As I have indicated, the text of the New Testament was copied in a


fairly standardized form throughout the centuries of the Middle


Ages, both in the East (the Byzantine text) and in the West (the Latin


Vulgate). It was the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth


century by Johannes Gutenberg (1400–1468) that changed everything


for the reproduction of books in general and the books of the Bible


in particular. By printing books with moveable type, one could guarantee


that every page looked exactly like every other page, with no


variations of any kind in the wording. Gone were the days when transcribers


would each produce different copies of the same text by means


of accidental and intentional alterations. What was set in print was set


in stone. Moreover, books could be made far more rapidly: no longer


did they need to be copied one letter at a time. And, as a result, they


could be made much more cheaply. Scarcely anything has made a more


Texts of the New Testament 75


revolutionary impact on the modern world than the printing press;


the next closest thing (which may, eventually, surpass it in significance)


is the advent of the personal computer.


The first major work to be printed on Gutenberg’s press was a magnificent


edition of the Latin (Vulgate) Bible, which took all of 1450–56


to produce.6 In the half century that followed, some fifty editions of the


Vulgate were produced at various printing houses in Europe. It may


seem odd that there was no impulse to produce a copy of the Greek New


Testament in those early years of printing. But the reason is not hard to


find: it is the one already alluded to. Scholars throughout Europe—including


biblical scholars—had been accustomed for nearly a thousand


years to thinking that Jerome’s Vulgate was the Bible of the church


(somewhat like some modern churches assume that the King James


Version is the “true” Bible). The Greek Bible was thought of as foreign


to theology and learning; in the Latin West, it was thought of as belonging


to the Greek Orthodox Christians, who were considered to be schismatics


who had branched off from the true church. Few scholars in


Western Europe could even read Greek. And so, at first, no one felt


compelled to put the Greek Bible in print.


The first Western scholar to conceive the idea of producing a version


of the Greek New Testament was a Spanish cardinal named


Ximenes de Cisneros (1437–1517). Under his leadership, a group of


scholars, including one named Diego Lopez de Zuñiga (Stunica), undertook


a multivolume edition of the Bible. This was a polyglot edition;


that is, it reproduced the text of the Bible in a variety of


languages. And so, the Old Testament was represented by the original


Hebrew, the Latin Vulgate, and the Greek Septuagint, side by side in


columns. (What these editors thought of the superiority of the Vulgate


can be seen in their comments on this arrangement in their preface:


they likened it to Christ—represented by the Vulgate—being


crucified between two criminals, the false Jews represented by the


Hebrew and the schismatic Greeks represented by the Septuagint.)


The work was printed in a town called Alcalá, whose Latin name


is Complutum. For this reason, Ximenes’s edition is known as the


76 Misquoting Jesus


Complutensian Polyglot. The New Testament volume was the first to


be printed (volume 5, completed in 1514); it contained the Greek text


and included a Greek dictionary with Latin equivalents. But there


was no plan to publish this volume separately—all six volumes (the


sixth included a Hebrew grammar and dictionary, to assist in the


reading of volumes 1–4) were to be published together, and this took


considerable time. The entire work was finished, evidently, by 1517;


but as this was a Catholic production, it needed the sanction of the


pope, Leo X, before it could appear. This was finally obtained in 1520,


but because of other complications, the book did not come to be distributed


until 1522, some five years after Ximenes himself had died.


As we have seen, by this time there were many hundreds of Greek


manuscripts (i.e., handwritten copies) available to Christian churches


and scholars in the East. How did Stunica and his fellow editors decide


which of these manuscripts to use, and which manuscripts were


actually available to them? Unfortunately, these are questions that


scholars have never been able to answer with confidence. In the Dedication


of the work, Ximenes expresses his gratitude to Pope Leo X for


Greek copies lent “from the Apostolical Library.” And so the manuscripts


for the edition may have come from the Vatican’s holdings.


Some scholars, however, have suspected that manuscripts available


locally were used. About 250 years after the production of the Complutum,


a Danish scholar named Moldenhawer visited Alcalá to survey


their library resources in order to answer the question, but he


could find no manuscripts of the Greek New Testament at all. Suspecting


that the library must have had some such manuscripts at some


point, he made persistent inquiries until he was finally told by the librarian


that the library had indeed previously contained ancient


Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, but that in 1749 all of


them had been sold to a rocket maker named Toryo “as useless parchments”


(but suitable for making fireworks).


Later scholars have tried to discredit this account.7 At the very


least, though, it shows that the study of the Greek manuscripts of the


New Testament is not rocket science.


Texts of the New Testament 77


The First Published Edition of


the Greek New Testament


Even though the Complutensian Polyglot was the first printed edition


of the Greek New Testament, it was not the first published version.


As we have seen, the Complutum had been printed by 1514, but it did


not see the light of published day until 1522. Between those two dates


an enterprising Dutch scholar, the humanist intellectual Desiderius


Erasmus, both produced and published an edition of the Greek New


Testament, receiving the honor, then, of editing the so-called editio


princeps (= first published edition). Erasmus had studied the New


Testament, along with other great works of antiquity, on and off for


many years, and had considered at some point putting together an


edition for printing. But it was only when he visited Basel in August


1514 that he was persuaded by a publisher named Johann Froben to


move forward.


