Misquoting
Jesus
The Story Behind Who
Changed the Bible and Why
Bart D. Ehrman
To Bruce M. Metzger
Acknowledgments
I owe a debt of gratitude to four keen and careful scholars who have
read my manuscript and suggested (occasionally urged and pleaded
for) changes: Kim Haines-Eitzen of Cornell University; Michael W.
Holmes of Bethel College in Minnesota; Jeffrey Siker of Loyola Marymount
University; and my wife, Sarah Beckwith, a medieval scholar
at Duke University. The scholarly world would be a happier place if
all authors had readers such as these.
Thanks are also due to the editors at Harper San Francisco: John
Loudon, for encouraging the project and signing it up; Mickey Maudlin,
for bringing it home to completion; and above all Roger Freet, for a
careful reading of the text and helpful comments.
Translations of biblical texts, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.
I have dedicated this book to my mentor and “Doctor-Father,”
Bruce M. Metzger, who taught me the field and continues to inspire
me in my work.
Introduction
More than almost anything I’ve ever written about, the subject
of this book has been on my mind for the past thirty years,
since I was in my late teens and just beginning my study of the New
Testament. Because it has been a part of me for so long, I thought I
should begin by giving a personal account of why this material has
been, and still is, very important to me.
The book is about ancient manuscripts of the New Testament and
the differences found in them, about scribes who copied scripture and
sometimes changed it. This may not seem to be very promising as a
key to one’s own autobiography, but there it is. One has little control
over such things.
Before explaining how and why the manuscripts of the New Testament
have made a real difference to me emotionally and intellectually,
to my understanding of myself, the world I live in, my views of
God, and the Bible, I should give some personal background.
I was born and raised in a conservative place and time—the nation’s
heartland, beginning in the mid 1950s. My upbringing was
nothing out of the ordinary. We were a fairly typical family of five,
churchgoing but not particularly religious. Starting the year I was in
fifth grade, we were involved with the Episcopal church in Lawrence,
Kansas, a church with a kind and wise rector, who happened also
to be a neighbor and whose son was one of my friends (with whom I
got into mischief later on in junior high school—something involving
cigars). As with many Episcopal churches, this one was socially respectable
and socially responsible. It took the church liturgy seriously,
and scripture was part of that liturgy. But the Bible was not overly
emphasized: it was there as one of the guides to faith and practice,
along with the church’s tradition and common sense. We didn’t actually
talk about the Bible much, or read it much, even in Sunday school
classes, which focused more on practical and social issues, and on how
to live in the world.
The Bible did have a revered place in our home, especially for my
mom, who would occasionally read from the Bible and make sure
that we understood its stories and ethical teachings (less so its “doctrines”).
Up until my high school years, I suppose I saw the Bible as a
mysterious book of some importance for religion; but it certainly was
not something to be learned and mastered. It had a feel of antiquity to
it and was inextricably bound up somehow with God and church and
worship. Still, I saw no reason to read it on my own or study it.
Things changed drastically for me when I was a sophomore in
high school. It was then that I had a “born-again” experience, in a setting
quite different from that of my home church. I was a typical
“fringe” kid—a good student, interested and active in school sports
but not great at any of them, interested and active in social life but not
in the upper echelon of the school’s popular elite. I recall feeling a
kind of emptiness inside that nothing seemed to fill—not running
around with my friends (we were already into some serious social
drinking at parties), dating (beginning to enter the mysterium tremendum
of the world of sex), school (I worked hard and did well but was
no superstar), work (I was a door-to-door salesman for a company
that sold products for the blind), church (I was an acolyte and pretty
devout—one had to be on Sunday mornings, given everything that
happened on Saturday nights). There was a kind of loneliness associated
with being a young teenager; but, of course, I didn’t realize that
2 Misquoting Jesus
it was part of being a teenager—I thought there must be something
missing.
That’s when I started attending meetings of a Campus Life Youth
for Christ club; they took place at kids’ houses—the first I went to was
a yard party at the home of a kid who was pretty popular, and that
made me think the group must be okay. The leader of the group was a
twenty-something-year-old named Bruce who did this sort of thing
for a living—organized Youth for Christ clubs locally, tried to convert
high school kids to be “born again” and then get them involved in serious
Bible studies, prayer meetings, and the like. Bruce was a completely
winsome personality—younger than our parents but older and
more experienced than we—with a powerful message, that the void
we felt inside (We were teenagers! All of us felt a void!) was from not
having Christ in our hearts. If we would only ask Christ in, he would
enter and fill us with the joy and happiness that only the “saved”
could know.
Bruce could quote the Bible at will, and did so to an amazing degree.
Given my reverence for, but ignorance of, the Bible, it all
sounded completely convincing. And it was so unlike what I got at
church, which involved old established ritual that seemed more
geared toward old established adults than toward kids wanting fun
and adventure, but who felt empty inside.
To make a short story shorter, I eventually got to know Bruce,
came to accept his message of salvation, asked Jesus into my heart,
and had a bona fide born-again experience. I had been born for real
only fifteen years earlier, but this was a new and exciting experience
for me, and it got me started on a lifelong journey of faith that has
taken enormous twists and turns, ending up in a dead end that proved
to be, in fact, a new path that I have since taken, now well over thirty
years later.
