Was Your New Testament Copied Correctly? And How Much Does It Matter If It Wasn’t?
A quick look at some key claims in Bart Ehrman’s bestselling book Misquoting Jesus
If you want to dig deeper into the content of this article, I have written three books that address these issues from a variety of perspectives. This article is excerpted from my book Why Should I Trust the Bible?
_____
When you purchase a book today, you can be fairly confident that every copy of that edition of that particular book is identical.
And yet, for most of human history, complete uniformity in different copies of the same scroll or book would have struck readers as strange. That perception didn’t begin to change until the fifteenth century, when a man named Johannes Gutenberg perfected a press that printed books using a new type of type. Each letter that Gutenberg forged for his press was movable and molded from a long-lasting metal alloy. This allowed books to be typeset more quickly and duplicated more uniformly than ever before. Prior to the widespread adoption of Gutenberg’s press, metal-smiths sometimes forged full-page plates to print books, and woodworkers might have carved entire manuscript pages for a printing press—but such plates were inefficient to produce, and they wore out quickly. And so, until the rise of the movable metal-type printing press, most texts continued to be copied by hand.
Whenever a book is copied by hand, different copies of the same book will never be identical—and it’s not simply the style or the spacing of the letters that will vary. Human copying capacities are imperfect because humans are imperfect. What’s more, human beings are quite capable of convincing themselves that they have the capacity to improve the texts that they’re copying. And so, words and phrases inevitably end up changed. That’s why a handmade copy will never be an exact copy.
So what does that mean for the Bible?
Think about it for a moment: For more than a millennium, the words of the Bible were copied by hand in an age that predated eyeglasses and electric lights. If other texts have been modified over generations of copying, doesn’t that mean the Bible has been changed as well? And, if the Bible has been altered over the centuries, how can anyone trust what the Bible has to say, even if the initial editions of each book may have told the truth?
Was Jesus Misquoted?
Few people other than biblical scholars seem to have concerned themselves with these questions prior to the early twenty-first century. All of that began to change around 2005 when a book entitled Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why unexpectedly rushed to the upper reaches of the bestseller lists. After comedian Jon Stewart promoted Misquoting Jesus as “a helluva book,” this treatise about the text of the Bible became a number-one bestseller on Amazon.com—quite a feat for a book that expends most of its pages exploring the rather tedious history of biblical manuscripts. The author of this unexpected blockbuster book was New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman.
Misquoting Jesus takes a less-than-cheery perspective on the reliability of those many generations of hand-copied manuscripts. Here’s how Bart Ehrman describes the condition of the biblical texts in Misquoting Jesus:
We don’t have the originals [of the biblical manuscripts]. ... What we have are copies made later—much later. … These copies differ from one another in so many places that we don’t even know how many differences there are. Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. … We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals. ... If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture? In some places, … we simply cannot be sure that we have reconstructed the text accurately. It’s a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don’t even know what the words are.
According to the cover copy for Misquoting Jesus, “many of our cherished biblical stories and widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself stem from both intentional and accidental alterations by scribes.” Some of the changes that copyists have made are—Ehrman claims—so earth-shaking that they have altered “the interpretation of an entire book” of the Bible.
Despite these rather dire assessments of the biblical text, I must admit that I appreciate most of what Misquoting Jesus has to say. That’s partly because, even though I disagree strongly with Ehrman’s conclusions, he’s helped people to see that this is an issue that can’t be ignored. I also appreciate Misquoting Jesus because I was raised in churches that lied to me about this very topic. According to what I was taught as a teenager, the Bible has been perfectly preserved with no copying variants in a lineage of manuscripts known as the “Textus Receptus,” from which the King James Version of the Bible was translated. These claims that I heard from fundamentalist pulpits were—I learned years later—completely false. The original manuscripts of the Bible decayed into dust centuries ago, and not one ancient manuscript agrees in every detail with any of the others. Misquoting Jesus helps to dispel this flawed perception of perfectly preserved manuscripts.