Both Erasmus and Froben knew that the Complutensian Polyglot


was in the works, and so they made haste to publish a Greek text as


quickly as possible, although other obligations prevented Erasmus


from taking up the task seriously until July of 1515. At that time he


went to Basel in search of suitable manuscripts that he could use as the


basis of his text. He did not uncover a great wealth of manuscripts,


but what he found was sufficient for the task. For the most part, he relied


on a mere handful of late medieval manuscripts, which he marked


up as if he were copyediting a handwritten copy for the printer; the


printer took the manuscripts so marked and set his type directly from


them.


It appears that Erasmus relied heavily on just one twelfth-century


manuscript for the Gospels and another, also of the twelfth century, for


the book of Acts and the Epistles—although he was able to consult


several other manuscripts and make corrections based on their readings.


For the book of Revelation he had to borrow a manuscript from


his friend the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin; unfortunately,


this manuscript was almost impossible to read in places, and it had lost


78 Misquoting Jesus


its last page, which contained the final six verses of the book. In his


haste to have the job done, in those places Erasmus simply took the


Latin Vulgate and translated its text back into Greek, thereby creating


some textual readings found today in no surviving Greek manuscript.


And this, as we will see, is the edition of the Greek New Testament


that for all practical purposes was used by the translators of the King


James Bible nearly a century later.


The printing of Erasmus’s edition began in October 1515 and was


finished in just five months. The edition included the rather hastily


gathered Greek text and a revised version of the Latin Vulgate, side


by side (in the second and later editions, Erasmus included his own


Latin translation of the text in lieu of the Vulgate, much to the consternation


of many theologians of the day, who still considered the


Vulgate to be “the” Bible of the church). The book was a large one,


nearly a thousand pages. Even so, as Erasmus himself later said, it was


“rushed out rather than edited” (in his Latin phrasing: praecipitatum


verius quam editum).


It is important to recognize that Erasmus’s edition was the editio princeps


of the Greek New Testament not simply because it makes for an interesting


historical tale, but even more so because, as the history of the


text developed, Erasmus’s editions (he made five, all based ultimately on


this first rather hastily assembled one) became the standard form of the


Greek text to be published by Western European printers for more than


three hundred years. Numerous Greek editions followed, produced by


publishers whose names are well known to scholars in this field:


Stephanus (Robert Estienne), Theodore Beza, and Bonaventure and


Abraham Elzevir. All these texts, however, relied more or less on the


texts of their predecessors, and all those go back to the text of Erasmus,


with all its faults, based on just a handful of manuscripts (sometimes just


two or even one—or in parts of Revelation, none!) that had been produced


relatively late in the medieval period. Printers for the most part


did not search out new manuscripts that might be older and better in


order to base their texts on them. Instead, they simply printed and


reprinted the same text, making only minor changes.


Texts of the New Testament 79


Some of these editions, to be sure, are significant. For example,


Stephanus’s third edition of 1550 is notable as the first edition ever to


include notes documenting differences among some of the manuscripts


consulted; his fourth edition (1551) is possibly even more significant,


as it is the first edition of the Greek New Testament that


divides the text into verses. Until then, the text had been printed all


together, with no indication of verse division. There’s an amusing anecdote


associated with how Stephanus did his work for this edition.


His son later reported that Stephanus had decided on his verse divisions


(most of which are retained for us in our English translations)


while making a journey on horseback. Undoubtedly he meant that


his father was “working on the road”—that is, that he entered verse


numbers in the evenings at the inns in which he was staying. But since


his son literally says that Stephanus made these changes “while on


horseback,” some wry observers have suggested that he actually did


his work in transit, so that whenever his horse hit an unexpected


bump, Stephanus’s pen jumped, accounting for some of the rather


odd verse placements that we still find in our English translations of


the New Testament.


The larger point I am trying to make, however, is that all these


subsequent editions—those of Stephanus included—ultimately go back


to Erasmus’s editio princeps, which was based on some rather late, and


not necessarily reliable, Greek manuscripts—the ones he happened to


find in Basel and the one he borrowed from his friend Reuchlin.


There would be no reason to suspect that these manuscripts were particularly


high in quality. They were simply the ones he could lay his


hands on.


Indeed, as it turns out, these manuscripts were not of the best quality:


they were, after all, produced some eleven hundred years after the


originals! For example, the main manuscript that Erasmus used for


the Gospels contained both the story of the woman taken in adultery


in John and the last twelve verses of Mark, passages that did not originally


form part of the Gospels, as we learned in the preceding chapter.


There was one key passage of scripture that Erasmus’s source man-


80 Misquoting Jesus


uscripts did not contain, however. This is the account of 1 John 5:7–8,


which scholars have called the Johannine Comma, found in the manuscripts


of the Latin Vulgate but not in the vast majority of Greek


manuscripts, a passage that had long been a favorite among Christian


theologians, since it is the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly


delineates the doctrine of the Trinity, that there are three persons


in the godhead, but that the three all constitute just one God. In the


Vulgate, the passage reads:


There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and


the Spirit, and these three are one; and there are three that bear witness


on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one.


