themselves faced with persecution. Already this kind of defense was
found in the New Testament period, for example, in the book of
1 Peter (3:15: “always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who
asks you to give an account of the hope that is in you”) and in the book
of Acts, where Paul and other apostles defend themselves against
charges leveled at them. By the second half of the second century,
apologies had become a popular form of Christian writing.
Christian Martyrologies
At about the same time that apologies began to be written, Christians
started producing accounts of their persecutions and the martyrdoms
that happened as a result of them. There is some portrayal of both
matters already in the New Testament book of Acts, where opposition
to the Christian movement, the arrest of Christian leaders, and
the execution of at least one of them (Stephen) form a significant part
of the narrative (see Acts 7). Later, in the second century, martyrologies
(accounts of the martyrs) began to appear. The first of them is the
Martyrdom of Polycarp, who was an important Christian leader who
served as bishop of the church of Smyrna, in Asia Minor, for almost
the entire first half of the second century. The account of Polycarp’s
death is found in a letter produced by members of his church, written
to another community. Soon afterward, accounts of other martyrs
began to appear. These too were popular among Christians, as they
provided encouragement to those who were also persecuted for the
faith, and guidance about how to face the ultimate threats of arrest,
torture, and death.
Antiheretical Tractates
The problems Christians faced were not confined to external threats
of persecution. From the earliest times, Christians were aware that a
variety of interpretations of the “truth” of the religion existed within
their own ranks. Already the apostle Paul rails against “false teachers”—
for example, in his letter to the Galatians. Reading the surviving
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture 27
accounts, we can see clearly that these opponents were not outsiders.
They were Christians who understood the religion in fundamentally
different ways. To deal with this problem, Christian leaders began to
write tractates that opposed “heretics” (those who chose the wrong way
to understand the faith); in a sense, some of Paul’s letters are the earliest
representations of this kind of tractate. Eventually, though, Christians
of all persuasions became involved in trying to establish the “true
teaching” (the literal meaning of “orthodoxy”) and to oppose those
who advocated false teaching. These antiheretical tractates became an
important feature of the landscape of early Christian literature. What
is interesting is that even groups of “false teachers” wrote tractates
against “false teachers,” so that the group that established once and for
all what Christians were to believe (those responsible, for example, for
the creeds that have come down to us today) are sometimes polemicized
against by Christians who take the positions eventually decreed
as false. This we have learned by relatively recent discoveries of
“heretical” literature, in which the so-called heretics maintain that
their views are correct and those of the “orthodox” church leaders are
false.8
Early Christian Commentaries
A good deal of the debate over right belief and false belief involved
the interpretation of Christian texts, including the “Old Testament,”
which Christians claimed as part of their own Bible. This shows yet
again how central texts were to the life of the early Christian communities.
Eventually, Christian authors began to write interpretations of
these texts, not necessarily with the direct purpose of refuting false interpretations
(although that was often in view as well), but sometimes
simply to unpack the meaning of these texts and to show their relevance
to Christian life and practice. It is interesting that the first
Christian commentary on any text of scripture that we know about
came from a so-called heretic, a second-century Gnostic named Heracleon,
who wrote a commentary on the Gospel of John.9 Eventually
28 Misquoting Jesus
commentaries, interpretive glosses, practical expositions, and homilies
on texts became common among the Christian communities of
the third and fourth centuries.
I have been summarizing the different kinds of writings that were
important to the lives of the early Christian churches. As I hope can be
seen, the phenomenon of writing was of uppermost importance to
these churches and the Christians within them. Books were at the
very heart of the Christian religion—unlike other religions of the empire—
from the very beginning. Books recounted the stories of Jesus
and his apostles that Christians told and retold; books provided
Christians with instruction in what to believe and how to live their
lives; books bound together geographically separated communities
into one universal church; books supported Christians in their times
of persecution and gave them models of faithfulness to emulate in the
face of torture and death; books provided not just good advice but
correct doctrine, warning against the false teachings of others and
urging the acceptance of orthodox beliefs; books allowed Christians
to know the true meaning of other writings, giving guidance in what
to think, how to worship, how to behave. Books were completely central
to the life of the early Christians.
The Formation of the Christian Canon
Eventually, some of these Christian books came to be seen not only as
worthy of reading but as absolutely authoritative for the beliefs and
practices of Christians. They became Scripture.
