Misquoting Jesus “The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why” Bart D. Ehrman

This work is the first of its kind, because the writer reveals where and why these changes were made and how modern scholars go about reconstructing the original words of the New Testament as closely as possible.

Erhman makes the point that many Biblical stories and beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity and the divine origins of the Bible itself stem from both intentional and accidental alterations.

A Brief Outline

Chapter 2. The copyists of the Early Christian Writing.

The only way to copy a book in the ancient world was by hand. Anyone reading in antiquity could never be completely sure that he or she was reading what the author had written….Copies produced this way could end up being quite different from the original.

Copying texts allowed for the possibility of manual error; and the problem was widely recognized throughout antiquity.

For Example one of the problems….”is that when they copied, no marks of punctuation were used, and no spaces used for separate words. This was a kind of continuous writing and difficult to read, leave alone understand.” Page 48.

Origen (One of the early church fathers) wrote;
“The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.” Page 52

Celsus is also quoted by Ehrman.

“Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over, and they change its character to enable them to deny difficulties in face of criticism. (Against Celsus 2.27) page 52

“Scribes who were associated with the orthodox position not infrequently changed their text, sometimes in order to eliminate the possibility of their ‘misuse’ by Christians affirming heretical beliefs and sometimes to make them more amendable to the doctrines being espoused by Christians of their own persuasion.” Page 53

“Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple – slips of the pen, accidental omissions inadvertent additions, miss-spelled words, blunders of one sort or another…..Sometimes though as we have seen, they change the text because they thought it was supposed to be changed. This was not just for certain theological reasons.” ….

“…then again a third scribe reads the manuscript and notices the alteration his predecessor had made; he, in turn, erased the word ‘bears’ and re-wrote the word ‘manifests’. He then added a scribal note to the margin to indicate what he thought of the earlier, second scribe. The note says,’Fool and knave! Leave the old reading, don’t change it’ ” Page 56

Another example is, ‘The Women Taken in Adultery’.

“Despite the brilliance of the story, its captivating quality, and its inherent intrigue, there is one other enormous problem that it poses. As it turns out, it was not originally in the Gospel of John. In fact, it was not originally part of any of the Gospels. It was added by later scribes.” Page 64

Chapter 2. This chapter discusses the alterations in Mark and concludes; “The passages discussed above represent just two out of thousands of places in which the manuscripts of the New Testament came to be changed by scribes. In both of the examples, we are dealing with additions that scribes made to the text, additions of sizable length. Page 68

Chapter 3 is an amazing chapter on all the changes that came later in the Christian era when the printing press was employed to make copies. . There were further tremendous changes in this later era.
This chapter concludes; “We could go on nearly forever talking about specific places in which the texts of the New Testament came to be changed, either accidentally or intentionally. As I have indicated, the examples are not just in the hundreds but in the thousands…….In the next chapter we will trace some of that story, starting from the time of John Mill and carrying it down to the present, seeing the methods that have developed for reconstructing the text of the New Testament and for recognizing the ways that it came to be changed in the process of its transmission.” Page 98-99.


Chapter 4 is the Quest for Origins and the Methods and Discoveries.

Chapter 5 is the Originals that Matter.

“It is clear that Luke does not share Mark’s understanding that Jesus was in anguish, bordering on despair. No-where is this more evident then in their subsequent accounts of Jesus crucifixion. Mark portrays Jesus as silent on the path to Golgotha. His disciples have fled; ….and… all those present deride him – passes by, Jewish leaders, and both robbers. Mark’s Jesus has been beaten, mocked, disserted, and forsaken, not just by his followers but finally by God himself. His only words in the entire proceedings come at the very end, when he cries aloud, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani” (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?) He then mutters a loud cry and dies…….
…In Luke’s account, Jesus is far from silent, and when he speaks he shows he is still in control, trustful of God his Father, confident of his fate….
It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of these changes that Luke made in his source (Mark) for understanding our textual problem…..At no point in Luke’s Passion narrative does Jesus loose control……
It appears that the account of Jesus’ ‘bloody sweat’, not found in our earliest and best manuscripts, is not original to Luke but is a scribal addition to the Gospel.” ….
Luke’s portrayal of Jesus stands in contrast not only to that of Mark, but also to that of other New Testament authors, including the unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who appears to presuppose knowledge of passion traditions in which Jesus was terrified in the face of death and died with no divine succour or support, as can be seen in the resolution of one of the most interesting textual problems in the New Testament. " Page 143-44.