It is a mysterious passage, but unequivocal in its support of the traditional


teachings of the church on the “triune God who is one.”


Without this verse, the doctrine of the Trinity must be inferred from a


range of passages combined to show that Christ is God, as is the Spirit


and the Father, and that there is, nonetheless, only one God. This passage,


in contrast, states the doctrine directly and succinctly.


But Erasmus did not find it in his Greek manuscripts, which instead


simply read: “There are three that bear witness: the Spirit, the


water, and the blood, and these three are one.” Where did the “Father,


the Word, and the Spirit” go? They were not in Erasmus’s primary


manuscript, or in any of the others that he consulted, and so, naturally,


he left them out of his first edition of the Greek text.


More than anything else, it was this that outraged the theologians


of his day, who accused Erasmus of tampering with the text in an attempt


to eliminate the doctrine of the Trinity and to devalue its corollary,


the doctrine of the full divinity of Christ. In particular, Stunica,


one of the chief editors of the Complutensian Polyglot, went public


with his defamation of Erasmus and insisted that in future editions he


return the verse to its rightful place.


As the story goes, Erasmus—possibly in an unguarded moment—


agreed that he would insert the verse in a future edition of his Greek


Texts of the New Testament 81


New Testament on one condition: that his opponents produce a


Greek manuscript in which the verse could be found (finding it in


Latin manuscripts was not enough). And so a Greek manuscript was


produced. In fact, it was produced for the occasion. It appears that


someone copied out the Greek text of the Epistles, and when he came


to the passage in question, he translated the Latin text into Greek,


giving the Johannine Comma in its familiar, theologically useful form.


The manuscript provided to Erasmus, in other words, was a sixteenth-


century production, made to order.


Despite his misgivings, Erasmus was true to his word and included


the Johannine Comma in his next edition, and in all his subsequent


editions. These editions, as I have already noted, became the basis for


the editions of the Greek New Testament that were then reproduced


time and again by the likes of Stephanus, Beza, and the Elzevirs.


These editions provided the form of the text that the translators of the


King James Bible eventually used. And so familiar passages to readers


of the English Bible—from the King James in 1611 onward, up until


modern editions of the twentieth century—include the woman taken


in adultery, the last twelve verses of Mark, and the Johannine Comma,


even though none of these passages can be found in the oldest and superior


manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. They entered into


the English stream of consciousness merely by a chance of history,


based on manuscripts that Erasmus just happened to have handy to


him, and one that was manufactured for his benefit.


The various Greek editions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries


were so much alike that eventually printers could claim that


they were the text that was universally accepted by all scholars and


readers of the Greek New Testament—as indeed they were, since


there were no competitors! The most-quoted claim is found in an edition


produced in 1633 by Abraham and Bonaventure Elzevir (who


were uncle and nephew), in which they told their readers, in words


that have since become famous among scholars, that “You now have


the text that is received by all, in which we have given nothing changed


or corrupted.”8 The phrasing of this line, especially the words “text


82 Misquoting Jesus


that is received by all,” provides us with the common phrase Textus


Receptus (abbreviated T.R.), a term used by textual critics to refer to


that form of the Greek text that is based, not on the oldest and best


manuscripts, but on the form of text originally published by Erasmus


and handed down to printers for more than three hundred years,


until textual scholars began insisting that the Greek New Testament


should be established on scientific principles based on our oldest and


best manuscripts, not simply reprinted according to custom. It was


the inferior textual form of the Textus Receptus that stood at the base


of the earliest English translations, including the King James Bible,


and other editions until near the end of the nineteenth century.


Mill’s Apparatus of


the Greek New Testament


The text of the Greek New Testament, then, appeared to be on solid


footing to most scholars who could avail themselves of the printed


editions throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After


all, nearly all the editions were the same in their wording. Occasionally,


though, scholarship was devoted to finding and noting that the


Greek manuscripts varied from the text as it was familiarly printed.


We have seen that Stephanus, in his edition of 1550, included marginal


notes identifying places of variation among several manuscripts


he had looked at (fourteen altogether). Somewhat later, in the seventeenth


century, editions were published by English scholars such as


Brian Walton and John Fell who took the variations in the surviving


(and available) manuscripts more seriously. But almost no one recognized


the enormity of the problem of textual variation until the groundbreaking


publication in 1707 of one of the classics in the field of New


Testament textual criticism, a book that had a cataclysmic effect on


the study of the transmission of the Greek New Testament, opening


the floodgates that compelled scholars to take the textual situation of


our New Testament manuscripts seriously.9


Texts of the New Testament 83


This was an edition of the Greek New Testament by John Mill, fellow


of Queens College, Oxford. Mill had invested thirty years of hard


work amassing the materials for his edition. The text that he printed


was simply the 1550 edition of Stephanus; what mattered for Mill’s


publication was not the text he used, but the variant readings from that


text that he cited in a critical apparatus. Mill had access to the readings


of some one hundred Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. In


addition, he carefully examined the writings of the early church fathers


to see how they quoted the text—on the assumption that one


could reconstruct the manuscripts available to those fathers by examining


their quotations. Moreover, even though he could not read many


of the other ancient languages, except for Latin, he used an earlier edition


published by Walton to see where the early versions in languages


such as Syriac and Coptic differed from the Greek.


