The Social Worlds
of the Text
It is probably safe to say that the copying of early Christian texts was
by and large a “conservative” process. The scribes—whether nonprofessional
scribes in the early centuries or professional scribes of the
Middle Ages—were intent on “conserving” the textual tradition they
were passing on. Their ultimate concern was not to modify the tradition,
but to preserve it for themselves and for those who would follow
them. Most scribes, no doubt, tried to do a faithful job in making sure
that the text they reproduced was the same text they inherited.
Nonetheless, changes came to be made in the early Christian texts.
Scribes would sometimes—lots of times—make accidental mistakes,
by misspelling a word, leaving out a line, or simply bungling the sentences
they were supposed to be copying; and on occasion they changed
the text deliberately, making a “correction” to the text, which in fact
turned out to be an alteration of what the text’s author had originally
written. We examined in the preceding chapter one kind of intentional
change—changes relating to some of the theological controversies
raging in the second and third centuries, when most of the changes
of our textual tradition were made. I do not want to convey the false
impression that this kind of theological change of the text happened
every time a scribe sat down to copy a passage. It happened on occasion.
And when it happened, it had a profound effect on the text.
In this chapter, we will look at other contextual factors that led, on
occasion, to the alteration of the text. In particular, we will be examining
three kinds of disputes that were evident in the early Christian
communities: one internal dispute, about the role of women in the
church, and two external disputes, one with non-Christian Jews and
the other with antagonistic pagans. We will see in each case that, on
scattered occasions, these disputes also played a role in the transmission
of the texts that scribes (themselves involved in the disputes) were
reproducing for their communities.
Women and the Texts of Scripture
Debates over the role of women in the church did not play an enormous
role in the transmission of the texts of the New Testament, but
they did play a role, in interesting and important passages. To make
sense of the kinds of textual changes that were made, we need some
background on the nature of these debates.1
Women in the Early Church
Modern scholars have come to recognize that disputes over the role of
women in the early church occurred precisely because women had a
role—often a significant and publicly high profile role. Moreover, this
was the case from the very beginning, starting with the ministry of
Jesus himself. It is true that Jesus’s closest followers—the twelve disciples—
were all men, as would be expected of a Jewish teacher in firstcentury
Palestine. But our earliest Gospels indicate that Jesus was also
178 Misquoting Jesus
accompanied by women on his travels, and that some of these women
provided for him and his disciples financially, serving as patrons for
his itinerant preaching ministry (see Mark 15:40–51; Luke 8:1–3).
Jesus is said to have engaged in public dialogue with women and to
have ministered to them in public (Mark 7:24–30; John 4:1–42). In
particular, we are told that women accompanied Jesus during his final
trip to Jerusalem, where they were present at his crucifixion and
where they alone remained faithful to him at the end, when the male
disciples had fled (Matt. 27:55; Mark 15:40–41). Most significant of all,
each of our Gospels indicates that it was women—Mary Magdalene
alone, or with several companions—who discovered his empty tomb
and so were the first to know about and testify to Jesus’s resurrection
from the dead (Matt. 28:1–10; Mark 16:1–8; Luke 23:55–24:10; John
20:1–2).
It is intriguing to ask what it was about Jesus’s message that particularly
attracted women. Most scholars remain convinced that Jesus
proclaimed the coming Kingdom of God, in which there would be no
more injustice, suffering, or evil, in which all people, rich and poor,
slave and free, men and women, would be on equal footing. This obviously
proved particularly attractive as a message of hope to those
who in the present age were underprivileged—the poor, the sick, the
outcast. And the women.2
In any event, it is clear that even after his death, Jesus’s message
continued to be attractive to women. Some of Christianity’s early opponents
among the pagans, including, for example, the late-secondcentury
critic Celsus, whom we have met before, denigrated the
religion on the grounds that it was made up largely of children, slaves,
and women (i.e., those of no social standing in society at large). Strikingly,
Origen, who wrote the Christian response to Celsus, did not
deny the charge but tried to turn it against Celsus in an attempt to
show that God can take what is weak and invest it with strength.
But we do not need to wait until the late second century to see that
women played a major role in the early Christian churches. We already
get a clear sense of this from the earliest Christian writer whose
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works have survived, the apostle Paul. The Pauline letters of the New
Testament provide ample evidence that women held a prominent place
in the emerging Christian communities from the earliest of times. We
might consider, for example, Paul’s letter to the Romans, at the end of
which he sends greetings to various members of the Roman congregation
(chapter 16). Although Paul names more men than women
here, it is clear that women were seen as in no way inferior to their
male counterparts in the church. Paul mentions Phoebe, for example,
who is a deacon (or minister) in the church of Cenchreae, and Paul’s
own patron, whom he entrusts with the task of carrying his letter to
Rome (vv. 1–2). And there is Prisca, who along with her husband,
Aquila, is responsible for missionary work among the Gentiles and
who supports a Christian congregation in her home (vv. 3–4: notice
that she is mentioned first, ahead of her husband). Then there is Mary,
a colleague of Paul’s who works among the Romans (v. 6); there are
also Tryphaena, Tryphosa, and Persis, women whom Paul calls his
“co-workers” in the gospel (vv. 6, 12). And there are Julia and the
mother of Rufus and the sister of Nereus, all of whom appear to have
a high profile in the community (vv. 13, 15). Most impressive of all,
there is Junia, a woman whom Paul calls “foremost among the apostles”
(v. 7). The apostolic band was evidently larger than the list of
twelve men with whom most people are familiar.
