Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Is this scenario likely? Not at all. Am I proposing this is what really happened? Absolutely not. Is it more probable that something like this happened than that a miracle happened and Jesus left the tomb to ascend to heaven? Absolutely! From a purely historical point of view, a highly unlikely event is far more probable than a virtually impossible one.

  Why, then, did some of the disciples claim to see Jesus alive after his crucifixion? I don’t doubt at all that some disciples claimed this. We don’t have any of their written testimony, but Paul, writing about twenty-five years later, indicates that this is what they claimed, and I don’t think he is making it up. And he knew at least a couple of them, whom he met just three years after the event (Galatians 1:18–19). But does the fact that some people claimed to have seen Jesus alive mean that he really did come back from the dead? Is that the most probable occurrence? It can’t be—by definition it is the least probable. What would be more probable? Nearly any explanation you can think of.

  Let me suggest one. It is an extremely well-documented phenomenon that people sometimes have visions of their loved ones after they died. A man sees his wife in his bedroom a month after she was buried; a woman sees her dead daughter; a girl sees her dead grandmother. Happens all the time. It is extremely well documented.10 In many instances the person having this experience can talk to the dead person, can give them a hug and feel them. There are documented instances of multiple people having some such visionary experience together, and not just visions of relatives. The blessed Virgin Mary appears to groups of people all the time—there are thousands of eyewitnesses. Do I think that she really has appeared to them? No. Or that the grandmother really did come back from the dead to visit her granddaughter’s bedroom? No. Maybe these things happened. But it is unlikely. In fact, from the historian’s point of view, it is virtually impossible. But people claim they happen all the time.

  Jesus’ closest followers, and later Paul, claimed they saw him alive afterward. Does it mean he was really raised from the dead? No, it means that they, like so many thousands of other people, had a real-seeming, tangible experience of a person after he died. The disciples had not done any research into postmortem visionary experiences. They experienced what they experienced, and they interpreted it in terms that they knew: Jesus was alive. He must have been raised from the dead. Where is he now? He’s not here—he must have ascended to heaven.

  Is my explanation of why they claimed what they did very probable? No. But it’s not impossible. From a strictly historical point of view, it is more probable than an actual resurrection.

  I am decidedly not saying that Jesus was not raised from the dead. I’m not saying the tomb was not empty. I’m not saying that he did not appear to his disciples and ascend into heaven. Believers believe that all these things are true. But they do not believe them because of historical evidence. They take the Christian claims on faith, not on the basis of proof. There can be no proof. Historians can only establish what probably happened in the past, and by definition, miracles are the least probable of occurrences.

  SIX

  How We Got the Bible

  Even though I was a conservative evangelical Christian when I arrived at Princeton Theological Seminary in the late 1970s, I was not a completely ignorant, head-in-the-sand fundamentalist. I did have a liberal arts education, a bachelor’s degree in English literature, and some training in history, classics, and philosophy. I also knew something about the world and didn’t think that everyone who disagreed with me on a point of doctrine was going to roast in hell. I’ve known more conservative Christians. But I was pretty conservative.

  Among other things, I continued to be convinced that the Bible was not just a collection of authoritative books that could guide a Christian’s views about what to believe and how to behave. I was convinced that the Bible was the very Word of God, inerrant in everything that it taught. This was the view that I had been taught at Moody Bible Institute, where I had majored in “Bible Theology”; even with my more progressive education in the liberal arts at Wheaton, I held on to this view. At least for a while.

  Various aspects of my study of the New Testament began to eat away at this view. One of the issues that I had to confront was a very basic question that is somewhat damning in its simplicity, a question that everyone who believes that the Bible is the verbally inspired Word of God has to confront. Which Bible?

  Is the inspired Bible the one that we actually use? The King James Version? Some people continue to insist so, even if it does seem to be a rather silly view: do you mean that for all those centuries before the King James translators got to work, Christians did not have access to God’s inspired word? What was God thinking? Some other modern translation then? The Hebrew and Greek texts from which these English translations are made? If one chooses the last option, what does one do about the fact that we don’t have the original Hebrew and Greek texts of any of the books of the Bible, but only later copies of these texts, all of which have mistakes?

  At Moody I had been taught that the inspired words were the words of the originals, the so-called autographs. Sure, scribes had modified these words over the years, but before they were modified they were the perfectly inspired Word of God. As I explain in Misquoting Jesus, eventually this view came to seem problematic to me. Why would God have inspired the words of the Bible if he chose not to preserve these words for posterity? Put differently, what should make me think he had inspired the words in the first place if I knew for certain (as I did) that he had not preserved them? This became a major problem for me in trying to figure out which Bible I thought was inspired.

