Misquoting Jesus, by Bart D. Ehrman

Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperSan Francisco, 2005).

Bart Ehrman brings solid scholarship to the popular reader with such provocatively titled books as The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (1993), Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (2003), and Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament (2003), published by the Oxford University Press. The present book is essentially a popular introduction to the field of New Testament textual criticism in 242 pages, comprising seven chapters, with introductory and concluding remarks, notes and an index.  In the Introduction the author states that it “is written for anyone who might be interested in seeing how we got our New Testament, seeing how in some instances we don’t even know what the words of the original writers were, seeing in what interesting ways these words occasionally got changed, and seeing how we might, through the application of some rather rigorous methods of analysis, reconstruct what those original words actually were.” After an overview of the work we will return to the Introduction and Conclusion.The first chapter (“The Beginnings of Christian Scripture”) begins with the Jewish background of the church, sharing its monotheism and its sacred writings, while gradually supplementing them with further writings and interpreting them in light of their faith in Jesus. These new writings included letters, gospels, acts of apostles, apocalypses, church orders, theological tracts and even commentaries.  Many of them came to be accepted by the growing church as authoritative.  Their very profusion created a problem, and it was not until 367 A.D. that the twenty-seven books we know today as the New Testament were defined as exclusively canonical by the bishop of Alexandria.  But while Christianity was a literary religion, literacy levels in the Roman Empire hovered at around 10 to 15 percent, and the literacy rate in the church was probably even lower.  Paul’s letters to the churches he established were not read by them, but to them by one of their very few literate members.

The second chapter (“The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings”) examines book production in the first century.  Before the printing press was invented all copying of books was done by hand, slowly, painfully and not always accurately.   Words were not written separately but run together. Multiple copies of a document were never identical, as from a printing press. Especially in the second and third centuries, before Constantine gave official recognition to the Christian religion, the church was not able to use professional scribes. Consequently, their texts were subject to all kinds of variation, mostly unintentional but sometimes intentional, as when well-intentioned copyists corrected what they saw as errors made by earlier copyists. On occasion there is the very real question of distinguishing the original form of a text from the scribal correction of a misunderstood original.

The third chapter (“Texts of the New Testament”) sketches the career of the text from the age of Constantine to the eighteenth century.  When Christianity began to enjoy public prestige, regional church centers developed – in Rome, Constantinople, Palestine and Egypt. Monasteries were established with scriptoria to provide their regions with standard texts, copied by professional scribes.  Byzantium led with Greek Scriptures in the East, and Jerome’s Latin Vulgate version came to dominate in the West.  With Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press came the possibility of multiple identical copies of a text, and the first book to be printed was the Bible in 1456 – in Latin, the language of the church in the West. After Byzantium fell the Renaissance scholars discovered the Greek New Testament – a text the West had ignored for a millennium. Erasmus edited the first published edition of this Greek text in 1516 based on a few late manuscripts brought by Orthodox Christians fleeing from Byzantium, and it served essentially as the standard text (textus receptus) for Western scholarship until the late nineteenth century. As scholars compared it with other and earlier manuscripts they printed the differences in a marginal apparatus (e.g., from Robert Stephanus’ edition in 1550 with 15 variants to John Mill’s in 1707 with 30,000 variants). Traditionalists feared and skeptics claimed that such variants endangered the authority of the text, and the classical scholar Richard Bentley pointed out that such fears and hopes were irrelevant, because the variants posed no threat to Christian faith – they only revealed the historical vicissitudes of the text’s transmission. While the mass of variants are real, they are best analyzed and understood as accidental or intentional.

The fourth chapter (“The Quest for Origins”) introduces some scholarly responses to the textual problem posed by Mill’s edition.  Richard Simon’s A Critical History of the Text of the New Testament (1689) argued that the Christian faith is based not on the Scriptures alone, but also on the church tradition, so that Jerome’s Latin version has an authority that Greek manuscripts cannot match. Richard Bentley tried to establish the Greek text of the fourth century, antedating Jerome’s Vulgate, by using the earliest Latin manuscripts available to correct the text of the fifth century, Codex Alexandrinus, the most important Greek manuscript in England – but he died before he could publish an edition. Johann Bengel attempted to develop a genealogical view of New Testament manuscripts based on their similarities, and for his edition of 1734 he formed a critical principle for evaluating readings: “The more difficult reading is the preferable reading.” Johann J. Wettstein’s edition of 1752 developed the system still used by scholars today of referring to uncial manuscripts by capital letters and cursive manuscripts by arabic numerals. Karl Lachmann’s edition of 1831 broke away from the textus receptus, no longer printing it with notes on variants from it, but replacing it with an independent text based exclusively on the evidence of early manuscripts, versions and patristic quotations. The major contributions of the nineteenth century, however, were made by Constantine von Tischendorf (d. 1874), who scoured Europe, Russia and the Near East for biblical manuscripts and published eight editions of the New Testament. The last of these editions remains unsurpassed as a resource for manuscript and versional evidence for the New Testament text. Also of note is the contribution by the Cambridge scholars, Westcott and Hort, who spent thirty years preparing their edition of The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881) based exclusively on documentary evidence and “an  inordinately closely reasoned and compelling survey of the materials and methods available” for textual criticism.

