But change it they did, sometimes accidentally, sometimes intentionally. In numerous places, the scribes altered the tradition they inherited; and on occasion they did this in order to make the text say what it was already supposed to mean.
As the years went by and I continued to study the text of the New Testament, I gradually became less judgmental toward the scribes who changed the scriptures they copied. Early on, I suppose I was a bit surprised, maybe even scandalized, by the number of changes these anonymous copyists of the text had made in the process of transcription, as they altered the words of the texts, putting the text in their own words rather than the words of the original authors. But I softened my view of these transcribers of the text as I (slowly) came to realize that what they were doing with the text was not all that different from what each of us does every time we read a text.
For the more I studied, the more I saw that reading a text necessarily involves interpreting a text. I suppose when I started my studies I had a rather unsophisticated view of reading: that the point of reading a text is simply to let the text "speak for itself," to uncover the meaning inherent in its words. The reality, I came to see, is that meaning is not inherent and texts do not speak for themselves. If texts could speak for themselves, then everyone honestly and openly reading a text would agree on what the text says. But interpretations of texts abound, and people in fact do not agree on what the texts mean. This is obviously true of the texts of scripture: simply look at the hundreds, or even thousands, of ways people interpret the book of Revelation, or consider all the different Christian denominations, filled with intelligent and well-meaning people who base their views of how the church should be organized and function on the Bible, yet all of them coming to radically different conclusions (Baptists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Appalachian snake-handlers, Greek Orthodox, and on and on).
Or think back on the last time you were involved in a heated debate in which the Bible was invoked, and someone volunteered an interpretation of a scripture verse that left you wondering, How did he (or she) come up with that? We hear this all around us in discussions of homosexuality, women in the church, abortion, divorce, and even American foreign policy, with both sides quoting the same Bible— and sometimes even the same verses—to make their case. Is this because some people are simply more willful or less intelligent than others and can't understand what the text plainly says? Surely not—surely the texts of the New Testament are not simply collections of words whose meaning is obvious to any reader. Surely the texts have to be interpreted to make sense, rather than simply read as if they can divulge their meanings without the process of interpretation. And this, of course, applies not just to the New Testament documents, but to texts of every kind. Why else would there be such radically different understandings of the U.S. Constitution, or Das Kapital, or Middlemarch? Texts do not simply reveal their own meanings to honest inquirers. Texts are interpreted, and they are interpreted (just as they were written) by living, breathing human beings, who can make sense of the texts only by explaining them in light of their other knowledge, explicating their meaning, putting the words of the texts "in other words."
Once readers put a text in other words, however, they have changed the words. This is not optional when reading; it is not something you can choose not to do when you peruse a text. The only way to make sense of a text is to read it, and the only way to read it is by putting it in other words, and the only way to put it in other words is by having other words to put it into, and the only way you have other words to put it into is that you have a life, and the only way to have a life is by being filled with desires, longings, needs, wants, beliefs, perspectives, worldviews, opinions, likes, dislikes—and all the other things that make human beings human. And so to read a text is, necessarily, to change a text.
That's what the scribes of the New Testament did. They read the texts available to them and they put them in other words. Sometimes, however, they literally put them in other words. On the one hand, when they did this, they did what all of us do every time we read a text, but on the other, they did something very different from the rest of us. For when we put a text in other words in our minds, we don't actually change the physical words on the page, whereas the scribes sometimes did precisely that, changing the words so that the words later readers would have before them were different words, which then had to be put into yet other words to be understood.
In that respect, the scribes changed scripture in ways that we do not. In a more basic sense, though, they changed scripture the way we all change scripture, every time we read it. For they, like we, were trying to understand what the authors wrote while also trying to see how the words of the authors' texts might have significance for them, and how they might help them make sense of their own situations and their own lives.
Notes
Introduction
1. My friend Jeff Siker says that reading the New Testament in Greek is like seeing it in color, whereas reading it in translation is like seeing it in black and white: one gets the point but misses a lot of the nuances.
2. The book that comes closest is David C. Parker's The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: The Univ. Press, 1997).
Chapter 1
Scholars today use the "common era" (abbreviated C.E.) for the older designation anno Domini (= A.D., or "in the year of the Lord"), since the former is more inclusive of all faiths.
For a sketch that deals with the formation of the Jewish canon of scripture, see James Sanders's "Canon, Hebrew Bible" in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1:838-52.