The Beginnings of a Christian Canon
The formation of the Christian canon of scripture was a long, involved
process, and I do not need to go into all the details here.10 As I
have already indicated, in some sense Christians started with a canon
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture 29
in that the founder of their religion was himself a Jewish teacher
who accepted the Torah as authoritative scripture from God, and who
taught his followers his interpretation of it. The earliest Christians
were followers of Jesus who accepted the books of the Jewish Bible
(which was not yet set as a “canon,” once and for all) as their own
scripture. For the writers of the New Testament, including our earliest
author, Paul, the “scriptures” referred to the Jewish Bible, the collection
of books that God had given his people and that predicted the
coming of the Messiah, Jesus.
It was not long, however, before Christians began accepting other
writings as standing on a par with the Jewish scriptures. This acceptance
may have had its roots in the authoritative teaching of Jesus
himself, as his followers took his interpretation of scripture to be equal
in authority to the words of scripture itself. Jesus may have encouraged
this understanding by the way he phrased some of his teachings.
In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus is recorded as stating
laws given by God to Moses, and then giving his own more radical interpretation
of them, indicating that his interpretation is authoritative.
This is found in the so-called Antitheses recorded in Matthew,
chapter 5. Jesus says, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit
murder’ [one of the Ten Commandments], but I say to you, ‘whoever
is even angry with a brother or sister is liable to judgment.’” What
Jesus says, in his interpretation of the Law, appears to be as authoritative
as the Law itself. Or Jesus says, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall
not commit adultery’ [another of the Ten Commandments]. But I say
to you, ‘whoever looks at a woman to lust after her in his heart has already
committed adultery with her.’”
On some occasions these authoritative interpretations of scripture
appear, in effect, to countermand the laws of scripture themselves.
For example, Jesus says, “You have heard it said, ‘Whoever divorces
his wife should give her a certificate of divorce’ [a command found in
Deut. 24:1], but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife for
reason other than sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and
30 Misquoting Jesus
whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” It is hard to
see how one can follow Moses’ command to give a certificate of divorce,
if in fact divorce is not an option.
In any event, Jesus’s teachings were soon seen to be as authoritative
as the pronouncements of Moses—that is, those of the Torah itself.
This becomes even more clear later in the New Testament period,
in the book of 1 Timothy, allegedly by Paul but frequently taken by
scholars to have been written in his name by a later follower. In 1 Tim.
5:18 the author is urging his readers to pay those who minister among
them, and supports his exhortation by quoting “the scripture.” What
is interesting is that he then quotes two passages, one found in the
Torah (“Do not muzzle an ox that is treading,” Deut. 25:4) and the
other found on the lips of Jesus (“A workman is worthy of his hire”;
see Luke 10:7). It appears that for this author, Jesus’s words are already
on a par with scripture.
Nor was it just Jesus’s teachings that were being considered scriptural
by these second- or third-generation Christians. So too were the
writings of his apostles. Evidence comes in the final book of the New
Testament to be written, 2 Peter, a book that most critical scholars believe
was not actually written by Peter but by one of his followers,
pseudonymously. In 2 Peter 3 the author makes reference to false
teachers who twist the meaning of Paul’s letters to make them say
what they want them to say, “just as they do with the rest of the scriptures”
(2 Pet. 3:16). It appears that Paul’s letters are here being understood
as scripture.
Soon after the New Testament period, certain Christian writings
were being quoted as authoritative texts for the life and beliefs of the
church. An outstanding example is a letter written by Polycarp, the
previously mentioned bishop of Smyrna, in the early second century.
Polycarp was asked by the church at Philippi to advise them, particularly
with respect to a case involving one of the leaders who had evidently
engaged in some form of financial mismanagement within the
church (possibly embezzling church funds). Polycarp’s letter to the
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture 31
Philippians, which still survives, is intriguing for a number of reasons,
not the least of which is its propensity to quote earlier writings of the
Christians. In just fourteen brief chapters, Polycarp quotes more than
a hundred passages known from these earlier writings, asserting their
authority for the situation the Philippians were facing (in contrast to
just a dozen quotations from the Jewish scriptures); in one place he
appears to call Paul’s letter to the Ephesians scripture. More commonly,
he simply quotes or alludes to earlier writings, assuming their authoritative
status for the community.11
The Role of Christian Liturgy in the Formation of the Canon
Some time before the letter of Polycarp, we know that Christians were
hearing the Jewish scriptures read during their worship services. The
author of 1 Timothy, for example, urges that the letter’s recipient “pay
close attention to [public] reading, to exhortation, and to teaching”
(4:13). As we saw in the case of the letter to the Colossians, it appears
that letters by Christians were being read to the gathered community
as well. And we know that by the middle of the second century, a good
portion of the Christian worship services involved the public reading
of scripture. In a much discussed passage from the writings of the
Christian intellectual and apologist Justin Martyr, for example, we get
a glimpse of what a church service involved in his home city of Rome:
On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country
gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the
writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when
the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to
the imitation of these good things . . . (1 Apol. 67)
It seems likely that the liturgical use of some Christian texts—for
example, “the memoirs of the apostles,” which are usually understood
to be the Gospels—elevated their status for most Christians so that
they, as much as the Jewish scriptures (“the writings of the prophets”),
were considered to be authoritative.
