Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman

(Book Review)

Subtitle: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

            In my first Bart Erhman book review, I expressed some disappointment with Forged, but also came away with the feeling that Bart Ehrman was a talented writer, and that I wanted to check out more of his books.

            I was right to stick with Ehrman, because this book was a fascinating read from beginning to end.

            This book is the one that put Bart Ehrman on the map.  It’s not his first book, but this was his first bestseller that catapulted him to broad attention back in 2005.

The Review

          This is a book about the textual problems with the New Testament.  (The textual problems with the Old Testament would be a fascinating subject matter as well, but that’s not Ehrman’s area of expertise, so this book focuses only on the New Testament.)

            Much of what is inside the book is not new and, in and of itself it’s not even that controversial.  Most of the textual problems Bart Ehrman points out should already be footnoted as problem areas in your Bibles  —for example Mark 16:9—20 (the resurrected Jesus appears to his disciples), or John 7:53—8:11 (the woman caught in adultery).  And since Christian scholars already acknowledge these problems exists, much of what Bart Ehrman has to say in this book could just as easily come from a Christian writer—were it not for the fact that Christians tend to avoid drawing attention to these issues.  (For example: the history of how Christianity went from an unquestioning faith in the authority of the Latin Vulgate, to the acknowledgement that there were serious problems that existed with the surviving Latin and Greek manuscripts; how modern biblical scholars determine which are the best and most reliable manuscripts; and the techniques scholars use to try and reconstruct what the original words must have been from all the surviving conflicting manuscripts.)

            What makes this book much more charged is that Bart Ehrman explicitly ties the subject material into his own personal story of how he lost his faith in Christianity.

            Ehrman starts the book out with an autobiographical account of how he grew up in an Episcopalian background, became a born-again Christian as a teenager, and went into Biblical studies at Moody Bible College, Wheaton, and finally Princeton Seminary.  At each step of the way, his faith was challenged as he learned more about the Bible, but the final straw came one day at Princeton.

            As Ehrman relates it (pages 8-10):

            A turning point came in my second semester, in a course I was taking with a much revered and pious professor named Cullen Story.  The course was on the exegesis of the Gospel of Mark. .... [W]e had to write a final term paper on an interpretive crux of our own choosing.  I chose a passage in Mark 2, where Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees because his disciples had been walking through a grain field, eating the grain on the Sabbath.  Jesus wants to show the Pharisees that “Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath” and so reminds them of what the great King David had done when he and his men were hungry, how they went into the Temple “when Abiathar was the high priest” and ate the show bread, which was only for the priests to eat. One of the well-known problems of the passage is that when one looks at the Old Testament passage that Jesus is citing (1 Sam. 21:1-6), it turns out that David did this not when Abiathar was the high priest, but, in fact, when Abiathar’s father Abimelech was. In other words, this is one of those passages that have been pointed to in order to show that the Bible is not inerrant at all but contains mistakes.

            In my paper for Professor Story, I developed a long and complicated argument to the effect that even though Mark indicates this happened “when Abiathar was the high priest,” it doesn’t really mean that Abiathar was the high priest, but that the event took place in the part of the scriptural text that has Abiathar as one of the main characters.  My argument was based on the meaning of the Greek words involved and was a bit convoluted.  I was pretty sure Professor Story would appreciate the argument, since I knew him as a good Christian scholar who obviously (like me) would never think there could be a genuine error in the Bible. But at the end of my paper he made a simple one-line comment that for some reason went straight through me.  He wrote: “Maybe Mark just made a mistake.”  I started thinking about it, considering all the work I had put into the paper, realizing that I had had to do some pretty fancy exegetical footwork to get around the problem, and that my solution was in fact a bit of a stretch. I finally concluded, “Hmm… maybe Mark did make a mistake.”

