mas, above); they were simply the literate people in the Christian congregation
who could make copies (since they were literate) and wanted
to do so.
Some of these people—or most of them?—may have been the
leaders of the communities. We have reason to think that the earliest
Christian leaders were among the wealthier members of the church,
in that the churches typically met in the homes of their members
(there were no church buildings, that we know of, during the first two
centuries of the church) and only the homes of the wealthier members
would have been sufficiently large to accommodate very many people,
since most people in ancient urban settings lived in tiny apartments. It
is not unreasonable to conclude that the person who provided the
home also provided the leadership of the church, as is assumed in a
number of the Christian letters that have come down to us, in which
an author will greet so-and-so and “the church that meets in his
home.” These wealthier homeowners would probably have been more
educated, and so it is no surprise that they are sometimes exhorted to
“read” Christian literature to their congregations, as we have seen, for
example, in 1 Tim. 4:13: “Until I come, pay special heed to [public]
reading, to exhortation, and to teaching.” Is it possible, then, that church
leaders were responsible, at least a good bit of the time, for the copying
of the Christian literature being read to the congregation?
Problems with Copying
Early Christian Texts
Because the early Christian texts were not being copied by professional
scribes,8 at least in the first two or three centuries of the church,
but simply by educated members of the Christian congregations who
could do the job and were willing to do so, we can expect that in the
earliest copies, especially, mistakes were commonly made in transcription.
Indeed, we have solid evidence that this was the case, as it
The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings 51
was a matter of occasional complaint by Christians reading those texts
and trying to uncover the original words of their authors. The thirdcentury
church father Origen, for example, once registered the following
complaint about the copies of the Gospels at his disposal:
The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either
through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse
audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have
transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or
deletions as they please.9
Origen was not the only one to notice the problem. His pagan opponent
Celsus had, as well, some seventy years earlier. In his attack on
Christianity and its literature, Celsus had maligned the Christian
copyists for their transgressive copying practices:
Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose
themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or
several times over, and they change its character to enable them to
deny difficulties in face of criticism. (Against Celsus 2.27)
What is striking in this particular instance is that Origen, when
confronted with an outsider’s allegation of poor copying practices
among Christians, actually denies that Christians changed the text,
despite the fact that he himself decried the circumstance in his other
writings. The one exception he names in his reply to Celsus involves
several groups of heretics, who, Origen claims, maliciously altered the
sacred texts.10
We have already seen this charge that heretics sometimes modified
the texts they copied in order to make them stand in closer conformity
with their own views, for this was the accusation leveled
against the second-century philosopher-theologian Marcion, who presented
his canon of eleven scriptural books only after excising those
portions that contradicted his notion that, for Paul, the God of the
Old Testament was not the true God. Marcion’s “orthodox” opponent
Irenaeus claimed that Marcion did the following:
52 Misquoting Jesus
dismembered the epistles of Paul, removing all that is said by the
apostle respecting that God who made the world, to the effect that
He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and also those passages
from the prophetical writings which the apostle quotes, in order to
teach us that they announced beforehand the coming of the Lord.
(Against Heresies 1.27.2)
Marcion was not the only culprit. Living roughly at the same time
as Irenaeus was an orthodox bishop of Corinth named Dionysius who
complained that false believers had unscrupulously modified his own
writings, just as they had done with more sacred texts.
When my fellow-Christians invited me to write letters to them I did
so. These the devil’s apostles have filled with tares, taking away some
things and adding others. For them the woe is reserved. Small wonder
then if some have dared to tamper even with the word of the Lord
himself, when they have conspired to mutilate my own humble efforts.
Charges of this kind against “heretics”—that they altered the texts
of scripture to make them say what they wanted them to mean—are
very common among early Christian writers. What is noteworthy,
however, is that recent studies have shown that the evidence of our
surviving manuscripts points the finger in the opposite direction.