On the basis of this intense thirty-year effort to accumulate materials,


Mill published his text with apparatus, in which he indicated


places of variation among all the surviving materials available to him.


To the shock and dismay of many of his readers, Mill’s apparatus isolated


some thirty thousand places of variation among the surviving


witnesses, thirty thousand places where different manuscripts, Patristic


(= church father) citations, and versions had different readings for


passages of the New Testament.


Mill was not exhaustive in his presentation of the data he had collected.


He had, in fact, found far more than thirty thousand places of


variation. He did not cite everything he discovered, leaving out variations


such as those involving changes of word order. Still, the places


he noted were enough to startle the reading public away from the


complacency into which it had fallen based on the constant republication


of the Textus Receptus and the natural assumption that in the


T.R. one had the “original” Greek of the New Testament. Now the


status of the original text was thrown wide open to dispute. If one did


not know which words were original to the Greek New Testament,


how could one use these words in deciding correct Christian doctrine


and teaching?


84 Misquoting Jesus


The Controversy Created by


Mill’s Apparatus


The impact of Mill’s publication was immediately felt, although he


himself did not live to see the drama play out. He died, the victim of a


stroke, just two weeks after his massive work was published. His untimely


death (said by one observer to have been brought on by “drinking


too much coffee”!) did not prevent detractors from coming to the


fore, however. The most scathing attack came three years later in a


learned volume by a controversialist named Daniel Whitby, who in


1710 published a set of notes on the interpretation of the New Testament,


to which he added an appendix of one hundred pages examining,


in great detail, the variants cited by Mill in his apparatus. Whitby


was a conservative Protestant theologian whose basic view was that


even though God certainly would not prevent errors from creeping


into scribal copies of the New Testament, at the same time he would


never allow the text to be corrupted (i.e., altered) to the point that it


could not adequately achieve its divine aim and purpose. And so he


laments, “I GRIEVE therefore and am vexed that I have found so


much in Mill’s Prolegomena which seems quite plainly to render the


standard of faith insecure, or at best to give others too good a handle


for doubting.”10


Whitby goes on to suggest that Roman Catholic scholars—whom


he calls “the Papists”—would be all too happy to be able to show, on


the basis of the insecure foundations of the Greek text of the New


Testament, that scripture was not a sufficient authority for the faith—


that is, that the authority of the church instead is paramount. As he


states: “Morinus [a Catholic scholar] argued for a depravation of the


Greek Text which would render its authority insecure from the variety


of readings which he found in the Greek Testament of R. Stephens


[= Stephanus]; what triumphs then will the Papists have over the same


text when they see the variations quadrupled by Mill after sweating for


thirty years at the work?”11 Whitby proceeds to argue that, in fact, the


text of the New Testament is secure, since scarcely any variant cited by


Texts of the New Testament 85


Mill involves an article of faith or question of conduct, and the vast


majority of Mill’s variants have no claim to authenticity.


Whitby may have intended his refutation to have its effect without


anyone actually reading it; it is a turgid, dense, unappealing one hundred


pages of close argumentation, which tries to make its point simply


through the accumulated mass of its refutation.


Whitby’s defense might well have settled the issue had it not been


taken up by those who used Mill’s thirty thousand places of variation


precisely to the end that Whitby feared, to argue that the text of scripture


could not be trusted because it was in itself so insecure. Chief


among those who argued the point was the English deist Anthony


Collins, a friend and follower of John Locke, who in 1713 wrote a


pamphlet called Discourse on Free Thinking. The work was typical of


early-eighteenth-century deistic thought: it urged the primacy of


logic and evidence over revelation (e.g., in the Bible) and claims of the


miraculous. In section 2 of the work, which deals with “Religious


Questions,” Collins notes, in the midst of a myriad of other things,


that even the Christian clergy (i.e., Mill) have been “owning and labouring


to prove the Text of the Scripture to be precarious,” making reference


then to Mill’s thirty thousand variants.


Collins’s pamphlet, which was widely read and influential, provoked


a number of pointed responses, many of them dull and laborious,


some of them learned and indignant. Arguably its most significant result


was that it drew into the fray a scholar of enormous international


reputation, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Richard Bentley.


Bentley is renowned for his work on classical authors such as


Homer, Horace, and Terence. In a reply to both Whitby and Collins,


written under the pseudonym Phileleutherus Lipsiensis (which means


something like “the lover of freedom from Leipzig”—an obvious allusion


to Collins’s urging of “free thinking”), Bentley made the obvious


point that the variant readings that Mill had accumulated could


not render the foundation of the Protestant faith insecure, since the


readings existed even before Mill had noticed them. He didn’t invent


them; he only pointed them out!


