Review: Misquoting Jesus

Though not religious myself, I'm fascinated by religion, and do a lot of reading about it. I lately read Bart D. Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus", and was so fascinated by it that I put aside all my other reading to finish it. Though it usually takes me a long time to finish a book (due to my reading many things in parallel), I finished this book in under a week. It helps that the book is short, in spite of dense material.

My fascination with religion doesn't usually extend to discussing it with other people. I neither want to be converted, nor to convert anybody else to a different point of view. In fact, I often find religious discussion distasteful. However I found this book fascinating enough, and its subject matter important enough, that I felt compelled to write a review. It's been difficult to write this article. In fact, it's taken far longer to finish this review than it ever took to read the book in the first place.

Ehrman is a New Testament scholar, trained first at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, then at Wheaton College. Both are known as very strictly fundamentalist institutions, though Moody was so strict that they tried to deter him from attending Wheaton, considering it not theologically pure enough. He fervently believed in the divine inspiration of the original authors of the Bible. However, knowing that the original manuscripts were lost, and that those we have now have been modified in various ways, he set out to try to reconstruct the text of the New Testament as it was first written. Presumably, this text, if it could be found, would be the true inerrant Word of God.

If no original manuscripts exist, how could we possibly reconstruct their content? Techniques exist to do this, by comparing the texts we do have. Discrepancies, once introduced, usually are preserved in subsequent copies. By tracing these "family lines" backwards, one can determine which texts are closer to the original. It's a process common to other fields of study, much like tracing a real family tree, or the evolution of languages and biological species.

Though many scholars engage in this activity and believe we know more about what is was written in the original New Testament texts than people did even a few centuries after they were written, Ehrman eventually came to doubt the feasibility of the project. "Misquoting Jesus" book is his attempt to communicate the results of his own studies and conclusions to a wider audience than the scholars he ordinarily communicates with. Since I found out about this book by seeing it on Amazon's best seller list, and since Ehrman has been interviewed on the Daily Show, he seems to have enjoyed some success. Given the recent popularity of the dogma-questioning Da Vinci Code, and the recent fascination with the newly reconstructed Gospel of Judas, this book seems especially timely.

The book focuses on the New Testament in particular, though one can't help but get the strong impression that the same problems or worse would also be found with the Old Testament. Over the New Testament's long history, many changes have occurred. It has been copied, translated, additions and removals made, certain books selected as authoritative and others discarded, as if there was a fog lying between us and the original authors.

In this post-Gutenberg age, we take it for granted that all copies of a book are identical, at least if they're for the same edition. However, well over half the history of the Bible came before the printing press, when copying was far from a faithful process. The early Christian church respected the written word very highly, but was short on literate followers. The earliest copyists were literate, but not professionally trained for the task, at least until Constantine gave Christianity the official stamp of the Roman Empire. Copying a text at that time was very difficult. Not only did it have to be done by hand, but as ancient Greek texts were written, mistakes were easy to make. There was no punctuation, nor even white space to distinguish between words.

We don't have to merely speculate that such copying errors occurred. We know for a fact that they happened simply because we have extant copies of the same book that vary in their text. There are literally tens of thousands of variations among the texts we have, and surely many others have been lost over the ages. Some vary only by a word or two, but others differ in entire verses or even chapters. And because doctrine can be sensitive to the particular way texts are worded, even a single-word change can be highly significant. The idea of a standardized edition of the Bible is one that could only become realistic after the invention of the printing press.

Even with the printing press and the advent of reliable copying processes, there are plenty of reasons to question the texts that have come down to our day. First, they depend on selecting among past texts, which themselves may be questionable. This goes beyond the question of picking out which books are canonical; it is really about how to pick which versions of books are the canonical ones. This is on top of the independent issue of translation. This pair of problems came together in the creation of the King James Bible. It was based on Greek texts. In theory, this could avoid problems that had been introduced by their translation to Latin, but these texts themselves had to be selected. The translators of the King James Bible used the first published Greek Bible. However, this edition had been rushed to the printing press in order to be the first edition published. This meant that some of the texts were not as carefully selected as they might have been. They came from relatively late medieval sources, and where there were gaps in the manuscripts at hand, the "Greek" passages were simply translated back from the Latin editions available at the time. This Greek edition became very influential because it was the first to be published, but it was not necessarily the best. Hence the King James Bible, still by many Protestants considered the authoritative Bible, had to face not only problems of translating Greek to English, but problems with the original manuscripts it was based on.

As Ehrman points out, there are problems on the opposite end of the historical scale too. The idea of finding an "original" text may be a complete red herring, for there may be nothing that could be considered an original text in the first place. Some of Paul's epistles were probably distributed to multiple churches in a region. Hence upon their original writing, there were already multiple copies extant. Errors may have already crept into these copies. Furthermore, Paul probably didn't write the letters in his own hand, but dictated them to a scribe. It's quite possible that none of the letters sent actually replicated Paul's original words; and it is of course impossible to determine. In considering the very idea of an "original" text for the Bible, it's important to remember that the process of writing at the time was nothing like it is today. The very idea of a word-for-word transcription did not exist.

