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Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

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It takes no small amount of courage to shed a faith, even more to do it publicly. Bart Ehrman depicts his conversion to evangelical Christianity, with its insistence on Biblical literalism. He goes on to explain how studying the Gospel writings led to questioning the wealth of inconsistencies they contain. From there, he realised that by following what others insisted was "Truth", he had avoided what was indeed true. The stories of Jesus simply failed to present what had actually occurred in Palestine in those years. Putting faith in what the Gospels related was misplaced effort. From his studies, he recognised that there are no "original" texts. What had come down to him and others was the work of imperfect or purposely misleading copyists. How this scenario developed is the theme and purpose of this work.

The earliest "gospels" are Paul's letters to various congregations. After establishing many of these groups, he became aware of differences in outlook and practices among them. Many letters must have been exchanged, Ehrman suggests, between individuals and groups. These missives would be copied by those literate enough for the task. It was difficult to understand what the text was imparting since the letters ran together without word spaces or punctuation. With the early texts penned in Greek, many words were easily misconstrued or even changed, some in innocent error, some with a purpose in mind. As the centuries passed, even the role of Jesus was defined in various ways. Those followers who came to be known as "gnostics" [a term Ehrman views with some suspicion], questioned the divinity of the man they venerated. How could a deity be crucified? The opposing camps produced reams of text to support their arguments and oppose that of others. The Christian canon was a long time in development, and when one was finally chosen as "orthodoxy" it was enforced by imperial fiat. Orthodoxy became a legal matter.

The predominance of Roman authority in Western Europe led to the Latin Vulgate bible issued in the Fourth Century C.E. Not for another millennium did a Greek text emerge. It was produced by the Dutch monk, Desiderius Erasmus in the midst of the Protestant Reformation. It lasted for nearly three centuries. More importantly, it was the foundation for the widely used "King James Version" produced in English a century later. Erasmus, in his haste to provide a Greek text, used a "mere handful of medieval manuscripts" which were woefully inadequate as reliable "originals". The copying techiques that had been used were hardly unblemished. The "Greek Bible" thus rested on highly questionable authenticity.

Among the problems raised by Erasmus' version of the Jesus story is that of the "Johannine Comma". This passage is the sole reference in the Vulgate that defines the triune nature of the deity, Jesus and the resurrected "spirit". This definition is missing in the available Greek texts and the nature of the "Trinity" must be derived from a multitude of various passages put out by a spectrum of authors. Since Erasmus didn't include the Johannine Comma text, there was outrage expressed by the theologians of his day. If the concept of the "Trinity" is without foundation, a mainstay of Christian orthodoxy thus collapses. It took another century for biblical scholars to examine and compare the available Greek texts. The result, particularly a study by a John Mill, who spent three decades at the task, to compile a list of thirty thousand variations in the writings. The ensuing scandal exceeded even that of Erasmus' day. With so many errors, how could the texts be "divinely" inspired?

According to Ehrman, most of the errors were simply innocent mistakes. Nodding scribes in monasteries, skipping a passage or reading one twice, poor penmanship leading to "wrong" words and just plain ignorance was often responsible. More serious were those changes imposed by copyists to "correct" a passage. The meaning was incorrect or a citation listed in order to make a point. One significant insertion referred to Jesus' genealogy as coming directly from Abraham. Another is the variations in the portrayal of Joseph, Mary's husband. Or "betrothed" as some scribes depicted him. The difference hinged on whether Joseph was Jesus' biological father, which impacted the concept of "virgin" birth.