86 Misquoting Jesus


[I]f we are to believe not only this wise Author [Collins] but a wiser


Doctor of your own [ Whitby], He [ Mill] was labouring all that


while, to prove the Text of the Scripture precarious. . . . For what


is it, that your Whitbyus so inveighs and exclaims at? The Doctor’s


Labours, says he, make the whole Text precarious; and expose both the


Reformation to the Papists, and Religion itself to the Atheists. God


forbid! We’ll still hope better things. For sure those Various Readings


existed before in the several Exemplars; Dr Mill did not make and coin


them, he only exhibited them to our View. If Religion therefore was


true before, though such Various Readings were in being: it will be as


true and consequently as safe still, though every body sees them. Depend


on’t; no Truth, no matter of Fact fairly laid open, can ever subvert


true Religion.12


Bentley, an expert in the textual traditions of the classics, goes on


to point out that one would expect to find a multitude of textual variants


whenever one uncovers a large number of manuscripts. If there


were only one manuscript of a work, there would be no textual variants.


Once a second manuscript is located, however, it will differ from


the first in a number of places. This is not a bad thing, however, as a


number of these variant readings will show where the first manuscript


has preserved an error. Add a third manuscript, and you will


find additional variant readings, but also additional places, as a result,


where the original text is preserved (i.e., where the first two manuscripts


agree in an error). And so it goes—the more manuscripts one


discovers, the more the variant readings; but also the more the likelihood


that somewhere among those variant readings one will be able


to uncover the original text. Therefore, the thirty thousand variants


uncovered by Mill do not detract from the integrity of the New Testament;


they simply provide the data that scholars need to work on to


establish the text, a text that is more amply documented than any


other from the ancient world.


As we will see in the next chapter, this controversy over Mill’s publication


eventually induced Bentley to turn his remarkable powers of


Texts of the New Testament 87


intellect to the problem of establishing the oldest available text of the


New Testament. Before moving to that discussion, however, perhaps


we should take a step back and consider where we are today vis-à-vis


Mill’s astonishing discovery of thirty thousand variations in the manuscript


tradition of the New Testament.


Our Current Situation


Whereas Mill knew of or examined some one hundred Greek manuscripts


to uncover his thirty thousand variations, today we know of


far, far more. At last count, more than fifty-seven hundred Greek


manuscripts have been discovered and catalogued. That’s fifty-seven


times as many as Mill knew about in 1707. These fifty-seven hundred


include everything from the smallest fragments of manuscripts—the


size of a credit card—to very large and magnificent productions, preserved


in their entirety. Some of them contain only one book of the


New Testament; others contain a small collection (for example, the


four Gospels or the letters of Paul); a very few contain the entire New


Testament.13 There are, in addition, many manuscripts of the various


early versions (= translations) of the New Testament.


These manuscripts range in date from the early second century (a


small fragment called P52, which has several verses from John 18)


down to the sixteenth century.14 They vary greatly in size: some are


small copies that could fit in the hand, such as Coptic copy of Matthew’s


Gospel, called the Scheide Codex, which measures 4  5 inches; others


are very large and impressive copies, among them the previously mentioned


Codex Sinaiticus, which measures 15  13.5 inches, making an


impressive spread when opened up completely. Some of these manuscripts


are inexpensive, hastily produced copies; some were actually


copied onto reused pages (a document was erased and the text of the


New Testament was written over the top of the erased pages); others


are enormously lavish and expensive copies, including some written


on purple-dyed parchment with silver or gold ink.


88 Misquoting Jesus


As a rule, scholars speak of four kinds of Greek manuscripts.15


(1) The oldest are papyrus manuscripts, written on material manufactured


from the papyrus reed, a valuable but inexpensive and efficient


writing material in the ancient world; they date from the second to


the seventh centuries. (2) The majuscule (= large-lettered) manuscripts


are made of parchment (= animal skins; sometimes called vellum)


and are named after the large letters, somewhat like our capital


letters, that are used; these date, for the most part, from the fourth to


the ninth centuries. (3) Minuscule (= small-lettered) manuscripts are


also made of parchment but are written in smaller letters that are frequently


combined (without the pen leaving the page) into what looks


something like the Greek equivalent of cursive writing; these date


from the ninth century onward. (4) Lectionaries are usually minuscule


in form as well, but instead of consisting of the books of the New Testament,


they contain, in a set order, “readings” taken from the New


Testament to be used in church each week or on each holiday (like the


lectionaries used in churches today).


In addition to these Greek manuscripts, we know of about ten


thousand manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate, not to mention the manuscripts


of other versions, such as the Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Old


Georgian, Church Slavonic, and the like (recall that Mill had access to


only a few of the ancient versions, and these he knew only through


their Latin translations). In addition, we have the writings of church


fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius


among the Greeks and Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine among the


Latins—all of them quoting the texts of the New Testament in places,


making it possible to reconstruct what their manuscripts (now lost,


for the most part) must have looked like.


With this abundance of evidence, what can we say about the total


number of variants known today? Scholars differ significantly in their


estimates—some say there are 200,000 variants known, some say


300,000, some say 400,000 or more! We do not know for sure because,


despite impressive developments in computer technology, no one has yet


been able to count them all. Perhaps, as I indicated earlier, it is best simply


Texts of the New Testament 89


to leave the matter in comparative terms. There are more variations


among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.


Kinds of Changes in Our Manuscripts


If we have trouble talking about the numbers of changes that still survive,


what can we say about the kinds of changes found in these manuscripts?