Women, in short, appear to have played a significant role in the
churches of Paul’s day. To some extent, this high profile was unusual
in the Greco-Roman world. And it may have been rooted, as I have
argued, in Jesus’s proclamation that in the coming Kingdom there
would be equality of men and women. This appears to have been
Paul’s message as well, as can be seen, for example, in his famous declaration
in Galatians:
For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free; there is not
male and female; for all of you are one in Jesus Christ. (Gal. 3:27–28)
180 Misquoting Jesus
The equality in Christ may have manifested itself in the actual
worship services of the Pauline communities. Rather than being silent
“hearers of the word,” women appear to have been actively involved
in the weekly fellowship meetings, participating, for example, by
praying and prophesying, much as the men did (1 Corinthians 11).
At the same time, to modern interpreters it may appear that Paul
did not take his view of the relationship of men and women in Christ
to what could be thought of as its logical conclusion. He did require,
for example, that when women prayed and prophesied in church they
do so with their heads covered, to show that they were “under authority”
(1 Cor. 11:3–16, esp. v. 10). In other words, Paul did not urge a social
revolution in the relationship of men and women—just as he did
not urge the abolition of slavery, even though he maintained that in
Christ there “is neither slave nor free.” Instead he insisted that since
“the time is short” (until the coming of the Kingdom), everyone
should be content with the roles they had been given, and that no one
should seek to change their status—whether slave, free, married, single,
male, or female (1 Cor. 7:17–24).
At best, then, this can be seen as an ambivalent attitude toward the
role of women: they were equal in Christ and were allowed to participate
in the life of the community, but as women, not as men (they were,
for example, not to remove their veils and so appear as men, without an
“authority” on their head). This ambivalence on Paul’s part had an interesting
effect on the role of women in the churches after his day. In
some churches it was the equality in Christ that was emphasized; in others
it was the need for women to remain subservient to men. And so in
some churches women played very important, leadership roles; in others,
their roles were diminished and their voices quieted. Reading later
documents associated with Paul’s churches, after his death, we can see
that disputes arose about the roles women should play; eventually there
came an effort to suppress the role of women in the churches altogether.
This becomes evident in a letter that was written in Paul’s name.
Scholars today are by and large convinced that 1 Timothy was not
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written by Paul but by one of his later, second-generation followers.3
Here, in one of the (in)famous passages dealing with women in the
New Testament, we are told that women must not be allowed to teach
men because they were created inferior, as indicated by God himself
in the Law; God created Eve second, for the sake of man; and a woman
(related to Eve) must not therefore lord it over a man (related to
Adam) through her teaching. Furthermore, according to this author,
everyone knows what happens when a woman does assume the role
of teacher: she is easily duped (by the devil) and leads the man astray.
So, women are to stay at home and maintain the virtues appropriate
to women, bearing children for their husbands and preserving their
modesty. As the passage itself reads:
Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no
woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.
For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but
the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be
saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love
and holiness, with modesty. (1 Tim. 2:11–15)
This seems a long way from Paul’s view that “in Christ there is . . .
not male and female.” As we move into the second century, the battle
lines appear clearly drawn. There are some Christian communities
that stress the importance of women and allow them to play significant
roles in the church, and there are others that believe women must
be silent and subservient to the men of the community.
The scribes who were copying the texts that later became scripture
were obviously involved in these debates. And on occasion the debates
made an impact on the text being copied, as passages were changed to
reflect the views of the scribes who were reproducing them. In almost
every instance in which a change of this sort occurs, the text is changed
in order to limit the role of women and to minimize their importance
to the Christian movement. Here we can consider just a few examples.
182 Misquoting Jesus
Textual Alterations Involving Women
One of the most important passages in the contemporary discussion of
the role of women in the church is found in 1 Corinthians 14. As represented
in most of our modern English translations, the passage reads
as follows.
33For God is not a God of confusion but of peace. As in all the
churches of the saints, 34let the women keep silent. For it is not permitted
for them to speak, but to be in subjection, just as the law says.
35But if they wish to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands
at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. 36What!
Did the word go forth only from you, or has it reached you alone?
The passage appears to be a clear and straightforward injunction
for women not to speak (let alone teach!) in the church, very much
like the passage from 1 Timothy 2. As we have seen, however, most
scholars are convinced that Paul did not write the 1 Timothy passage,
because it occurs in a letter that appears to have been written instead
by a second-generation follower of Paul in his name. No one doubts,
however, that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians. But there are doubts about
this passage. For as it turns out, the verses in question (vv. 34–35) are
shuffled around in some of our important textual witnesses. In three
Greek manuscripts and a couple of Latin witnesses, they are found
not here, after verse 33, but later, after verse 40. That has led some
scholars to surmise that the verses were not written by Paul but originated
as a kind of marginal note added by a scribe, possibly under the
influence of 1 Timothy 2. The note was then inserted in different places
of the text by various scribes—some placing the note after verse 33
and others inserting it after verse 40.
There are good reasons for thinking that Paul did not originally
write these verses. For one thing, they do not fit well into their immediate
context. In this part of 1 Corinthians 14, Paul is addressing the
issue of prophecy in the church, and is giving instructions to Christian
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prophets concerning how they are to behave during the Christian
services of worship. This is the theme of verses 26–33, and it is the
theme again of verses 36–40. If one removes verses 34–35 from their
context, the passage seems to flow seamlessly as a discussion of the
role of Christian prophets. The discussion of women appears, then, as
intrusive in its immediate context, breaking into instructions that Paul
is giving about a different matter.