Scribes who were associated with the orthodox tradition not infrequently
changed their texts, sometimes in order to eliminate the possibility
of their “misuse” by Christians affirming heretical beliefs and
sometimes to make them more amenable to the doctrines being espoused
by Christians of their own persuasion.11
The very real danger that texts could be modified at will, by
scribes who did not approve of their wording, is evident in other ways
as well. We need always to remember that the copyists of the early
Christian writings were reproducing their texts in a world in which
there were not only no printing presses or publishing houses but also
no such thing as copyright law. How could authors guarantee that
their texts were not modified once put into circulation? The short
The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings 53
answer is that they could not. That explains why authors would
sometimes call curses down on any copyists who modified their texts
without permission. We find this kind of imprecation already in one
early Christian writing that made it into the New Testament, the
book of Revelation, whose author, near the end of his text, utters a
dire warning:
I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book:
If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in
this book; and if anyone removes any of the words of the book of this
prophecy, God will remove his share from the tree of life and from
the holy city, as described in this book. (Rev. 22:18–19 )
This is not a threat that the reader has to accept or believe everything
written in this book of prophecy, as it is sometimes interpreted;
rather, it is a typical threat to copyists of the book, that they are not to
add to or remove any of its words. Similar imprecations can be found
scattered throughout the range of early Christian writings. Consider
the rather severe threats uttered by the Latin Christian scholar Rufinus
with respect to his translation of one of Origen’s works:
Truly in the presence of God the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit, I adjure and beseech everyone who may either transcribe or
read these books, by his belief in the kingdom to come, by the mystery
of the resurrection from the dead, and by that everlasting fire prepared
for the devil and his angels, that, as he would not possess for an eternal
inheritance that place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth
and where their fire is not quenched and their spirit does not die, he
add nothing to what is written and take nothing away from it, and
make no insertion or alteration, but that he compare his transcription
with the copies from which he made it.12
These are dire threats—hellfire and brimstone—for simply changing
some words of a text. Some authors, though, were fully determined
to make sure their words were transmitted intact, and no threat could
54 Misquoting Jesus
be serious enough in the face of copyists who could change texts at
will, in a world that had no copyright laws.
Changes of the Text
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the only changes being
made were by copyists with a personal stake in the wording of the
text. In fact, most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts
have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away
the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple—slips
of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled
words, blunders of one sort or another. Scribes could be incompetent:
it is important to recall that most of the copyists in the early centuries
were not trained to do this kind of work but were simply the literate
members of their congregations who were (more or less) able and
willing. Even later, starting in the fourth and fifth centuries, when
Christian scribes emerged as a professional class within the church,13
and later still when most manuscripts were copied by monks devoted
to this kind of work in monasteries—even then, some scribes were
less skilled than others. At all times the task could be drudgery, as is
indicated in notes occasionally added to manuscripts in which a scribe
would pen a kind of sigh of relief, such as “The End of the Manuscript.
Thanks Be to God!”14 Sometimes scribes grew inattentive;
sometimes they were hungry or sleepy; sometimes they just couldn’t
be bothered to give their best effort.
Even scribes who were competent, trained, and alert sometimes
made mistakes. Sometimes, though, as we have seen, they changed
the text because they thought it was supposed to be changed. This was
not just for certain theological reasons, however. There were other
reasons for scribes to make an intentional change—for example, when
they came across a passage that appeared to embody a mistake that
needed to be corrected, possibly a contradiction found in the text, or a
The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings 55
mistaken geographical reference, or a misplaced scriptural allusion.
Thus, when scribes made intentional changes, sometimes their motives
were as pure as the driven snow. But the changes were made
nonetheless, and the author’s original words, as a result, may have become
altered and eventually lost.
An interesting illustration of the intentional change of a text is
found in one of our finest old manuscripts, Codex Vaticanus (so named
because it was found in the Vatican library), made in the fourth century.
In the opening of the book of Hebrews there is a passage in
which, according to most manuscripts, we are told that “Christ bears
[Greek: PHER
–
ON] all things by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). In
Codex Vaticanus, however, the original scribe produced a slightly different
text, with a verb that sounded similar in Greek; here the text
instead reads: “Christ manifests [Greek: PHANER
–
ON] all things by
the word of his power.” Some centuries later, a second scribe read this
passage in the manuscript and decided to change the unusual word
manifests to the more common reading bears—erasing the one word
and writing in the other. Then, again some centuries later, a third
scribe read the manuscript and noticed the alteration his predecessor
had made; he, in turn, erased the word bears and rewrote the word
manifests. He then added a scribal note in the margin to indicate what
he thought of the earlier, second scribe. The note says: “Fool and
knave! Leave the old reading, don’t change it!”
I have a copy of the page framed and hanging on the wall above
my desk as a constant reminder about scribes and their proclivities to
change, and rechange, their texts. Obviously it is the change of a single
word: so why does it matter? It matters because the only way to
understand what an author wants to say is to know what his words—
all his words—actually were. (Think of all the sermons preached on
the basis of a single word in a text: what if the word is one the author
didn’t actually write?) Saying that Christ reveals all things by his
word of power is quite different from saying that he keeps the universe
together by his word!
56 Misquoting Jesus
Complications in Knowing
the “Original Text”
And so, all kinds of changes were made in manuscripts by the scribes
who copied them. We will be looking at the types of changes in greater
depth in a later chapter. For the moment, it is enough to know that
the changes were made, and that they were made widely, especially in
the first two hundred years in which the texts were being copied,
when most of the copyists were amateurs. One of the leading questions
that textual critics must deal with is how to get back to the original
text—the text as the author first wrote it—given the circumstance
that our manuscripts are so full of mistakes. The problem is exacerbated
by the fact that once a mistake was made, it could become
firmly embedded in the textual tradition, more firmly embedded, in
fact, than the original.