32 Misquoting Jesus
The Role of Marcion in the Formation of the Canon
We can trace the formation of the Christian canon of scripture a bit
more closely still, from the surviving evidence. At the same time that
Justin was writing in the mid second century, another prominent
Christian was also active in Rome, the philosopher-teacher Marcion,
later declared a heretic.12 Marcion is an intriguing figure in many
ways. He had come to Rome from Asia Minor, having already made a
fortune in what was evidently a shipbuilding business. Upon arriving
in the Rome, he made an enormous donation to the Roman church,
probably, in part, to get in its good favor. For five years he stayed in
Rome, spending much of his time teaching his understanding of the
Christian faith and working out its details in several writings. Arguably
his most influential literary production was not something he
wrote but something he edited. Marcion was the first Christian that
we know of who produced an actual “canon” of scripture—that is, a
collection of books that, he argued, constituted the sacred texts of the
faith.
To make sense of this initial attempt to establish the canon, we
need to know a bit about Marcion’s distinctive teaching. Marcion was
completely absorbed by the life and teachings of the apostle Paul,
whom he considered to be the one “true” apostle from the early days
of the church. In some of his letters, such as Romans and Galatians,
Paul had taught that a right standing before God came only by faith
in Christ, not by doing any of the works prescribed by the Jewish law.
Marcion took this differentiation between the law of the Jews and
faith in Christ to what he saw as its logical conclusion, that there was
an absolute distinction between the law on the one hand and the
gospel on the other. So distinct were the law and the gospel, in fact,
that both could not possibly have come from the same God. Marcion
concluded that the God of Jesus (and Paul) was not, therefore, the
God of the Old Testament. There were, in fact, two different Gods:
the God of the Jews, who created the world, called Israel to be his
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture 33
people, and gave them his harsh law; and the God of Jesus, who sent
Christ into the world to save people from the wrathful vengeance of
the Jewish creator God.
Marcion believed this understanding of Jesus was taught by Paul
himself, and so, naturally, his canon included the ten letters of
Paul available to him (all those in the New Testament apart from the
pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus); and since Paul sometimes
referred to his “Gospel,” Marcion included a Gospel in his
canon, a form of what is now the Gospel of Luke. And that was all.
Marcion’s canon consisted of eleven books: there was no Old Testament,
only one Gospel, and ten Epistles. But not only that: Marcion
had come to believe that false believers, who did not have his understanding
of the faith, had transmitted these eleven books by copying
them, and by adding bits and pieces here and there in order to accommodate
their own beliefs, including the “false” notion that the God of
the Old Testament was also the God of Jesus. And so Marcion “corrected”
the eleven books of his canon by editing out references to the
Old Testament God, or to the creation as the work of the true God, or
to the Law as something that should be followed.
As we will see, Marcion’s attempt to make his sacred texts conform
more closely to his teaching by actually changing them was not
unprecedented. Both before and after him, copyists of the early Christian
literature occasionally changed their texts to make them say what
they were already thought to mean.
The “Orthodox” Canon after Marcion
Many scholars are convinced that it was precisely in opposition to
Marcion that other Christians became more concerned to establish the
contours of what was to become the New Testament canon. It is interesting
that in Marcion’s own day, Justin could speak rather vaguely
about the “memoirs of the apostles” without indicating which of these
books (presumably Gospels) were accepted in the churches or why,
whereas some thirty years later another Christian writer, who equally
34 Misquoting Jesus
opposed Marcion, took a far more authoritative stand. This was the
bishop of Lyons in Gaul (modern France), Irenaeus, who wrote a fivevolume
work against heretics such as Marcion and the Gnostics, and
who had very clear ideas about which books should be considered
among the canonical Gospels.