By calling Jesus a rabbi I do not mean to say that he had some kind of official standing within Judaism but simply that he was a Jewish teacher. He was, of course, not only a teacher; he can perhaps best be understood as a "prophet." For further discussion, see Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999).
For this abbreviation, see n. 1 above.
These would include the three "Deutero-Pauline" letters of Colossians, Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians and, especially, the three "pastoral" letters of 1 and 2
Timothy and Titus. For scholars' reasons for doubting that these letters were from Paul himself, see Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), chap. 23.
At a later time, there were several forged letters claiming to be the letter to the Laodiceans. We still have one of them, which is usually included in the so-called New Testament Apocrypha. It is little more than a pastiche of Pauline phrases and clauses, patched together to look like one of Paul's letters. Another letter called To the Laodiceans was evidently forged by the second-century "heretic" Marcion; this one no longer survives.
Although Q obviously no longer exists, there are good reasons for thinking that it was a real document—even if we cannot know for sure its complete contents. See Ehrman, The New Testament, chap. 6. The name Q is short for the German word Quelle, which means "source" (that is, the source for much of Matthew's and Luke's sayings material).
For example, in the tractates known as the Apocalypse of Peter and the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, both discovered in 1945 in a cache of "Gnostic" documents near the village of Nag Hammadi in Egypt. For translations, see James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3d ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFran-cisco, 1988), 362-78.
The name Gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means "knowledge." Gnosticism refers to a group of religions from the second century onward that emphasized the importance of receiving secret knowledge for salvation from this evil, material world.
10. For a fuller discussion, see Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 20
03), esp. chap. 11. More information about the entire process can be found in Harry Gamble, The New Testament Canon: Its Maying and Meaning (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985). For the standard authoritative scholarly account, see Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
11. For a recent translation of the letter of Polycarp, see Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), vol. 1.
For further information on Marcion and his teachings, see Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 105-8.
See especially William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989).
For literacy rates among Jews in antiquity, see Catherine Hezser, Jewish Lit eracy in Roman Palestine (Tubingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 2001).
See the discussion of Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 27-28, and the articles by H. C. Youtie that she cites there.
16. The standard English translation is by Henry Chadwick, Origen's "Contra Celsum" (Cambridge: The Univ. Press, 1953), which I follow here.
Chapter 2
For further discussion, see Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995), chap. 3.
Seneca: Moral Essays, ed. and trans. John W. Basore (Loeb Classical Library; London: Heinemann, 1925), 221.
Martial: Epigrams, ed. and trans. Walter C. A. Ker (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), 1:115.
The fullest discussion is in Haines-Eitzen's Guardians of Letters.
I borrow this example from Bruce M. Metzger. See Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), 22-23.
This is stated in the famous Muratorian Canon, the earliest list of the books accepted as "canonical" by its anonymous author. See Ehrman, host Christianities, 240-43.
This is one of the key conclusions of Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters.
By professional I mean scribes who were specially trained and/or paid to copy texts as part of their vocation. At a later period, monks in monasteries were typically trained, but not paid; I would include them among the ranks of professional scribes.
Commentary on Matthew 15.14, as quoted in Bruce M. Metzger, "Explicit References in the Works of Origen to Variant Readings in New Testament Manuscripts," in Biblical and Patristic Studies in Memory of Robert Pierce Casey, ed. J. Neville Birdsall and Robert W. Thomson (Freiburg: Herder, 1968), 78-79.
Against Celsus 2.27.
See Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effects of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993).
Origen, On First Principles, Preface by Rufinus; as quoted in Gamble, Books and Readers, 124.
Sec n. 8 above.
For other notes added to manuscripts by tired or bored scribes, see the examples cited in Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, chap. 1, sect. iii.
On only one occasion does one of Paul's secretarial scribes identify himself; this is a man named Tertius, to whom Paul dictated his letter to the Romans. See Rom. 16:22.
See, especially, E. Randolph Richards, The Secretary in the Letters of Paul (Tubingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1991)-
17. Even the New Testament indicates that the Gospel writers had "sources" for their accounts. In Luke 1:1-4, or example, the author states that "many" predecessors had written an account of the things Jesus said and did, and that after reading them and consulting with "eyewitnesses and ministers of the word," he decided to produce his own account, one which he says is, in contrast to the others, "accurate." In other words, Luke had both written and oral sources for the events he narrates—he was not himself an observer of Jesus's earthly life. The same was probably true of the other Gospel writers as well. On John's sources, see Ehrman, The New Testament, 164-67.