Ehrman goes on to describe the rise of the "Higher Criticism" in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Calling this text analysis movement "The Quest for Origins", he describes the work of such scholars as Richard Simon, Richard Bentley, Johann Bengel, Johann Wettstein and others. Each was a serious analyst, bent on devising new analytical techniques. As these methods were successively applied, yet more revelations emerged. Inevitably, some of these were theological, with fresh characterisations of Jesus resulting. Certain texts depicted him as either angry or compassionate in a given circumstance. Others portrayed him in conflicting views of his confronting his end. Some of these depictions again raised the issue of what kind of being Jesus was. In an aside, Ehrman considers how the "gospels" changed the view of Christian society toward its own women and that regarding the Jews. Ehrman notes the irony of Jesus being born and living as a Jew, yet whose life and supposed sayings were tranformed into one of the most Jew-repressing forces in history. It was a simple matter, Ehrman shows, to change texts to present an anti-Jewish orthodoxy.

Ehrman's book, which is derived from an earlier and larger text, is one of the first to delineate the issue of modifying sacred texts. His style is light and conversational. It must be a delight to attend his lectures. Since he documents his sources and explains the changes in the text as far as he can follow them, the book is a valuable resource. That there are those who will condemn him for raising these issues is undeniable. Yet, so is the case he presents. It's a book well worth reading - perhaps more than once. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

This is the first book of Ehrman's I have read. I found it interesting and well-written for the average person who has little background in Biblical Textual Studies, (which equates to more than 99% of the population.)

I do not have the credentials of Dr. Ehrman, but I do have the equivalent of a degree in Biblical Literature and have worked in the original languages. My Senior Thesis was doing a textual comparison of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas discovered at Nag Hammadi with the parallel passages of the Kingdom Parables of Matthew 13. To do that I had to teach myself some Coptic Egyptian and do some translating to form a basis for comparison.

All that said to establish that I have some background to make an evaluation of what is being said in this book.

I also have some common ground with Dr. Ehrman in life history. I too was trained as an evangelical with a very high view of inspiration and further had to struggle as I became aware of how difficult it is to interact with the text in its manuscript and historical form all while becoming painfully aware of the fact that any view of inspiration must tacitly admit that it is a hypothetical basis of faith because as Ehrman states clearly:

1. If the original manuscripts are inspired, we don't have them.

2. What we do have, while overall reliable and fairly easily examined for error, still leaves some serious questions of textual manipulation by scribes that makes several key passages difficult to stand upon for important doctrines.

This is, in fact, not as great a secret as Ehrman seems to imply throughout his book. There are a great number of books from all backgrounds and degrees of belief that acknowledge these types of issues. Granted, they tend to be more of an academic nature than what Ehrman has attempted to do here. But they are there nonetheless and have been for centuries.

Jefferson's Bible was an early example (though not necessarily intended for distribution at the time) of how people wrestled with this issue. The means of wrestling with them have improved with additional manuscripts discovered (i.e. the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi to name the better known ones.) Scholarship has improved to where I believe it is safe to say that what we know in this realm today has improved our confidence in most areas of the text.

In fact, the newer translations themselves (The NIV, the NASB etc.), actually have margin notes and some variant readings noted very clearly in just the areas that Ehrman focuses on within his book. That hardly equates to a "cover-up."

In view of this, I think Ehrman somewhat oversteps his points in favor of salesmanship to try and press home his own doubts that have arisen in his personal journey. Most Christians have many tools, books, websites, and Bibles themselves to be introduced to these types of issues (IF they want to be.) This is an issue well within the grasp of the average layman if they should be interested in pursuing it.

There are many conservative scholars with equally distinguished academic backgrounds that match Ehrman's and yet still maintain a higher view of Scripture than he appears to have adopted. I accept that his views are well informed and sincere. I do not accept his conclusion that inspiration of the original text requires equally divine preservation. However, in recognizing that I accept that the onus is on those of my persuasion to provide solid scholarship to demonstrate our case. I believe that is being provided. I would encourage any reading this book to listen to what Ehrman has to say and do some research on what others of a more conservative approach and respect for Scripture have to say as well. In this regard, even Bruce Metzger, Ehrman's mentor to whom he dedicates the book has a somewhat more conservative view and conclusion based on the same criteria.

