Misquoting Jesus

Bart D. Ehrman opens with a personal narrative that frames the book's central question. Raised in an Episcopalian family in Kansas in the 1950s, Ehrman had a "born-again" experience as a high school sophomore and went on to study at Moody Bible Institute, where all faculty and students affirmed the doctrine of verbal, plenary inspiration: the belief that the Bible is inerrant down to its very words. There he encountered a foundational problem: The original manuscripts of the New Testament no longer exist. What survives are copies made years or centuries later, and these copies contain errors, both accidental and intentional. At Wheaton College he studied Greek, and at Princeton Theological Seminary he trained in textual criticism, the discipline of reconstructing original texts from surviving copies, under the field's leading expert, Bruce M. Metzger. A turning point came when a professor responded to Ehrman's elaborate defense of an apparent error in Mark's Gospel with the comment, "Maybe Mark just made a mistake" (9). That concession opened the door to recognizing other discrepancies across the Gospels and apostolic letters, and over time Ehrman came to see the Bible not as a divine blueprint but as a deeply human book, written by different authors with different perspectives and theologies.

With this autobiographical frame established, Ehrman traces Christianity's origins as a "bookish" religion. Judaism, from which Christianity emerged, was unusual in the ancient world for grounding sacred authority in written texts, especially the Torah (the five books of Moses). Most polytheistic religions of the Roman Empire centered on ritual sacrifice and had no doctrinal books. Christianity inherited this textual orientation: Jesus was a Jewish teacher who read and interpreted scripture, and his earliest followers continued to treat written texts as authoritative. A wide range of Christian literature emerged, including Paul's letters (the earliest Christian writings, dating from around 49 C.E.), Gospels, apocalyptic prophecy, and antiheretical treatises. The canon of the New Testament, the officially recognized collection of sacred books, took centuries to solidify. The first surviving list matching today's 27 books came from Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, in 367 C.E., nearly 300 years after those books were written.

Ehrman then examines how these texts were copied and transmitted. Reproducing a book meant copying it by hand, letter by letter, and this process inevitably introduced changes. Early Christian scribes were not professionals but literate members of their congregations, especially prone to error. Ancient Greek manuscripts compounded the difficulty by using scriptio continua, continuous writing with no spaces between words, no punctuation, and no distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters. Mistakes accumulated as each copy was made from an already flawed copy. Scribes also made deliberate changes, correcting perceived mistakes, harmonizing contradictory passages, or adjusting theology. Ehrman presents two prominent examples of major scribal additions: the story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:12), absent from the oldest manuscripts and written in a style foreign to John; and the last 12 verses of Mark (16:9–20), likewise absent from the earliest manuscripts. Without the added ending, Mark's Gospel concludes with women fleeing Jesus's empty tomb in fear, telling no one what they have seen.

The book traces the history of the printed Greek New Testament. The Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus produced the first published edition in 1516, working hastily from a handful of late medieval manuscripts. For the book of Revelation, he lacked the final page of his source and translated the missing verses from Latin back into Greek, creating readings found in no surviving Greek manuscript. This flawed edition became the basis for all subsequent printed Greek texts for over 300 years, including the text behind the King James Bible. Ehrman recounts the controversy over the Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7–8), the only passage in the Bible that explicitly states the doctrine of the Trinity, which Erasmus omitted because it appeared in no Greek manuscript available to him. When critics demanded its inclusion, a Greek manuscript was apparently manufactured for the occasion, and Erasmus added the passage to later editions.

A turning point came in 1707, when John Mill, a fellow of Queens College, Oxford, published an edition documenting some 30,000 places of variation among roughly 100 Greek manuscripts. The classical scholar Richard Bentley countered critics by arguing that the variants existed before Mill noticed them and that more manuscripts increase the likelihood of recovering the original text. Ehrman surveys subsequent scholars who advanced the field: Johann Albrecht Bengel, who established the principle that the more difficult reading is more likely original; Johann J. Wettstein, whose research cast doubt on passages affirming Christ's divinity; Karl Lachmann, who in 1831 produced the first Greek New Testament based entirely on ancient evidence rather than the Textus Receptus, the standard printed text descended from Erasmus's edition; Lobegott Friedrich Constantine von Tischendorf, who discovered the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus at Saint Catherine's monastery on Mount Sinai; and Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort, whose 1881 edition classified manuscripts into textual families and produced a Greek text close to what scholars use today. More than 5,700 Greek manuscripts are now catalogued, with an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 variant readings, more variations than there are words in the New Testament.

Ehrman applies textual-critical methods to three cases where he argues most English translations present the wrong text. In Mark 1:41, he contends the original text describes Jesus as angry, not compassionate, when approached by a leper; scribes softened the emotion because anger seemed inappropriate. In Luke 22:43–44, the verses describing Jesus sweating blood were likely added to counter docetism (the belief that Jesus only appeared to be human), since they contradict Luke's consistent portrayal of Jesus as calm during his Passion. In Hebrews 2:9, the original text stated that Jesus died "apart from God," not "by the grace of God"; scribes altered the unsettling phrase to a more familiar one.

The book's final chapters demonstrate how theological and social controversies of the second and third centuries shaped scribal behavior. To counter adoptionists (who believed Jesus was a man adopted by God at baptism), scribes altered texts to emphasize his divinity, changing "who" to "God" in 1 Timothy 3:16 and modifying the voice at Jesus's baptism in Luke 3:22. To counter docetists, scribes added material stressing Jesus's physical humanity, including the bloody sweat passage and the words over the bread and cup at the Last Supper in Luke. To counter Gnostic separationists (who believed the divine Christ abandoned the human Jesus at the crucifixion), scribes changed "apart from God" to "by the grace of God" in Hebrews and altered Jesus's cry on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Social conflicts also left traces: Scribes added a passage silencing women in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, which contradicts Paul's assumption elsewhere that women pray and prophesy aloud; they diminished the prominence of women such as the apostle Junia; they deleted Jesus's prayer of forgiveness in Luke 23:34; and they modified passages that pagan critics used to mock Jesus.

Ehrman concludes by reflecting that both scribes and the original New Testament authors transformed the traditions they inherited. Luke changed Mark; John differs from the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke); Paul differs from James. Each author shaped the tradition through his own perspective, and readers who merge these distinct voices into a single harmonized narrative lose what each writer was trying to say. Reading itself, Ehrman argues, is an act of interpretation, and the scribes who sometimes altered the words on the page did what all readers do: They tried to understand what the authors wrote while making sense of the text in their own world.