Not only do the verses seem intrusive in the context of chapter 14,
they also appear anomalous with what Paul explicitly says elsewhere
in 1 Corinthians. For earlier in the book, as we have already noticed,
Paul gives instructions to women speaking in the church: according
to chapter 11, when they pray and prophesy—activities that were always
done aloud in the Christian services of worship—they are to be
sure to wear veils on their heads (11:2–16). In this passage, which no
one doubts Paul wrote, it is clear that Paul understands that women
both can and do speak in church. In the disputed passage of chapter
14, however, it is equally clear that “Paul” forbids women from speaking
at all. It is difficult to reconcile these two views—either Paul allowed
women to speak (with covered heads, chapter 11) or not
(chapter 14). As it seems unreasonable to think that Paul would flat
out contradict himself within the short space of three chapters, it appears
that the verses in question do not derive from Paul.
And so on the basis of a combination of evidence—several manuscripts
that shuffle the verses around, the immediate literary context,
and the context within 1 Corinthians as a whole—it appears that Paul
did not write 1 Cor. 14:34–35. One would have to assume, then, that
these verses are a scribal alteration of the text, originally made, perhaps,
as a marginal note and then eventually, at an early stage of the
copying of 1 Corinthians, placed in the text itself. The alteration was
no doubt made by a scribe who was concerned to emphasize that
women should have no public role in the church, that they should be
silent and subservient to their husbands. This view then came to be
incorporated into the text itself, by means of a textual alteration.4
184 Misquoting Jesus
We might consider briefly several other textual changes of a similar
sort. One occurs in a passage I have already mentioned, Romans
16, in which Paul speaks of a woman, Junia, and a man who was presumably
her husband, Andronicus, both of whom he calls “foremost
among the apostles” (v. 7). This is a significant verse, because it is the
only place in the New Testament in which a woman is referred to as
an apostle. Interpreters have been so impressed by the passage that a
large number of them have insisted that it cannot mean what it says,
and so have translated the verse as referring not to a woman named
Junia but to a man named Junias, who along with his companion Andronicus
is praised as an apostle. The problem with this translation is
that whereas Junia was a common name for a woman, there is no evidence
in the ancient world for “Junias” as a man’s name. Paul is referring
to a woman named Junia, even though in some modern English
Bibles (you may want to check your own!) translators continue to
refer to this female apostle as if she were a man named Junias.5
Some scribes also had difficulty with ascribing apostleship to this
otherwise unknown woman, and so made a very slight change in the
text to circumvent the problem. In some of our manuscripts, rather
than saying “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives and fellow
prisoners, who are foremost among the apostles,” the text is now
changed so as to be more readily translated: “Greet Andronicus and
Junia, my relatives; and also greet my fellow prisoners who are foremost
among the apostles.” With this textual change, no longer does
one need to worry about a woman being cited among the apostolic
band of men!
A similar change was made by some scribes who copied the book
of Acts. In chapter 17 we learn that Paul and his missionary companion
Silas spent time in Thessalonica preaching the gospel of Christ to
the Jews of the local synagogue. We are told in verse 4 that the pair
made some important converts: “And some of them were persuaded
and joined with Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the pious Greeks,
along with a large number of prominent women.”
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The idea of women being prominent—let alone prominent converts—
was too much for some scribes, and so the text came to be
changed in some manuscripts, so that now we are told: “And some of
them were persuaded and joined with Paul and Silas, as did a great
many of the pious Greeks, along with a large number of wives of
prominent men.” Now it is the men who are prominent, not the wives
who converted.
Among Paul’s companions in the book of Acts were a husband
and wife named Aquila and Priscilla; sometimes when they are mentioned,
the author gives the wife’s name first, as if she had some kind
of special prominence either in the relationship or in the Christian
mission (as happens in Rom. 16:3 as well, where she is called Prisca).
Not surprisingly, scribes occasionally took umbrage at this sequencing
and reversed it, so that the man was given his due by having his
name mentioned first: Aquila and Priscilla rather than Priscilla and
Aquila.6
In short, there were debates in the early centuries of the church
over the role of women, and on occasion these debates spilled over
into the textual transmission of the New Testament itself, as scribes
sometimes changed their texts in order to make them coincide more
closely with the scribes’ own sense of the (limited) role of women in
the church.
Jews and the Texts of Scripture
To this point we have looked at various controversies that were internal
to early Christianity—disputes over christological issues and over
the role of women in the church—and have considered how they affected
the scribes who reproduced their sacred texts. These were not
the only kinds of controversy with which Christians were involved,
however. Just as poignant for those involved, and significant for our
considerations here, were conflicts with those outside the faith, Jews
and pagans who stood in opposition to Christians and engaged in
186 Misquoting Jesus
polemical controversies with them. These controversies also played
some role in the transmission of the texts of scripture. We can begin
by considering the disputes that Christians of the early centuries had
with non-Christian Jews.
Jews and Christians in Conflict
One of the ironies of early Christianity is that Jesus himself was a Jew
who worshiped the Jewish God, kept Jewish customs, interpreted the
Jewish law, and acquired Jewish disciples, who accepted him as the
Jewish messiah. Yet, within just a few decades of his death, Jesus’s followers
had formed a religion that stood over-against Judaism. How
did Christianity move so quickly from being a Jewish sect to being an
anti-Jewish religion?
This is a difficult question, and to provide a satisfying answer
would require a book of its own.7 Here, I can at least provide a historical
sketch of the rise of anti-Judaism within early Christianity as a
way of furnishing a plausible context for Christian scribes who occasionally
altered their texts in anti-Jewish ways.