Those of us who had these born-again experiences considered
ourselves to be “real” Christians—as opposed to those who simply went
to church as a matter of course, who did not really have Christ in their
hearts and were therefore simply going through the motions with
Introduction 3
none of the reality. One of the ways we differentiated ourselves from
these others was in our commitment to Bible study and prayer. Especially
Bible study. Bruce himself was a Bible man; he had gone to
Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and could quote an answer from
the Bible to every question we could think of (and many we would
never think of ). I soon became envious of this ability to quote scripture
and got involved with Bible studies myself, learning some texts,
understanding their relevance, and even memorizing the key verses.
Bruce convinced me that I should consider becoming a “serious”
Christian and devote myself completely to the Christian faith. This
meant studying scripture full time at Moody Bible Institute, which,
among other things, would involve a drastic change of lifestyle. At
Moody there was an ethical “code” that students had to sign off on: no
drinking, no smoking, no dancing, no card playing, no movies. And
lots of Bible. As we used to say, “Moody Bible Institute, where Bible is
our middle name.” I guess I looked on it as a kind of Christian boot
camp. In any event, I decided not to go half-measures with my faith; I
applied to Moody, got in, and went there in the fall of 1973.
The Moody experience was intense. I decided to major in Bible
theology, which meant taking a lot of biblical study and systematic theology
courses. Only one perspective was taught in these courses, subscribed
to by all the professors (they had to sign a statement) and by all
the students (we did as well): the Bible is the inerrant word of God. It
contains no mistakes. It is inspired completely and in its very words—
“verbal, plenary inspiration.” All the courses I took presupposed and
taught this perspective; any other was taken to be misguided or even
heretical. Some, I suppose, would call this brainwashing. For me, it
was an enormous “step up” from the milquetoast view of the Bible I
had had as a socializing Episcopalian in my younger youth. This was
hard-core Christianity, for the fully committed.
There was an obvious problem, however, with the claim that the
Bible was verbally inspired—down to its very words. As we learned
at Moody in one of the first courses in the curriculum, we don’t actually
have the original writings of the New Testament. What we have
are copies of these writings, made years later—in most cases, many
4 Misquoting Jesus
years later. Moreover, none of these copies is completely accurate,
since the scribes who produced them inadvertently and/or intentionally
changed them in places. All scribes did this. So rather than actually
having the inspired words of the autographs (i.e., the originals) of
the Bible, what we have are the error-ridden copies of the autographs.
One of the most pressing of all tasks, therefore, was to ascertain what
the originals of the Bible said, given the circumstances that (1) they
were inspired and (2) we don’t have them.
I must say that many of my friends at Moody did not consider this
task to be all that significant or interesting. They were happy to rest
on the claim that the autographs had been inspired, and to shrug off,
more or less, the problem that the autographs do not survive. For me,
though, this was a compelling problem. It was the words of scripture
themselves that God had inspired. Surely we have to know what
those words were if we want to know how he had communicated to
us, since the very words were his words, and having some other words
(those inadvertently or intentionally created by scribes) didn’t help us
much if we wanted to know His words.
This is what got me interested in the manuscripts of the New Testament,
already as an eighteen-year-old. At Moody, I learned the basics
of the field known as textual criticism—a technical term for the science
of restoring the “original” words of a text from manuscripts that
have altered them. But I wasn’t yet equipped to engage in this study:
first I had to learn Greek, the original language of the New Testament,
and possibly other ancient languages such as Hebrew (the language
of the Christian Old Testament) and Latin, not to mention modern
European languages like German and French, in order to see what
other scholars had said about such things. It was a long path ahead.
At the end of my three years at Moody (it was a three-year diploma),
I had done well in my courses and was more serious than ever about becoming
a Christian scholar. My idea at the time was that there were
plenty of highly educated scholars among the evangelical Christians,
but not many evangelicals among the (secular) highly educated scholars,
so I wanted to become an evangelical “voice” in secular circles, by
getting degrees that would allow me to teach in secular settings while
Introduction 5
retaining my evangelical commitments. First, though, I needed to
complete my bachelor’s degree, and to do that I decided to go to a toprank
evangelical college. I chose Wheaton College, in a suburb of
Chicago.
At Moody I was warned that I might have trouble finding real
Christians at Wheaton—which shows how fundamentalist Moody
was: Wheaton is only for evangelical Christians and is the alma mater
of Billy Graham, for example. And at first I did find it to be a bit liberal
for my tastes. Students talked about literature, history, and philosophy
rather than the verbal inspiration of scripture. They did this from
a Christian perspective, but even so: didn’t they realize what really
mattered?
I decided to major in English literature at Wheaton, since reading
had long been one of my passions and since I knew that to make inroads
into the circles of scholarship, I would need to become well
versed in an area of scholarship other than the Bible. I decided also to
commit myself to learning Greek. It was during my first semester at
Wheaton, then, that I met Dr. Gerald Hawthorne, my Greek teacher
and a person who became quite influential in my life as a scholar,
teacher, and, eventually, friend. Hawthorne, like most of my professors
at Wheaton, was a committed evangelical Christian. But he was
not afraid of asking questions of his faith. At the time, I took this as a
sign of weakness (in fact, I thought I had nearly all the answers to the
questions he asked); eventually I saw it as a real commitment to truth
and as being willing to open oneself up to the possibility that one’s views
need to be revised in light of further knowledge and life experience.
