Misquoting Jesus

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

First edition
Author	Bart D. Ehrman
Language	English
Subject	Biblical criticism
Publisher	HarperCollins
Publication date	2005
Pages	256
ISBN	978-0-06-073817-4
OCLC	59011567
Dewey Decimal	225.4/86 22
LC Class	BS2325 .E45 2005
Preceded by	Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine (2004)
Followed by	The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed (2006)

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (published as Whose Word Is It? in United Kingdom) is a book by Bart D. Ehrman, a New Testament scholar at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The book introduces lay readers to the field of textual criticism of the Bible. Ehrman discusses a number of textual variants that resulted from intentional or accidental manuscript changes during the scriptorium era. The book made it to The New York Times Best Seller List.

Summary

Ehrman recounts his personal experiences with the study of the Bible and textual criticism. He summarizes the history of textual criticism, from the works of Desiderius Erasmus to the present. The book describes an early Christian environment in which the books that would later compose the New Testament were copied by hand, mostly by Christian amateurs. Ehrman concludes that various early scribes altered the New Testament texts in order to de-emphasize the role of women in the early church, to unify and harmonize the different portrayals of Jesus in the four gospels, and to oppose certain heresies (such as Adoptionism).

Ehrman discusses the significance in understanding how Christianity stemmed from Judaism. Christianity was foreshadowed by Judaism, and was seen as the first "religion of the book" in Western civilization. Judaism, in its earliest years, was distinctive in some ways to other religions; it was the most-recognized monotheistic faith, set apart from all the other faiths that were polytheistic. The most significant and unique aspect of Judaism, Ehrman points out, was of having instructions along with ancestral traditions written down in sacred books, which were found in no other religious faith on the face of the earth during the given time period. The sacred books read by the Jews stressed ancestral traditions, customs, and laws. In order to pinpoint the canonization of the religion of Christianity, Ehrman discusses how the New Testament came into existence during the first century of the common era. Jews were scattered throughout the Roman Empire, and only relied upon the writings given to Moses by God, the Torah, which literally means "law" or "guidance." Ehrman continues on discussing how those writings were canonized and then later on recognized as the "Old Testament" following the rise of Christianity at the given time period.

In order to summarize his point that Christianity at its beginning was a religion of the book, Ehrman concludes how Jesus himself was a Jewish rabbi and adhered to all the sacred books held by the Jews, especially the Torah.

Reviews and reception

Alex Beam of The Boston Globe wrote that the book was "a series of dramatic revelations for the ignorant", and that "Ehrman notes that there have been a lot of changes to the Bible in the past 2,000 years. I don't want to come between Mr. Ehrman and his payday, but this point has been made much more eloquently by... others."

Jeffrey Weiss of The Dallas Morning News wrote, "Whichever side you sit on regarding Biblical inerrancy, this is a rewarding read." The American Library Association wrote, "To assess how ignorant or theologically manipulative scribes may have changed the biblical text, modern scholars have developed procedures for comparing diverging texts. And in language accessible to nonspecialists, Ehrman explains these procedures and their results. He further explains why textual criticism has frequently sparked intense controversy, especially among scripture-alone Protestants."

Charles Seymour of the Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, Texas wrote, "Ehrman convincingly argues that even some generally received passages are late additions, which is particularly interesting in the case of those verses with import for doctrinal issues such as women's ordination or the Atonement."

Neely Tucker of The Washington Post wrote that the book is "an exploration into how the 27 books of the New Testament came to be cobbled together, a history rich with ecclesiastical politics, incompetent scribes and the difficulties of rendering oral traditions into a written text."

Craig Blomberg, of Denver Seminary in Colorado, wrote on the Denver Journal that "Most of Misquoting Jesus is actually a very readable, accurate distillation of many of the most important facts about the nature and history of textual criticism, presented in a lively and interesting narrative that will keep scholarly and lay interest alike." Blomberg also wrote that Ehrman "has rejected his evangelicalism and whether he is writing on the history of the transmission of the biblical text, focusing on all the changes that scribes made over the centuries, or on the so-called 'lost gospels' and 'lost Christianities,' trying to rehabilitate our appreciation for Gnosticism, it is clear that he has an axe to grind."