These are all theoretical considerations, so Ehrman gives practical examples to illustrate his point, some of which are very surprising. For instance in some manuscripts, the description of Jesus' words at the Last Supper differs. Sometimes Jesus says simply, "This is my body", without the further elaboration, "which has been given for you; do this in remembrance of me". The latter words are so familiar to Christians that it's hard to imagine them not being there. However, Ehrman contents that they must have been added to the more expansive texts, rather than removed from the more restricted ones. First, it would be much odder for a copyist to omit them if they were there than to add them if they weren't. It would be very hard to strip out the words of such a famous formula, as demonstrated by our own discomfort with the verse with the text missing. Second, the words themselves introduce a concept foreign to the rest of the Gospel of Luke, that Jesus' blood was shed for us. Though this idea is an essential element of modern Christian theology, it was not present in Luke's Gospel apart from this verse. In fact, Luke even altered other verses from his own source (Mark) to remove this very idea. Hence Ehrman claims that some later author must have added this part of the communion formula to bring Luke in line with other Gospels.

Another example is the "let he who has no sin cast the first stone" story. In it, Jesus stops prevents a woman from being stoned for her transgressions by shaming her accusers with the above statement. It may be one of the most famous stories about Jesus, but it is almost certainly not in any of the original Gospels. The earliest manuscripts lack it entirely, and the style in which it is written is very different from the rest of the Gospel of John in which it appears. It is a later addition, perhaps inserted by scribes from an independent oral tradition.

Other changes are not as drastic, but perhaps equally important. Ehrman describes a class of changes in which subtle changes of wording serve to diminish the importance of women in the scriptures. For instance, in older manuscripts of Acts, the sentence "And some of them [new converts to Christianity] 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" appears. Later this becomes "...along with a large number of wives of prominent men". Suddenly it is not the women themselves who are prominent; instead they are only important because of the status of their husbands. Similarly, a husband and wife who were companions to Paul were sometimes in older manuscripts referred to as "Priscilla and Aquila", with the woman's name first. Later manuscripts always took care to mention the husband first. Such subtle changes removed obstacles from the church maintaining that men were more important than women. These are minor changes, but they can serve to change the way that either supports one point of view or undercuts another.

What does this all mean? I think there are several lessons to be taken from all this, for Christians and non-Christians alike. To me personally, the biggest shock of the book was the inauthenticity of "he who has no sin" story. It's a tale that encapsulated what I imagine Jesus to have been all about; a warning against self-righteousness. As a liberal, I like to read Christ as a kind of proto-liberal, but this view may not be as well supported by the facts as I thought. I'm sure this will not be the only surprise to many. The words of the communion are deeply ingrained in Christian ritual that it's hard to imagine being without them, without even considering what theological changes they may have entailed. I suspect that if we consider the original words of the New Testament, everybody will be discomfited in some way or another. The changes are too pervasive for it to be otherwise.

My suspicion is borne out by history. When a compendium of variations of Greek New Testament texts was released in the early 18th century, it already listed 30,000 textual variations, a vast number for a supposedly inerrant book (today we know of many more). At the time, Protestants felt particularly threatened, as they believed that Scripture contained all that was necessary for salvation. The Catholic church, which held that Church tradition was important as well, felt less pressure. However this may be an illusion. It's far from clear that any distinctly Catholic traditions would stand up to the same kind of scrutiny that the texts have received. And Catholics certainly still stake a great deal of doctrine on New Testament texts. It's not as though they would claim that Jesus didn't say "...given for you..." at the Last Supper.

I think that the biggest lesson to be learned from all this is that it's best not to develop a detailed theology based on the specific words of any edition of the Bible. They have been through too much history--copy errors, deliberate redactions, selection of canonical texts, translations--to derive precise, detailed meanings into. Instead, the Bible should be read for overall themes and thrust, which are far likelier to be preserved through history than the specific words.

There's one other lesson I take from Ehrman's study, one which he does not draw himself. At times, scribes have made changes to the New Testament deliberately, inserting meanings not originally there. These could have been done for the best of intentions--to clarify theology, resolve contradictions, or promote morality they thought the text didn't sufficiently make clear. Were such changes to be attempted today, they would be strongly resisted, as has in fact happened when more gender-neutral translations have been proposed. But if the Bible we accept today is the result of changes to the original texts, on what basis can we oppose further changes? The Bible we have today is the result of an evolutionary process having been frozen at an arbitrary point in time, allowing it to go no further. But if the Bible had evolved in the past, why prevent such development in the future? As the scribes who altered the Bible in the past did so in light of the best moral understanding of their time, why can we not be permitted to do the same? Seen in this light, the original words of the Bible, which are lost to history anyway, are no longer of paramount importance. Instead, the Bible is a reflection of human understanding of God's plan, an understanding that can change and improve over time. Rather than resisting such improvement, we should embrace it, as past changes have been embraced. The basis of faith should not be the text, but the message.

Whether Christians would be willing to go so far, Ehrman's book is a valuable resource. It reveals the tip of the vast iceberg of the Bible's history. Sadly, only a few scholars are aware of even the smallest part of this history, but anybody can deepen their understanding of the Bible by learning about it. Erhman's deeply investigated examples and strong reasoning provide an appropriate antidote both to dogmatic, literalist fundamentalism and populist conspiracy theory.