            Once I had made that admission, the floodgates opened. For if there could be one little, picayune mistake in Mark 2, maybe there could be mistakes in other places as well.  Maybe, when Jesus says later in Mark 4 that the mustard seed is “the smallest of all seeds on the earth,” maybe I don’t need to come up with a fancy explanation for how the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds when I know full well it isn’t. And maybe these “mistakes” apply to bigger issues.  Maybe when Mark says that Jesus was crucified the day after the Passover meal was eaten (Mark 14:12, 15:25) and John says he died the day before it was eaten (John 19:14)—maybe that is a genuine difference. Or when Luke indicates in his account of Jesus’s birth that Joseph and Mary returned to Nazareth just over a month after they had come to Bethlehem (and performed the rites of purification; Luke 2:39), whereas Matthew indicates they instead fled to Egypt (Matt. 2:19-22)—maybe that is a difference. Or when Paul says that after he converted on the way to Damascus he did not go to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before him (Gal. 1:16-17), whereas the book of Acts says that that was the first thing he did after leaving Damascus (Acts 9: 26)—maybe that is a difference.

            From this revelation, Ehrman proceeds to the problem of textual manuscripts:

           

            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. (p. 10).

            Aah, but the Christian response to this is that it doesn’t matter that we don’t have the originals, because the same divine power that inspired the originals also ensured that the copies stayed faithful, right?

            Well, according to Ehrman this point is precisely the problem:

            [T]hese copies all differ form one another, in many thousands of places.  As we will see later in this book, 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….

            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, as we will see, we simply cannot be sure that we have reconstructed the original 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!

            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. If he wanted his people to have his words, surely he would have given them to them (and possibly even given them the words in a language they could understand, rather than Greek and Hebrew). The fact that we don’t have the words surely must show, I reasoned, that he did not preserve them for us.  And if he didn’t perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words. (p.10-11).

            As you can see, in his introduction Ehrman deliberately frames the whole textual problem from the perspective of a skeptic.

            However, once he gets done setting the tone of the book, not every section carries this polemical charge.  For much of the meat in the book, Ehrman goes into his scholarly mode.  He’s not so much interested in making a theological point as he is in talking about a subject that fascinates him, and he wants to convey this interest to the reader as he explains how exactly Biblical scholars are able to re-construct their approximation of the original manuscripts from all the varied texts that we have.

            As I read the book, I found myself wondering: why I was just hearing about all this now?  Why hadn’t my Bible teachers ever explained this process to me in school?

            But it’s not just their fault.  To my own detriment, why had I never been curious about this before?  I had seen in my Bible many times footnotes indicating that the text was uncertain, or that variant readings were possible.  But it had never occurred to me to be curious as to how scholars arrived at these decisions.  (Maybe I was just intellectually lazy.)

            Ehrman himself highlights how overlooked this whole subject material has been in the past.  It’s not just that he is writing about this from a different perspective than Christians—it’s that Christians haven’t been writing about it at all.

            What is striking, however, is that most readers—even those interested in Christianity, in the Bible, in biblical studies, both those who believe the Bible is inerrant and those who do not— know almost nothing about textual criticism.  And it’s not difficult to see why.  Despite the fact that this has been a topic of sustained scholarship for more than three hundred years, there is scarcely a single book written about it for a lay audience—that is, for those who know nothing about it, who don’t have the Greek and other languages necessary for the in-depth study of it, who do not realize there is even a “problem” with the text, but who would be intrigued to learn both what the problems are and how scholars have set about dealing with them.

            That is the kind of book this is—to my knowledge, the first of its kind.  (p. 15)

My Own Personal Memories

          I’m going to go off on a little bit of a tangent here with some of my own personal memories.

            I don’t ever recall any of the textual problems with the Bible being taught at all in my religious school. But since modern translations of the Bible are usually pretty good about footnoting textual problems, most of us noticed it on our own.  (In my school, the teachers told us Bible stories from Kindergarten to 2nd grade, but from 3rd grade we were given our own copy of the NIV Bible and gradually we were expected to do more and more of the reading on our own.) 