That is to say, once a scribe changes a text—whether accidentally
or intentionally—then those changes are permanent in his manuscript
(unless, of course, another scribe comes along to correct the mistake).
The next scribe who copies that manuscript copies those mistakes
(thinking they are what the text said), and he adds mistakes of his own.
The next scribe who then copies that manuscript copies the mistakes of
both his predecessors and adds mistakes of his own, and so on. The
only way mistakes get corrected is when a scribe recognizes that a
predecessor has made an error and tries to resolve it. There is no guarantee,
however, that a scribe who tries to correct a mistake corrects it
correctly. That is, by changing what he thinks is an error, he may in
fact change it incorrectly, so now there are three forms of the text: the
original, the error, and the incorrect attempt to resolve the error. Mistakes
multiply and get repeated; sometimes they get corrected and
sometimes they get compounded. And so it goes. For centuries.
Sometimes, of course, a scribe may have more than one manuscript
at hand, and can correct the mistakes in one manuscript by the
correct readings of the other manuscript. This does, in fact, improve
The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings 57
the situation significantly. On the other hand, it is also possible that a
scribe will sometimes correct the correct manuscript in light of the
wording of the incorrect one. The possibilities seem endless.
Given these problems, how can we hope to get back to anything
like the original text, the text that an author actually wrote? It is an
enormous problem. In fact, it is such an enormous problem that a
number of textual critics have started to claim that we may as well
suspend any discussion of the “original” text, because it is inaccessible
to us. This may be going too far, but a concrete example or two taken
from the New Testament writings can show the problems.
Examples of the Problems
For the first example, let’s take Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Even at
the point of the original penning of the letter, we have numerous difficulties
to consider, which may well make us sympathetic with those
who want to give up on the notion of knowing what the “original”
text was. Galatia was not a single town with a single church; it was a
region in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in which Paul had established
churches. When he writes to the Galatians, is he writing to one of
the churches or to all of them? Presumably, since he doesn’t single out
any particular town, he means for the letter to go to all of them. Does
that mean that he made multiple copies of the same letter, or that he
wanted the one letter to circulate to all the churches of the region? We
don’t know.
Suppose he made multiple copies. How did he do it? To begin
with, it appears that this letter, like others by Paul, was not written by
his hand but was dictated to a secretarial scribe. Evidence for this
comes at the end of the letter, where Paul added a postscript in his
own handwriting, so that the recipients would know that it was he
who was responsible for the letter (a common technique for dictated
letters in antiquity): “See with what large letters I am writing you
with my own hand” (Gal. 6:11). His handwriting, in other words, was
58 Misquoting Jesus
larger and probably less professional in appearance than that of the
scribe to whom he had dictated the letter.15
Now, if Paul dictated the letter, did he dictate it word for word?
Or did he spell out the basic points and allow the scribe to fill in the
rest? Both methods were commonly used by letter writers in antiquity.
16 If the scribe filled in the rest, can we be assured that he filled it
in exactly as Paul wanted? If not, do we actually have Paul’s words,
or are they the words of some unknown scribe? But let’s suppose
that Paul dictated the letter word for word. Is it possible that in
some places the scribe wrote down the wrong words? Stranger things
have happened. If so, then the autograph of the letter (i.e., the original)
would already have a “mistake” in it, so that all subsequent copies
would not be of Paul’s words (in the places where his scribe got them
wrong).
Suppose, though, that the scribe got all the words 100 percent correct.
If multiple copies of the letter went out, can we be sure that all
the copies were also 100 percent correct? It is possible, at least, that
even if they were all copied in Paul’s presence, a word or two here or
there got changed in one or the other of the copies. If so, what if only
one of the copies served as the copy from which all subsequent copies
were made—then in the first century, into the second century and the
third century, and so on? In that case, the oldest copy that provided
the basis for all subsequent copies of the letter was not exactly what
Paul wrote, or wanted to write.
Once the copy is in circulation—that is, once it arrives at its destination
in one of the towns of Galatia—it, of course, gets copied, and
mistakes get made. Sometimes scribes might intentionally change the
text; sometimes accidents happen. These mistake-ridden copies get
copied; and the mistake-ridden copies of the copies get copied; and so
on, down the line. Somewhere in the midst of all this, the original
copy (or each of the original copies) ends up getting lost, or worn out,
or destroyed. At some point, it is no longer possible to compare a copy
with the original to make sure it is “correct,” even if someone has the
bright idea of doing so.
