“The Bible’s Portrait of Jesus Can’t Be Trusted Because the Church Tampered with the Text”
CHALLENGE #2
“THE BIBLE’S PORTRAIT OF JESUS CAN’T BE TRUSTED BECAUSE THE CHURCH TAMPERED WITH THE TEXT”
The more I studied the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, the more I realized just how radically the text had been altered over the years at the hands of scribes. . . . In some instances, the very meaning of the text is at stake.
Bart D. Ehrman1
These, is ... an endless record of persistent ideological doctoring of the canonical texts from the earliest dates.
Atheist Richard C. Carrier 2
When I was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, a college student from a small Midwestern town was hired as a summer intern. Her parents were nervous about her working in such a big and volatile city, so her mother made a habit of regularly calling to check up on her.
One day the phone rang on the intern’s desk, and a passing reporter picked up the phone. When the intern’s mother asked if she could speak to her daughter, the reporter replied: “Oh, I’m sorry — she’s in the morgue.”
The shriek through the phone line instantly sensitized the reporter to the fact that not everyone was familiar with newspaper jargon. He wasn’t referring to the county morgue, where dead bodies are temporarily stored and autopsied; in journalism lingo, the morgue is the newspaper library where old articles are filed.
The term morgue is still in use today, but technology has radically transformed how newspapers handle their archives. When I was at the Tribune, librarians would meticulously clip articles from the newspaper, neatly fold them, and file them in yellow envelopes — one each for the topic of the article, every person mentioned in the story, and the name of the reporter. Outside researchers were rarely granted access to the morgue because of concerns about protecting this valuable repository of history.
Today many newspaper archives can be electronically searched through the Internet. In 2006, the New York Times announced it was giving its home subscribers free access to every article published in the newspaper since 1851 — a treasure trove of historical nuggets that offer on-the-spot accounts of times gone by.3
Most historians today don’t get to handle the original newspaper clippings on yellowing and brittle newsprint. Instead, they get an electronic copy of the story—one that easily could have been altered by someone intent on rewriting history. For example, the New York Times, to its unending embarrassment, was repeatedly scooped by its rival, the Washington Post, during the Watergate investigation in the 1970s. What if someone in the Times’s library simply doctored the texts of some Watergate articles to make it appear that the Times had actually beaten the Post to the punch?
When a researcher accessed those altered articles, how would he be able to figure out what had been part of the original stories and what had been added later? There would be numerous clues: later additions would be self-serving to the Times. Their writing style may differ subtly from the rest of the story. Instead of fitting into the smooth narrative of the article, they may seem awkwardly out of place. Most importantly, researchers could visit municipal libraries around the country and check micofilm copies of the same Times articles. These versions would predate the counterfeit articles, and a comparison would quickly unmask alterations to the electronic copy.
This is roughly analogous to the way scholars try to reconstruct the original text of the New Testament. The earliest papyrus copies have long ago been reduced to dust. Up until the first Greek New Testament was produced on a printing press in the early sixteenth century, scribes would make handwritten copies of New Testament manuscripts. Errors were inevitable in this very human process — so how can we be sure that the text we have today hasn’t been altered in significant ways?
Scholars trained in “textual criticism” use a variety of techniques to try to determine the wording of an original text. They meticulously comb through manuscripts in a painstaking search for anomalies.
They carefully compare copies of ancient manuscripts from different dates and various regions to see where they agree and where they differ. This was considered a fairly arcane endeavor—until one of the world’s leading textual critics, Bart D. Ehrman, penned the first general-interest book on the topic, Misquoting Jesus, which exploded onto the bestsellers list in 2006. For months, it was the top religion book in America.
Actually, the book’s title is a misnomer. There’s almost nothing in its 242 pages about the words of Jesus having been misquoted.4 The book’s underlying message, however, was that readers can’t really trust the text of their Bible—and that the common portrait of Jesus gleaned from the New Testament might not be reliable after all.
“WE DON’T HAVE THE ORIGINALS!”
Ehrman’s book immediately set off alarm bells among the public. Ehrman, head of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reported that the number of variants, or differences, between various handwritten manuscripts, total between 200,000 and perhaps 400,000—more variants among the manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament!5
“How does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes — sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly?” Ehrman asked. “We don’t have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.”6
Even more troubling, Ehrman said that some scribes through the centuries intentionally tampered with the text for theological and other reasons. “In some instances,” he said, “the very meaning of the text is at stake, depending on how one resolves a textual problem.”7 For example:
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____8
Many readers were stunned when Ehrman dismissed the authenticity of one of the most beloved passages in the Bible—the moving story of a compassionate Jesus forgiving an adulterous woman. What’s more, he said, the ending of the Gospel of Mark, which reports Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances, and the Bible’s most unambiguous passage describing the Trinity also are later additions that don’t really belong in the New Testament.
Ehrman isn’t the only scholar questioning the fidelity with which the New Testament has been transmitted. “Even careful copyists make some mistakes, as every proofreader knows. So we will never be able to claim certain knowledge of exactly what the original text of any biblical writing was,” wrote members of the Jesus Seminar.9 Said atheist Richard C. Carrier: “Many of these conflicting readings cannot be explained as mere scribal errors, but are ideological in nature.”10 Nevertheless, it was Ehrman’s book —readable, witty, and seemingly highly credible—that really stoked the controversy. Part of the reason for the book’s widespread success was the way Ehrman winsomely recounted how supposed errors in the text of the New Testament launched him on a personal journey from Christianity to agnosticism.