            I remember in 6th grade my Bible teacher was talking about Rahab the prostitute, and making a point about how God can sometimes use sinful people to bring about good results.  (Put aside for the moment that the “good result” intended here was the mass slaughter of the entire town of Jericho.)  A couple of my fellow classmates raised their hands and pointed out that the footnotes in the NIV said that possibly Rahab was an innkeeper instead of a prostitute, and thus the whole theological point our teacher was trying to make was possibly moot.

            Our teacher just laughed it off.  “You know how there’s so many lawsuits going around these days?” he said.  “I imagine if Rahab was still alive now, this would be something she would want to sue someone about.”

            [Granted this example is from the Old Testament, which is outside the scope of Ehrman’s book.]

            The other memory I have is from sometime in my teenage years.  I was having dinner at my grandparents house, and they concluded each meal with devotions from the Christian Reformed publication ---I think the name was Today (is that right?) and accompanying Bible readings. 

            That month, Today had been working its way through the Gospel of Mark, and that particular night was the devotional on Mark 16.

            To its credit, Today didn’t try and dodge the issue that Mark 16:9-20 was added by a later writer.  (Probably they didn't have a choice--the footnotes in the Bible  so clearly highlight the additions that it would have been difficult to avoid.)  Instead, Today insisted that even though this was a later addition to Mark, it was still the inspired word of God just like everything else in the Bible.  (The logic being, I think, that by virtue of it being in the Bible, ipso facto it therefore must be inspired.)

            After my grandfather finished reading the devotional aloud, he added, “Hmm.  That’s very true and important to remember.” 

            Still, there was something about the way he said it.  I got the impression that this was all new information to him, and that he was having some difficulty processing it.

            It didn’t sit entirely well with me either, despite Today’s attempts to re-assure.  If God had wanted these last 11 verses in the Gospel of Mark, why hadn’t he just originally inspired Mark to write them?  Why did someone have to come along later and add them?

            And if these last 11 verses weren’t inspired, then why did God allow the Bible to become corrupted?

           

            Other than that, my only experience is just noticing the footnotes on my own.  (In 7th grade, my church gave us all a copy of the NIV Student Bible for confirmation, and the front of the Student Bible had an independent Bible study plan—if you read one chapter of the Bible a day, in 3 years you can read the whole thing.  For 7th, 8th and 9th grade I dutifully worked my way through on Bible chapter a day.)  But at the time, how textual variants arose, and how exactly scholars determined what the correct reading was, never concerned me.  Perhaps I was just intellectual complacent. 

            But also, when you’re a Christian, you have a vested emotional interest in not really opening up Pandora’s Box by thinking about these things too deeply.

A Critique of Bart Ehrman

          Since this book was published, a number of people have written critiques and rebuttals.

            This one here caught my eye because it was written by an atheist, Common Sense Atheism, someone who you would think would be sympathetic to Ehrman’s argument.  But no, Common Sense Atheism claims that Ehrman exaggerates the textual problems of the New Testament.

            It’s worth reading the whole critique in full, but I’ll just quote a small section of Common Sense Atheism’s  thoughts here.

            But of course Ehrman knows (p 87) that the vast number of textual variants we have is a blessing not a curse, because his books for a scholarly audience spend every page using those variants to reconstruct the original text.  In comparison, we can do no such thing with the works of Plato: our earliest manuscript comes 1200 years after Plato lived! We have no hopes of reconstructing Plato’s original text, but when it comes to the New Testament we have thousands of copies, and dozens of manuscripts within just two centuries of the originals….

           The fact is there are a lot ofvariants in our manuscripts—but that’s because we have so many manuscripts,each of which helps us reconstruct the original text.  If only we had so many early, variantmanuscripts for Plato!

            My own reading is that Misquoting Jesus doesn’t necessarily disagree with this, but it’s a question of emphasis.

            A critical reading of Ehrman is that he is deliberately sensationalizing the problem. 