The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings 59
What survives today, then, is not the original copy of the letter, nor
one of the first copies that Paul himself had made, nor any of the
copies that were produced in any of the towns of Galatia to which the
letter was sent, nor any of the copies of those copies. The first reasonably
complete copy we have of Galatians (this manuscript is fragmentary;
i.e., it has a number of missing parts) is a papyrus called P46 (since
it was the forty-sixth New Testament papyrus to be catalogued), which
dates to about 200 C.E.17 That’s approximately 150 years after Paul
wrote the letter. It had been in circulation, being copied sometimes
correctly and sometimes incorrectly, for fifteen decades before any
copy was made that has survived down to the present day. We cannot
reconstruct the copy from which P46 was made. Was it an accurate
copy? If so, how accurate? It surely had mistakes of some kind, as did
the copy from which it was copied, and the copy from which that copy
was copied, and so on.
In short, it is a very complicated business talking about the “original”
text of Galatians. We don’t have it. The best we can do is get back
to an early stage of its transmission, and simply hope that what we reconstruct
about the copies made at that stage—based on the copies
that happen to survive (in increasing numbers as we move into the
Middle Ages)—reasonably reflects what Paul himself actually wrote,
or at least what he intended to write when he dictated the letter.
As a second example of the problems, let’s take the Gospel of John.
This Gospel is quite different from the other three Gospels of the
New Testament, telling a range of stories that differ from theirs and
employing a very different style of writing. Here, in John, the sayings
of Jesus are long discourses rather than pithy, direct sayings; Jesus
never tells a parable, for example, in John, unlike in the other three
Gospels. Moreover, the events narrated in John are often found only
in this Gospel: for example, Jesus’s conversations with Nicodemus (in
chapter 3) and with the Samaritan woman (chapter 4) or his miracles
of turning water into wine (chapter 2) and raising Lazarus from the
dead (chapter 10). The author’s portrayal of Jesus is quite different
too; unlike in the other three Gospels, Jesus spends much of his time
60 Misquoting Jesus
explaining who he is (the one sent from heaven) and doing “signs” in
order to prove that what he says about himself is true.
John no doubt had sources for his account—possibly a source that
narrated Jesus’s signs, for example, and sources that described his discourses.
18 He put these sources together into his own flowing narrative
of Jesus’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection. It is possible,
though, that John actually produced several different versions of his
Gospel. Readers have long noted, for example, that chapter 21 appears
to be a later add-on. The Gospel certainly seems to come to an
end in 20:30–31; and the events of chapter 21 seem to be a kind of afterthought,
possibly added to fill out the stories of Jesus’s resurrection
appearances and to explain that when the “beloved disciple” responsible
for narrating the traditions in the Gospel had died, this was not
unforeseen (cf. 21:22–23).
Other passages of the Gospel also do not cohere completely with
the rest. Even the opening verses 1:1–18, which form a kind of prologue
to the Gospel, appear to be different from the rest. This highly
celebrated poem speaks of the “Word” of God, who existed with God
from the beginning and was himself God, and who “became flesh” in
Jesus Christ. The passage is written in a highly poetic style not found
in the rest of the Gospel; moreover, while its central themes are repeated
in the rest of the narrative, some of its most important vocabulary
is not. Thus, Jesus is portrayed throughout the narrative as the
one who came from above, but never is he called the Word elsewhere
in the Gospel. Is it possible that this opening passage came from a different
source than the rest of the account, and that it was added as an
appropriate beginning by the author after an earlier edition of the
book had already been published?
Assume, for a second, just for the sake of the argument, that chapter
21 and 1:1–18 were not original components of the Gospel. What
does that do for the textual critic who wants to reconstruct the “original”
text? Which original is being constructed? All our Greek manuscripts
contain the passages in question. So does the textual critic
reconstruct as the original text the form of the Gospel that originally
The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings 61
contained them? But shouldn’t we consider the “original” form to be
the earlier version, which lacked them? And if one wants to reconstruct
that earlier form, is it fair to stop there, with reconstructing, say,
the first edition of John’s Gospel? Why not go even further and try to
reconstruct the sources that lie behind the Gospel, such as the signs
sources and the discourse sources, or even the oral traditions that lie
behind them?
These are questions that plague textual critics, and that have led
some to argue that we should abandon any quest for the original text—
since we can’t even agree on what it might mean to talk about the
“original” of, say, Galatians or John. For my part, however, I continue
to think that even if we cannot be 100 percent certain about what we
can attain to, we can at least be certain that all the surviving manuscripts
were copied from other manuscripts, which were themselves
copied from other manuscripts, and that it is at least possible to get
back to the oldest and earliest stage of the manuscript tradition for
each of the books of the New Testament. All our manuscripts of
Galatians, for example, evidently go back to some text that was copied;
all our manuscripts of John evidently go back to a version of John that
included the prologue and chapter 21. And so we must rest content
knowing that getting back to the earliest attainable version is the best
we can do, whether or not we have reached back to the “original” text.