The last twenty years have seen an explosion of research into the
historical Jesus. As a result, there is now an enormous range of opinion
about how Jesus is best understood—as a rabbi, a social revolutionary,
a political insurgent, a cynic philosopher, an apocalyptic
prophet: the options go on and on. The one thing that nearly all scholars
agree upon, however, is that no matter how one understands the
major thrust of Jesus’s mission, he must be situated in his own context
as a first-century Palestinian Jew. Whatever else he was, Jesus was
thoroughly Jewish, in every way—as were his disciples. At some point—
probably before his death, but certainly afterward—Jesus’s followers
came to think of him as the Jewish messiah. This term messiah was
understood in different ways by different Jews in the first century, but
one thing that all Jews appear to have had in common when thinking
about the messiah was that he was to be a figure of grandeur and
power, who in some way—for example, through raising a Jewish army
or by leading the heavenly angels—would overcome Israel’s enemies
The Social Worlds of the Text 187
and establish Israel as a sovereign state that could be ruled by God
himself (possibly through human agency). Christians who called Jesus
the messiah obviously had a difficult time convincing others of this
claim, since rather than being a powerful warrior or a heavenly judge,
Jesus was widely known to have been an itinerant preacher who had
gotten on the wrong side of the law and had been crucified as a lowlife
criminal.
To call Jesus the messiah was for most Jews completely ludicrous.
Jesus was not the powerful leader of the Jews. He was a weak and
powerless nobody—executed in the most humiliating and painful
way devised by the Romans, the ones with the real power. Christians,
however, insisted that Jesus was the messiah, that his death was not a
miscarriage of justice or an unforeseen event, but an act of God, by
which he brought salvation to the world.
What were Christians to do with the fact that they had trouble
convincing most Jews of their claims about Jesus? They could not, of
course, admit that they themselves were wrong. And if they weren’t
wrong, who was? It had to be the Jews. Early on in their history,
Christians began to insist that Jews who rejected their message were
recalcitrant and blind, that in rejecting the message about Jesus, they
were rejecting the salvation provided by the Jewish God himself.
Some such claims were being made already by our earliest Christian
author, the apostle Paul. In his first surviving letter, written to the
Christians of Thessalonica, Paul says:
For you, our brothers, became imitators of the churches of God that
are in Judea in Christ Jesus, because you suffered the same things from
your own compatriots as they did from the Jews, who killed both the
Lord Jesus and the prophets, and persecuted us, and are not pleasing
to God, and are opposed to all people. (1 Thess. 2:14–15)
Paul came to believe that Jews rejected Jesus because they understood
that their own special standing before God was related to the
fact that they both had and kept the Law that God had given them
188 Misquoting Jesus
(Rom. 10:3–4). For Paul, however, salvation came to the Jews, as well
as to the Gentiles, not through the Law but through faith in the death
and resurrection of Jesus (Rom. 3:21–22). Thus, keeping the Law
could have no role in salvation; Gentiles who became followers of
Jesus were instructed, therefore, not to think they could improve their
standing before God by keeping the Law. They were to remain as
they were—and not convert to become Jews (Gal. 2:15–16).
Other early Christians, of course, had other opinions—as they did
on nearly every issue of the day! Matthew, for example, seems to presuppose
that even though it is the death and resurrection of Jesus that
brings salvation, his followers will naturally keep the Law, just as
Jesus himself did (see Matt. 5:17–20). Eventually, though, it became
widely held that Christians were distinct from Jews, that following
the Jewish law could have no bearing on salvation, and that joining
the Jewish people would mean identifying with the people who had
rejected their own messiah, who had, in fact, rejected their own God.
As we move into the second century we find that Christianity and
Judaism had become two distinct religions, which nonetheless had a
lot to say to each other. Christians, in fact, found themselves in a bit of
a bind. For they acknowledged that Jesus was the messiah anticipated
by the Jewish scriptures; and to gain credibility in a world that cherished
what was ancient but suspected anything “recent” as a dubious
novelty, Christians continued to point to the scriptures—those ancient
texts of the Jews—as the foundation for their own beliefs. This
meant that Christians laid claim to the Jewish Bible as their own. But
was not the Jewish Bible for Jews? Christians began to insist that Jews
had not only spurned their own messiah, and thereby rejected their
own God, they had also misinterpreted their own scriptures. And so
we find Christian writings such as the so-called Letter of Barnabas, a
book that some early Christians considered to be part of the New Testament
canon, which asserts that Judaism is and always has been a
false religion, that Jews were misled by an evil angel into interpreting
the laws given to Moses as literal prescriptions of how to live, when in
fact they were to be interpreted allegorically.8
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Eventually we find Christians castigating Jews in the harshest
terms possible for rejecting Jesus as the messiah, with authors such as
the second-century Justin Martyr claiming that the reason God commanded
the Jews to be circumcised was to mark them off as a special
people who deserved to be persecuted. We also find authors such as
Tertullian and Origen claiming that Jerusalem was destroyed by the
Roman armies in 70 C.E. as a punishment for the Jews who killed
their messiah, and authors such as Melito of Sardis arguing that in
killing Christ, the Jews were actually guilty of killing God.
Pay attention all families of the nations and observe! An extraordinary
murder has taken place in the center of Jerusalem, in the city devoted
to God’s Law, in the city of the Hebrews, in the city of the prophets, in
the city thought of as just. And who has been murdered? And who is
the murderer? I am ashamed to give the answer, but give it I must. . . .
The one who hung the earth in space, is himself hanged; the one who
fixed the heavens in place is himself impaled; the one who firmly fixed
all things is himself firmly fixed to the tree. The Lord is insulted, God
has been murdered, the King of Israel has been destroyed by the right
hand of Israel. (Paschal Homily, 94–96)9
Clearly we have come a long way from Jesus, a Palestinian Jew
who kept Jewish customs, preached to his Jewish compatriots, and
taught his Jewish disciples the true meaning of the Jewish law. By the
second century, though, when Christian scribes were reproducing the
texts that eventually became part of the New Testament, most Christians
were former pagans, non-Jews who had converted to the faith
and who understood that even though this religion was based, ultimately,
on faith in the Jewish God as described in the Jewish Bible, it
was nonetheless completely anti-Jewish in its orientation.