            A more sympathetic reading of Ehrman is that he is following the academic tradition of starting with a controversial statement, and then refining it more in the analysis.  Ehrman starts out by stating that there are thousands upon thousands of variants in the New Testament, but then he goes onto explain that most of these are not actually that important.

            Either way, a close reading of Ehrman shows he does acknowledge that the variants can be used to reconstruct the original text.  (Whether or not he places enough emphasis on this is I suppose debatable.)

            Erhman believes that it’s impossible to know for sure what the original words of the Bible were.  Those words were lost to us the moment the document went from the original to the first copy.  Any mistakes made in copying at this initial stage would have been transmitted to all the other copies.

            However, by comparing the wide range of copies available to us, Ehrman says it is possible in most cases to at least reconstruct what the early textual tradition was.

            The problem, for someone who comes from Bart Ehrman’s fundamentalist background, is that it is necessary to do this reconstruction in the first place.  If every word of the Bible is supposed to be inspired by God, then why did God allow so many variants to come into the text?  Why didn’t God just ensure that the text was correctly copied each time?  Surely it is within God’s power, and if God interjected himself in human affairs to inspire the text, why not interject himself into the copying process?

            As Bart Ehrman himself says:

            [T]he only reason (I came to think) for God to inspire the Bible would be so that his people would have his actual words; but if he really wanted people to have his actual words, surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he had miraculously inspired them in the first place. Given the circumstance that he didn’t preserve the words, the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn’t gone through the trouble of inspiring them. (p. 211).

            Moreover, as Erhman points out, the field of textual reconstruction has only really existed relatively recently.  If God considered his word important for all people, why did generations of Christians have to rely on the flawed King James Version?  (Would George Hensley, the founder of the snake-handling churches in 1909, not have died of a snake bite if he had known that the verses in Mark commanding believers to handle snakes was a later addition?)

            Thirdly although most of the time it is possible to figure out what the text original said, there are exceptions and Bart Ehrman is more concerned with the exceptions—the areas where we still have question marks over what the Bible really said.  After highlighting many of these problem areas in the main body of the text, Ehrman sums them all up in the conclusion:

             

            To be sure, of all the hundreds of thousands of textual changes found among our manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial, of no real importance for anything other than showing that scribes could not spell or keep focused any better than the rest of us.  It would be wrong, however, to say—as people sometimes do—that the changes in our text have no real bearing on what the texts mean or on the theological conclusions that one draws from them.  We have seen, in fact, that just the opposite is the case.  In some instances the very meaning of the text is at stake, depending on how one resolves a textual problem: Was Jesus an angry man? Was he completely distraught in the face of death?  Did he tell his disciples that they could drink poison without being harmed? Did he let an adulteress off the hook with nothing but a mild warning?  Is the doctrine of the Trinity explicitly taught in the New Testament?  Is Jesus actually called the “unique God” there? Does the New Testament indicate that even the Son of God himself does not know when the end will come? The questions go on and on, and all of them are related to how one resolves difficulties in the manuscript tradition as it comes down to us.

(p. 207-208—all of the examples briefly mentioned here refer to something discussed in more detail in the body of the book.)

            Another thing Ehrman points out in the body of the book is that the whole debate about women in the church (something the Christian Reformed Church, in my hometown, has been tearing itself to pieces over for the last 40 years) is directly related to textual variants.

            The verses in 1 Corinthians 14:33-35, appear to have been added by a later scribe, and are not in the original words of Paul:

            As in all the churches of God’s people, the women should keep quiet in the meetings. They are not allowed to speak; as the Jewish Law says, they must not be in charge. If they want to find out about something, they should ask their husbands at home. It is a disgraceful thing for a woman to speak in a church meeting.

[Dale Martin also points out the problem with these verses in his New Testament Lecture series.]

             The other verses forbidding women from being in authority in the church come from 1st Timothy, but since 1st Timothy wasn’t written by Paul, but was written by someone else using Paul’s name, those verses are equally problematic.