Learning Greek was a thrilling experience for me. As it turned
out, I was pretty good at the basics of the language and was always
eager for more. On a deeper level, however, the experience of learning
Greek became a bit troubling for me and my view of scripture. I came
to see early on that the full meaning and nuance of the Greek text of
the New Testament could be grasped only when it is read and studied
in the original language (the same thing applies to the Old Testament,
as I later learned when I acquired Hebrew). All the more reason, I
thought, for learning the language thoroughly. At the same time, this
6 Misquoting Jesus
started making me question my understanding of scripture as the verbally
inspired word of God. If the full meaning of the words of scripture
can be grasped only by studying them in Greek (and Hebrew),
doesn’t this mean that most Christians, who don’t read ancient languages,
will never have complete access to what God wants them to
know? And doesn’t this make the doctrine of inspiration a doctrine
only for the scholarly elite, who have the intellectual skills and leisure
to learn the languages and study the texts by reading them in the original?
What good does it do to say that the words are inspired by God
if most people have absolutely no access to these words, but only to
more or less clumsy renderings of these words into a language, such as
English, that has nothing to do with the original words?1
My questions were complicated even more as I began to think increasingly
about the manuscripts that conveyed the words. The more
I studied Greek, the more I became interested in the manuscripts that
preserve the New Testament for us, and in the science of textual criticism,
which can supposedly help us reconstruct what the original
words of the New Testament were. I kept reverting to my basic question:
how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of
God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired,
but only the words copied by the scribes—sometimes correctly but
sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the
autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals!
We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these
are centuries removed from the originals and different from them,
evidently, in thousands of ways.
These doubts both plagued me and drove me to dig deeper and
deeper, to understand what the Bible really was. I completed my degree
at Wheaton in two years and decided, under the guidance of Professor
Hawthorne, to commit myself to the textual criticism of the New
Testament by going to study with the world’s leading expert in the
field, a scholar named Bruce M. Metzger who taught at Princeton
Theological Seminary.
Once again I was warned by my evangelical friends against going
to Princeton Seminary, since, as they told me, I would have trouble
Introduction 7
finding any “real” Christians there. It was, after all, a Presbyterian
seminary, not exactly a breeding ground for born-again Christians.
But my study of English literature, philosophy, and history—not to
mention Greek—had widened my horizons significantly, and my
passion was now for knowledge, knowledge of all kinds, sacred and
secular. If learning the “truth” meant no longer being able to identify
with the born-again Christians I knew in high school, so be it. I was
intent on pursuing my quest for truth wherever it might take me,
trusting that any truth I learned was no less true for being unexpected
or difficult to fit into the pigeonholes provided by my evangelical
background.
Upon arriving at Princeton Theological Seminary, I immediately
signed up for first-year Hebrew and Greek exegesis (interpretation)
classes, and loaded my schedule as much as I could with such courses.
I found these classes to be a challenge, both academically and personally.
The academic challenge was completely welcome, but the personal
challenges that I faced were emotionally rather trying. As I’ve
indicated, already at Wheaton I had begun to question some of the
foundational aspects of my commitment to the Bible as the inerrant
word of God. That commitment came under serious assault in my detailed
studies at Princeton. I resisted any temptation to change my
views, and found a number of friends who, like me, came from conservative
evangelical schools and were trying to “keep the faith” (a
funny way of putting it—looking back—since we were, after all, in
a Christian divinity program). But my studies started catching up
with me.
A turning point came in my second semester, in a course I was taking
with a much revered and pious professor named Cullen Story. The
course was on the exegesis of the Gospel of Mark, at the time (and
still) my favorite Gospel. For this course we needed to be able to read
the Gospel of Mark completely in Greek (I memorized the entire
Greek vocabulary of the Gospel the week before the semester began);
we were to keep an exegetical notebook on our reflections on the interpretation
of key passages; we discussed problems in the interpretation
of the text; and we had to write a final term paper on an
8 Misquoting Jesus
interpretive crux of our own choosing. I chose a passage in Mark 2,
where Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees because his disciples had
been walking through a grain field, eating the grain on the Sabbath.
Jesus wants to show the Pharisees that “Sabbath was made for humans,
not humans for the Sabbath” and so reminds them of what the
great King David had done when he and his men were hungry, how
they went into the Temple “when Abiathar was the high priest” and
ate the show bread, which was only for the priests to eat. One of the
well-known problems of the passage is that when one looks at the Old
Testament passage that Jesus is citing (1 Sam. 21:1–6), it turns out that
David did this not when Abiathar was the high priest, but, in fact,
when Abiathar’s father Ahimelech was. In other words, this is one of
those passages that have been pointed to in order to show that the
Bible is not inerrant at all but contains mistakes.
In my paper for Professor Story, I developed a long and complicated
argument to the effect that even though Mark indicates this
happened “when Abiathar was the high priest,” it doesn’t really mean
that Abiathar was the high priest, but that the event took place in the
part of the scriptural text that has Abiathar as one of the main characters.