In 2007, Timothy Paul Jones wrote a book-length response to Misquoting Jesus, called Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus". It was published by InterVarsity Press. Novum Testamentum suggested that Misquoting Truth was a useful example of how conservative readers have engaged Ehrman’s arguments.

In 2008 evangelical biblical scholar Craig A. Evans wrote a book called Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels: despite having been written in response to Ehrman's book, Fabricating Jesus includes a lengthy critique of several scholars of the historical Jesus, including the Jesus Seminar, Robert Eisenman, Morton Smith, James Tabor, Michael Baigent and Elaine Pagels and Ehrman himself. In his work, Evans accused the mentioned scholars of creating absurd and unhistorical images of Jesus, while also arguing against the historical value of New Testament apochrypha.

Another book written in response to Ehrman was Can We Still Believe the Bible? An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions, published in 2014 by evangelical biblical scholar Craig Blomberg. The book contains a lengthy response to Misquoting Jesus, pointing out that nothing in Ehrman's work is new to biblical scholars – both liberal and conservative – and that the interpolations he mentions are all explicitly mentioned as such in standard Bibles and that, in any case, no cardinal doctrine of Christianity is jeopardized by these variants.

The criticism of Dante A. Urbina

Dante A. Urbina is a Peruvian intellectual in the field of economics, philosophy and theology, and has developed a critique of arguments that Bart Ehrman raises in his book. The references that appear in this section in parentheses are all taken from the cited book, that is, from his book What is true religion? Rational demonstration of in which God has revealed himself.

One of the arguments that have been put forward to justify the historical validity of the New Testament is what is called the "three tests criterion", raised by the historian Chauncey Sanders in An Introduction to Research in English Literary History (1952, ed. Macmillan Company, New York, pp. 143ff.). This criterion is used to examine and determine the historicity of a document (that is, whether or not a document is historical), and the three tests mentioned are the following: bibliographic test, internal evidence test, and external evidence test. What Barth Ehrman does is criticize the New Testament bibliographic evidence in his book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changes the Bible and Why (2007, ed. Harper, San Francisco, pp. 7 and 90). He also does so in the keynote speech of the debate against James White at the Sheraton Airport Hotel in Florida on January 21, 2009.

The bibliographic test consists of examining and determining if the examined document can be trusted to correspond to the original, based on knowing how many original manuscripts there are (1), how early these manuscripts are (2) and with how much precision they were transmitted (3). “Thus, if a certain document has a very low number of manuscripts that in turn were elaborated many centuries after the historical events they refer to took place and, in addition, exhibit a high degree of distortion in copying and transmission, it must be said that this document does not pass the bibliographic test ”(Urbina, 2018, p. 61).

Regarding the number of original manuscripts (cf. Urbina, 2018, p. 61), the New Testament is the work with the most manuscript copies of Antiquity: while the Iliad has 647 copies (cf. Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, Oxford University Press, New York, 1968, p. 34), the New Testament has 5664 manuscripts in the original Greek language and about 18000 in other languages (Latin, Syriac, Ethiopian, etc.), this being a total of 24,000 handwritten copies of portions of the New Testament (cf. FF Bruce, The Books and the Parchments, ed. Fleming H. Revell, New Jersey, 1963, p. 178).

Regarding how early these manuscripts are, Urbina (2018, p. 62-63) develops several examples to address the question. One of them is that of the Letter to the Corinthians by Clement of Rome, an author of the late first and early second centuries. This letter dates from around the last two or even three decades of the first century (cf. G. Edmundson, The Church in Rome in the First Century, ed. Longmans, London, 1913, pp. 180-205), and cites several phrases that appear in parts of the New Testament (specifically, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and eight epistles). This makes it very likely that these texts were written before Clement quoted them (cf. Paul Barnett, Is the New Testament Reliable? A Look at the Historical Evidence, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, 1986, p. 39).

Regarding the precision in the transmission process (cf. Urbina, 2018, p. 63), the levels of distortion in the transmission and copying of the New Testament, the Iliad and the Mahabharata of the Hindus were evaluated by Bruce Metzger, professor at Princeton University, and concluded that, while the levels of distortion in the transmission and copying of the Iliad and the Mahabharata were respectively 5% and 10%, those of the New Testament were 0.2% (cf Bruce Metzger, Chapters in the History of New Testament Textual Criticism, ed. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1963, pp. 144-151).