In a frequently cited passage from his work Against Heresies, Irenaeus
says that not just Marcion, but also other “heretics,” had mistakenly
assumed that only one or another of the Gospels was to be
accepted as scripture: Jewish Christians who held to the ongoing validity
of the Law used only Matthew; certain groups who argued that
Jesus was not really the Christ accepted only the Gospel of Mark;
Marcion and his followers accepted only (a form of ) Luke; and a group
of Gnostics called the Valentinians accepted only John. All these groups
were in error, however, because
it is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in
number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world
in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is
scattered throughout the world, and the pillar and ground of the
Church is the Gospel . . . it is fitting that she should have four
pillars . . . (Against Heresies 3.11.7)
In other words, four corners of the earth, four winds, four pillars—
and necessarily, then, four Gospels.
And so, near the end of the second century there were Christians
who were insisting that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were the
Gospels; there were neither more nor fewer.
Debates about the contours of the canon continued for several centuries.
It appears that Christians by and large were concerned to know
which books to accept as authoritative so that they would (1) know which
books should be read in their services of worship and, relatedly, (2)
know which books could be trusted as reliable guides for what to believe
and how to behave. The decisions about which books should finally
be considered canonical were not automatic or problem-free; the
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture 35
debates were long and drawn out, and sometimes harsh. Many Christians
today may think that the canon of the New Testament simply appeared
on the scene one day, soon after the death of Jesus, but nothing
could be farther from the truth. As it turns out, we are able to pinpoint
the first time that any Christian of record listed the twenty-seven
books of our New Testament as the books of the New Testament—
neither more nor fewer. Surprising as it may seem, this Christian was
writing in the second half of the fourth century, nearly three hundred
years after the books of the New Testament had themselves been
written. The author was the powerful bishop of Alexandria named
Athanasius. In the year 367 C.E., Athanasius wrote his annual pastoral
letter to the Egyptian churches under his jurisdiction, and in it he included
advice concerning which books should be read as scripture in
the churches. He lists our twenty-seven books, excluding all others.
This is the first surviving instance of anyone affirming our set of books
as the New Testament. And even Athanasius did not settle the matter.
Debates continued for decades, even centuries. The books we call the
New Testament were not gathered together into one canon and considered
scripture, finally and ultimately, until hundreds of years after
the books themselves had first been produced.
The Readers of Christian Writings
In the preceding section our discussion focused on the canonization of
scripture. As we saw earlier, however, many kinds of books were
being written and read by Christians in the early centuries, not just
the books that made it into the New Testament. There were other
gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses; there were records of persecution,
accounts of martyrdom, apologies for the faith, church orders,
attacks on heretics, letters of exhortation and instruction, expositions
of scripture—an entire range of literature that helped define Christianity
and make it the religion it came to be. It would be helpful at
36 Misquoting Jesus
this stage of our discussion to ask a basic question about all this literature.
Who, actually, was reading it?
In the modern world, this would seem to be a rather bizarre question.
If authors are writing books for Christians, then the people reading
the books would presumably be Christians. When asked about
the ancient world, however, the question has special poignancy because,
in the ancient world, most people could not read.
Literacy is a way of life for those of us in the modern West. We
read all the time, every day. We read newspapers and magazines and
books of all kinds—biographies, novels, how-to books, self-help books,
diet books, religious books, philosophical books, histories, memoirs,
and on and on. But our facility with written language today has little
to do with reading practices and realities in antiquity.
Studies of literacy have shown that what we might think of as
mass literacy is a modern phenomenon, one that appeared only with
the advent of the Industrial Revolution.13 It was only when nations
could see an economic benefit in having virtually everyone able to
read that they were willing to devote the massive resources—especially
time, money, and human resources—needed to ensure that
everyone had a basic education in literacy. In nonindustrial societies,
the resources were desperately needed for other things, and literacy
would not have helped either the economy or the well-being of society
as a whole. As a result, until the modern period, almost all societies
contained only a small minority of people who could read and write.