At the same time, significant problems and exaggerations pop up throughout Misquoting Jesus. The variants that Bart Ehrman describes have had far less effect on the text than his book seems to suggest. The biblical manuscripts weren’t copied with perfect precision, but neither was their message lost in transmission. Despite the presence of multiple textual families and hundreds of thousands of copying variants, the surviving manuscripts adequately—albeit imperfectly—preserve the message of the Old Testament that Jesus trusted and the New Testament that eyewitnesses of his resurrection and their close associates composed. Comparison of biblical texts across the ages reveals that generation after generation of copyists replicated the biblical texts with sufficient accuracy to maintain the same message that was present in the initial manuscripts.
Processes that Produced the Biblical Manuscripts
When it comes to the Old Testament, the historical chronicles of Israel record the early emergence of a scribal clan known as the “Sopherites” (from the Hebrew saphar, “to count”) who oversaw the replication of sacred texts (1 Chronicles 2:55). These scribes and their heirs developed detailed guidelines to preserve the Hebrew and Aramaic Scriptures. Near the end of the fifth century A.D., a group of Jewish scholars known as the “Masoretes” (from the Hebrew masorah, “tradition”) standardized and expanded these guidelines. The Masoretes counted how many words and letters belonged in every book in their Bible, and they even knew which word and what letter should stand at the exact center of every book. Over time, they developed an entire series of marginal markings and vowel points to preserve the ancient readings of the texts that they received.
As far as anyone knows, Christian copyists didn’t count the words or letters in the texts they copied—but they did develop well-ordered practices for preserving their sacred texts. Many early Christian copyists seem to have been trained scribes whose handwriting reflected the style of ordinary documents of their day; the result was a script that is consistent and clear but unadorned. Much like earlier Jewish scribes, Christian copyists included spacing patterns and breathing marks in the texts to assist those who read the Scriptures aloud in weekly worship gatherings. Early fragments of the New Testament also exhibit distinct patterns of abbreviating words such as “God,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” and “Christ” that are unique to Christian texts, suggesting that early Christian copyists noticed and followed certain shared copying practices. Early fragments from Matthew’s Gospel reveal that early readers of the New Testament made corrections when manuscripts had been miscopied. These ancient emendations weren’t always correct, but they do show a capacity and a willingness to compare texts to conserve the best readings. While some copyists may have been loose and fluid in their copying, the primary concern of the women and men who copied the Scriptures seems to have been to preserve the words that they received.
But the most important question for our purposes isn’t whether these copyists intended to preserve the text; it’s whether or not they succeeded. To find out how well the copyists preserved the text, let’s begin by taking a quick trip to a series of limestone cliffs near the northwestern corner of the Dead Sea.
A Flock, a Rock, and a Cave Filled with Scrolls
Until the mid-twentieth century, no one knew for certain whether the text that the Masoretes had preserved was an accurate representation of earlier Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Old Testament. The oldest known copy of the entire Old Testament was a Masoretic manuscript produced more than a thousand years after the initial texts were written.
But then, in 1947, a young shepherd discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, and that changed everything.
Muhammed edh-Dhib had lost his sheep, and he didn’t know where to find them—or at least that’s the story that circulated afterward. According to one version of the local legend, Muhammed tossed a rock into a cave, hoping to hear the bleating of his lost flock when the rock landed. What he heard instead was the shattering of pottery. It’s possible that the sixteen-year-old shepherd was seeking his goats when he ran across the desert cave. It’s also conceivable that he was hunting for tombs that might contain valuable artifacts—no one knows for certain. Regardless of what Muhammed was actually looking for when he located those pottery jars, what he found inside the jars would impact the world long after his flocks were forgotten.
What Muhammed edh-Dhib discovered in the winter of 1947 were the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the decade that followed the initial discovery of seven scrolls, nine hundred or so additional fragments and scrolls were located in nearby caves. More than two hundred of these texts were manuscripts of the Old Testament copied before the birth of Jesus.