The fifth chapter (“Originals That Matter”) surveys briefly the methods of textual criticism and demonstrates their application with three examples. In methodology, the critical factors are either external or internal in nature. External factors refer to manuscripts which are weighed by their geographical distribution and genealogical relationships rather than by their quantity or age. Further, the reputation of a manuscript in demonstrable instances may tilt the balance of its witness in more difficult instances. Internal factors refer to an author’s characteristic style, vocabulary and theology, or again to scribal tendencies in transcribing texts such as harmonizing texts or correcting suspected errors. Examples given are Mark 1:41, where Ehrman prefers with anger to the commonly accepted with pity; the omission of Luke 22:43, 44; and Hebrews 2:9 apart from God over by the grace of God. In each instance Ehrman argues that the commonly accepted text sacrifices the message of the text in its context to an orthodox harmonization.

The sixth chapter (“Theologically Motivated Alterations of the Text”) focuses on the Christological debates of the second and third centuries and how they affected the text of the New Testament. Examples are found in textual variants preserved by some manuscripts and also in early patristic writings reflecting differences between the orthodox tradition and competing Christologies of the Adoptionists (1 Timothy 3:16; Luke 2:33; 3:22; John 1:18), Docetics (Luke 22:43f; 24:51) and Separationists (Hebrews 2:9; Mark 15:34; 1 John 4:2f).

The seventh chapter (“The Social Worlds of the Text”) adduces three other kinds of disputes which affected the transmission of the text.  One concerned the role of women in the church: they were active in the ministry of Jesus and the first witnesses to his resurrection (in each of the canonical Gospels), and Paul counts women among his coworkers. Later generations, however, sometimes demoted their significance, silencing women in 1 Corinthians 14:33-36 in the spirit of 1 Timothy 2:11-15 (ignoring the evidence of 1 Corinthians 11:5), and in Acts 17:4 making the prominent women who were converted become the wives of prominent men. Again, the relationship of Christians to Jews is implied by Jesus’ unfulfilled prayer in Luke 23:34 which may have been embarrassing to the orthodox (cf. Matthew 27:24 f.), while subtler anti-Jewish nuances may be detected in Matthew 1:21 (where Jesus is to save the world instead of his people), and John 4:22 (salvation comes from Judea instead of from the Jews). The criticism of pagan intellectuals also influenced Christian scribes to explain in Mark 6:3 that Jesus was not a “mere” carpenter but the son of a carpenter, and in Matthew 27:34 it was vinegar and not wine that Jesus tasted (to avoid inconsistency with 26:29). Scribes were inevitably affected by the controversies and assumptions of their own day.

The Introduction and Conclusion are autobiographical. They tell the story of how the author, from a normal not-particularly-biblically oriented Episcopal family background, was “born again” as a teenager. Determined to be a real Christian, he attended Moody Bible Institute where he became devoted to the Bible as the inerrant, verbally inspired word of God, and where he also learned that it was not originally written in English. Wanting to access the true inspired original words of God he went on to Wheaton College, and  later to Princeton Theological Seminary, learning the biblical languages, weathering such traumas as discovering inaccuracies in the biblical text (e.g., that the Abiathar of Mark 2:26 actually referred to the Ahimelech of 1 Samuel 21:1), learning about the history of the Christian church, its writings, and the manuscripts which preserve them, and how scholars have dealt with them. He came ultimately to appreciate the fact that reality is rarely neat and simple, and that divine inspiration is not a mechanical process. Ehrman realizes that not just the scribes who copied the text, but the biblical authors themselves were all individuals, bringing their own perspectives and assumptions to the texts they read and the events they related. They used their own words to pass on to others the insights and traditions they inherited – a living tradition of faith expressed in living situations. In retrospect Ehrman feels that he has moved from an unsophisticated acceptance of the Scriptures as absolute, mechanically integrated and monolithic, to an appreciation of their creative and inspiring function as they are interpreted by individuals in an ever-changing world – a message and medium at once divine and truly human.