Anti-Jewish Alterations of the Text
The anti-Jewishness of some second- and third-century Christian
scribes played a role in how the texts of scripture were transmitted. One
190 Misquoting Jesus
of the clearest examples is found in Luke’s account of the crucifixion, in
which Jesus is said to have uttered a prayer for those responsible:
And when they came to the place that is called “The Skull,” they crucified
him there, along with criminals, one on his right and the other
on his left. And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know
what they are doing.” (Luke 23:33–34)
As it turns out, however, this prayer of Jesus cannot be found in all
our manuscripts: it is missing from our earliest Greek witness (a papyrus
called P75, which dates to about 200 C.E.) and several other
high-quality witnesses of the fourth and later centuries; at the same
time, the prayer can be found in Codex Sinaiticus and a large range of
manuscripts, including most of those produced in the Middle Ages.
And so the question is, Did a scribe (or a number of scribes) delete the
prayer from a manuscript that originally included it? Or did a scribe
(or scribes) add it to a manuscript that originally lacked it?
Scholarly opinion has long been divided on the question. Because
the prayer is missing from several early and high-quality witnesses,
there has been no shortage of scholars to claim that it did not originally
belong to the text. Sometimes they appeal to an argument based
on internal evidence. As I have pointed out, the author of the Gospel
of Luke also produced the Acts of the Apostles, and a passage similar
to this one can be found in Acts in the account of the first Christian
martyr, Stephen, the only person whose execution is described at any
length in Acts. Because Stephen was charged with blasphemy, he was
stoned to death by a crowd of angry Jews; and before he expired he
prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60).
Some scholars have argued that a scribe who did not want Jesus to
look any less forgiving than his first martyr, Stephen, added the
prayer to Luke’s Gospel, so that Jesus also asks that his executioners
be forgiven. This is a clever argument, but it is not altogether convincing,
for several reasons. The most compelling is this: whenever scribes
try to bring texts into harmony with each other, they tend to do so by
The Social Worlds of the Text 191
repeating the same words in both passages. In this case, however, we
do not find identical wording, merely a similar kind of prayer. This is
not the kind of “harmonization” that scribes typically make.
Also striking in conjunction with this point is that Luke, the author
himself, on a number of occasions goes out of his way to show the
similarities between what happened to Jesus in the Gospel and what
happened to his followers in Acts: both Jesus and his followers are
baptized, they both receive the Spirit at that point, they both proclaim
the good news, they both come to be rejected for it, they both suffer at
the hands of the Jewish leadership, and so on. What happens to Jesus
in the Gospel happens to his followers in Acts. And so it would be no
surprise—but rather expected—that one of Jesus’s followers, who
like him is executed by angry authorities, should also pray that God
forgive his executioners.
There are other reasons for suspecting that Jesus’s prayer of forgiveness
is original to Luke 23. Throughout both Luke and Acts, for
example, it is emphasized that even though Jesus was innocent (as
were his followers), those who acted against him did so in ignorance.
As Peter says in Acts 3: “I know that you acted in ignorance” (v. 17); or
as Paul says in Acts 17: “God has overlooked the times of ignorance”
(v. 27). And that is precisely the note struck in Jesus’s prayer: “for they
don’t know what they are doing.”
It appears, then, that Luke 23:34 was part of Luke’s original text.
Why, though, would a scribe (or a number of scribes) have wanted to
delete it? Here is where understanding something about the historical
context within which scribes were working becomes crucial. Readers
today may wonder for whom Jesus is praying. Is it for the Romans
who are executing him in ignorance? Or is it for the Jews who are responsible
for turning him over to the Romans in the first place? However
we might answer that question in trying to interpret the passage
today, it is clear how it was interpreted in the early church. In almost
every instance in which the prayer is discussed in the writings of the
church fathers, it is clear that they interpreted the prayer as being ut-
192 Misquoting Jesus
tered not on behalf of the Romans but on behalf of the Jews.10 Jesus
was asking God to forgive the Jewish people (or the Jewish leaders)
who were responsible for his death.
Now it becomes clear why some scribes would have wanted to omit
the verse. Jesus prayed for the forgiveness of the Jews? How could that
be? For early Christians there were, in fact, two problems with the
verse, taken in this way. First, they reasoned, why would Jesus pray
for forgiveness for this recalcitrant people who had willfully rejected
God himself? That was scarcely conceivable to many Christians. Even
more telling, by the second century many Christians were convinced
that God had not forgiven the Jews because, as mentioned earlier, they
believed that he had allowed Jerusalem to be destroyed as a punishment
for the Jews in killing Jesus. As the church father Origen said:
“It was right that the city in which Jesus underwent such sufferings
should be completely destroyed, and that the Jewish nation be overthrown”
(Against Celsus 4, 22).11
The Jews knew full well what they were doing, and God obviously
had not forgiven them. From this point of view, it made little
sense for Jesus to ask for forgiveness for them, when no forgiveness
was forthcoming. What were scribes to do with this text, then, in
which Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what
they are doing”? They dealt with the problem simply by excising the
text, so that Jesus no longer asked that they be forgiven.
There were other passages in which the anti-Jewish sentiment of
early Christian scribes made an impact on the texts they were copying.
One of the most significant passages for the eventual rise of anti-
Semitism is the scene of Jesus’s trial in the Gospel of Matthew.