“Although almost all the surviving manuscripts state that Jesus died for all people ‘by the grace of God’ (CHARITI THEOU) a couple of others state, instead, that he died ‘apart from God’ (CHORIS THEOU). There are good reasons for thinking that the latter, however, was the original reading of the Epistle to the Hebrews……..Christians in the early centuries commonly regarded Jesus’ death as the supreme manifestation of God’s grace. To say, though, that Jesus died ‘apart from God’ could be taken to mean any number of things, most of them unpalatable. Since scribes must have created one of these readings out of the other, there is little question concerning which of the two is more likely the corruption.” Page 145

“”thus, for example, Heb. 5:7 speaks of Jesus, in the face of death, beseeching God with loud cries and tears. In 12:2 he is said to endure the “shame” of his death, not because God sustained him, but because he hoped for vindication. Throughout this Epistle, Jesus is said to experience human pain and death, like other human beings ‘in every respect’. His was not an agony attenuated by special dispensation…..It is as a full human being that Jesus experiences his passion, apart from any succour that might have been his as an exalted being….Heb 2:9 appears originally to have said that Jesus died ‘apart from God’, forsaken, much as he is portrayed in the Passion narrative of Mark’s Gospel…..There is also the question of why these words came to be changed….This question of the modification of scripture in the early Christian church will be the subject of the next two chapters, as I try to show how scribes who were not altogether satisfied with what the New Testament books said modified their words to make them more clearly support orthodox Christianity and more vigorously oppose heretics, women, Jews, and pagans.” Page 148-9

Theologically Motivated Alterations of the Text.

Textual criticism involves more than simply determining the original text. It also entails seeing how that text came to be modified over time, both through scribal slips and as scribes made deliberate modifications. ….
The thesis of this chapter is that sometimes the texts of the New Testament were modified for theological reasons. This happened whenever the scribes copying the texts were concerned to ensure that the texts said what they wanted them to say; sometimes this was because of theological disputes raging in the scribes’ own day. To make sense of this kind of change, we need to understand something about theological disputes in the early centuries of Christianity – the centuries in which most alterations of scripture were made, before the widespread appearance of ‘professional’ scribes………In fact, the theological diversity was so extensive that groups calling themselves Christian adhered to beliefs and practices that most Christians today would insist were not Christian at all.
In the second and third centuries there were, of course, Christians who believed that there was only one God, the Creator of all there is. Other people who called themselves Christian, however, insisted that there were two different gods – one of the Old Testament (a God of wrath) and one of the New Testament (a God of love and mercy). ….
During the second and third centuries, however, there was no agreed-upon canon – and no agreed-upon theology. Instead, theologies based on diverse written texts, all claiming to be written by apostles of Jesus. ….
Some of these groups insisted that Jesus Christ was the one Son of God who was both completely human and completely divine; other groups insisted that Christ was completely human and not at all divine; others maintained that he was completely divine and not at all human; and yet others asserted that Jesus Christ was two things – a divine being (Christ) and a human being (Jesus). Some of these groups believed that Christ’s death brought about the salvation of the world; others maintained that Christ’s death had nothing to do with the salvation of this world; yet other groups insisted that Christ had never actually died.” Pages 151-3

Antiadoptionistic Alterations of the Text.

“We know of a number of Christian groups from the second and third centuries that had an “adoptionistic” view of Christ. This view is called adoptionist because its adherents maintained that Jesus was not divine but a full flesh-and-blood human being whom God had ‘adopted’ to be his son, usually at his baptism.” 155

“In particular, it was their understanding of Jesus as the Jewish messiah that set these Christians apart from others. For since they were strict monotheists – believing that only One could be God – they insisted that Jesus was not himself divine, but was a human being no different in ‘nature’ from the rest of us. He was born from the sexual union of his parents, Joseph and Mary, born like everyone else (his mother was not a virgin), and reared, then, in a Jewish home. …Page 156

Ehrman points out, “What we do find, however, are instances in which texts have been altered in such a way as to oppose an adoptionistic Christology. These changes emphasize that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he was not adopted at his baptism, and that he was himself God…….

Antiadoptionist Changes of the Text

1 Tim 3;16 says “God was manifested in the flesh”
“Whereas; “Our earliest and best manuscripts say that ‘Christ was manifest in the flesh’…It was a change made to counter a claim that Jesus was fully human but not himself divine.” Page 157 –8

Ehrmans shows how the verse ‘You are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased’, is the translation that is accepted today and why it was changed.

“One of the most intriguing antiadoptionist variants among our manuscripts occurs just where one might expect it, in an account of Jesus’ baptism by John, the point at which many adoptionists insisted Jesus had been chosen by God to be his adopted son…’You are my Son, today I have begotten you’….....Today I have begotten you’ – is indeed the original, and that it came to be changed by scribes who feared its adoptionistic overtones.” Page 158-9

On page 166 Ehrman discusses Luke 22:17-19 the words that Jesus spoke about his broken body and spilt blood.
“Despite the fact that they are familiar, there are good reasons for thinking that these verses were not originally in Luke’s Gospel but were added to stress that it was Jesus’ broken body and shed blood that brought salvation ‘for you’.”