My argument was based on the meaning of the Greek words involved
and was a bit convoluted. I was pretty sure Professor Story
would appreciate the argument, since I knew him as a good Christian
scholar who obviously (like me) would never think there could be
anything like a genuine error in the Bible. But at the end of my paper
he made a simple one-line comment that for some reason went
straight through me. He wrote: “Maybe Mark just made a mistake.” I
started thinking about it, considering all the work I had put into the
paper, realizing that I had had to do some pretty fancy exegetical footwork
to get around the problem, and that my solution was in fact a bit
of a stretch. I finally concluded, “Hmm . . . maybe Mark did make a
mistake.”
Once I made that admission, the floodgates opened. For if there
could be one little, picayune mistake in Mark 2, maybe there could be
mistakes in other places as well. Maybe, when Jesus says later in Mark
4 that the mustard seed is “the smallest of all seeds on the earth,”
Introduction 9
maybe I don’t need to come up with a fancy explanation for how the
mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds when I know full well it isn’t.
And maybe these “mistakes” apply to bigger issues. Maybe when
Mark says that Jesus was crucified the day after the Passover meal was
eaten (Mark 14:12; 15:25) and John says he died the day before it
was eaten (John 19:14)—maybe that is a genuine difference. Or when
Luke indicates in his account of Jesus’s birth that Joseph and Mary returned
to Nazareth just over a month after they had come to Bethlehem
(and performed the rites of purification; Luke 2:39), whereas
Matthew indicates they instead fled to Egypt (Matt. 2:19–22)—maybe
that is a difference. Or when Paul says that after he converted on the
way to Damascus he did not go to Jerusalem to see those who were
apostles before him (Gal. 1:16–17), whereas the book of Acts says that
that was the first thing he did after leaving Damascus (Acts 9:26)—
maybe that is a difference.
This kind of realization coincided with the problems I was encountering
the more closely I studied the surviving Greek manuscripts
of the New Testament. It is one thing to say that the originals
were inspired, but the reality is that we don’t have the originals—so
saying they were inspired doesn’t help me much, unless I can reconstruct
the originals. Moreover, the vast majority of Christians for the
entire history of the church have not had access to the originals, making
their inspiration something of a moot point. Not only do we not
have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We
don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the
copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made
later—much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries
later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many
thousands of places. As we will see later in this book, these copies differ
from one another in so many places that we don’t even know how
many differences there are. Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative
terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than
there are words in the New Testament.
Most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant.
A good portion of them simply show us that scribes in antiquity
10 Misquoting Jesus
could spell no better than most people can today (and they didn’t even
have dictionaries, let alone spell check). Even so, what is one to make
of all these differences? If one wants to insist that God inspired the
very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the
very words of scripture? In some places, as we will see, we simply cannot
be sure that we have reconstructed the original text accurately. It’s
a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don’t even
know what the words are!
This became a problem for my view of inspiration, for I came to
realize that it would have been no more difficult for God to preserve
the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire
them in the first place. If he wanted his people to have his words,
surely he would have given them to them (and possibly even given
them the words in a language they could understand, rather than
Greek and Hebrew). The fact that we don’t have the words surely
must show, I reasoned, that he did not preserve them for us. And if he
didn’t perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think
that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words.
In short, my study of the Greek New Testament, and my investigations
into the manuscripts that contain it, led to a radical rethinking
of my understanding of what the Bible is. This was a seismic change
for me. Before this—starting with my born-again experience in high
school, through my fundamentalist days at Moody, and on through
my evangelical days at Wheaton—my faith had been based completely
on a certain view of the Bible as the fully inspired, inerrant word of
God. Now I no longer saw the Bible that way. The Bible began to appear
to me as a very human book. Just as human scribes had copied,
and changed, the texts of scripture, so too had human authors originally
written the texts of scripture. This was a human book from beginning
to end. It was written by different human authors at different
times and in different places to address different needs. Many of these
authors no doubt felt they were inspired by God to say what they did,
but they had their own perspectives, their own beliefs, their own
views, their own needs, their own desires, their own understandings,
their own theologies; and these perspectives, beliefs, views, needs,
Introduction 11
desires, understandings, and theologies informed everything they
said. In all these ways they differed from one another. Among other
things, this meant that Mark did not say the same thing that Luke
said because he didn’t mean the same thing as Luke. John is different
from Matthew—not the same. Paul is different from Acts. And
James is different from Paul. Each author is a human author and
needs to be read for what he (assuming they were all men) has to say,
not assuming that what he says is the same, or conformable to, or consistent
with what every other author has to say. The Bible, at the end
of the day, is a very human book.
This was a new perspective for me, and obviously not the view I
had when I was an evangelical Christian—nor is it the view of most
evangelicals today. Let me give an example of the difference my
changed perspective could have for understanding the Bible. When I
was at Moody Bible Institute, one of the most popular books on campus
was Hal Lindsey’s apocalyptic blueprint for our future, The Late Great
Planet Earth. Lindsey’s book was popular not only at Moody; it was, in
fact, the best-selling work of nonfiction (apart from the Bible; and
using the term nonfiction somewhat loosely) in the English language
in the 1970s. Lindsey, like those of us at Moody, believed that the Bible
was absolutely inerrant in its very words, to the extent that you could
read the New Testament and know not only how God wanted you to
live and what he wanted you to believe, but also what God himself
was planning to do in the future and how he was going to do it. The
world was heading for an apocalyptic crisis of catastrophic proportions,
and the inerrant words of scripture could be read to show what,
how, and when it would all happen.