According to this account, Pilate declares Jesus innocent, washing his
hands to show that “I am innocent of this man’s blood! You see to it!”
The Jewish crowd then utters a cry that was to play such a horrendous
role in the violence manifest against the Jews down through the Middle
Ages, in which they appear to claim responsibility for the death of
Jesus: “His blood be upon us and our children” (Matt. 27:24–25).
The Social Worlds of the Text 193
The textual variant we are concerned with occurs in the next
verse. Pilate is said to have flogged Jesus and then “handed him over
to be crucified.” Anyone reading the text would naturally assume that
he handed Jesus over to his own (Roman) soldiers for crucifixion.
That makes it all the more striking that in some early witnesses—including
one of the scribal corrections in Codex Sinaitius—the text is
changed to heighten even further the Jewish culpability in Jesus’s
death. According to these manuscripts, Pilate “handed him over to
them [i.e., to the Jews] in order that they might crucify him.” Now the
Jewish responsibility for Jesus’s execution is absolute, a change motivated
by anti-Jewish sentiment among the early Christians.
Sometimes anti-Jewish variants are rather slight and do not catch
one’s attention until some thought is given to the matter. For example,
in the birth narrative of the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph is told to call
Mary’s newborn son Jesus (which means “salvation”) “because he will
save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). It is striking that in one
manuscript preserved in Syriac translation, the text instead says “because
he will save the world from its sins.” Here again it appears that a
scribe was uncomfortable with the notion that the Jewish people
would ever be saved.
A comparable change occurs in the Gospel of John. In chapter 4,
Jesus is talking with the woman from Samaria and tells her, “You
worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, because
salvation comes from the Jews” (v. 22). In some Syriac and Latin
manuscripts, however, the text has been changed, so that now Jesus
declares that “salvation comes from Judea.” In other words, it is not
the Jewish people who have brought salvation to the world; it is
Jesus’s death in the country of Judea that has done so. Once again we
might suspect that it was anti-Jewish sentiment that prompted the
scribal alteration.
My final example in this brief review comes from the fifth-century
Codex Bezae, a manuscript that arguably contains more interesting
and intriguing variant readings than any other. In Luke 6, where the
194 Misquoting Jesus
Pharisees accuse Jesus and his disciples of breaking the Sabbath
(6:1–4), we find in Codex Bezae an additional story consisting of a single
verse: “On the same day he saw a man working on the Sabbath,
and he said to him, ‘O man, if you know what you are doing, you are
blessed, but if you do not know, you are cursed, and a transgressor of
the Law.’” A full interpretation of this unexpected and unusual passage
would require a good deal of investigation.12 For our purposes
here it is enough to note that Jesus is quite explicit in this passage, in a
way that he never is elsewhere in the Gospels. In other instances,
when Jesus is accused of violating the Sabbath, he defends his activities,
but never does he indicate that the Sabbath laws are to be violated.
In this verse, on the other hand, Jesus plainly states that anyone
who knows why it is legitimate to violate Sabbath is blessed for doing
so; only those who don’t understand why it is legitimate are doing what
is wrong. Again, this is a variant that appears to relate to the rising
tide of anti-Judaism in the early church.
Pagans and the Texts of Scripture
Thus far we have seen that internal disputes over correct doctrine or
church management (the role of women) affected early Christian
scribes, and so too did conflicts between church and synagogue, as the
church’s anti-Jewish sentiment played a role in how those scribes
transmitted the texts that were eventually declared to be the New
Testament. Christians in the early centuries of the church not only
had to contend with heretical insiders and Jewish outsiders, they also
saw themselves embattled in the world at large, a world that was for
the most part made up of pagan outsiders. The word pagan in this
context, when used by historians, does not carry negative connotations.
It simply refers to anyone in the ancient world who subscribed
to any of the numerous polytheistic religions of the day. Since this included
anyone who was neither Jewish nor Christian, we are talking
The Social Worlds of the Text 195
about something like 90–93 percent of the population of the empire.
Christians were sometimes opposed by pagans because of their unusual
form of worship and their acceptance of Jesus as the one Son of
God whose death on the cross brought salvation; and occasionally this
opposition came to affect the Christian scribes who were reproducing
the texts of scripture.
Pagan Opposition to Christianity
Our earliest records indicate that Christians were sometimes violently
opposed by pagan mobs and/or authorities.13 The apostle Paul, for example,
in a listing of his various sufferings for the sake of Christ, recounts
that on three occasions he was “beaten with rods” (1 Cor. 11:25),
a form of punishment used by Roman municipal authorities against
criminals judged to be socially dangerous. And as we have seen, Paul
writes in his first surviving letter that his Gentile-Christian congregation
in Thessalonica had “suffered from your own compatriots what
they [the church of Judea] did from the Jews” (1 Thess. 2:14). In the
latter case, it appears that the persecution was not “official” but the result
of some kind of mob violence.
In fact, most of the pagan opposition to Christians during the
church’s first two centuries happened on the grassroots level rather
than as a result of organized, official Roman persecution. Contrary to
what many people appear to think, there was nothing “illegal” about
Christianity, per se, in those early years. Christianity itself was not
outlawed, and Christians for the most part did not need to go into
hiding. The idea that they had to stay in the Roman catacombs in
order to avoid persecution, and greeted one another through secret
signs such as the symbol of the fish, is nothing but the stuff of legend.
It was not illegal to follow Jesus, it was not illegal to worship the Jewish
God, it was not illegal to call Jesus God, it was not illegal (in most
places) to hold separate meetings of fellowship and worship, it was
not illegal to convince others of one’s faith in Christ as the Son of
God.