Scholars typically differentiate today between changes that


appear to have been made accidentally through scribal mistakes and


those made intentionally, through some forethought. These are not


hard and fast boundaries, of course, but they still seem appropriate:


one can see how a scribe might inadvertently leave out a word when


copying a text (an accidental change), but it is hard to see how the last


twelve verses of Mark could have been added by a slip of the pen.


And so, it might be worthwhile to end this chapter with a few examples


of each kind of change. I will start by pointing out some kinds


of “accidental” variants.


Accidental Changes


Accidental slips of the pen16 no doubt were exacerbated, as we have


seen, by the fact that Greek manuscripts were all written in scriptuo


continua—with no punctuation, for the most part, or even spaces between


words. This means that words that looked alike were often mistaken


for one another. For example, in 1 Cor. 5:8, Paul tells his readers


that they should partake of Christ, the Passover lamb, and should not


eat the “old leaven, the leaven of wickedness and evil.” The final word,


evil, is spelled PON


_


ERAS in Greek, which, it turns out, looks a lot like


the word for “sexual immorality,” PORNEIAS. The difference in


meaning may not be overwhelming, but it is striking that in a couple of


surviving manuscripts, Paul explicitly warns not against evil in general,


but against sexual vice in particular.


This kind of spelling mistake was made even more likely by the


90 Misquoting Jesus


circumstance that scribes sometimes abbreviated certain words to


save time or space. The Greek word for “and,” for example, is KAI,


for which some scribes simply wrote the initial letter K, with a kind of


downstroke at the end to indicate that it was an abbreviation. Other


common abbreviations involved what scholars have called the nomina


sacra (= sacred names), a group of words such as God, Christ, Lord,


Jesus, and Spirit that were abbreviated either because they occurred so


frequently or else to show that they were being paid special attention.


These various abbreviations sometimes led to confusion for later


scribes, who mistook one abbreviation for another or misread an abbreviation


as a full word. So, for example, in Rom. 12:11, Paul urges


his reader to “serve the Lord.” But the word Lord, KURIW, was typically


abbreviated in manuscripts as KW (with a line drawn over the


top), which some early scribes misread as an abbreviation for KAIRW,


which means “time.” And so in those manuscripts, Paul exhorts his


readers to “serve the time.”


Similarly, in 1 Cor. 12:13, Paul points out that everyone in Christ


has been “baptized into one body” and they have all “drunk of one


Spirit.” The word Spirit (PNEUMA) would have been abbreviated in


most manuscripts as


——


PMA, which understandably could be—and


was—misread by some scribes as the Greek word for “drink”


(POMA); and so in these witnesses Paul is said to indicate that all have


“drunk of one drink.”


One common type of mistake in Greek manuscripts occurred when


two lines of the text being copied ended with the same letters or the


same words. A scribe might copy the first line of text, and then when his


eye went back to the page, it might pick up on the same words on the


next line, instead of the line he had just copied; he would continue copying


from there and, as a result, leave out the intervening words and/or


lines. This kind of mistake is called periblepsis (an “eye-skip”) occasioned


by homoeoteleuton (the “same endings”). I teach my students that


they can lay claim to a university education when they can speak intelligently


about periblepsis occasioned by homoeoteleuton.


Texts of the New Testament 91


How this works can be illustrated by the text of Luke 12:8–9,


which reads:


8Whoever confesses me before humans, the son of man


will confess before the angels of God


9But whoever denies me before humans


will be denied before the angels of God


Our earliest papyrus manuscript of the passage leaves off all of


verse 9; and it is not difficult to see how the mistake was made. The


scribe copied the words “before the angels of God” in verse 8, and


when his eye returned to the page, he picked up the same words in


verse 9 and assumed those were the words just copied—and so he


proceeded to copy verse 10, leaving out verse 9 altogether.


Sometimes this kind of error can be even more disastrous to the


meaning of a text. In John 17:15, for example, Jesus says in his prayer


to God about his followers:


I do not ask that you keep them from the


world, but that you keep them from the


evil one.


In one of our best manuscripts (the fourth-century Codex Vaticanus),


however, the words “world . . . from the” are omitted, so that


now Jesus utters the unfortunate prayer “I do not ask that you keep


them from the evil one”!


Sometimes accidental mistakes were made not because words


looked alike, but because they sounded alike. This could happen, for


example, when a scribe was copying a text by dictation—when one


scribe would be reading from a manuscript and one or more


other scribes would be copying the words into new manuscripts, as


sometimes happened in scriptoria after the fourth century. If two


words were pronounced the same, then the scribe doing the copying


might inadvertently use the wrong one in his copy, especially if it


made perfectly good (but wrong) sense. This appears to be what hap-


92 Misquoting Jesus


pened, for example, in Rev. 1:5, where the author prays to “the one


who released us from our sins.” The word for “released” (LUSANTI)


sounds exactly like the word for “washed” (LOUSANTI), and so it is


no surprise that in a number of medieval manuscripts the author


prays to the one “who washed us from our sins.”