This applies even to ancient societies that we might associate with
reading and writing—for example, Rome during the early Christian
centuries, or even Greece during the classical period. The best and
most influential study of literacy in ancient times, by Columbia University
professor William Harris, indicates that at the very best of
times and places—for example, Athens at the height of the classical
period in the fifth century B.C.E.—literacy rates were rarely higher
than 10–15 percent of the population. To reverse the numbers, this
means that under the best of conditions, 85–90 percent of the population
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture 37
could not read or write. In the first Christian century, throughout the
Roman Empire, the literacy rates may well have been lower.14
As it turns out, even defining what it means to read and write is a
very complicated business. Many people can read but are unable to
compose a sentence, for example. And what does it mean to read? Are
people literate if they can manage to make sense of the comic strips
but not the editorial page? Can people be said to be able to write if
they can sign their name but cannot copy a page of text?
The problem of definition is even more pronounced when we turn
to the ancient world, where the ancients themselves had difficulty
defining what it meant to be literate. One of the most famous illustrative
examples comes from Egypt in the second Christian century.
Throughout most of antiquity, since most people could not write,
there were local “readers” and “writers” who hired out their services
to people who needed to conduct business that required written texts:
tax receipts, legal contracts, licenses, personal letters, and the like. In
Egypt, there were local officials who were assigned the task of overseeing
certain governmental tasks that required writing. These assignments
as local (or village) scribes were not usually sought after:
as with many “official” administrative posts, the people who were required
to take them were responsible for paying for the job out-ofpocket.
These jobs, in other words, went to the wealthier members of
the society and carried a kind of status with them, but they required
the expenditure of personal funds.
The example that illustrates the problem of defining literacy involves
an Egyptian scribe called Petaus, from the village of Karanis in
upper Egypt. As often happened, Petaus was assigned to duties in a
different village, Ptolemais Hormou, where he was given oversight
of financial and agricultural affairs. In the year 184 C.E., Petaus had
to respond to some complaints about another village scribe from
Ptolemais Hormou, a man named Ischyrion, who had been assigned
somewhere else to undertake responsibilities as a scribe. The villagers
under Ischyrion’s jurisdiction were upset that Ischyrion could not ful-
38 Misquoting Jesus
fill his obligations, because, they charged, he was “illiterate.” In dealing
with the dispute Petaus argued that Ischyrion wasn’t illiterate at
all, because he had actually signed his name to a range of official documents.
In other words, for Petaus “literacy” meant simply the ability
to sign one’s name.
Petaus himself had trouble doing much more than that. As it turns
out, we have a scrap of papyrus on which Petaus practiced his writing,
on which he wrote, twelve times over, the words (in Greek) that he
had to sign on official documents: “I Petaus, the village scribe, have
submitted this.” What is odd is that he copied the words correctly the
first four times, but the fifth time he left off the first letter of the final
word, and for the remaining seven times he continued to leave off the
letter, indicating that he was not writing words that he knew how to
write but was merely copying the preceding line. He evidently couldn’t
read even the simple words he was putting on the page. And he was
the official local scribe!15
If we count Petaus among the “literate” people in antiquity, how
many people could actually read texts and make sense of what they
said? It is impossible to come up with an exact figure, but it appears
that the percentage would not be very high. There are reasons for
thinking that within the Christian communities, the numbers would
have been even lower than in the population at large. This is because
it appears that Christians, especially early on in the movement, came
for the most part from the lower, uneducated classes. There were always
exceptions, of course, like the apostle Paul and the other authors
whose works made it into the New Testament and who were obviously
skilled writers; but for the most part, Christians came from the
ranks of the illiterate.
This is certainly true of the very earliest Christians, who would
have been the apostles of Jesus. In the Gospel accounts, we find that
most of Jesus’s disciples are simple peasants from Galilee—uneducated
fishermen, for example. Two of them, Peter and John, are explicitly
said to be “illiterate” in the book of Acts (4:13). The apostle
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture 39
Paul indicates to his Corinthian congregation that “not many of you
were wise by human standards” (1 Cor. 1:27)—which might mean
that some few were well educated, but not most. As we move into the
second Christian century, things do not seem to change much. As I
have indicated, some intellectuals converted to the faith, but most
Christians were from the lower classes and uneducated.