The primary and most valuable point that I think Ehrman makes in this work, is that there are many Christians in denial either through ignorance or worse, perhaps an unwillingness to face these issues for fear of upsetting their internal house of cards and being forced to admit that there are unanswered questions and room for some intellectual honesty and humility in facing difficult issues related to the Bible.

There are many Christians, unfortunately who prefer denial to honest appraisal. Ehrman very rightly confronts this with his material.

As an evangelical who has retained and maintained his faith in this journey, I haven't found it necessary to resort to denial. There are satisfactory answers to be found. It does, however, require a willingness to adopt some humility and to honestly rethink and modify positions when the facts call for it. That is not a bad thing. In fact, I think it's a good thing and results in a deeper, more understanding, more relevent and intellectually honest faith that can move and interact within our society and culture without apology. I don't believe God intends for his people to be mental midgets or follow their faith mindlessly.

That having been said, I didn't find the text offensive or threatening for that matter. I think he does a good job of raising the points on the major issues without overly sensationalizing them beyond what I have qualified above. His facts are reasonably sound and accurate, even if they are somewhat selective. His conclusions in places seem to be somewhat hastily arrived at, but I'm willing to give him some latitude due to his goal of making this easily grasped by the average person with no formal training.

Worth the read. Hopefully any reading this as an introduction to the field will not stop here but go on to explore and learn more. Metzger is good, Gordon Fee is good. FF Bruce also has some good material, but there are many others if you want to enter the field more deeply and see some differing persepctives.

Evangelicals, (such as myself) need to read and interact with these types of books and enter the field as participants in the debate rather than naysayers throwing verbal salvos from behind our walls of faith, security and (unfortunately at times) ignorance.

Read it and be introduced into an important field of knowledge.

Ehrman believes the history of our great stories matters. And his exploration of the New Testament's evolution is an enormous accomplishment. This is a work building on hundreds of years of research, for example, Stephanus's 1550 translation with marginal notes identifying variations between 14 different ancient Greek manuscripts. Or John Mill's 1707 comparison of over 100 Greek manuscripts to show 30,000 points of difference. And Ehrman's data base includes over 5,700 manuscripts in Greek alone, which yield a total of between 200,000 to 400,000 varients among them.

While comparing manuscripts, Ehrman gives us a parallel history of arguments and riposts among scholarly egos, making this a fascinating human story. We have, for example, the French Catholic scholar Richard Simon who in 1689 produced "A Critical History of the Text of the New Testament", giving a partisan blast at Protestant rejection of Church tradition in favor of reliance on scripture alone:

"The great changes that have taken place in the manuscripts of the Bible ... since the first originals were lost, completely destroy the principle of the Protestants ..., who consult only these same manuscripts of the Bible in the form they are today. If the truth of religion had not lived on in the Church, it would not be safe to look for it now in books that have been subjected to so many changes and that in so many matters were dependent on the will of the copyists."

Do all these differences among ancient hand-copied versions of the Bible make any difference? Ehrman shows thay do at many important points -- concerning Jesus, women, Jews, leadership, and more. And that's the really good part. I think this book is a big step forward in separating wheat from chaff in the scriptures.

--author of Correcting Jesus

This book is a very readable and lively introduction to the biblical study of textual-criticism. It shows the importance of the work of these scholarly text-men, and the impact that it has upon the making of modern english versions. It also shows how textual-criticism is often necessary to a proper interpretation and understanding of entire NT books, as well as the specific verses therein. The book is not flawless, to be sure; but the few errors it has are generally of a minor nature. For example, at one point he says something about the sources that the author of John's gospel used; including imaginary documents that recall the offensive spectre of the so-called Q-document.
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Even so, this book is a marvelous introduction to the art/science of textual criticism; the goal of which is to bring us to a better understanding of what the earliest texts actually said (ie. before all the various changes crept in). There are plently of examples to illustrate how and why the texts were changed over time, and these are all both fascinating and informative. This book is also an excellent antidote for those inclined toward bibliolatry (ie. via doctrines of inerrancy and verbal inspiration). But my favorite part of the book is the opening paragraph of the last chapter where professor Ehrman speaks about what it means to be a text-man:
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"In many ways, being a textual critic is like doing detective work. There is a puzzle to be solved and evidence to be uncovered. The evidence is often ambiguous, capable of being interpreted in various ways, and a case has to be made for one solution of the problem over another" (p.207). Herein lies the glory - and the frustration - of textual criticism; for the "iron-clad proof" that most people (irrationally) demand is beyond the reach of the text-men (ie. owing to the sad fact that the original autographs of the NT-documents are simply not available to us). ~ textman ;>