Another example occurs in Paul’s letter to the Romans, where


Paul states that “since we have been justified by faith, we have peace


with God” (Rom. 5:1). Or is that what he said? The word for “we


have peace,” a statement of fact, sounded exactly like the word “let


us have peace,” an exhortation. And so in a large number of manuscripts,


including some of our earliest, Paul doesn’t rest assured that


he and his followers have peace with God, he urges himself and others


to seek peace. This is a passage for which textual scholars have difficulty


deciding which reading is the correct one.17


In other cases there is little ambiguity, because the textual change,


while understandable, actually makes for nonsense instead of sense.


This happens a lot, and often for some of the reasons we have been


discussing. As an example, in John 5:39, Jesus tells his opponents to


“search the scriptures . . . for they bear witness to me.” In one early


manuscript, the final verb was changed to one that sounds similar but


makes no sense in the context. In that manuscript Jesus says to “search


the scriptures . . . for they are sinning against me”! A second example


comes from the book of Revelation, where the prophet has a vision of


the throne of God, around which there “was a rainbow that looked


like an emerald” (1:3). In some of our earliest manuscripts there is a


change, in which, odd as it might seem, we are told that around the


throne “were priests that looked like an emerald”!


Of all the many thousands of accidental mistakes made in our


manuscripts, probably the most bizarre is one that occurs in a minuscule


manuscript of the four Gospels officially numbered 109, which


was produced in the fourteenth century.18 Its peculiar error occurs in


Luke, chapter 3, in the account of Jesus’s genealogy. The scribe was evidently


copying a manuscript that gave the genealogy in two columns.


Texts of the New Testament 93


For some reason, he did not copy one column at a time, but copied


across the two columns. As a result, the names of the genealogy are


thrown out of whack, with most people being called the sons of the


wrong father. Worse still, the second column of the text the scribe was


copying did not have as many lines as the first, so that now, in the copy


he made, the father of the human race (i.e., the last one mentioned) is


not God but an Israelite named Phares; and God himself is said to be


the son of a man named Aram!


Intentional Changes


In some respects, the changes we have been looking at are the easiest


to spot and eliminate when trying to establish the earliest form of the


text. Intentional changes tend to be a bit more difficult. Precisely because


they were (evidently) made deliberately, these changes tend to


make sense. And since they make sense, there will always be critics


who argue that they make the best sense—that is, that they are original.


This is not a dispute between scholars who think the text has been


altered and those who think it has not. Everyone knows that the text


has been changed; the only question is which reading represents the


alteration and which represents the earliest attainable form of the


text. Here scholars sometimes disagree.


In a remarkable number of instances—most of them, actually—


scholars by and large agree. It is perhaps useful for us here to consider


an array of the kinds of intentional changes one finds among our


manuscripts, as these can show us the reasons scribes had for making


alterations.


Sometimes scribes changed their texts because they thought the


text contained a factual error. This appears to be the case at the very


beginning of Mark, where the author introduces his Gospel by saying,


“Just as is written in Isaiah the prophet, ‘Behold I am sending a messenger


before your face. . . . Make straight his paths.’” The problem is


that the beginning of the quotation is not from Isaiah at all but represents


a combination of a passage from Exod. 23:20 and one from


94 Misquoting Jesus


Mal. 3:1. Scribes recognized that this was a difficulty and so changed


the text, making it say, “Just as is written in the prophets. . . .” Now


there is no problem with a misattribution of the quotation. But there


can be little doubt concerning what Mark originally wrote: the attribution


to Isaiah is found in our earliest and best manuscripts.


On occasion the “error” that a scribe attempted to correct was


not factual, but interpretive. A well-known example comes in Matt.


24:36, where Jesus is predicting the end of the age and says that “concerning


that day and hour, no one knows—not the angels in heaven,


nor even the Son, but only the Father.” Scribes found this passage difficult:


the Son of God, Jesus himself, does not know when the end will


come? How could that be? Isn’t he all-knowing? To resolve the problem,


some scribes simply modified the text by taking out the words


“nor even the Son.” Now the angels may be ignorant, but the Son of


God isn’t.19


In other cases scribes changed a text not because they thought that


it contained a mistake but because they wanted to circumvent a misunderstanding


of it. An example is Matt. 17:12–13, in which Jesus


identifies John the Baptist as Elijah, the prophet to come at the end of


time:


“I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize


him, but did to him as much as they wished. Thus also the Son of Man


is about to suffer by them.” Then his disciples realized that he was


speaking to them about John the Baptist.


The potential problem is that, as it reads, the text could be interpreted


to mean not that John the Baptist was Elijah, but that he was


the Son of Man. Scribes knew full well this was not the case, and so


some of them switched the text around, making the statement “his


disciples realized that he was speaking to them about John the Baptist”


occur before the statement about the Son of Man.


Sometimes scribes changed their text for more patently theological


reasons, to make sure that the text could not be used by “heretics”


Texts of the New Testament 95


or to ensure that it said what it was already supposed (by the scribes)


to mean. There are numerous instances of this kind of change, which


we will consider at greater length in a later chapter. For now I will


simply point out a couple of brief examples.