This oldest form of the text is no doubt closely (very closely) related to
what the author originally wrote, and so it is the basis for our interpretation
of his teaching.
Reconstructing the Texts of
the New Testament
Similar problems, of course, apply to all our early Christian writings,
both those in the New Testament and those outside it, whether gospels,
acts, epistles, apocalypses, or any of the other kinds of early Christian
writing. The task of the textual critic is to determine what the earliest
62 Misquoting Jesus
form of the text is for all these writings. As we will see, there are established
principles for making this determination, ways of deciding
which differences in our manuscripts are mistakes, which are intentional
changes, and which appear to go back to the original author.
But it’s not an easy task.
The results, on the other hand, can be extremely enlightening, interesting,
and even exciting. Textual critics have been able to determine
with relative certainty a number of places in which manuscripts
that survive do not represent the original text of the New Testament.
For those who are not at all familiar with the field, but who know the
New Testament well (say, in English translation), some of the results
can be surprising. To conclude this chapter, I will discuss two such
passages—passages from the Gospels, in this case, that we are now
fairly certain did not originally belong in the New Testament, even
though they became popular parts of the Bible for Christians down
through the centuries and remain so today.
The Woman Taken in Adultery
The story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery is arguably the
best-known story about Jesus in the Bible; it certainly has always been
a favorite in Hollywood versions of his life. It even makes it into Mel
Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, although that movie focuses only on
Jesus’s last hours (the story is treated in one of the rare flashbacks).
Despite its popularity, the account is found in only one passage of the
New Testament, in John 7:53–8:12, and it appears not to have been
original even there.
The story line is familiar. Jesus is teaching in the temple, and a
group of scribes and Pharisees, his sworn enemies, approach him,
bringing with them a woman “who had been caught in the very act of
adultery.” They bring her before Jesus because they want to put him
to the test. The Law of Moses, as they tell him, demands that such a
one be stoned to death; but they want to know what he has to say
about the matter. Should they stone her or show her mercy? It is a
trap, of course. If Jesus tells them to let the woman go, he will be
The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings 63
accused of violating the Law of God; if he tells them to stone her, he
will be accused of dismissing his own teachings of love, mercy, and
forgiveness.
Jesus does not immediately reply; instead he stoops to write on the
ground. When they continue to question him, he says to them, “Let
the one who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at
her.” He then returns to his writing on the ground, while those who
have brought the woman start to leave the scene—evidently feeling
convicted of their own wrongdoing—until no one is left but the
woman. Looking up, Jesus says, “Woman, where are they? Is there no
one who condemns you?” To which she replies, “No one, Lord.” He
then responds, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”
It is a brilliant story, filled with pathos and a clever twist in which
Jesus uses his wits to get himself—not to mention the poor woman—
off the hook. Of course, to a careful reader, the story raises numerous
questions. If this woman was caught in the act of adultery, for example,
where is the man she was caught with? Both of them are to be
stoned, according to the Law of Moses (see Lev. 20:10). Moreover,
when Jesus wrote on the ground, what exactly was he writing? (According
to one ancient tradition, he was writing the sins of the accusers,
who seeing that their own transgressions were known, left in
embarrassment!) And even if Jesus did teach a message of love, did he
really think that the Law of God given by Moses was no longer in
force and should not be obeyed? Did he think sins should not be punished
at all?
Despite the brilliance of the story, its captivating quality, and its
inherent intrigue, there is one other enormous problem that it poses.
As it turns out, it was not originally in the Gospel of John. In fact, it
was not originally part of any of the Gospels. It was added by later
scribes.
How do we know this? In fact, scholars who work on the manuscript
tradition have no doubts about this particular case. Later in this
book we will be examining in greater depth the kinds of evidence that
scholars adduce for making judgments of this sort. Here I can simply
64 Misquoting Jesus
point out a few basic facts that have proved convincing to nearly all
scholars of every persuasion: the story is not found in our oldest and
best manuscripts of the Gospel of John;18 its writing style is very different
from what we find in the rest of John (including the stories immediately
before and after); and it includes a large number of words
and phrases that are otherwise alien to the Gospel. The conclusion is
unavoidable: this passage was not originally part of the Gospel.
How then did it come to be added? There are numerous theories
about that. Most scholars think that it was probably a well-known
story circulating in the oral tradition about Jesus, which at some point
was added in the margin of a manuscript. From there some scribe
or other thought that the marginal note was meant to be part of the
text and so inserted it immediately after the account that ends in John
7:52. It is noteworthy that other scribes inserted the account in different
locations in the New Testament—some of them after John 21:25,
for example, and others, interestingly enough, after Luke 21:38. In
any event, whoever wrote the account, it was not John.
That naturally leaves readers with a dilemma: if this story was not
originally part of John, should it be considered part of the Bible? Not
everyone will respond to this question in the same way, but for most
textual critics, the answer is no.
