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