In the second century there were Christians who firmly believed


that the salvation brought by Christ was a completely new thing, superior


to anything the world had ever seen and certainly superior to


the religion of Judaism from which Christianity had emerged. Some


Christians went so far as to insist that Judaism, the old religion of the


Jews, had been completely circumvented by the appearance of Christ.


For some scribes of this persuasion, the parable that Jesus tells of new


wine and old wineskins may have seemed problematic.


No one places new wine in old wineskins. . . . But new wine must be


placed in new wineskins. And no one who drinks the old wine wishes


for the new, for they say, “The old is better.” (Luke 5:38–39 )


How could Jesus indicate that the old is better than the new? Isn’t


the salvation he brings superior to anything Judaism (or any other religion)


had to offer? Scribes who found the saying puzzling simply


eliminated the last sentence, so that now Jesus says nothing about the


old being better than the new.


Sometimes scribes altered their text to ensure that a favorite doctrine


was duly emphasized. We find this, for example, in the account


of Jesus’s genealogy in Matthew’s Gospel, which starts with the father


of the Jews, Abraham, and traces Jesus’s line from father to son all the


way down to “Jacob, who was the father of Joseph, the husband of


Mary, from whom was born Jesus, who is called the Christ” (Matt.


1:16). As it stands, the genealogy already treats Jesus as an exceptional


case in that he is not said to be the “son” of Joseph. For some scribes,


however, that was not enough, and so they changed the text to read


“Jacob, who was the father of Joseph, to whom being betrothed the


virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus, who is called the Christ.” Now Joseph


is not even called Mary’s husband, but only her betrothed, and she is


96 Misquoting Jesus


clearly stated to be a virgin—an important point for many early scribes!


On occasion scribes modified their texts not because of theology


but for liturgical reasons. As the ascetic tradition strengthened in


early Christianity, it is not surprising to find this having an impact on


scribal changes to the text. For example, in Mark 9, when Jesus casts


out a demon that his disciples had been unable to budge, he tells them,


“This kind comes out only by prayer” (Mark 9:29). Later scribes made


the appropriate addition, in view of their own practices, so that now


Jesus indicates that “This kind comes out only by prayer and fasting.”


One of the best-known liturgical changes to the text is found


in Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. The prayer is also found in


Matthew, of course, and it is that longer, Matthean form that was, and


is, most familiar to Christians.20 By comparison, Luke’s version


sounds hopelessly truncated.


Father, hallowed be your name. May your kingdom come. Give us


each day our daily bread. And forgive our sins, for we forgive our


debtors. And do not lead us into temptation. (Luke 11:2–4)


Scribes resolved the problem of Luke’s shortened version by


adding the petitions known from the parallel passage in Matt. 6:9–13,


so that now, as in Matthew, the prayer reads:


Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. May your kingdom


come and your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us


each day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our


debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.


This scribal tendency to “harmonize” passages in the Gospels is


ubiquitous. Whenever the same story is told in different Gospels, one


scribe or another is likely to have made sure that the accounts are perfectly


in harmony, eliminating differences by strokes of their pens.


Sometimes scribes were influenced not by parallel passages but by


oral traditions then in circulation about Jesus and the stories told


about him. We have already seen this in a big way in the case of the


Texts of the New Testament 97


woman taken in adultery and the last twelve verses of Mark. In


smaller cases as well, we can see how oral traditions affected the written


texts of the Gospels. One outstanding example is the memorable


story in John 5 of Jesus healing an invalid by the pool of Bethzatha.


We are told at the beginning of the story that a number of people—invalids,


blind, lame, and paralyzed—lay beside this pool, and that


Jesus singled out one man, who had been there for thirty-eight years,


for healing. When he asks the man if he would like to be healed, the


man replies that there is no one who can place him in the pool, so that


“when the water is troubled” someone always beats him into it.


In our oldest and best manuscripts there is no explanation for


why this man would want to enter the pool once the waters became


disturbed, but the oral tradition supplied the lack in an addition to


verses 3–4 found in many of our later manuscripts. There we are told


that “an angel would at times descend into the pool and disturb the


water; and the first to descend after the water was disturbed would be


healed.”21 A nice touch to an already intriguing story.


Conclusion


We could go on nearly forever talking about specific places in which


the texts of the New Testament came to be changed, either accidentally


or intentionally. As I have indicated, the examples are not just in


the hundreds but in the thousands. The examples given are enough to


convey the general point, however: there are lots of differences among


our manuscripts, differences created by scribes who were reproducing


their sacred texts. In the early Christian centuries, scribes were


amateurs and as such were more inclined to alter the texts they


copied—or more prone to alter them accidentally—than were scribes


in the later periods who, starting in the fourth century, began to be


professionals.


It is important to see what kinds of changes, both accidental and


intentional, scribes were susceptible of making, because then it is eas-


98 Misquoting Jesus


ier to spot the changes and we can eliminate some of the guesswork


involved in determining which form of the text represents an alteration


and which represents its earliest form. It is also important to see


how modern scholars have devised methods for making this kind of


determination. In the next chapter we will trace some of that story,


starting from the time of John Mill and carrying it down to the present,


seeing the methods that have developed for reconstructing the


text of the New Testament and for recognizing the ways that it came


to be changed in the process of its transmission.


Texts of the New Testament 99