18. Later we will see how some manuscripts can be established as "better" than others.
In fact, there were different endings added by different scribes—not just the final twelve verses familiar to readers of the English Bible. For an account of all the endings, see Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Gree k New Testament, 2d ed. (New York: United Bible Society, 1994), 102-6.
See Ehrman, The New Testament, chap. 5, esp. 79-80.
Chapter 3
1. For my understanding of the term professional scribe, see n. 8 in chapter 2.
For an argument that there is no evidence of scriptoria in the earlier centuries, see Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, 83-91.
Eusebius is widely known today as the father of church history, based on his ten-volume account of the church's first three hundred years.
For an account of these early "versions" (i.e., translations) of the New Testament, see Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, chap. 2, sect. ii.
On the Latin versions of the New Testament, including the work of Jerome, see Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, chap. 2, ii.2.
For fuller information on this, and on the other printed editions discussed in the following pages, see Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, chap. 3.
See, especially, the informative account in Samuel P. Tregelles, An Account of the Printed Text of the Greeks New Testament (London: Samuel Bagster & Sons, 1854), 3-11.
The Latin reads: "textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum: in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum damus."
See Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, chap. 3, sect. ii.
10. Whitby's emphasis. Quoted in Adam Fox, John Mill and Richard Bentley: A Study of Textual Criticis m of the New Testament, 1675-1729 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954), 106.
Fox, Mill and Bentley, 106.
Phileleutherus Lipsiensis, Remarks upon a Tate Discourse of Tree Thinking, 7th ed. (London: W. Thurbourn, 1737), 93-94-
My friend Michael Holmes points out to me that of the seven thousand copies of the Greek Bible (both Greek New Testament and Greek Old Testament), fewer than ten, to our knowledge, ever contained the entire Bible, both Old and New Testaments. All ten of these are now defective (missing pages here and there); and only four of them predate the tenth century.
Manuscripts—handwritten copies—continued to be made after the invention of printing, just as some people continue to use typewriters today, even though word processors are available.
It will be seen that the four categories of manuscripts arc not grouped on the same principles. The papyri are written in majuscule script, as are the majuscules, but on a different writing surface; the minuscules are written on the same kind of writing surface as the majuscules (parchment) but in a different kind of script.
For additional examples of accidental changes, see Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, chap. 7, sect. I.
Those interested in seeing how scholars debate back and forth concerning the virtues of one reading over another should consult Metzger, Textual Commentary.
I owe this example, along with several of the preceding ones, to Bruce M. Metzger. See Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, p. 259.
For a further discussion of this variant, see pp. 203-04.
For a fuller discussion of the variants in the traditions of the Lord's Prayer, see Parker, Living Text of the Gospels, 49-74.
There are a number of textual variants among the witnesses that attest this longer form of the passage.
Chapter 4
For a classic study of how the Bible was understood and treated
in the Middle Ages, see Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941).
Richard Simon, A Critical History of the Text of the New Testament (London: R. Taylor, 1689), Preface.
Simon, Critical History, pt. 1, p. 65.
Simon, Critical History, pt. 1, pp. 30-31.
Simon, Critical History, pt. 1, p. 31.
Quoted in Georg Werner Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972), 41.
The fullest biography is still that by James Henry Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley, D.D., 2 vols. (London: Rivington, 1833).
Quoted in Monk, Life of Bentley, 1:398.
Monk, Life of Bentley, 399.
Proposals for Printing a New Edition of the Greeks New Testament and St. Hieroms Latin Version (London, 1721), 3.
See Monk, Life of Bentley, 2:130-33.
Monk, Life of Bentley, 136.
Monk, Life of Bentley, 135—37.
For a full biography, see John C. F. Burk, A Memoir of the Life and Writings of John Albert Bengel (London: R. Gladding, 1842).
Burk, A Memoir, 316.
We have seen this principle at work already; see the examples of Mark 1:2 and Matt. 24:36 discussed in chapter 3.
C. L. Hulbert-Powell, John James Wettstein, 1693-1754: An Account of His Life, Wor k, and Some of His Contemporaries (London: SPCK, 1938), 15, 17.
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why Page 23
