord's Supper, known in a very similar form also from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 11:23-25). Despite the fact that they are familiar, there are good reasons for thinking that these verses were not originally in Luke's Gospel but were added to stress that it was Jesus's broken body and shed blood that brought salvation "for you." For one thing, it is hard to explain why a scribe would have omitted the verses if they were original to Luke (there is no homoeoteleuton, for example, that would explain an omission), especially since they make such clear and smooth sense when they are added. In fact, when the verses are taken away, most people find that the text sounds a bit truncated. The unfamiliarity of the truncated version (without the verses) may have been what led scribes to add the verses.

  Moreover, it should be noted that the verses, as familiar as they are, do not represent Luke's own understanding of the death of Jesus. For it is a striking feature of Luke's portrayal of Jesus's death—this may sound strange at first—that he never, anywhere else, indicates that the death itself is what brings salvation from sin. Nowhere in Luke's entire two-volume work (Luke and Acts), is Jesus's death said to be "for you." In fact, on the two occasions in which Luke's source (Mark) indicates that it was by Jesus's death that salvation came (Mark 10:45; 15:39), Luke changed the wording of the text (or eliminated it). Luke, in other words, has a different understanding of the way in which Jesus's death leads to salvation than does Mark (and Paul, and other early Christian writers).