Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrmann
San Francisco, HarperCollins, 2005
Reviewed by Roy Johnson
royj(AT)webster.edu (to email, replace the (AT) with @)
It is important to look at the author’s background in reviewing any book. And in this case, Ehrmann devotes considerable space in the first part o his book to his own background.
Ehrman was raised in an Episcopal family, churchgoing, but not particularly religious. The Bible was only one of the guides to faith, along with church tradition and common sense. However, he felt something missing, that something was wrong with him. As an adult looking back, he now thinks it was just typical teenage angst.
He met a charismatic young “born again”
Christian leader and became convinced his problem was that he did not have
Christ in his heart. He experienced a “born again” conversion. He says
“Those of us who had these born-again experiences considered themselves to
be “real” Christians, as opposed to those who simply went to church.”
He decided to attend the Moody Bible Institute—the most fundamentalist school in existence. No drinking, no dancing, no card playing, no movies, lots of Bible. The Bible was considered to be the inerrant word, of God; no mistakes. BUT—and this was a biggie to him as he progressed in his thinking--we don’t actually have the original New Testament writings, only copies of copies of copies, and the copies may contain errors. Only the originals are the inerrant word of God. Most Moody students did not seem disturbed by that but he was.
This led him to major in textual criticism (exegesis), the science of determining as closely as possible the original text of the books of the Bible. Part of this is the search for older sources, but much can be done by cross-comparing the earliest texts. This required learning Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and maybe some modern European languages to see what other writers said. He eagerly undertook this study; he wanted to be an evangelical “voice” in secular settings by acquiring degrees that would allow him to teach in secular settings usually dominated by liberals or by the non-religious.
He decided next to attend Wheaton, Billy Graham’s alma mater; one of the top evangelical schools. The people at Moody considered Wheaton too liberal; he would find “no ‘Real Christians’ there”.
He learned Greek and found it troubling; he came to feel that the full meaning of the Gospels cannot be grasped without reading it in Greek. Translations are someone’s opinion; most seemed to him to be clumsy.
He began to wonder: What good is literal
inspiration if most people will never be able to read the originals? In his
words: “how does it help to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God
if we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired (or can’t read them
even if we do)? He graduated at Wheaton in two years and
decided to move on.
His next choice was Princeton, a Presbyterian university. He chose Princeton because the world’s leading expert in textual criticism, Bruce Metzgar was there. At Wheaton, he was warned that he would not find many “real Christians” there.
At Princeton, he began to doubt more. He wrote a term paper on a passage in Mark where Jesus talks about what King David did on the Sabbath “when Abiathar was high priest.” But the Book of Samuel says that Abiathar’s father was high priest. He developed a complex argument that Abiathar was one of the priests; he used the Greek to try to show that it was not a contradiction. He now say is was “a very convoluted argument.”
His mentor, Metzger, wrote only a one line “Maybe Mark made a mistake.” The floodgates opened. He began to note other contradictions.
· Mark says Mark 14: 12 and 15:25 says Jesus died the day after the Passover meal; John 19:14 says the day before
· Luke says Joseph and Mary returned to Nazareth just over a month after they had come to Bethlehem; Matthew says they fled to Egypt.
· Paul says that after he converted on the road to Damascus he did not go immediately to Jerusalem (Galatians); Acts says that is the first thing he did.
So—we don’t have the originals; we don’t have copies, we don’t even have copies of copies of copies. In the extant manuscripts, there are more differences than there are words in the New Testament. His conclusion: if God miraculously inspired the words in the first place, it would be no harder for Him to miraculously preserve them. “The Bible began to appear to me as a very human book. Humans copied it and changed it; therefore humans—not God—wrote the first versions as well. All of the authors are trying to understand the world and their place in it, and all of them have valuable things to teach us. But that doesn’t rule out exegesis. We need to better understand what they had to say if we are to understand those valuable things. There are scarcely any books written about exegesis for lay audiences. So he decided to write one.