Ehrmann goes to a lot of trouble to explain that Luke had an entirely different concept of the death of Jesus from that of Mark’s. “Jesus death for Luke in other words drives people to repentance and it is this repentance that brings salvation” Page 167

The next alteration is dealt with on pages 168-9 where Ehrman explains how the resurrection became a physical resurrection and Jesus’ departure became a physical departure. “Texts were altered because they portrayed so well the real humanity of Jesus” Page 165

Chapter 7 deals with the social aspects of textual change.

Amongst the many changes discussed in this chapter it is striking that the Gospel of Matthew says that ‘Jesus would save his people from their sins’ Matt1:21. “But in the Syriac translation the text says, “Because he will save the world from their sins”. Page 194.

Changing Scripture. In Ehrman’s conclusion he writes: “The more I studied the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, the more I realized just how radially the text had been altered over the years at the hands of scribes, who were not only conserving scripture but also changing it.” However He also writes: “The Bible is, by all counts, the most significant book in the history of Western civilization.” Page 208

…”Even if God had inspired the original words we don’t have the original words so the doctrine of inspiration was in a sense irrelevant to the Bible as we have it.” Page 211

This brief outline is to inspire you to get a copy of this book and read it.

Misquoting Jesus by Bart D Ehrman – The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.
HarperSanFrancisco A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers.
Book reviews : (back cover)

How Mistakes and Changes Shaped the Bible We Read Today.

“Engaging and fascinating….[Ehrman’s] absorbing story, fresh and lively prose, and seasoned insights into the challenges of recreating the texts of the New Testament ensure that readers might never read the Gospels or Paul’s letters the same way again.” Publisher’s Weekley (starred review)

“Misquoting Jesus is a fascinating report on the scribes who wrote the
Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, the scholars who used these thousands of manuscripts to establish the best text, and Bible translators who use their results to produce the modern translations we use today. I recommend it enthusiastically to everyone interested in the wording of the New Testament.” James M. Robinson, author of The Gospel of Jesus.”

In Misquoting Jesus Ehrman reveals that: “The King James Bible was based on corrupted and inferior manuscripts that in many cases do not accurately represent the meaning of the original text.”

The favorite Bible story of Jesus’s forgiving the woman caught in adultery, John 8:3-11 doesn’t belong in the Bible.

Scribal errors were so common in antiquity that the author of the Book of Revbelation threatened damnation to anyone who “adds to” or “takes away” words from the text.”

“When world-class biblical scholar Bart Ehrman first began to study the texts of the Bible in their original languages he was startled to discover the multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations that had been made by earlier translators. In Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman tells the story behind the mistakes and changes that ancient scribes made to the New testament and shows the great impact they had upon the Bible we use today. He frames his account with personal reflections on how his study of the Greek manuscripts made him abandon his once ultraconservative views of the Bible.
Since the advent of the printing press and the accurate reproduction of texts, most people have assumed that when they read the New Testament they are reading an exact copy of Jesus’s words or Saint Paul’s writings. And yet, for almost fifteen hundred years these manuscripts were hand copied by scribes who were deeply influenced by the cultural, theological, and political disputes of their day. Both mistakes and intentional changes abound in the surviving manuscripts, making the original words difficult to reconstruct. For the first time, Ehrman reveals where and why these changes were made and how scholars go about reconstructing the orgiinal words of the New Testament as closely as possible.
Ehrman makes the provocative case that 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 – alterations that dramatically affected all subsequent versions of the Bible. HarperSanFrancisco Publishers.

In the Introduction page 10-15 the writer says: “This kind of realization coincided with the problems I was encountering the more closely I studied the surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. It is one thing to say that the originals were inspired, but the reality is that we don’t have the originals – so saying they were inspired doesn’t help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals. Moreover, the vast majority of Christians for the entire history of the church have not had access to the originals, making their inspiration something of a moot point. Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later – much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places. As we will see later in this book, these copies differ from one another in 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…..This became a problem for my view of inspiration, for I came to realize that it would have been no more difficult for God to preserve the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire them in the first place. The Bible began to appear to me as a very human book. Just as human scribes had copied, and changed, the texts of scripture, so too had human authors originally written the texts of scripture. This was a human book from beginning to end……In all these ways they differed from one another. Among other things, this meant that Mark did not say the same thing that Luke said because he didn’t mean the same thing as Luke, John is different from Matthew – not the same. Paul is different from Acts. And James is different from Paul. Each author is a human author and needs to be read for what he (assuming they were all men) has to say not assuming that what he says is the same, or comformable to, or consistent with what every other author has to say. The Bible, at the end of the day, is a very human book…….It is my conviction that textual criticism is a compelling and intiguing field of study of real importance not just to scholars but to everyone with an interest in the Bible. ….( Misquoting Jesus) This book is written for people who know nothing about textual criticism but who might like to learn something about how scribes were changing scripture and about how we can recognize where they did so.

Another article on Ehrman's work under Unitarian Faith on this site.