Evidence for this view comes from several sources. One of the
most interesting is a pagan opponent of Christianity named Celsus
who lived in the late second century. Celsus wrote a book called The
True Word, in which he attacked Christianity on a number of grounds,
arguing that it was a foolish, dangerous religion that should be wiped
off the face of the earth. Unfortunately, we do not have The True Word
itself; all we have are quotations from it in the writings of the famous
Christian church father Origen, who lived about seventy years after
Celsus and was asked to produce a reply to his charges. Origen’s book
Against Celsus survives and is our chief source of information about
what the learned critic Celsus said in his book directed against the
Christians.16 One of the great features of Origen’s book is that he
quotes Celsus’s earlier work at length, line by line, before offering his
refutation of it. This allows us to reconstruct with fair accuracy Celsus’s
claims. One of these claims is that the Christians are ignorant
lower-class people. What is striking is that in his reply, Origen does
not deny it. Consider the following charges made by Celsus.
[The Christians’] injunctions are like this. “Let no one educated,
no one wise, no one sensible draw near. For these abilities are thought
by us to be evils. But as for anyone ignorant, anyone stupid, anyone
uneducated, anyone who is a child, let him come boldly.” (Against
Celsus 3.44)
Moreover, we see that those who display their secret lore in the
market-places and go about begging would never enter a gathering
of intelligent men, nor would they dare to reveal their noble beliefs
in their presence; but whenever they see adolescent boys and a crowd
40 Misquoting Jesus
of slaves and a company of fools, they push themselves in and show
off. (Against Celsus 3.50)
In private houses also we see wool-workers, cobblers, laundryworkers,
and the most illiterate and bucolic yokels, who would not
dare to say anything at all in front of their elders and more intelligent
masters. But whenever they get hold of children in private and some
stupid women with them, they let out some astonishing statements, as,
for example, that they must not pay any attention to their father and
school teachers . . . ; they say that these talk nonsense and have no understanding.
. . . But, if they like, they should leave father and their
schoolmasters, and go along with the women and little children who
are their playfellows to the wooldresser’s shop, or to the cobbler’s or the
washerwoman’s shop, that they may learn perfection. And by saying
this they persuade them. (Against Celsus 3.56)
Origen replies that the true Christian believers are in fact wise
(and some, in fact, are well educated), but they are wise with respect to
God, not with respect to things in this world. He does not deny, in
other words, that the Christian community is largely made up of the
lower, uneducated classes.
Public Reading in Christian Antiquity
We appear, then, to have a paradoxical situation in early Christianity.
This was a bookish religion, with writings of all kinds proving to be
of uppermost importance to almost every aspect of the faith. Yet most
people could not read these writings. How do we account for this
paradox?
In fact, the matter is not all that strange if we recall what was
hinted at earlier, that communities of all kinds throughout antiquity
generally used the services of the literate for the sake of the illiterate.
For in the ancient world “reading” a book did not mean, usually,
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture 41
reading it to oneself; it meant reading it aloud, to others. One could be
said to have read a book when in fact one had heard it read by others.
There seems to be no way around the conclusion that books—as important
as they were to the early Christian movement—were almost
always read aloud in social settings, such as in settings of worship.
We should recall here that Paul instructs his Thessalonian hearers
that his “letter is to be read to all of the brothers and sisters” (1 Thess.
5:27). This would have happened out loud, in community. And the
author of Colossians wrote: “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). Recall, too, Justin Martyr’s
report that “On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the
country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles
or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits” (1
Apol. 67). The same point is made in other early Christian writings.
For example, in the book of Revelation we are told, “Blessed is the one
who reads the words of the prophecy and blessed are those who hear
the words” (1:3)—obviously referring to the public reading of the
text. In a lesser-known book called 2 Clement, from the mid second
century, the author indicates, in reference to his words of exhortation,
“I am reading you a request to pay attention to what has been written,
so that you may save yourselves and the one who is your reader” (2
Clem. 19.1).
In short, the books that were of paramount importance in early
Christianity were for the most part read out loud by those who were
able to read, so that the illiterate could hear, understand, and even
study them. Despite the fact that early Christianity was by and large
made up of illiterate believers, it was a highly literary religion.
Other key issues need to be discussed, however. If books were so
important to early Christianity, if they were being read to Christian
communities around the Mediterranean, how did the communities
actually get those books? How were they put in circulation? This was
in the days before desktop publishing, electronic means of reproduc-
42 Misquoting Jesus
tion, and even moveable type. If communities of believers obtained
copies of various Christian books in circulation, how did they acquire
those copies? Who was doing the copying? And most important for
the ultimate subject of our investigation, how can we (or how could
they) know that the copies they obtained were accurate, that they
hadn’t been modified in the process of reproduction?