When the scrolls and fragments were analyzed, it became clear that the Old Testament text had remained far more stable over the centuries than many scholars had imagined. One scroll of Isaiah discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls was produced at least a century before the time of Jesus. Yet the wording of this copy of Isaiah was virtually identical to the Masoretic texts that were copied a thousand years later. The remainder of the Dead Sea Scrolls did reveal a variety of versions and copying variations in other Old Testament texts. And yet, even in these texts, none of the changes challenged anyone’s overall understanding of the Bible or any of the beliefs that have been derived from these texts. What the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed is that the processes which produced the surviving manuscripts of the Old Testament were quite capable of effectively preserving the text.
More Variants Than There Are Words? Yes—and No
The New Testament manuscripts include far more variants than the Old Testament texts, partly because far more manuscripts of the New Testament have survived. And yet, these same manuscripts also reveal a text that’s remained remarkably stable over the centuries. Fragments from the second and third centuries generally confirm the text that’s found in complete manuscripts of the New Testament from the fourth and fifth centuries. When variations in the text of Acts are compared in the two most dissimilar “families” of New Testament manuscripts, the level of consensus between the text types is 92%; a similar comparison of the letters of James, Peter, John, and Jude yields 93% agreement, leaving very little of the text in question.
How is it, then, that Bart Ehrman claims “there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament”? And do these differences actually include “lots of significant changes”?
What he claims in Misquoting Jesus is partly correct. There are more differences spread across all the manuscripts than there are words in a single Greek New Testament. The Greek New Testament includes around 138,000 words, and there are around a half-million copying variants in the Greek texts. And yet, what Ehrman says is also misleading due to some critical data that he doesn’t trumpet in his talk-show sound bites: These 500,000 or so copying variants are scattered among millions and millions of words in more than five thousand Greek fragments and manuscripts. Embedded within this wealth of witnesses, a half-million copying variants touch only a tiny percentage of the total text.
More importantly, the overwhelming majority of these variants have no impact whatsoever on the meaning of any text. Most of these variations are the result of well-intended attempts to smooth out the grammar or scribal slips that led to divergences in word order, definite articles, and other similar minutiae. Very few of these variants have any impact on the translation of any text; fewer still have any effect on the meaning.
Here’s a simple example of the type of variant I’m describing here: In some manuscripts, John 3:3—translated very literally from Greek—begins with these words: “Answered, the Jesus and said to him”; in other manuscripts of the same verse, the Greek definite article (the word translated “the”) is missing. In many languages—including ancient Greek—the grammar allows a definite article to be placed before proper nouns as well as common nouns. And so, neither one of these sentences is grammatically incorrect. But, since English never places “the” in front of a name anyway, this difference isn’t meaningful or even observable in any English translation. Regardless of the presence or absence of the definite article, the clause comes into English as, “Jesus answered and said to him” or some simpler wording such as, “Jesus answered him.” These are the types of copying variants that characterize most of the differences in the New Testament manuscripts.
In the end, only the tiniest fraction of the textual variants have any meaningful impact on the text of the New Testament. Even when textual variants do have some effect, it’s almost always possible to discover the earlier reading of the text. For example, at some point perhaps in the fourth or fifth centuries A.D., a copyist added this verse to a story in which Jesus healed a physically-challenged man at the Pool of Bethesda:
They were waiting for the water to move, because an angel from the Lord went down at certain times into the pool and stirred the water; whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was healed of any disease. (John 5:4)
The oldest manuscript in which I’ve seen this extra verse is Codex Alexandrinus, a manuscript that was probably produced in the fifth century A.D. The addition is not present in the third-century codices P66 (Papyrus Bodmer II) or P75 (Papyrus Bodmer XIV—XV), nor does it appear in the fourth-century manuscript known as Codex Sinaiticus.