I was particularly struck by the “when.” Lindsey pointed to Jesus’s
parable of the fig tree as an indication of when we could expect the future
Armageddon. Jesus’s disciples want to know when the “end” will
come, and Jesus replies:
From the fig tree learn this parable. When its branch becomes tender
and it puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also you,
when you see all these things you know that he [the Son of Man] is
12 Misquoting Jesus
near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass
away before all these things take place. (Matt. 24:32–34)
What does this parable mean? Lindsey, thinking that it is an inerrant
word from God himself, unpacks its message by pointing out
that in the Bible the “fig tree” is often used as an image of the nation of
Israel. What would it mean for it to put forth its leaves? It would
mean that the nation, after lying dormant for a season (the winter),
would come back to life. And when did Israel come back to life? In
1948, when Israel once again became a sovereign nation. Jesus indicates
that the end will come within the very generation that this was
to occur. And how long is a generation in the Bible? Forty years. Hence
the divinely inspired teaching, straight from the lips of Jesus: the end
of the world will come sometime before 1988, forty years after the reemergence
of Israel.
This message proved completely compelling to us. It may seem
odd now—given the circumstance that 1988 has come and gone, with
no Armageddon—but, on the other hand, there are millions of Christians
who still believe that the Bible can be read literally as completely
inspired in its predictions of what is soon to happen to bring history as
we know it to a close. Witness the current craze for the Tim
LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins series Left Behind, another apocalyptic vision
of our future based on a literalistic reading of the Bible, a series
that has sold more than sixty million copies in our own day.
It is a radical shift from reading the Bible as an inerrant blueprint
for our faith, life, and future to seeing it as a very human book, with
very human points of view, many of which differ from one another
and none of which provides the inerrant guide to how we should live.
This is the shift in my own thinking that I ended up making, and to
which I am now fully committed. Many Christians, of course, have
never held this literalistic view of the Bible in the first place, and for
them such a view might seem completely one-sided and unnuanced
(not to mention bizarre and unrelated to matters of faith). There are,
however, plenty of people around who still see the Bible this way. Occasionally
I see a bumper sticker that reads: “God said it, I believe it,
Introduction 13
and that settles it.” My response is always, What if God didn’t say it?
What if the book you take as giving you God’s words instead contains
human words? What if the Bible doesn’t give a foolproof answer to
the questions of the modern age—abortion, women’s rights, gay rights,
religious supremacy, Western-style democracy, and the like? What if
we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own,
without setting up the Bible as a false idol—or an oracle that gives us
a direct line of communication with the Almighty? There are clear
reasons for thinking that, in fact, the Bible is not this kind of inerrant
guide to our lives: among other things, as I’ve been pointing out, in
many places we (as scholars, or just regular readers) don’t even know
what the original words of the Bible actually were.
My personal theology changed radically with this realization, taking
me down roads quite different from the ones I had traversed in
my late teens and early twenties. I continue to appreciate the Bible
and the many and varied messages that it contains—much as I have
come to appreciate the other writings of early Christians from about
the same time and soon thereafter, the writings of lesser-known figures
such as Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, and Barnabas of
Alexandria, and much as I have come to appreciate the writings of
persons of other faiths at roughly the time, the writings of Josephus,
and Lucian of Samosata, and Plutarch. All of these authors are trying
to understand the world and their place in it, and all of them have
valuable things to teach us. It is important to know what the words of
these authors were, so that we can see what they had to say and judge,
then, for ourselves what to think and how to live in light of those
words.
This brings me back to my interest in the manuscripts of the New
Testament and the study of those manuscripts in the field known as
textual criticism. It is my conviction that textual criticism is a compelling
and intriguing field of study of real importance not just to
scholars but to everyone with an interest in the Bible (whether a literalist,
a recovering literalist, a never-in-your-life-would-I-ever-be-aliteralist,
or even just anyone with a remote interest in the Bible as a
14 Misquoting Jesus
historical and cultural phenomenon). What is striking, however, is
that most readers—even those interested in Christianity, in the Bible,
in biblical studies, both those who believe the Bible is inerrant and
those who do not—know almost nothing about textual criticism. And
it’s not difficult to see why. Despite the fact that this has been a topic of
sustained scholarship now for more than three hundred years, there
is scarcely a single book written about it for a lay audience—that is,
for those who know nothing about it, who don’t have the Greek and
other languages necessary for the in-depth study of it, who do not
realize there is even a “problem” with the text, but who would be intrigued
to learn both what the problems are and how scholars have set
about dealing with them.2
That is the kind of book this is—to my knowledge, the first of its
kind. It is written for people who know nothing about textual criticism
but who might like to learn something about how scribes were
changing scripture and about how we can recognize where they did
so. It is written based on my thirty years of thinking about the subject,
and from the perspective that I now have, having gone through such
radical transformations of my own views of the Bible. 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. In many ways, then,
this is a very personal book for me, the end result of a long journey.
Maybe, for others, it can be part of a journey of their own.
Introduction 15
1
The Beginnings of
Christian Scripture
To discuss the copies of the New Testament that we have, we need
to start at the very beginning with one of the unusual features
of Christianity in the Greco-Roman world: its bookish character. In
fact, to make sense of this feature of Christianity, we need to start
before the beginnings of Christianity with the religion from which
Christianity sprang, Judaism. For the bookishness of Christianity was
in some sense anticipated and foreshadowed by Judaism, which was
the first “religion of the book” in Western civilization.