  Another big problem is one that I don’t deal with in Misquoting Jesus. If God inspired certain books in the decades after Jesus died, how do I know that the later church fathers chose the right books to be included in the Bible? I could accept it on faith—surely God would not allow noninspired books in the canon of Scripture. But as I engaged in more historical study of the early Christian movement, I began to realize that there were lots of Christians in lots of places who fully believed that other books were to be accepted as Scripture; conversely, some of the books that eventually made it into the canon were rejected by church leaders in different parts of the church, sometimes for centuries.

  In some parts of the church, the Apocalypse of John (the book of Revelation) was flat out rejected as containing false teaching, whereas the Apocalypse of Peter, which eventually did not make it in, was accepted. There were some Christians who accepted the Gospel of Peter and some who rejected the Gospel of John. There were some Christians who accepted a truncated version of the Gospel of Luke (without its first two chapters), and others who accepted the now noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. Some Christians rejected the three Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, which eventually made it in, and others accepted the Epistle of Barnabas, which did not.

  If God was making sure that his church would have the inspired books of Scripture, and only those books, why were there such heated debates and disagreements that took place over three hundred years? Why didn’t God just make sure that these debates lasted weeks, with assured results, rather than centuries?1

  In this chapter I want to talk about the problems that arose for me in thinking of the Bible as the inspired Word of God. The first problem is that we don’t have the originals of any of the writings of the New Testament (since I already have devoted an entire book to the subject, I can keep this part of the discussion short).2 The second problem involves how the canon of twenty-seven books was eventually formed.

  THE “ORIGINAL” TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

  Even though Misquoting Jesus seemed to stir up a bit of a hornet’s nest, at least among conservative evangelical Christians, its overarching theses were almost entirely noncontroversial. I would summarize them as follows:

  We don’t have the originals of any of the books of the New Testament.

  The copies we have were made much later, in most instances many centuries later
.

  We have thousands of these copies, in Greek—the language in which of all the New Testament books were originally written.

  All of these copies contain mistakes—accidental slips on the part of the scribes who made them or intentional alterations by scribes wanting to change the text to make it say what they wanted it to mean (or thought that it did mean).

  We don’t know how many mistakes there are among our surviving copies, but they appear to number in the hundreds of thousands. It is safe to put the matter in comparative terms: there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

  The vast majority of these mistakes are completely insignificant, showing us nothing more than that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most people can today.

  But some of the mistakes matter—a lot. Some of them affect the interpretation of a verse, a chapter, or an entire book. Others reveal the kinds of concerns that were affecting scribes, who sometimes altered the text in light of debates and controversies going on in their own surroundings.

  The task of the textual critic is both to figure out what the author of a text actually wrote and to understand why scribes modified the text (to help us understand the context within which scribes were working).

  Despite the fact that scholars have been working diligently at these tasks for three hundred years, there continue to be heated differences of opinion. There are some passages where serious and very smart scholars disagree about what the original text said, and there are some places where we will probably never know what the original text said.

  The conservative evangelical response to my book surprised me a bit.3 Some of these critics criticized Misquoting Jesus for “misleading” people—as if facts such as those I have just cited could lead someone down a slippery slope toward perdition. A number of critics indicated that they didn’t much appreciate my tone. And a whole lot of them wanted to insist that the facts I laid out do not require anyone to lose their faith in the Bible as the inspired word of God.

  That last point is one with which I might take issue: there are certain views of the inspiration of Scripture, such as the one I had pounded into me as a late teenager, that do not stand up well to the facts of textual criticism. For most Christians, who don’t have a conservative evangelical view like the one I had, these textual facts can be interesting, but there is nothing in them to challenge their faith, which is built on something other than having the very words that God inspired in the Bible. And I certainly never intended to lead anyone away from the Christian faith; critics who have suggested that I myself stopped being a Christian once I realized there were differences among our manuscripts are simply wrong and being ridiculous.4

  In any event, as I indicated, these theses themselves were almost entirely noncontroversial. Who can deny that we have thousands of manuscripts? Or hundreds of thousands of variants? Or that lots of the variants involve spelling? Or that scholars continue to debate what the original text was in lots of places? All of these statements are factually true.

  The one statement that has stirred up controversy is my claim that some of these variations are significant. This view has been objected to by some conservative evangelicals and no one else that I know of. That gives me pause—why is this criticism coming only from people with a particular set of theological views? The typical response has been two-pronged: critics have charged that (1) the vast majority of textual alterations don’t matter at all, and I’ve misled people into thinking that they do; and (2) none of the variants is terrifically significant; they have all been known for a long time and none of them counts for much of anything.

  I’m not completely sure how to respond to the first criticism, since I have always insisted that most textual variants are insignificant (for example, right away on page 10 of Misquoting Jesus). I think maybe the objection is that I don’t say this enough, and that by focusing on the variants that do matter, I mislead people into thinking that the situation is worse than it is. I get the sense from these critics that they would have preferred me to write mainly about the insignificant textual changes that don’t matter for anything. Now wouldn’t that be an interesting book?