The Beginning of Christian scripture
An unusual feature of Judao-Christianity is that they are “people of the book” Other religions of the day were polytheistic. They had no scriptures, not much doctrine, ethics and morals often played no part, just sacrifice to the gods and hope that will persuade them to be good to you.
Only a tiny minority could read, so these would read orally to the rest. But a huge amount of written material was being produced, disseminated, and read, unlike anything the pagan Roman world had ever seen. When Paul wrote, the “scriptures” were the Jewish Bible; little by little other writings (including Paul’s) came to be accepted as having equal authority. Varieties of Christianity arose and sometimes copyists would change texts to say what they “really” meant. It was second half of the 4th century (the 300s) before the 27 books of the current New Testament were accepted. They were still debated for a few hundred more years.
Early copyists
For 200 years copyists were amateurs. There is a huge difference in texts produced in these years. They did not separate letters or use any marks of punctuation. Consider for example if you were presented with the following.
· Godisnowhere
· Lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable
Is God now here or is God nowhere? Was there abundance on the table or did the writer see a bun dance on the table (perhaps after a few glasses of wine)? So how would later copyists know how to separate the words?
The earliest manuscripts that we have are not very early—an example—the earliest text of Galatians is a FRAGMENTARY copy 150 years after Paul wrote it. But even in these early centuries, scribes in Alexandria, an intellectual center, were the most scrupulous and that is where some of the earlier manuscripts have been found most recently.
Here are some of the examples of changes:
John 7:53-8:12 The woman taken in adultery. This story is not found in the oldest manuscripts. It apparently was added during the middle ages. There are other problems with the story: Where is the man? Law of Moses said both should be stoned. Copyists moved the story around, some putting it in different places in John; one manuscript puts it in Luke. It is in a different writing style and vocabulary from the rest of John and includes words and phrases not found in the rest of John. Most scholars believe it was a well known story circulating by word of mouth.
Last 12 verses of Mark are not found in the original gospels. Check them out. They seem very different, perhaps contradictory, to what comes before.
Examples of other problems: Did Paul dictate word for word or, as was sometimes done, lay out the ideas and let the scribe provide the words? In many books it appears by style and content things were tacked on later. Example: “In the beginning was the Word…” The vocabulary and style are different from the rest of John, and nowhere else in this book or any other is Christ called the “Word”.
But there remains a problem even if we get back to the earliest copies: Because the earliest copying was done by amateurs, the earliest copies that we have are thus the ones which differ most from each other and are more likely to contain copying errors.
Texts of the New Testament
Beginning of 4th century (300s) the church began to train and use professional copyists (monks).
Latin Vulgate: In 382 AD Pope Damasus commissioned a scholar named Jerome to produce an “official” New Testament in Latin. He tried. He chose one of the best Latin translations and compared it with the best Greek documents he could find. Throughout the Middle Ages this was the official Bible of the Church.
It was not until 1522 that the first version of the Greek New Testament was published, by the scholar Erasmus. A Spanish scholar was working on a version of the New Testament to be published in several languages including Greek A publisher suggested to Erasmus that he publish a Greek version. They wanted to beat the Spanish version to press (Gutenberg invented the Western printing press in 1450; the Chinese had it a couple of thousand years earlier.)
Erasmus used only a handful of not very reliable late medieval copies. When he couldn’t get complete Greek versions, he took the Latin Vulgate and translated it back into Greek. He took out the “Johannine comma” the only passage in the Bible that specifically defines the Trinity because it was not found in the earliest known documents. (John 5 7-8 in the Vulgate: There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three re one, and there are three that bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one. The King James Bible was based mostly on this Greek version.