Judaism as a Religion of the Book
The Judaism from which Christianity sprang was an unusual religion
in the Roman world, although by no means unique. Like adherents of
any of the other (hundreds of ) religions in the Mediterranean area,
Jews acknowledged the existence of a divine realm populated by superhuman
beings (angels, archangels, principalities, powers); they
subscribed to the worship of a deity through sacrifices of animals and
other food products; they maintained that there was a special holy
place where this divine being dwelt here on earth (the Temple in
Jerusalem), and it was there that these sacrifices were to be made.
They prayed to this God for communal and personal needs. They told
stories about how this God had interacted with human beings in the
past, and they anticipated his help for human beings in the present. In
all these ways, Judaism was “familiar” to the worshipers of other gods
in the empire.
In some ways, though, Judaism was distinctive. All other religions
in the empire were polytheistic—acknowledging and worshiping
many gods of all sorts and functions: great gods of the state, lesser
gods of various locales, gods who oversaw different aspects of human
birth, life, and death. Judaism, on the other hand, was monotheistic;
Jews insisted on worshiping only the one God of their ancestors, the
God who, they maintained, had created this world, controlled this
world, and alone provided what was needed for his people. According
to Jewish tradition, this one all-powerful God had called Israel to
be his special people and had promised to protect and defend them in
exchange for their absolute devotion to him and him alone. The Jewish
people, it was believed, had a “covenant” with this God, an agreement
that they would be uniquely his as he was uniquely theirs. Only
this one God was to be worshiped and obeyed; so, too, there was
only one Temple, unlike in the polytheistic religions of the day in
which, for example, there could be any number of temples to a god
like Zeus. To be sure, Jews could worship God anywhere they lived,
but they could perform their religious obligations of sacrifice to God
only at the Temple in Jerusalem. In other places, though, they could
gather together in “synagogues” for prayer and to discuss the ancestral
traditions at the heart of their religion.
These traditions involved both stories about God’s interaction
with the ancestors of the people of Israel—the patriarchs and matriarchs
of the faith, as it were: Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rachel, Jacob,
Rebecca, Joseph, Moses, David, and so on—and detailed instructions
concerning how this people was to worship and live. One of the things
18 Misquoting Jesus
that made Judaism unique among the religions of the Roman Empire
was that these instructions, along with the other ancestral traditions,
were written down in sacred books.
For modern people intimately familiar with any of the major contemporary
Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), it may be
hard to imagine, but books played virtually no role in the polytheistic
religions of the ancient Western world. These religions were almost
exclusively concerned with honoring the gods through ritual acts of
sacrifice. There were no doctrines to be learned, as explained in books,
and almost no ethical principles to be followed, as laid out in
books. This is not to say that adherents of the various polytheistic religions
had no beliefs about their gods or that they had no ethics, but
beliefs and ethics—strange as this sounds to modern ears—played almost
no role in religion per se. These were instead matters of personal
philosophy, and philosophies, of course, could be bookish. Since ancient
religions themselves did not require any particular sets of “right
doctrines” or, for the most part, “ethical codes,” books played almost
no role in them.
Judaism was unique in that it stressed its ancestral traditions, customs,
and laws, and maintained that these had been recorded in sacred
books, which had the status, therefore, of “scripture” for the Jewish
people. During the period of our concern—the first century of the common
era,1 when the books of the New Testament were being written—
Jews scattered throughout the Roman Empire understood in
particular that God had given direction to his people in the writings
of Moses, referred to collectively as the Torah, which literally means
something like “law” or “guidance.” The Torah consists of five books,
sometimes called the Pentateuch (the “five scrolls”), the beginning of
the Jewish Bible (the Christian Old Testament): Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Here one finds accounts of
the creation of the world, the calling of Israel to be God’s people, the
stories of Israel’s patriarchs and matriarchs and God’s involvement
with them, and most important (and most extensive), the laws that
God gave Moses indicating how his people were to worship him and
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture 19
behave toward one another in community together. These were sacred
laws, to be learned, discussed, and followed—and they were written
in a set of books.
Jews had other books that were important for their religious lives
together as well, for example, books of prophets (such as Isaiah, Jeremiah,
and Amos), and poems (Psalms), and history (such as Joshua
and Samuel). Eventually, some time after Christianity began, a group
of these Hebrew books—twenty-two of them altogether—came to be
regarded as a sacred canon of scripture, the Jewish Bible of today, accepted
by Christians as the first part of the Christian canon, the “Old
Testament.”2
These brief facts about Jews and their written texts are important
because they set the backdrop for Christianity, which was also, from
the very beginning, a “bookish” religion. Christianity began, of course,
with Jesus, who was himself a Jewish rabbi (teacher) who accepted the
authority of the Torah, and possibly other sacred Jewish books, and
taught his interpretation of those books to his disciples.3 Like other
rabbis of his day, Jesus maintained that God’s will could be found in
the sacred texts, especially the Law of Moses. He read these scriptures,
studied these scriptures, interpreted these scriptures, adhered to these
scriptures, and taught these scriptures. His followers were, from the
beginning, Jews who placed a high premium on the books of their
tradition. And so, already, at the start of Christianity, adherents of this
new religion, the followers of Jesus, were unusual in the Roman Empire:
like the Jews before them, but unlike nearly everyone else, they
located sacred authority in sacred books. Christianity at its beginning
was a religion of the book.