This addition probably does preserve a popular belief about the Pool of Bethesda. Otherwise, the words spoken later by the physically-challenged man wouldn’t make sense: “Sir,” the man pleads with Jesus, “I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me” (5:7). Perhaps a copyist who knew about this bizarre custom recognized that people’s knowledge of the tradition was fading. And so, the copyist added an explanation in the margin of a manuscript that was eventually incorporated into the text. Whatever the reason, textual criticism—the process of analyzing manuscripts to discover the earliest recoverable form of a text—enables biblical scholars to determine which words were added or changed in this text and in the vast majority of other similar cases.
I don’t want to give the false impression that every textual dilemma is as straightforward as this additional verse in John’s Gospel; many textual differences are far more complex. In some cases, it’s difficult to be certain about the initial wording of a text, and the differences do change the meaning. But the crucial question for our purposes is, “Are these variants so significant that they alter our understanding of Jesus or our interpretation of entire books of the Bible, as Misquoting Jesus suggests?”
Let’s take a look at three examples from Misquoting Jesus to find out.
Mark 1:41: Angry Jesus or Compassionate Jesus?
Early in Mark’s Gospel, the author preserves a story in which Jesus heals a skin-diseased man. The man falls to his knees before Jesus and declares that—if Jesus so chooses—his diseased flesh can be cleansed. According to most of the Greek manuscripts, here’s how Jesus responds: “Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him” (Mark 1:41). In a few manuscripts, however, there is a variant that results in a very different rendering: “Becoming angry, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him.” According to Misquoting Jesus, the earlier reading of this text was “becoming angry,” and this variant reshapes the reading of Mark’s entire Gospel.
For what it’s worth, I think Bart Ehrman is quite likely right that the initial text read “becoming angry” and that a Greek word was changed at some point. At the same time, I readily admit that Peter Williams has pointed out some significant weaknesses in Ehrman’s claims in a Novum Testamentum article.
Either way, is this textual variant as highly significant as Misquoting Jesus seems to suggest?
In other words, does this variant actually alter how we understand the entirety of Mark’s Gospel?
Not really.
With or without “becoming angry” in Mark 1:41, Mark’s Gospel depicts Jesus as a passionate prophet, rapidly crisscrossing Galilee and Judea as he moves toward his impending encounter with a Roman cross. Jesus becomes vexed and upset when people don’t believe him (Mark 3:5; 9:23). And so, how does Jesus respond when the skin-diseased man says, “If you choose, you can make me clean”? Jesus becomes angry at the disbelief he sees around him (see also Mark 2:6, 24)—but he doesn’t respond with hatred or rage. Instead, the righteous anger of Jesus becomes a means that brings about wholeness and healing for the skin-diseased man.
So what happened to this text? It’s quite possible that an ancient copyist was uncomfortable with an angry Jesus, so the copyist altered the text to read “moved with pity” instead of “becoming angry.” And what if I’m wrong and the earlier reading is “moved with pity” instead of “becoming angry”? The Gospel According to Mark makes it clear elsewhere that following Jesus means living with sacrificial compassion for the marginalized, the poor, and the oppressed (Mark 6:34; 8:2; 9:22-23). And so, if Jesus was “moved with pity” for the skin-diseased man, that would make sense in Mark’s Gospel as well. This variant is important, and it’s a variant that matters when I teach this text—but it changes nothing about the overall interpretation of Mark’s Gospel. Both readings fit perfectly within Mark’s overall depiction of Jesus.
John 1:18: Only Son or Only God?
Something similar can be said about most other variants. In some manuscripts of John 1:18, the author describes Jesus as “the only Son.” Other manuscripts read “the only God.” (Some English translations have “only begotten” or “one and only” instead of “only”—but those differences aren’t due to any manuscript variant; they’re simply different ways of translating the same Greek word.) Since early Christian copyists consistently abbreviated both “Son” and “God” when they reproduced texts, the difference between these two words would have been only a single letter. Perhaps a tired scribe didn’t see his source text clearly and miscopied this verse at some point.