The beginning of textual criticism
In 1707 John Mill, in a 30 year study, isolated thirty thousand differences among the surviving texts. These were major changes, not just changes like word order. There was a firestorm of reaction from religious conservatives. There was support from 18th century Deists who didn’t much believe the Bible anyway. Catholics also tended to support it as it verified their belief that only the trained Church theologians could interpret the Bible. Today, more than 5700 Greek manuscripts have been discovered and cataloged, and the number of differences is in the hundreds of thousands.
There are certain rules and methods used by scholars to try to determine the most original:
· Because copyists try to simplify things, the more difficult reading is the most likely to be original.
· They use a “family” groupings of manuscripts.. 3 main ones: Byzantine, Alexandrian, Western.
· Numbers of agreeing texts may not be important. Maybe more copies were made of one than the other.
The gospels themselves are in a sense “copies”
· Mark was used as a source for both Matthew and Luke but they present a different view of Jesus.
· Mark speaks many times of Jesus becoming angry. In Matthew and Luke he never becomes angry.
· So each one is presenting a view of Jesus as HE understands Jesus, taking from the original but altering it.
Theological changes
· Earliest manuscripts of Jesus’ baptism say: “You are my beloved son; today I have begotten you.” Implies that Jesus becomes the Christ at this point. Some argue that he was adopted by God rather than born the Son of God. Some time later this was changed to “You are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”
Social changes: Women will like this.
· Women had strong role in early church. They spoke, prayed, and prophesied; Paul mentions several. “In Christ there is no male or female.” Paul even speaks of a woman, Junia, and her husband Andronicus as “Foremost among the apostles”. A later scribe (and some of today’s Bibles) seem to say that this was a man named Junius!
· This however, was not a social revolution; they should still keep their heads covered.
· In 1 Timothy Paul says the opposite; that women should keep silent, and are inferior to men. Scholars believe this was added by a later scribe as it contradicts Paul’s other writings.
Conclusion:
· The Bible is a human document, not literally inspired, but sincerely showing the different interpretations of human beings.
· We all change scripture every time we read it. You and I could read the same verse and interpret it differently. Biblical literalists do not agree on what the Bible literally means. We read it and try to see how it has significance for us—and that significance will differ based on our backgrounds.
Reviewer’s conclusions:
In conclusion, I like to refer to the Hindu story of the seven blind men and the elephant (seven always seems to be a favorite number).
The elephant represents God, or in Hindu belief, the ultimate reality of the Universe, which is beyond our understanding.
One blind man finds the elephant’s tail and says “an elephant is like a rope”. Another finds the elephant’s leg and says “an elephant is like a tree.” A third finds the elephant’s side and says “an elephant is like a wall”; another the ear; another the trunk; another the tusk. They fall into a heated debate about what the elephant is like—and all are correct but all are wrong. This illustrates the Hindu belief that seeming contradictions are partial truths not fully understood.
It is my belief God is beyond anything any of us can possible comprehend. We all have a spiritual sense; we interpret what we sense both individually and in light of our cultures. Our religions are our best attempt to explain God in a way that makes sense to us.
We just have to realize that the elephant (God) has more aspects than we imagine in our blindness and that the “truths” of others may be just as true as our own truths.
Seen in this sense, the Bible can have meaning to us. The Old Testament presents the Jewish religion, which differed from surrounding religions in that the Hebrew God called His people to high ethical standards, certainly even from a purely humanistic view this is an improvement over the capricious Gods of the world of the day.
The Hebrew religion became overly legalistic, but it prepared the way for Jesus to stand Jewish law on its head and emphasize love and the “Golden rule” as the standard rather than slavish following of the law. Regardless of the changes in the Bible, this message still comes through. Even if you are not religious, how much better would the world be if people followed this message of Jesus? The changes in the text of the Bible do not change this central message.
And what about the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery? Does it really matter whether the story was in the original text or not? It is a perfect illustration of the kind of forgiveness that Jesus calls all us to practice. “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” None of the other stories was written down immediately either, but they illustrate the kind of love and forgiveness that the early followers of Jesus believe he preached. That’s what really matters.