The Beginnings of Christian Scripture 43
2
The Copyists of
the Early Christian
Writings
As we saw in chapter 1, Christianity from its very beginning was
a literary religion, with books of all kinds playing a central
role in the life and faith of the burgeoning Christian communities
around the Mediterranean. How, then, was this Christian literature
placed in circulation and distributed? The answer, of course, is that
for a book to be distributed broadly, it had to be copied.
Copying in the Greco-Roman World
The only way to copy a book in the ancient world was to do it by hand,
letter by letter, one word at a time. It was a slow, painstaking process—
but there was no alternative. Accustomed as we are today to seeing
multiple copies of books appear on the shelves of major book chains
around the country just days after they are published, we simply accept
that one copy of, say, The Da Vinci Code will be exactly like any
other copy. None of the words will ever vary—it will be exactly the
same book no matter which copy we read. Not so in the ancient world.
Just as books could not easily be distributed en masse (no trucks or
planes or railroads), they could not be produced en masse (no printing
presses). And since they had to be copied by hand, one at a time,
slowly, painstakingly, most books were not mass produced. Those
few that were produced in multiple copies were not all alike, for the
scribes who copied texts inevitably made alterations in those texts—
changing the words they copied either by accident (via a slip of the
pen or other carelessness) or by design (when the scribe intentionally
altered the words he copied). Anyone reading a book in antiquity
could never be completely sure that he or she was reading what the
author had written. The words could have been altered. In fact, they
probably had been, if only just a little.
Today, a publisher releases a set number of books to the public by
having them sent to bookstores. In the ancient world, since books
were not mass produced and there were no publishing companies
or bookstores, things were different.1 Usually an author would write a
book, and possibly have a group of friends read it or listen to it being
read aloud. This would provide a chance for editing some of the
book’s contents. Then when the author was finished with the book, he
or she would have copies made for a few friends and acquaintances.
This, then, was the act of publication, when the book was no longer
solely in the author’s control but in the hands of others. If these others
wanted extra copies—possibly to give to other family members or
friends—they would have to arrange to have copies made, say, by a
local scribe who made copies for a living, or by a literate slave who
copied texts as part of his household duties.
We know that this process could be maddeningly slow and inaccurate,
that the copies produced this way could end up being quite
different from the originals. Testimony comes to us from ancient
writers themselves. Here I will mention just a couple of interesting
examples from the first century C.E. In a famous essay on the problem
of anger, the Roman philosopher Seneca points out that there is a dif-
46 Misquoting Jesus
ference between anger directed at what has caused us harm and anger
at what can do nothing to hurt us. To illustrate the latter category he
mentions “certain inanimate things, such as the manuscript which we
often hurl from us because it is written in too small a script or tear up
because it is full of mistakes.”2 It must have been a frustrating experience,
reading a text that was chock-full of “printer’s errors” (i.e., copyist’s
errors), enough to drive one to distraction.
A humorous example comes to us from the epigrams of the witty
Roman poet Martial, who, in one poem, lets his reader know
If any poems in those sheets, reader, seem to you either too obscure or
not quite good Latin, not mine is the mistake: the copyist spoiled them
in his haste to complete for you his tale of verses. But if you think that
not he, but I am at fault, then I will believe that you have no intelligence.
“Yet, see, those are bad.” As if I denied what is plain! They are
bad, but you don’t make better.3
Copying texts allowed for the possibilities of manual error; and
the problem was widely recognized throughout antiquity.
Copying in Early Christian Circles
We have a number of references in early Christian texts to the practices
of copying.4 One of the most interesting comes from a popular
text of the early second century called The Shepherd of Hermas. This
book was widely read during the second to fourth Christian centuries;
some Christians believed that it should be considered part of the
canon of scripture. It is included as one of the books of the New Testament,
for example, in one of our oldest surviving manuscripts, the famous
fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus. In the book, a Christian prophet
named Hermas is given a number of revelations, some of them concerning
what is to come, others concerned with the personal and communal
lives of Christians of the day. At an early point in the book (it is
a lengthy book, longer than any of the books that made it into the
The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings 47
New Testament), Hermas has a vision of an elderly woman, a kind of
angelic figure symbolizing the Christian church, who is reading aloud
from a little book. She asks Hermas if he can announce the things he
has heard to his fellow Christians. He replies that he can’t remember
everything she has read and asks her to “Give me the book to make a
copy.” She gives it to him, and he then relates that
I took it and went away to another part of the field, where I copied
the whole thing, letter by letter, for I could not distinguish between
the syllables. And then, when I completed the letters of the book,
it was suddenly seized from my hand; but I did not see by whom.