But which wording was in the initial text in the first century A.D.? “Only Son” or “only God”?
“The only God” seems to me to fit the structure of this chapter better than “the only Son”—but, regardless of which option is correct, each wording expresses a truth that’s clearly affirmed throughout the rest of the Gospel. In favor of “only God,” the opening verses of John’s Gospel already imply that Jesus was uniquely divine (John 1:1-2), and the apostle Thomas unambiguously identifies Jesus as God near the end of the book (John 20:28). In favor of “only Son,” the familiar words of John 3:16 and dozens of other verses throughout John’s Gospel refer to Jesus as the Son. Authentic differences do exist in the manuscripts that include the first chapter of John, but—once again—neither of these two possibilities alters the overall claims of this book or of the Bible as a whole.
1 John 5:7-8: An Addition to a Latin Edition that Ended Up in Greek
This final example is very different from the others, because virtually everyone agrees on the original wording of the text. In every surviving ancient and medieval Greek manuscript, 1 John 5:7-8 reads something like this when translated into English:
There are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree.
At some point in the late fourth or early fifth century A.D., the Latin version of this text was expanded to mention the Trinity. The resulting text, rendered in English, reads,
For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness on earth: the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree as one.
In the early sixteenth century, a scholar named Desiderius Erasmus collated a Greek New Testament to be printed alongside his new Latin translation of the New Testament. Since these extra lines were absent from the Greek manuscripts of 1 John, Erasmus omitted the addition from the first two editions of his Greek New Testament—but this omission upset certain other biblical scholars.
At some point before the publication of the third edition of his Greek New Testament, Erasmus was presented with Codex Montfortianus, a hand-copied edition of the New Testament in Greek. This codex just so happened to include a Greek rendering of the longstanding Latin addition. Some contemporary scholars have speculated that Codex Montfortianus was copied in the early sixteenth century for the purpose of pressuring Erasmus to include the additional text in his Greek New Testament. Regardless of how or why the extra lines ended up in Codex Montfortianus, Erasmus added the text in the third edition of his New Testament.
Every competent scholar in the modern era who has looked at this text has recognized that these lines were added to 1 John centuries after the letter was composed. But Bart Ehrman raises an issue related to this text that would be highly significant if he’s correct. According to Misquoting Jesus, this text is “the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly delineates the doctrine of the Trinity.” “Trinity,” of course, describes the essential Christian belief that God is one God in three persons—God the Holy Spirit, God the Son, and God the Father. Without this verse, Bart Ehrman claims, the Bible never clearly teaches the doctrine of the Trinity.
But does the Trinity really hang so heavily on this single verse?
Not even close.
In fact, the Gospel According to Matthew delineates the Trinity no less clearly than this clause that an overly-creative copyist added to the Latin text of 1 John. According to Matthew 28:19, God is one God (“in the name,” singular) in three persons (“of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”). The reference to the Trinity was added to 1 John 5 after the Apostles’ Creed and the Creed of Nicaea were already universally embraced in the churches. Both of these creeds are explicitly Trinitarian confessions of faith. If the sole biblical text that clearly delineates the Trinity didn’t even exist until the late fourth or early fifth century, from where did Christians in the early fourth century derive their dogged commitment to the Trinity as an essential component of Christian faith?
In fact, the doctrine of the Trinity was firmly established on the basis of the New Testament long before anyone made any additions to John’s first letter. This commitment grew from Matthew 28:19 and a number of other texts in which the authors of the New Testament articulated their emerging recognition that God is one God in three persons (see, for examples, John 14:16-17; 2 Corinthians 13:14). No, this text in 1 John didn’t exist in the earliest manuscripts—but this is far from the only verse to delineate the doctrine of the Trinity, and it’s not even close to constituting a theologically-significant alteration of the text.
Are the Changes Significant or Not?