Christianity as a Religion of the Book
As we will see momentarily, the importance of books for early Christianity
does not mean that all Christians could read books; quite the
contrary, most early Christians, like most other people throughout the
20 Misquoting Jesus
empire (including Jews!), were illiterate. But that did not mean that
books played a secondary role in the religion. In fact, books were centrally
important, in fundamental ways, to the lives of Christians in
their communities.
Early Christian Letters
The first thing to notice is that many different kinds of writing were
significant for the burgeoning Christian communities of the first century
after Jesus’s death. The earliest evidence we have for Christian
communities comes from letters that Christian leaders wrote. The
apostle Paul is our earliest and best example. Paul established churches
throughout the eastern Mediterranean, principally in urban centers,
evidently by convincing pagans (i.e., adherents of any of the empire’s
polytheistic religions) that the Jewish God was the only one to be worshiped,
and that Jesus was his Son, who had died for the sins of the
world and was returning soon for judgment on the earth (see 1 Thess.
1:9–10). It is not clear how much Paul used scripture (i.e., the writings
of the Jewish Bible) in trying to persuade his potential converts of the
truth of his message; but in one of his key summaries of his preaching
he indicates that what he preached was that “Christ died, in accordance
with the scriptures . . . and that he was raised, in accordance
with the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3–4). Evidently Paul correlated the
events of Christ’s death and resurrection with his interpretation of
key passages of the Jewish Bible, which he, as a highly educated Jew,
obviously could read for himself, and which he interpreted for his
hearers in an often successful attempt to convert them.
After Paul had converted a number of people in a given locale, he
would move to another and try, usually with some success, to convert
people there as well. But he would sometimes (often?) hear news
from one of the other communities of believers he had earlier established,
and sometimes (often?) the news would not be good: members
of the community had started to behave badly, problems of immorality
had arisen, “false teachers” had arrived teaching notions contrary
to his own, some of the community members had started to hold to
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture 21
false doctrines, and so on. Upon hearing the news, Paul would write a
letter back to the community, dealing with the problems. These letters
were very important to the lives of the community, and a number
of them eventually came to be regarded as scripture. Some thirteen
letters written in Paul’s name are included in the New Testament.
We can get a sense of how important these letters were at the earliest
stages of the Christian movement from the very first Christian
writing we have, Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, usually dated
to about 49 C.E.,4 some twenty years after Jesus’s death and some
twenty years before any of the Gospel accounts of his life. Paul ends
the letter by saying, “Greet all the brothers and sisters with a holy kiss;
I strongly adjure you in the name of the Lord that you have this letter
read to all the brothers and sisters” (1 Thess. 5:26–27). This was not a
casual letter to be read simply by anyone who was mildly interested;
the apostle insists that it be read, and that it be accepted as an authoritative
statement by him, the founder of the community.
Letters thus circulated throughout the Christian communities
from the earliest of times. These letters bound together communities
that lived in different places; they unified the faith and the practices
of the Christians; they indicated what the Christians were supposed to
believe and how they were supposed to behave. They were to be read
aloud to the community at community gatherings—since, as I pointed
out, most Christians, like most others, would not have been able to
read the letters themselves.
A number of these letters came to be included in the New Testament.
In fact, the New Testament is largely made up of letters written
by Paul and other Christian leaders to Christian communities (e.g.,
the Corinthians, the Galatians) and individuals (e.g., Philemon). Moreover,
the letters that survive—there are twenty-one in the New Testament—
are only a fraction of those written. Just with respect to Paul,
we can assume that he wrote many more letters than the ones attributed
to him in the New Testament. On occasion, he mentions other
letters that no longer survive; in 1 Cor. 5:9, for example, he mentions a
22 Misquoting Jesus
letter that he had earlier written the Corinthians (sometime before
First Corinthians). And he mentions another letter that some of the
Corinthians had sent him (1 Cor. 7:1). Elsewhere he refers to letters
that his opponents had (2 Cor. 3:1). None of these letters survives.
Scholars have long suspected that some of the letters found in the
New Testament under Paul’s name were in fact written by his later
followers, pseudonymously.5 If this suspicion is correct, it would provide
even more evidence of the importance of letters in the early
Christian movement: in order to get one’s views heard, one would write
a letter in the apostle’s name, on the assumption that this would carry
a good deal of authority. One of these allegedly pseudonymous letters
is Colossians, which itself emphasizes the importance of letters and
mentions yet another one that no longer survives: “And when you
have read this epistle, be sure that it is read in the church of the
Laodiceans, and that you read the letter written to Laodicea” (Col.
4:16). Evidently Paul—either himself, or someone writing in his
name—wrote a letter to the nearby town of Laodicea. This letter too
has been lost.6
My point is that letters were important to the lives of the early
Christian communities. These were written documents that were to
guide them in their faith and practice. They bound these churches together.
They helped make Christianity quite different from the other
religions scattered throughout the empire, in that the various Christian
communities, unified by this common literature that was being
shared back and forth (cf. Col. 4:16), were adhering to instructions
found in written documents or “books.”
And it was not only letters that were important to these communities.
