A young man in a Midwestern community, was, many decades ago “born again” into a faith that took the Bible very, very seriously. To them, each and every word in the Bible was inerrant. They were inspired by God and those who followed Christ were to take those words into their heart. They were to study them, live them, and take them seriously. So this young man, Bart Ehrman, devoted his life to the study of the Bible. He learned Greek and a smattering of Hebrew. And as he studied more and more, he learned that the words of the Bible he had been taught were inerrant were, well, full of errors.

Thus begins the story of Misquoting Jesus, where Bart Ehrman takes us on a fascinating journey through what we know about the New Testament, and the errors, deletions, changes, and inventions of scribes along the 1500 years before the invention of the printing press.

Anyone who’s studied the Bible at length know that there are differences between texts and translations. Most Bibles that I’m familiar with are footnoted, and oftentimes those footnotes note errors, discrepancies, etc. Most people are, by now, I’m sure aware that there are thousands of ancient manuscripts with versions of the New Testament as we know it today.

In that sense, then, Misquoting Jesus doesn’t teach too much that’s new. What Ehrman’s book does provide, though, is a nonspecialist look at the tools that scholars use to compare variant texts. In the process, Ehrman walks through some of the different kinds of errors that have crept up in the New Testament, in the process showing off a few things I didn’t know before.

Not Exactly A Literate Class

One thing that Ehrman revealed to me is that I had an appalling lack of knowledge about the state of literacy in the Roman Empire. It was abysmal, even among the upper classes. And even professional scribes weren’t literate in the sense we mean today. For example, early on Ehrman notes stories about professional scribes whose skills were limited to their ability to write–that is, they could copy texts, but they couldn’t read them. As you might imagine, this made for some problems with the text. Especially when you consider that, at the time, texts were often prepared with no spacing or punctuation.
Imagineentirepagesandpageswrittenjustlikethiswithoutanywaytodetermineexactplace
mentsofspellingorpunctuationnowimaginethatyoucannotreadthatmightmakeitdifficultoc
opyexactlyhuhitsprettyimpressivethattheymanagedtocopystuffcorrectlyatallconsiderin
gthattheycouldntactuallyread.

And it gets more interesting. For the first few centuries of Christianity, texts were generally copied by educated Christians. Not professional scribes. As Ehrman notes about literacy in this period:

[H]ow many people could actually read texts and make sense of what they said? It is impossible to come up with an exact figure, but it appears that the percentage would not be very high. There are reasons for thinking that within the Christian communities, the numbers would have been even lower than in the population at large. This is because it appears that Christians, especially early on in the movement, came for the most part from the lower, uneducated classes. There were always exceptions, of course, like the apostle Paul and other authors whose works made it into the New Testament and who were obviously skilled writers; but for the most part, Christians came from the ranks of the illiterate.

Naturally, this led to lots of different types of errors and mixups during the copying process. Indeed, as Ehrman points out later, the apostle Paul appears to have dictated most of his letters–and there’s no way to verify that his scribe dictated Paul exactly!

Against Heresies

Of more interest than mere copying errors, though, are errors that are made to make particular theological points. One interesting example comes from the fact that the Gospel of Mark portrays a very different Jesus than that seen in Matthew or Luke. For example, Mark’s Jesus has a marked tendency to get angry or frustrated. By contrast, Matthew and Luke are more in keeping with our more modern idea of Jesus as generally placid and compassionate. Accordingly, scholars can point to portions of Luke and Matthew that were copied from Mark–except that certain words were changed to make Jesus look a little less mad.

More saliently, Ehrman notes other portions of the Bible that appeared to have been subtly altered in order to combat specific heresies. Particularly, alterations were made in order to counter heresies that contended that Jesus was part of a trinity and was, in fact, the Son of God. Here’s one example:

A similar phenomenon happens a few verses later in the account of Jesus as a twelve-year-old in the Temple. The story line is familiar: Joseph, Mary, and Jesus attend a festival in Jerusalem, but then when the rest of the family heads home in the caravan, Jesus remains behind, unbeknowst to them. As the text says, “his parents did not know about it.” But why does the text speak of his parents when Joseph is not really his father? A number of textual witnesses [later texts - Ed.] “correct” the problem by having the text read, “Joseph and his mother did not know it.”

It’s significant to note that both the King James version and the New King James version of the Bible both repeat this alteration in the text. This is significant because these translations are probably the most widely used among American evangelicals. They are also, as Ehrman notes, based on some very bad Greek texts due to the paucity of available Greek manuscripts at the time.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line of Misquoting Jesus is that it’s a well-written, easy to read look at some of the very exciting scholarship going on in the field of Early Christianity. Not just what we know, but also the problems and the pitfalls in getting there. It also illustrates the quite simple truth that, regardless of the status of the founder of Christianity, those who drafted and copied its texts were very much human.