Bart Ehrman has written what many believe to be a thought-provoking analysis of the formation of The New Testament. I concur with this opinion, it is indeed intriguing.

The over-riding assumption according to Christian fundamentalist is that The New Testament is inerrant. And, in this state of perfection, there's a unified story amongst the authors on what appears to have happened in 1st century Palestine, the correction of Jewish philosophy and the way to eternal salvation.

These precepts have always been contested, by Jewish scholars, by Christian academics and, as Dr. Ehrman points out, by agnostics, atheists and polytheists of those eras. This book is an attempt to examine the environment in which the later writers (i.e., the scribes) who inherited these oftentimes contradictory stories.

I came to know of this book by way of PBS' The Diane Rhems Show. In that lively hour, Dr. Ehrman discussed his fundamentalist upbringing through his academic disillusionment years. There were many things discussed during that show that is not in the book.

The book spends a disproportionately long time discussing how the traditions were adapted by intentional "corrections", accidental, interpretive or just missing material.

Only sparsely does Mr. Ehrman actually deal with etymology. But, when he does it reveals much. I was also impressed with his addressing certain assumptions that the early Christian community was disproportionately discriminated against by the so-called unbelievers and the Roman community.

The book is very interesting and I recommend it only to those who've read other books that deal specifically with historicity.

Professor Ehrman has done the world a great service in bringing between the covers of a single book many of the problems and controversies that have plagued Christianity from the very beginning. At the heart of these debates are the sacred texts themselves. How reliable are they? Or, to put the question another way, how accurately do they reflect what their original authors actually wrote? What deliberate "corrections" and simple mistakes have been made throughout the centuries? Of course, many Fundamentalists will reply that these are of no concern in 2009, because all such errors were rectified back in 1611 by the translators of the King James Bible. Unfortunately, as Ehrman points out, rather than heralding a new beginning, the King James Version is riddled with even more errors than its predecessors, mostly as a result of "correcting" previous translations against a corrupt Greek Text hastily prepared by Erasmus from a group of inferior medieval manuscripts. A fresh beginning can only be made by scholars, such as J.B. Phillips and Garry Wills, who utilize the fine Greek text (complete with an overwhelming number of manuscript variations) published by the United Bible Societies in 1966. I have used this text myself, as well as the traditional Eberhard Nestle text (re-edited by a group of scholars in 1958), as the basis for my own reconstructions of the original Gospel of Mark in More Bible Wisdom for Modern Times: Selections from the Early New Testament and the original Gospel of John in Essential Bible Wisdom: Good News by John, the Beloved Disciple, and John, the Elder.

Like Ehrman I've passed through many different phases of my spirituality. As a one time fundamentalist born again Christian I've been for many years both vaguely aware of and acutely scared to learn what academia had in to say about the scriptures. Traditional concepts of biblical inerrancy are, given the sound reasoning presented by Ehrman, simply not tenable. The great thing about this book is that it introduce the basic arguments and methods used to debunk inerrancy with care and respect. Ehrman's mission is not to destroy yours or anyone's faith... instead it is to provides the tools that allow you to better understand the nature of the document(s) on which your faith is founded.

The truth will set you free.

Thanks for writing this book Bart!