The Last Twelve Verses of Mark
The second example that we will consider may not be as familiar to
the casual reader of the Bible, but it has been highly influential in the
history of biblical interpretation and poses comparable problems for
the scholar of the textual tradition of the New Testament. This example
comes from the Gospel of Mark and concerns its ending.
In Mark’s account, we are told that Jesus is crucified and then buried
by Joseph of Arimathea on the day before the Sabbath (15:42–47). On
the day after Sabbath, Mary Magdalene and two other women come
back to the tomb in order properly to anoint the body (16:1–2). When
they arrive, they find that the stone has been rolled away. Entering the
tomb, they see a young man in a white robe, who tells them, “Do not
The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings 65
be startled! You are seeking Jesus the Nazarene, who has been crucified.
He has been raised and is not here—see the place where they laid
him?” He then instructs the women to tell the disciples that Jesus is
preceding them into Galilee and that they will see him there, “just as
he told you.” But the women flee the tomb and say nothing to anyone,
“for they were afraid” (16:4–8).
Then come the last twelve verses of Mark in many modern English
translations, verses that continue the story. Jesus himself is said to
appear to Mary Magdalene, who goes and tells the disciples; but they
do not believe her (vv. 9–11). He then appears to two others (vv. 12–14),
and finally to the eleven disciples (the Twelve, not including Judas Iscariot)
who are gathered together at table. Jesus upbraids them for
failing to believe, and then commissions them to go forth and proclaim
his gospel “to the whole creation.” Those who believe and are
baptized “will be saved,” but those who do not “will be condemned.”
And then come two of the most intriguing verses of the passage:
And these are the signs that will accompany those who believe: they
will cast out demons in my name; they will speak in new tongues; and
they will take up snakes in their hands; and if they drink any poison,
it will not harm them; they will place their hands upon the sick and
heal them. (vv. 17–18)
Jesus is then taken up into heaven, and seated at the right hand of
God. And the disciples go forth into the world proclaiming the
gospel, their words being confirmed by the signs that accompany
them (vv. 19–20).
It is a terrific passage, mysterious, moving, and powerful. It is one
of the passages used by Pentecostal Christians to show that Jesus’s followers
will be able to speak in unknown “tongues,” as happens in
their own services of worship; and it is the principal passage used by
groups of “Appalachian snake-handlers,” who till this day take poisonous
snakes in their hands in order to demonstrate their faith in the
words of Jesus, that when doing so they will come to no harm.
But there’s one problem. Once again, this passage was not originally
in the Gospel of Mark. It was added by a later scribe.
66 Misquoting Jesus
In some ways this textual problem is more disputed than the passage
about the woman taken in adultery, because without these final
verses Mark has a very different, and hard to understand, ending.
That doesn’t mean that scholars are inclined to accept the verses, as
we’ll see momentarily. The reasons for taking them to be an addition
are solid, almost indisputable. But scholars debate what the genuine
ending of Mark actually was, given the circumstance that this ending
found in many English translations (though usually marked as inauthentic)
and in later Greek manuscripts is not the original.
The evidence that these verses were not original to Mark is similar
in kind to that for the passage about the woman taken in adultery, and
again I don’t need to go into all the details here. The verses are absent
from our two oldest and best manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel, along
with other important witnesses; the writing style varies from what we
find elsewhere in Mark; the transition between this passage and the
one preceding it is hard to understand (e.g., Mary Magdalene is introduced
in verse 9 as if she hadn’t been mentioned yet, even though she
is discussed in the preceding verses; there is another problem with the
Greek that makes the transition even more awkward); and there are a
large number of words and phrases in the passage that are not found
elsewhere in Mark. In short, the evidence is sufficient to convince
nearly all textual scholars that these verses are an addition to Mark.
Without them, though, the story ends rather abruptly. Notice what
happens when these verses are taken away. The women are told to inform
the disciples that Jesus will precede them to Galilee and meet
them there; but they, the women, flee the tomb and say nothing to
anyone, “for they were afraid.” And that’s where the Gospel ends.
Obviously, scribes thought the ending was too abrupt. The women
told no one? Then, did the disciples never learn of the resurrection?
And didn’t Jesus himself ever appear to them? How could that be the
ending! To resolve the problem, scribes added an ending.19
Some scholars agree with the scribes in thinking that 16:8 is too
abrupt an ending for a Gospel. As I have indicated, it is not that these
scholars believe the final twelve verses in our later manuscripts were
the original ending—they know that’s not the case—but they think
The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings 67
that, possibly, the last page of Mark’s Gospel, one in which Jesus actually
did meet the disciples in Galilee, was somehow lost, and that all
our copies of the Gospel go back to this one truncated manuscript,
without the last page.