And yet Christians were sometimes persecuted. Why was that?
196 Misquoting Jesus
To make sense of Christian persecution, it is important to know
something about pagan religions in the Roman Empire. All these religions—
and there were hundreds of them—were polytheistic, worshiping
many gods; all of them emphasized the need to worship these
gods through acts of prayer and sacrifice. For the most part, the gods
were not worshiped to secure for the worshiper a happy afterlife; by
and large, people were more concerned about the present life, which
for most people was harsh and precarious at best. The gods could provide
what was impossible for people to secure for themselves—for the
crops to grow, for the livestock to be fed, for enough rain to fall, for
personal health and well-being, for the ability to reproduce, for victory
in war, for prosperity in peace. The gods protected the state and
made it great; the gods could intervene in life to make it livable, long,
and happy. And they did this in exchange for simple acts of worship—
worship on the state level during civic ceremonies honoring
the gods, and worship on the local level, in communities and families.
When things did not go well, when there were threats of war, or
drought, or famine, or disease, this could be taken as a sign that the
gods were not satisfied with how they were being honored. At such
times, who would be blamed for this failure to honor the gods? Obviously,
those who refused to worship them. Enter the Christians.
Of course, Jews would not worship the pagan gods either, but they
were widely seen as an exception to the need for all people to worship
the gods, since Jews were a distinctive people with their own ancestral
traditions that they faithfully followed.14 When Christians came on
the scene, however, they were not recognized as a distinctive people—
they were converts from Judaism and from an entire range of pagan
religions, with no blood ties to one another or any other connections
except their peculiar set of religious beliefs and practices. Moreover,
they were known to be antisocial, gathering together in their own
communities, abandoning their own families and deserting their former
friends, not participating in communal festivals of worship.
Christians were persecuted, then, because they were regarded as
detrimental to the health of society, both because they refrained from
The Social Worlds of the Text 197
worshiping the gods who protected society and because they lived together
in ways that seemed antisocial. When disasters hit, or when
people were afraid they might hit, who more likely as the culprits
than the Christians?
Only rarely did the Roman governors of the various provinces, let
alone the emperor himself, get involved in such local affairs. When
they did, however, they simply treated Christians as a dangerous social
group that needed to be stamped out. Christians were usually
given the chance to redeem themselves by worshiping the gods in the
ways demanded of them (for example, by offering some incense to a
god); if they refused, they were seen as recalcitrant troublemakers and
treated accordingly.
By the middle of the second century, pagan intellectuals began taking
note of the Christians and attacking them in tractates written
against them. These works not only portrayed the Christians themselves
in negative ways. They also attacked the Christians’ beliefs as ludicrous
(they claimed to worship the God of the Jews, for example, and
yet refused to follow the Jewish law!) and maligned their practices as
scandalous. On the latter point, it was sometimes noted that Christians
gathered together under the cloak of darkness, calling one another
“brother” and “sister” and greeting one another with kisses; they were
said to worship their god by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of
the Son of God. What was one to make of such practices? If you can
imagine the worst, you won’t be far off. Pagan opponents claimed that
Christians engaged in ritual incest (sexual acts with brothers and sisters),
infanticide (killing the Son), and cannibalism (eating his flesh
and drinking his blood). These charges may seem incredible today, but
in a society that respected decency and openness, they were widely accepted.
Christians were perceived as a nefarious lot.
In the intellectual attacks against Christians, considerable attention
was paid to the founder of this newfangled and socially disreputable
faith, Jesus himself.15 Pagan writers pointed to his impoverished origins
and lower-class status in order to mock Christians for thinking
that he was worthy of worship as a divine being. Christians were said
198 Misquoting Jesus
to worship a crucified criminal, foolishly asserting that he was somehow
divine.
Some of these writers, starting near the end of the second century,
actually read the Christian literature in order better to build their
cases. As the pagan critic Celsus once said, concerning the basis of his
attack on Christian beliefs:
These objections come from your own writings, and we need no
other witnesses: for you provide your own refutation. (Against
Celsus 2, 74)
These writings were sometimes held up to ridicule, as in the words
of the pagan Porphry:
The evangelists were fiction-writers—not observers or eyewitnesses of
the life of Jesus. Each of the four contradicts the other in writing his
account of the events of his suffering and crucifixion. (Against the
Christians 2, 12–15)16
In response to these kinds of attacks, claims the pagan Celsus,
Christian scribes altered their texts in order to rid them of the problems
so obvious to well-trained outsiders:
Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose
themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several
times over, and change its character to enable them to deny difficulties
in the face of criticism. (Against Celsus 2, 27)
As it turns out, we do not need to rely on pagan opponents of
Christianity to find evidence of scribes occasionally changing their
texts in light of pagan opposition to the faith. There are places within
our surviving manuscript tradition of the New Testament that show
this kind of scribal tendency at work.17
Before considering some of the relevant passages, I should point
out that these pagan charges against Christianity and its founder did
not go unanswered from the Christian side. On the contrary, as intellectuals
began to be converted to the faith, starting in the mid-second
The Social Worlds of the Text 199
century, numerous reasoned defenses, called apologies, were forthcoming
from the pens of Christians. Some of these Christian authors
are well known to students of early Christianity, including the likes of
Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Origen; others are lesser known but
nonetheless noteworthy in their defense of the faith, including such
authors as Athenagoras, Aristides, and the anonymous writer of the
Letter to Diognetus.18 As a group, these Christian scholars worked to
show the fallacies in the arguments of their pagan opponents, arguing
that, far from being socially dangerous, Christians were the glue that
held society together; insisting not only that the Christian faith was
reasonable but that it was the only true religion the world had ever
seen; claiming that Jesus was in fact the true Son of God, whose death
brought salvation; and striving to vindicate the nature of the early
Christian writings as inspired and true.