  It is the second criticism that I want to respond to at length. It simply is not true, in my opinion, that none of the textual variants actually matters for very much. Some of them matter, a lot.

  In response to the assertion, made by conservative evangelicals, that not a single important Christian doctrine is affected by any textual variant, I point out:

  a. It simply isn’t true that important doctrines are not involved. As a key example: the only place in the entire New Testament where the doctrine of the Trinity is explicitly taught is in a passage that made it into the King James translation (1 John 5:7–8) but is not found in the vast majority of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. I would suggest that the Trinity is a rather important Christian doctrine. A typical response to this rebuttal is that the doctrine of the Trinity can be found in Scripture without appealing to 1 John 5:7–8. My reply is that this is true of every single Christian doctrine. In my experience, theologians do not hold to a doctrine because it is found in just one verse; you can take away just about any verse and still find just about any Christian doctrine somewhere else if you look hard enough.5

  b. It seems to me to be a very strange criterion of significance to say that textual variants ultimately don’t matter because they don’t affect any cardinal Christian doctrine. Why is Christian doctrine the ultimate criterion of significance? Suppose, for example, that we discovered a manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew that for some reason was lacking chapters 4–13. Would that be significant? I should think so. But would it affect anyone’s doctrine? Not at all. Or take an even more extreme example. Suppose we all woke up tomorrow morning and found that every trace of the books of Mark, Philippians, James, and 1 Peter had been removed from every New Testament on the planet. Would that be significant? It would be huge! Would it affect any Christian doctrine? Not in the least.

  c. Most important, some of the textual variants do matter deeply, for things other than “cardinal Christian doctrines.”

  Some matter for how to interpret entire books of the New Testament. Take a couple of variants in the Gospel of Luke. First, did Luke think that Jesus was in agony when going to his death, or that he was calm and controlled? It depends entirely on what you make of the textual variant in Luke 22:43–44, where Jesus allegedly sweated great drops as if of blood before his arrest. Leave the verses in, as some manuscripts do, and Jesus is obviously in deep agony. Take them out and there is no agony, either in this passage or anywhere else in Luke’s Passion narrative, as we saw earlier when we noticed that Luke had eliminated all of Mark’s references to Jesus’ being in pain, uncertain up to the end. Second, did Luke understand that Jesus’ death was an atonement for sin? It depends on what you do with Luke 22:19–20. Everywhere else in Luke, as we saw in chapter 3, Luke has eliminated Mark’s references to Jesus’ death as an atonement. The only remnant of that teaching is in some manuscripts of the Lord’s Supper, where Jesus says that the bread is his body to be broken “for you” and the cup is his blood poured out “for you.” But in our earliest and best manuscripts, these words are missing (much of v. 19 and all of v. 20). It appears scribes have added them to make Luke’s view of Jesus’ death conform to Mark’s and Matthew’s. I’d say that’s rather important—unless you think that Luke’s views on the subject don’t really matter.

  Some variants, including those just mentioned, are terrifically important for knowing what traditions about Jesus were in circulation among the early Christians. Did Jesus have an encounter with an adulterous woman and her accusers in which he told them, “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her,” and in which he told her, after all her accusers had left, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more”? It depends on which manuscripts of John you read. After his resurrection, did Jesus tell his disciples that th
ose who came to believe in him would be able to handle snakes and drink deadly poison without being harmed? It depends on which manuscripts of Mark you read.

  Some variants are crucial for understanding what was going on in the communities of the scribes who were copying the texts. Some scribes, for example, omitted the prayer of Jesus spoken while being crucified, “Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they were doing” (Luke 23:34). Early Christians interpreted this as a prayer of forgiveness for the Jews, ignorant of what they had done. No wonder some scribes omitted the verse in the context of Christian anti-Judaism in the second and third centuries, when many Christians believed that Jews knew exactly what they were doing and that God had in no way forgiven them. Or as an example from Paul: it appears that Paul’s injunction to women to be “silent” in the churches and “subordinate” to their husbands was not originally part of 1 Corinthians 14 (vv. 34–35) but was added by later scribes intent on keeping women in their place. Is that significant or not?

  d. Finally, I have to say that I actually don’t believe it when conservative evangelicals say that the textual variations in the New Testament don’t matter very much. If they don’t matter, why do such conservative evangelical seminaries as Dallas Theological Seminary (headed by one of my outspoken critics on the matter) and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary sponsor multi-million-dollar projects to examine the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament? If the differences in the manuscripts don’t matter, why bother to study them? If they are completely insignificant, why devote one’s career to examining them? If they are altogether immaterial, why devote millions of dollars to investigating them? I wonder what such people say when they’re out raising money for their projects: “We’d like you to invest five hundred thousand dollars to help us study the manuscripts of the New Testament, because we don’t think they have any significance”?