I'm not a Christian. Additionally, even as I do not believe in organized religion ('I'm not a joiner' combined with 'I wouldn't want to be a member of any organization that would have me as a member.'), I respect the Christian's right to believe what they're compelled to believe. Having said this, I do not respect the Christian's right to believe that theirs is the one Truth, the only Truth, that their Bible is beyond questioning, yadda, yadda, yadda. To me, this has always indicated a supreme arrogance...which of course has always been supported by the notion that The Bible is God's word, and everything in it is precisely as it was issued so very long ago, by Him.

This book confirmed what I had always suspected about the presumed 'infallibility' of the Bible. Not in its the meanings, not regarding the source, but rather regarding the notion that over the course of two thousand years, nothing had been changed. No matter the shifting of political agendas, no matter the changing of the times, no matter the various languages involved...no matter the method of transmission. 'God made it so, it is as He willed it to be.' Or, 'It's true because I say it's true.' Riiiiiight.

'Misquoting Jesus' also pulled back the curtain just a bit on other aspects of the question 'How much of what we perceive about Christianity is in fact representative of what had been intended, way back when it first unfolded?' And for these revelations, I'm grateful to the author. In fact, for me, the most powerful chapters were the final two, where he provides some wonderful context that goes beyond the presentation of his argument regarding Biblical changes. The final chapter, 'Conclusion: Changing Scripture' has some wonderful analogies, reasonable suggestions from a reasonable mind as to how we need to contextualize changes in any text's transmission, how just about anything that's observed, experienced or processed is apt to be 'modified' by the participant. In fact, it contains a section that's so perfectly salient that it should be required reading for anyone using the Web.

I'm also grateful for Mr. Ehrman's honesty, his candor regarding his own personal journey regarding his Christianity. It's refreshing when someone can express such candor, especially a scholar, but in his case, when he had been so devout for so very long, I was probably more moved by his story than by anything else in the book.

I'd recommend 'Misquoting Jesus' to anyone with a curiosity about Christianity's profile, anyone who's wondered about the credibility of its transmission, anyone who appreciates logical examination being applied where it deserves to be applied.

Personal rating: 8.5/10

This book is a fascinating study in how the Bible came into existence and how its contents can be evaluated. It should be required reading to liberate those who have been indoctrinated by the bibliolatry existing in the majority of so-called Bible-believing fundamentalist organizations. A commandment supposedly upheld by all Christians is to not tell a lie. Why then do so many of them lie by omission and commission when it comes to Biblical veracity? It is academically and ethically dishonest in the extreme to purport that this collection of old manuscripts is the complete inerrant divine truth dictated by God even for our time.

I am a firm believer in the ultimate universal reality, historically called God by our western culture. I also believe in the inner Christ which, as well as can be determined, was exemplified by the life of Jesus/Jeshua. These three words: God, Christ and Jesus have myriads of meanings and associations. Mankind has been bombarded by "those who know God's truth" for five millennia. Only in recent time have we become unshackled from some of the fears and falsehoods. Today we can, if we have the will and courage, investigate to find our own truth about divine (supernatural as well as natural) concepts. Our loyalty needs only to be to our eternal Higher Self. How wonderful is that?!

Ehrman is one of our time's most eminent scholars in the field of theology and eschatology. He seems to come without the baggage of hypocritical loyalties which induce so many authors to present evidences to fit a predetermined conclusion. (I highly recommend his religion courses available from The Teaching Company.) This book is very readable by anyone of average intelligence and education. It may provide challenges for people of fixed faith but these need not lead to disbelief and despair. God and Christ are larger than what can be contained in a book, including the Bible. The truth can make us free if we open heart, mind and spirit to revelations and inspiration whatever their source. To succeed it does require discipline and discernment. But never accept that all the answers have been found. Truth can seem ephemeral but it is always within reach and continually expanding.

Most everyone who composed scripture, transcribed it, interpreted it and lived by its message was earnest in his or her devotion to what they believed to be the will of God. But a few others used power and influence driven by selfish motives to corrupt the higher purpose. In this book Ehrman gives us the opportunity to examine the historical authenticity of the Bible and to ask ourselves what was and is the divine intention.