(Shepherd 5.4 )
Even though it was a small book, it must have been a difficult
process copying it one letter at a time. When Hermas says that he
“could not distinguish between the syllables,” he may be indicating
that he was not skilled in reading—that is, that he was not trained as a
professional scribe, as one who could read texts fluently. One of the
problems with ancient Greek texts (which would include all the earliest
Christian writings, including those of the New Testament) is that
when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction
made between lowercase and uppercase letters, and, even more
bizarre to modern readers, no spaces used to separate words. This
kind of continuous writing is called scriptuo continua, and it obviously
could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand, a text.
The words godisnowhere could mean quite different things to a theist
(God is now here) and an atheist (God is nowhere);5 and what would
it mean to say lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable? Was this a
normal or a supernormal event?
When Hermas says he could not distinguish between the syllables,
he evidently means he could not read the text fluently but could recognize
the letters, and so copied them one at a time. Obviously, if you
don’t know what you’re reading, the possibilities of making mistakes
in transcription multiply.
48 Misquoting Jesus
Hermas again refers to copying somewhat later in his vision. The
elderly woman comes to him again and asks whether he has yet
handed over the book he copied to the church leaders. He replies that
he has not, and she tells him:
You have done well. For I have some words to add. Then, when I
complete all the words they will be made known through you to all
those who are chosen. And so, you will write two little books, sending
one to Clement and the other to Grapte. Clement will send his to the
foreign cities, for that is his commission. But Grapte will admonish the
widows and orphans. And you will read yours in this city, with the
presbyters who lead the church. (Shepherd 8.3 )
And so the text he had slowly copied had some additions that he
was to make; and he was to make two copies. One of these copies
would go to a man named Clement, who may have been a person
known from other texts to have been the third bishop of the city of
Rome. Possibly this is before he became the head of the church, as it
appears here that he is a foreign correspondent for the Roman Christian
community. Was he a kind of official scribe who copied their
texts? The other copy is to go to a woman named Grapte, who possibly
was also a scribe, perhaps one who made copies of texts for some
of the church members in Rome. Hermas himself is to read his copy of
the book to the Christians of the community (most of whom would
have been illiterate, and so unable to read the text themselves)—
although how he can be expected to do so if he still can’t distinguish
the syllables from one another is never explained.
Here, then, we get a real-life glimpse into what copying practices
were like in the early church. Presumably the situation was similar in
various churches scattered throughout the Mediterranean region,
even though no other church was (probably) as large as the one in
Rome. A select few members were scribes for the church. Some of
these scribes were more skilled than others: Clement appears to have
had as one of his duties the dissemination of Christian literature;
The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings 49
Hermas simply does the task because on this one occasion it was assigned
to him. The copies of texts that are reproduced by these literate
members of the congregation (some of them more literate than others)
are then read to the community as a whole.
What more can we say about these scribes in the Christian communities?
We don’t know exactly who Clement and Grapte were, although
we do have additional information about Hermas. He speaks
of himself as a former slave (Shepherd 1.1). He was obviously literate,
and so comparatively well educated. He was not one of the leaders of
the church in Rome (he is not included among the “presbyters”), although
later tradition claims that his brother was a man named Pius,
who became bishop of the church in the mid second century.6 If so,
then possibly the family had attained a prestigious status level in the
Christian community—even though Hermas had once been a slave.
Since only educated people, obviously, could be literate, and since getting
educated normally meant having the leisure and money needed
to do so (unless one was trained in literacy as a slave), it appears that
the early Christian scribes were the wealthier, more highly educated
members of the Christian communities in which they lived.
As we have seen, outside the Christian communities, in the Roman
world at large, texts were typically copied either by professional scribes
or by literate slaves who were assigned to do such work within a household.
That means, among other things, that the people reproducing
texts throughout the empire were not, as a rule, the people who
wanted the texts. The copyists were by and large reproducing the
texts for others. One of the important recent findings of scholars who
study the early Christian scribes, on the other hand, is that just the opposite
was the case with them. It appears that the Christians copying
the texts were the ones who wanted the texts—that is, they were copying
the texts either for their own personal and/or communal use or
they were making them for the sake of others in their community.7 In
short, the people copying the early Christian texts were not, for the
most part, if at all, professionals who copied texts for a living (cf. Her-