            The fact that the church has placed so much emphasis on these few verses shows how big a problem it is when we discover that Paul didn’t even write them. 

            As Ehrman says: “Think of all the sermons preached on the basis of a single word in a text: what if the word is one the author didn’t actually write?” (p.56)

            As for the fact that the resurrected Jesus appearing to his disciples in Mark, the woman taken in adultery in John, and the doctrine of the Trinity in 1st John are all later additions, Common Sense Atheism doesn’t think this is a problem because it’s not new information.   Three of these [problematic passages highlighted by Ehrman] (Mark 16:9-20,John 7:53-8:11, 1 John 5:7-8) have been rejected by scholars for over acentury, and are marked as inauthentic in modern translations. No textualproblem there.

            But the point isn’t what whether these textual problems are new or old, the problem is that these passages were not in the original texts.  So the theological problem—did God inspire them or didn’t he?—can not be dismissed so easily.

            All that being said, Common Sense Atheism’s critique of Ehrman’s use of other passages (Hebrew 2:9, Matt 24:36) seem to be valid, and his essay is well worth reading as a counter-point to Ehrman.

Hitchens and Ehrman

          I’ve brought this subject up twice before now (here and here), and I realize I’m beginning to sound like a broken record on this issue.  So this is the last time I’ll mention it, I promise.

            After reading Christopher Hitchen’s book: God is Not Great, I puzzled over where Hitchens got this from:

“One of Professor Bart Ehrman’s more astonishing findings is that the account of Jesus’s resurrection in the Gospel of Mark was only added many years later.”  (p. 169)

            Hitchens didn’t actually cite his source here, leaving me to puzzle in my original review where he got his information from.  But I’m now pretty sure Hitchens was referring to this was the book, because this is the book where Ehrman deals with the extra verses.  But Hitchens obviously didn’t read the book very carefully.

            First of all, this was not one of “Professor Bart Ehrman’s findings”.  Scholars have known for over a century that the last 11 verses in Mark are a later edition and every modern translation of the Bible should have this clearly indicated.  Bart Ehrman discusses in this book how scholars arrived at the conclusion that verses 16:9-20 are a later edition, but he at no point does he take credit for discovering it himself.

            Secondly, even without those later verses, Jesus is still resurrected in the Gospel of Mark.  There’s an empty tomb, and the angels tell the women that Jesus has been raised. 

            The difference is (unlike the later Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John) the resurrected Jesus never makes any appearance in the original Gospel of Mark, and the disciples never actually see Jesus’s resurrected body.  But it is an exaggeration to say that there is no resurrection in Mark.  Bart Ehrman is clear on this—Hitchens just got sloppy.

Another Review
In his follow-up book, Jesus, Interrupted (book review coming soon), Bart Ehrman recommends Ben Witherington's review [LINK HERE] as one of the more thoughtful critiques of this book.  Ben Witherington mixes criticism with praise in his review (no doubt why Ehrman himself recommends it.)  What is noticeable to me is that even though Ben Witherington appears to be a conservative Christian, and is obviously coming at this whole problem from a different angle than Ehrman, he has no problem with Ehrman's description of textual criticism as a field:
The first four chapters provide a laypersons guide to textual criticism, and while one could quibble with this or that, basically Ehrman has provided us with a clear statement of the principles applied in that discipline. This is material I could happily assign to seminary students wanting to understand the basics of text criticism. I don't have a lot of qualms or quibbles about much of what he says there

But the very next sentence starts out with that ominous word However... He then begins his critique.
Basically my reaction to Witherington's critique of Bart Ehrman is similar to my statements about Common Sense Atheism’s critique.  Witherington is trying to show that Ehrman has over-stated the problem, but the very fact that there is a problem to being with indicates God has been careless with the scripture he supposedly directly inspired.

Link of the Day
Professor Chomsky Interview: Reflections on Education and Creativity

Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman: Book Review