As stated and cited above, Bart Ehrman criticizes this proof, arguing that there are errors and textual variants in the New Testament, to such a degree that he does not know what the original manuscripts actually said. These errors are due to the fact that, when a person copied a document, they did so with voluntary or involuntary errors, since, when the copy was copied, the problem of errors was repeated (cf. Urbina, 2018, pp. 68-69).

Urbina develops different responses to this argument (cf. 2018, pp. 69-74).

In the first place, the bibliographic proof cannot be called into question from the errors, because these errors are due, among other things, to the large number of documents. “[…] The textual variants among the New Testament manuscripts are nothing more than the absolutely reasonable price to pay for having a large number of copies available” (Urbina, 2018, p. 69-70). And, as it was seen, having many original documents, rather than being something negative, is something positive to pass the bibliographic test and therefore positive to determine the historicity of a document. Precisely because having many copies allows "to apply the historiographic criteria with more and better elements of judgment and to reconstruct the original text more reliably" (Urbina, 2018, p. 70). To better understand this, Urbina (2018, pp. 71-72) explains that the New Testament transcription process was not linear but geometric: instead of one scribe copying a document and passing it on to another scribe to do the same. same (being all in the same place), in reality the transcription process consisted of making several copies of a document and those documents were quickly sent to other areas with other cultures and languages so that this process would start again, in such a way that the transcription process "became uncontrolled" when the transcribed copies were sent elsewhere. This allows us to conclude two things: that it cannot be said that someone made errors for ideological reasons, for example, because the transcription did not depend on a place, a family, a language, a culture or something similar; and that, when analyzing transcription errors, it is enough to take the transcripts made in one place and compare them with the transcripts made in another. This is why having a lot of writings is something positive, as said, and not negative: because it facilitates comparison and, therefore, the detection of errors.

As if this were not enough, it is understood that there are documents considered historical with a reduced number of copies and central to know the events of the 1st century. Flavio Josephus's War of the Jews has only 9 copies dating from the 5th century (cf Paul Barnett, Is the New Testament History ?, ed. Vine Books, Ann Arbor, 1986, p. 45), and the Annals of Tacitus has only two copies dating from the Middle Ages (cf. Norman Geisler and William Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, ed. Moody Press, Chicago, 1986, p. 405).

Furthermore, when Ehrman mentions errors, he does not distinguish between spelling errors, inconsistent word order, significant (semantic) but not viable variants, and significant and viable variants. For Ehrman's thesis to be true, it would be necessary for most of the errors to be type 4, but these types of errors are covered in Bruce Metzger's comparative analysis mentioned above (that is, the analysis that concludes that the type 4 errors are less than 1%), and in the same line of approach van Andreas Köstenberger and Michael Kruger in their book The Heresy of Orthodoxy (ed. Crossway, Wheaton, 2010, p. 226). In fact, at least 95% of the New Testament is not questioned by current textual critics (cf. Greg Boyd, “How do you respond to Bart Ehrman's book Misquoting Jesus,” in ReKnew, January 8, 2008).

It's funny that Ehrman seems to be contradicting himself. Indeed, when mentioning that it is not possible to account for the original text due to the amount of errors, he exemplifies with additions and alterations to the original texts. That is, putting these examples in reality shows that it is possible to identify original texts.

Finally, Ehrman says that verses have been added, such as 1 John 5: 7, which would account for the Holy Trinity, or Luke 22:20, 24:12 and 24:51, and this would be problematic. However, the Holy Trinity "is not based on that text of the first letter of John and can be verified in many other passages that are not in question" (Urbina, 2018, p. 72); and, with respect to the additions in the book of Luke, "practically the same phrases and words appear in other well-established texts (Matthew 26:28, John 20: 3-7 and Acts 1: 9,11, respectively)" (Urbina, 2018, p. 73).

This analysis by Urbina allows us to understand that the criticism of the New Testament bibliographic evidence that Ehrman develops in his book loses its consistency.

See also

• List of Bible verses not included in modern translations
• Textual criticism
• Textus Receptus

External links

• Misquoting Jesus Internet Archive
• Misquoting Jesus from bartdehrman.com
• Misquoting Jesus excerpts from NPR
• Stanford lecture on "Misquoting Jesus"