Throughout Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman rightly points out that there are hundreds of thousands of copying variants, and these variants produce complex questions about a handful of biblical texts. And yet, none of these variants changes any vital belief that Christians hold about God, about Jesus, or about God’s work in the world. Regardless of whether the Bible is true or false, no Christian doctrine or practice is diminished, decided, or determined by any textually uncertain passage of Scripture.
From time to time, Bart Ehrman does manage to dampen his critiques with candid concessions that sound strangely similar to what I’ve argued in this chapter. For example, Ehrman acknowledges at one point in Misquoting Jesus, “I continue to think that even if we cannot be 100 percent certain about what we can attain to, ... it is at least possible to get back to the oldest and earliest stage of the manuscript tradition for each of the books of the New Testament.” Elsewhere, he admits that
it is probably safe to say that the copying of early Christian texts was by and large a “conservative” process. The scribes … 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.
In his earlier book Lost Christianities, Ehrman states that it is possible to “reconstruct the oldest form of the words of the New Testament with reasonable (though not 100 percent) accuracy.”
And yet, it seems that Ehrman wants “to have his text-critical cake and eat it, too.” Only a few pages after affirming that it is possible to recover the earliest stage of the manuscript tradition, Ehrman refers to Christianity as “a textually oriented religion whose texts have been changed” in “lots of significant” ways. But why are the changes scattered among thousands of manuscripts so significant if it is possible to recover—by Ehrman’s own admission—“the oldest form of the words”? The only answer I can give is that, in the end, these changes really aren’t that significant after all. Despite the many differences among the manuscripts, the process of transmission has resulted in a remarkably reliable and well-preserved Bible.
Different Texts, Same Truth
This morning, I gathered in the library archives with a group of my doctoral students to teach them about the history of the Greek New Testament. Class is over now, the students are gone, and there are four books left on the table. The oldest of the four volumes is GA2358, an eleventh-century manuscript of the Gospels also known as Codex Robertsonianus. Two of the volumes were published in the sixteenth century: one of them is the third edition of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament; the other is a far smaller Greek text printed in Geneva in 1552 for John Calvin’s students. The last and latest text is my Tyndale House Greek New Testament, published only a few years ago.
Not one of the Greek texts of the Gospels on this table agrees in every detail with all of the others. There are, in fact, thousands of differences that distinguish these four volumes from one another. Three of the four texts include the extra verse in John 5 about the Pool of Bethesda. One of these texts reads “only God” in John 1:18, while the others have “only Son.” And yet, let’s suppose that I selected one of these volumes to be my exclusive copy of the Gospels and that I never had access to the text in any of the others. No matter which of the four texts I chose, no textual variant in any of these books would change anything that I believe. Not one of the thousands of variants represented on this table threatens any aspect of my faith in the resurrected Jesus. The text of the Bible has not been preserved perfectly—but it has been preserved sufficiently to sustain every vital truth that Christians confess.
New subscriber here! Really great read! I’ve been reading/listening to a lot of these arguments just as I prepare myself as a writer new to the public sphere - wanting to be able to answer questions accurately and thoroughly. This is among the best resources I’ve found so far. I’m very interested to keep up with your posts.
Another issue that occurred to me today, as I try to encourage others to read the Bible for maybe the first time, is that so many of the newer/popular translations (as in the NKJV, NIV, NLT, ESV, etc) contain subheadings that differ from each other and sort of lead the reader down a certain understanding of the section. I’m trying to discern and seek answers for one in particular right now (“the Reinstatement/Restoration of Peter” in John21) to find out 1) how far back the notion that he was explicitly un-instated goes (because to me, it makes a difference if it’s the early church or a 1940s translation), and 2) what that heading means/doesn’t mean for discipleship, to put it broadly. I’m finding surprisingly limited information and critical views of the subheadings!
Thanks for this post! It’s definitely encouragement to keep looking into these things. 😊
Excellent article 👌