There was, in fact, an extraordinarily wide range of literature
being produced, disseminated, read, and followed by the early Christians,
quite unlike anything else the Roman pagan world had ever
seen. Rather than describe all this literature at great length, here I can
simply mention some examples of the kinds of books that were being
written and distributed.
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture 23
Early Gospels
Christians, of course, were concerned to know more about the life,
teachings, death, and resurrection of their Lord; and so numerous
Gospels were written, which recorded the traditions associated with
the life of Jesus. Four such Gospels became most widely used—those
of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the New Testament—but
many others were written. We still have some of the others: for example,
Gospels allegedly by Jesus’s disciple Philip, his brother Judas
Thomas, and his female companion Mary Magdalene. Other Gospels,
including some of the very earliest, have been lost. We know this, for
example, from the Gospel of Luke, whose author indicates that in
writing his account he consulted “many” predecessors (Luke 1:1), which
obviously no longer survive. One of these earlier accounts may have
been the source that scholars have designated Q, which was probably
a written account, principally of Jesus’s sayings, used by both Luke
and Matthew for many of their distinctive teachings of Jesus (e.g., the
Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes).7
Jesus’s life, as we have seen, was interpreted by Paul and others in
light of the Jewish scriptures. These books too—both the Pentateuch
and other Jewish writings, such as the Prophets and Psalms—were in
wide use among Christians, who explored them to see what they could
reveal about God’s will, especially as it had been fulfilled in Christ.
Copies of the Jewish Bible, usually in Greek translation (the so-called
Septuagint), were widely available, then, in early Christian communities
as sources for study and reflection.
Early Acts of the Apostles
Not just the life of Jesus, but also the lives of his earliest followers
were of interest to the growing Christian communities of the first and
second centuries. It is no surprise, then, to see that accounts of the
apostles—their adventures and missionary exploits, especially after
the death and resurrection of Jesus—came to occupy an important
place for Christians interested in knowing more about their religion.
24 Misquoting Jesus
One such account, the Acts of the Apostles, eventually made it into
the New Testament. But many other accounts were written, mainly
about individual apostles, such as those found in the Acts of Paul, the
Acts of Peter, and the Acts of Thomas. Other Acts have survived only in
fragments, or have been lost altogether.
Christian Apocalypses
As I have indicated, Paul (along with other apostles) taught that Jesus
was soon to return from heaven in judgment on the earth. The coming
end of all things was a source of continuous fascination for early
Christians, who by and large expected that God would soon intervene
in the affairs of the world to overthrow the forces of evil and establish
his good kingdom, with Jesus at its head, here on earth. Some Christian
authors produced prophetic accounts of what would happen at
this cataclysmic end of the world as we know it. There were Jewish
precedents for this kind of “apocalyptic” literature, for example, in
the book of Daniel in the Jewish Bible, or the book of 1 Enoch in the
Jewish Apocrypha. Of the Christian apocalypses, one eventually came
to be included in the New Testament: the Apocalypse of John. Others,
including the Apocalypse of Peter and The Shepherd of Hermas, were
also popular reading in a number of Christian communities in the
early centuries of the church.
Church Orders
The early Christian communities multiplied and grew, starting in
Paul’s day and continuing in the generations after him. Originally the
Christian churches, at least those established by Paul himself, were
what we might call charismatic communities. They believed that each
member of the community had been given a “gift” (Greek: charisma)
of the Spirit to assist the community in its ongoing life: for example,
there were gifts of teaching, administration, almsgiving, healing, and
prophecy. Eventually, however, as the expectation of an imminent
end of the world began to fade, it became clear that there needed to be
a more rigid church structure, especially if the church was to be around
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture 25
for the long haul (cf. 1 Corinthians 11; Matthew 16, 18). Churches
around the Mediterranean, including those founded by Paul, started
appointing leaders who would be in charge and make decisions
(rather than having every member as “equally” endowed with the
Spirit); rules began to be formulated concerning how the community
was to live together, practice its sacred rites (e.g., baptism and eucharist),
train new members, and so on. Soon documents started being
produced that indicated how the churches were to be ordered and
structured. These so-called church orders became increasingly important
in the second and third Christian centuries, but already by about
100 C.E. the first (to our knowledge) had been written and widely disseminated,
a book called The Didache [Teaching] of the Twelve Apostles.
Soon it had numerous successors.
Christian Apologies
As the Christian communities became established, they sometimes
faced opposition from Jews and pagans who saw this new faith as a
threat and suspected its adherents of engaging in immoral and socially
destructive practices (just as new religious movements today are
often regarded with suspicion). This opposition sometimes led to local
persecutions of Christians; eventually the persecutions became “official,”
as Roman administrators intervened to arrest Christians and try
to force them to return to the old ways of paganism. As Christianity
grew, it eventually converted intellectuals to the faith, who were well
equipped to discuss and dismiss the charges typically raised against
the Christians. The writings of these intellectuals are sometimes called
apologies, from the Greek word for “defense” (apologia). The apologists
wrote intellectual defenses of the new faith, trying to show that
far from being a threat to the social structure of the empire, it was a
religion that preached moral behavior; and far from being a dangerous
superstition, it represented the ultimate truth in its worship of the
one true God. These apologies were important for early Christian
readers, as they provided them with the arguments they needed when