That explanation is entirely possible. It is also possible, in the opinion
of yet other scholars, that Mark did indeed mean to end his Gospel
with 16:8.20 It certainly is a shocker of an ending. The disciples never
learn the truth of Jesus’s resurrection because the women never tell
them. One reason for thinking that this could be how Mark ended his
Gospel is that some such ending coincides so well with other motifs
throughout his Gospel. As students of Mark have long noticed, the
disciples never do seem to “get it” in this Gospel (unlike in some of the
other Gospels). They are repeatedly said not to understand Jesus
(6:51–52; 8:21), and when Jesus tells them on several occasions that he
must suffer and die, they manifestly fail to comprehend his words
(8:31–33; 9:30–32; 10:33–40). Maybe, in fact, they never did come to
understand (unlike Mark’s readers, who can understand who Jesus
really is from the very beginning). Also, it is interesting to note that
throughout Mark, when someone comes to understand something
about Jesus, Jesus orders that person to silence—and yet often the person
ignores the order and spreads the news (e.g., 1:43–45). How ironic
that when the women at the tomb are told not to be silent but to
speak, they also ignore the order—and are silent!
In short, Mark may well have intended to bring his reader up
short with this abrupt ending—a clever way to make the reader stop,
take a faltering breath, and ask: What?
Conclusion
The passages discussed above represent just two out of thousands of
places in which the manuscripts of the New Testament came to be
changed by scribes. In both of the examples, we are dealing with additions
that scribes made to the text, additions of sizable length. Al-
68 Misquoting Jesus
though most of the changes are not of this magnitude, there are lots of
significant changes (and lots more insignificant ones) in our surviving
manuscripts of the New Testament. In the chapters that follow we
will want to see how scholars began to discover these changes and
how they developed methods for figuring out what the oldest form of
the text (or the “original” text) is; we will especially like to see more
examples of where this text has been changed—and how these changes
affected our English translations of the Bible.
I would like to end this chapter simply with an observation about
a particularly acute irony that we seem to have discovered. As we saw
in chapter 1, Christianity from the outset was a bookish religion that
stressed certain texts as authoritative scripture. As we have seen in
this chapter, however, we don’t actually have these authoritative texts.
This is a textually oriented religion whose texts have been changed,
surviving only in copies that vary from one another, sometimes in
highly significant ways. The task of the textual critic is to try to recover
the oldest form of these texts.
This is obviously a crucial task, since we can’t interpret the words
of the New Testament if we don’t know what the words were. Moreover,
as I hope should be clear by now, knowing the words is important
not just for those who consider the words divinely inspired. It is
important for anyone who thinks of the New Testament as a significant
book. And surely everyone interested in the history, society, and
culture of Western civilization thinks so, because the New Testament,
if nothing else, is an enormous cultural artifact, a book that is revered
by millions and that lies at the foundation of the largest religion of the
world today.
The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings 69
3
Texts of the
New Testament
Editions, Manuscripts,
and Differences
The copying practices we have considered thus far have been
principally those of the first three centuries of Christianity, when
most of the copyists of the Christian texts were not professionals trained
for the job but simply literate Christians of this or that congregation,
able to read and write and so called upon to reproduce the texts of the
community in their spare time.1 Because they were not highly trained
to perform this kind of work, they were more prone to make mistakes
than professional scribes would have been. This explains why our earliest
copies of the early Christian writings tend to vary more frequently
from one another and from later copies than do the later copies (say, of
the high Middle Ages) from one another. Eventually a kind of professional
scribal class came to be a part of the Christian intellectual landscape,
and with the advent of professional scribes came more controlled
copying practices, in which mistakes were made much less frequently.
Before that happened, during the early centuries of the church,
Christian texts were copied in whatever location they were written or
taken to. Since texts were copied locally, it is no surprise that different
localities developed different kinds of textual tradition. That is to say,
the manuscripts in Rome had many of the same errors, because they
were for the most part “in-house” documents, copied from one another;
they were not influenced much by manuscripts being copied in
Palestine; and those in Palestine took on their own characteristics,
which were not the same as those found in a place like Alexandria,
Egypt. Moreover, in the early centuries of the church, some locales
had better scribes than others. Modern scholars have come to recognize
that the scribes in Alexandria—which was a major intellectual
center in the ancient world—were particularly scrupulous, even in
these early centuries, and that there, in Alexandria, a very pure form
of the text of the early Christian writings was preserved, decade after
decade, by dedicated and relatively skilled Christian scribes.
Professional Christian Scribes
When did the church begin to use professional scribes to copy its texts?