How did this “apologetic” movement in early Christianity affect
the second- and third-century scribes who were copying the texts of
the faith?
Apologetic Alterations of the Text
Although I did not mention it at the time, we have already seen one
text that appears to have been modified by scribes out of apologetic
concerns. As we saw in chapter 5, Mark 1:41 originally indicated that
when Jesus was approached by a leper who wanted to be healed, he
became angry, reached out his hand to touch him, and said “Be
cleansed.” Scribes found it difficult to ascribe the emotion of anger to
Jesus in this context, and so modified the text to say, instead, that Jesus
felt “compassion” for the man.
It is possible that what influenced the scribes to change the text
was something more than a simple desire to make a difficult passage
easier to understand. One of the constant points of debate between
pagan critics of Christianity and its intellectual defenders had to do
with the deportment of Jesus and whether he conducted himself in a
way that was worthy of one who claimed to be the Son of God. I
200 Misquoting Jesus
should emphasize that this was not a dispute over whether it was conceivable
that a human being could also, in some sense, be divine. That
was a point on which pagans and Christians were in complete agreement,
as pagans too knew of stories in which a divine being had become
human and interacted with others here on earth. The question
was whether Jesus behaved in such a way as to justify thinking of him
as someone of that sort, or whether, instead, his attitudes and behaviors
eliminated the possibility that he was actually a son of God.19
By this period it was widely believed among pagans that the gods
were not subject to the petty emotions and whims of mere mortals,
that they were, in fact, above such things.20 How was one to determine,
then, whether or not an individual was a divine being? Obviously,
he would have to display powers (intellectual or physical) that
were superhuman; but he would also need to comport himself in a
way that was compatible with the claim that he originated in the divine
realm.
We have a number of authors from this period who insist that the
gods do not get “angry,” as this is a human emotion induced by frustration
with others, or by a sense of being wronged, or by some other
petty cause. Christians, of course, could claim that God became “angry”
with his people for their misbehavior. But the Christian God, too, was
above any kind of peevishness. In this story about Jesus and the leper,
however, there is no very obvious reason for Jesus to get angry. Given
the circumstance that the text was changed during the period in
which pagans and Christians were arguing over whether Jesus comported
himself in a way that was appropriate to divinity, it is altogether
possible that a scribe changed the text in light of that controversy. This,
in other words, may have been an apologetically driven variation.
Another such alteration comes several chapters later in Mark’s
Gospel, in a well-known account in which Jesus’s own townsfolk
wonder how he could deliver such spectacular teachings and perform
such spectacular deeds. As they put it, in their astonishment, “Isn’t this
the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joseph and
The Social Worlds of the Text 201
Judas and Simon, and aren’t his sisters here with us?” (Mark 6:3).
How, they wondered, could someone who grew up as one of them,
whose family they all knew, be able to do such things?
This is the one and only passage in the New Testament in which
Jesus is called a carpenter. The word used, TEKT
–
ON, is typically applied
in other Greek texts to anyone who makes things with his
hands; in later Christian writings, for example, Jesus is said to have
made “yokes and gates.”21 We should not think of him as someone
who made fine cabinetry. Probably the best way to get a “feel” for this
term is to liken it to something more in our experience; it would be
like calling Jesus a construction worker. How could someone with
that background be the Son of God?
This was a question that the pagan opponents of Christianity took
quite seriously; in fact, they understood the question to be rhetorical:
Jesus obviously could not be a son of God if he was a mere TEKT
–
ON.
The pagan critic Celsus particularly mocked Christians on this point,
tying the claim that Jesus was a “woodworker” into the fact that he
was crucified (on a stake of wood) and the Christian belief in the
“tree” of life.
And everywhere they speak in their writings of the tree of life . . . I
imagine because their master was nailed to a cross and was a carpenter
by trade. So that if he happened to be thrown off a cliff or pushed into
a pit or suffocated by strangling, or if he had been a cobbler or stonemason
or blacksmith, there would have been a cliff of life above the
heavens, or a pit of resurrection, or a rope of immortality, or a blessed
stone, or an iron of love, or a holy hide of leather. Would not an old
woman who sings a story to lull a little child to sleep have been
ashamed to whisper tales such as these? (Against Celsus 6, 34)
Celsus’s Christian opponent, Origen, had to take seriously this
charge that Jesus was a mere “carpenter,” but oddly enough he dealt
with it not by explaining it away (his normal procedure), but by denying
it altogether: “[Celsus is] blind also to this, that in none of the
202 Misquoting Jesus
Gospels current in the Churches is Jesus himself ever described as
being a carpenter” ( Against Celsus 6, 36).
What are we to make of this denial? Either Origen had forgotten
about Mark 6:3 or else he had a version of the text that did not indicate
that Jesus was a carpenter. And as it turns out, we have manuscripts
with just such an alternative version. In our earliest manuscript of
Mark’s Gospel, called P45, which dates to the early third century (the
time of Origen), and in several later witnesses, the verse reads differently.
Here Jesus’s townsfolk ask, “Is this not the son of the carpenter?”
Now rather than being a carpenter himself, Jesus is merely the
carpenter’s son.22
Just as Origen had apologetically motivated reasons for denying
that Jesus is anywhere called a carpenter, it is conceivable that a scribe
modified the text—making it conform more closely with the parallel
in Matthew 13:55—in order to counteract the pagan charge that Jesus
could not be the Son of God because he was, after all, a mere lowerclass