There are good reasons for thinking that this happened sometime
near the beginning of the fourth century. Until then, Christianity was
a small, minority religion in the Roman Empire, often opposed, sometimes
persecuted. But a cataclysmic change occurred when the emperor
of Rome, Constantine, converted to the faith about 312 C.E. Suddenly
Christianity shifted from being a religion of social outcasts, persecuted
by local mobs and imperial authorities alike, to being a major player in
the religious scene of the empire. Not only were persecutions halted,
but favors began to pour out upon the church from the greatest power
in the Western world. Massive conversions resulted, as it became a
popular thing to be a follower of Christ in an age in which the emperor
himself publicly proclaimed his allegiance to Christianity.
More and more highly educated and trained persons converted to
72 Misquoting Jesus
the faith. They, naturally, were the ones most suited to copy the texts
of the Christian tradition. There are reasons to suppose that about this
time Christian scriptoria arose in major urban areas.2 A scriptorium is
a place for the professional copying of manuscripts. We have hints of
Christian scriptoria functioning by the early part of the fourth century.
In 331 C.E. the emperor Constantine, wanting magnificent Bibles
to be made available to major churches he was having built, wrote a
request to the bishop of Caesarea, Eusebius,3 to have fifty Bibles produced
at imperial expense. Eusebius treated this request with all the
pomp and respect it deserved, and saw that it was carried out. Obviously,
an accomplishment of this magnitude required a professional
scriptorium, not to mention the materials needed for making lavish
copies of the Christian scriptures. We are clearly in a different age
from just a century or two earlier when local churches would simply
request that one of their members cobble together enough free time to
make a copy of a text.
Starting in the fourth century, then, copies of scripture began to be
made by professionals; this naturally curtailed significantly the number
of errors that crept into the text. Eventually, as the decades grew into
centuries, the copying of the Greek scriptures became the charge of
monks working out of monasteries, who spent their days copying the
sacred texts carefully and conscientiously. This practice continued on
down through the Middle Ages, right up to the time of the invention
of printing with moveable type in the fifteenth century. The great
mass of our surviving Greek manuscripts come from the pens of these
medieval Christian scribes who lived and worked in the East (for example,
in areas that are now Turkey and Greece), known as the Byzantine
Empire. For this reason, Greek manuscripts from the seventh
century onward are sometimes labeled “Byzantine” manuscripts.
As I have pointed out, anyone familiar with the manuscript tradition
of the New Testament knows that these Byzantine copies of the
text tend to be very similar to one another, whereas the earliest copies
vary significantly both among themselves and from the form of text
found in these later copies. The reason for this should now be clear: it
Texts of the New Testament 73
had to do with who was copying the texts (professionals) and where
they were working (in a relatively constricted area). It would be a
grave mistake, though, to think that because later manuscripts agree
so extensively with one another, they are therefore our superior witnesses
to the “original” text of the New Testament. For one must always
ask: where did these medieval scribes get the texts they copied in
so professional a manner? They got them from earlier texts, which
were copies of yet earlier texts, which were themselves copies of still
earlier texts. Therefore, the texts that are closest in form to the originals
are, perhaps unexpectedly, the more variable and amateurish
copies of early times, not the more standardized professional copies of
later times.
The Latin Vulgate
The copying practices I have been summarizing principally involve
the eastern part of the Roman Empire, where Greek was, and continued
to be, the principal language. It was not long, however, before
Christians in non-Greek-speaking regions wanted the Christian sacred
texts in their own, local languages. Latin, of course, was the language
of much of the western part of the empire; Syriac was spoken in Syria;
Coptic in Egypt. In each of these areas, the books of the New Testament
came to be translated into the indigenous languages, probably
sometime in the mid to late second century. And then these translated
texts were themselves copied by scribes in their locales.4
Particularly important for the history of the text were the translations
into Latin, because a very large number of Christians in the
West had this as their principal language. Problems emerged very
soon, however, with the Latin translations of scripture, because there
were so many of them and these translations differed broadly from
one another. The problem came to a head near the end of the fourth
Christian century, when Pope Damasus commissioned the greatest
scholar of his day, Jerome, to produce an “official” Latin translation
74 Misquoting Jesus
that could be accepted by all Latin-speaking Christians, in Rome and
elsewhere, as an authoritative text. Jerome himself speaks of the plethora
of available translations, and set himself to resolving the problem.
Choosing one of the best Latin translations available, and comparing
its text with the superior Greek manuscripts at his disposal, Jerome
created a new edition of the Gospels in Latin. It may be that he, or one
of his followers, was also responsible for the new edition of the other
books of the New Testament in Latin.5
This form of the Bible in Latin—Jerome’s translation—came to
be known as the Vulgate (= Common) Bible of Latin-speaking Christendom.
This was the Bible for the Western church, itself copied and
recopied many times over. It was the book that Christians read, scholars
studied, and theologians used for centuries, down to the modern
period. Today there are nearly twice as many copies of the Latin
Vulgate as there are Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.
The First Printed Edition of
the Greek New Testament