He described having “a bona fide born-again experience” through a Christian student group in high school, later graduating from conservative Moody Bible Institute (“a kind of Christian boot camp”) and evangelical Wheaton College, the alma mater of Billy Graham. He came to a turning point while studying at the more liberal Princeton Theological Seminary, where he wrote a paper to offer ways to explain away an apparent discrepancy in the Gospel of Mark. He said he “had to do some pretty fancy exegetical footwork to get around the problem,” but he thought his professor, “a good Christian scholar,” would appreciate his effort. Instead, the professor simply wrote on the paper: “Maybe Mark just made a mistake.”11
That comment, Ehrman said, “went straight through me.” He concluded, well, yes, perhaps Mark did err—and then “the floodgates opened.”12 Maybe, he said, there were other mistakes in the Bible as well. This eventually resulted in “a seismic change,” prompting him to conclude that the Bible “was a human book from beginning to end.”13 Today, he describes himself as a “happy agnostic,” who believes that when the end of his life comes, he will “just cease to exist, like the mosquito you swatted yesterday.”14
The issues he raises in his book are now challenging the faith of others. Here’s the text of an email that I received:
Please help me. I have just read Bart Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus. I was raised in the church and I’m now 26 years old.
This book has devastated my faith. I don’t want to be kept in the dark; I want to know what really is going on in the Bible and what I should believe, even if it goes against what I’ve believed since I was a little boy. Is Ehrman correct ?15
That’s the question that prompted me to jump on a jet for Dallas to seek out another renowned textual critic whose scholarly credentials rival Ehrman’s. At stake was nothing less than whether the New Testament can be trusted to provide a reliable picture of the real Jesus.
INTERVIEW #2: DANIEL B. WALLACE, PH.D.
Chilling escapes from death, amazing coincidences, weird twists of fate, oddball occurrences—sooner or later, all reporters get pressed by their editors into writing a short item about some sort of wacky circumstance that belongs in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. I’ve covered my share through the years. People read them with wide eyes, then put down the paper and exclaim, “Wow, that’s really strange!” These are the type of articles that get forwarded all over the Internet.
Daniel B. Wallace could be one of those stories. How’s this for bizarre: Wallace, though he hardly knew the Greek language, taught himself to become a world’s leading expert in ancient Greek—and he did it by studying textbooks about Greek that he himself had written!
Okay, that calls for an explanation. First, some background: Wallace is a professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and one of the world’s foremost authorities on textual criticism. The title of his doctoral dissertation suggests how specialized the study of New Testament Greek can be: The Article with Multiple Substantives Connected by kai in the New Testament: Semantics and Significance. Wallace has done postdoctoral study at Tyndale House, Cambridge, as well as at Tubingen University and the Institut fur Neutestamentliche Textforschung, both in Germany.
Currently, he’s executive director of a new institute for textual criticism, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, whose objective is to digitally preserve New Testament manuscripts so scholars and others can examine them via enhancement software on the Internet.16 Between 2002 and 2006, the center took more than 35,000 high-resolution digital photographs of Greek New Testament manuscripts, including several recently discovered texts.
Wallace has traveled the world so he could personally study ancient manuscripts, visiting the Vatican, Cambridge University, Mt. Sinai, Istanbul, Florence, Berlin, Dresden, Munster, Cologne, Pat-mos, Jerusalem, and other sites.
He was the senior New Testament editor of the New English Translation of the Bible (NET), which has more explanatory footnotes than any other one-volume Bible translation ever published, and is a member of the prestigious Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas. His articles have appeared in New Testament Studies, Novum Testamen-tum, Biblica, Westminster Theological Journal, and the Bulletin for Biblical Research. In addition, he contributed forty articles to Nelson’s Illustrated Bible Dictionary and has over 150 essays on biblical studies posted on the Biblical Studies Foundation website.17
Among the several books he has coauthored is the popular-level Reinventing Jesus, in which he critiques Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus. But Wallace is most famous among seminarians for his textbook Greek Grammar beyond the Basics, which is used by more than two-thirds of the schools that teach intermediate Greek, including Yale Divinity School, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Cambridge University.
It was after Wallace completed this textbook that he was stricken with a crippling bout of viral encephalitis, which confined him to a wheelchair for more than a year and wreaked havoc with his memory. At one point, he had difficulty remembering his wife’s name. Eventually, he lost his knowledge of Greek almost completely—which is what prompted him to use his own book and others to actually relearn the difficult ancient language. And that, as radio commentator Paul Harvey likes to say, is the rest of the story.
In the world of textual critics, Wallace’s name is one of the few that can be appropriately uttered alongside of Ehrman’s. That’s what brought me knocking on the door of his suburban Dallas home one Friday evening, which happens to be pizza night in the Wallace household. We sat around his kitchen table, enjoying dinner and a casual conversation, and then adjourned to his office, a two-story dark-wood library with a capacity of six thousand books.
Wallace, with unruly dark gray hair and a graying goatee, couldn’t resist showing me his prized possession. Carefully removing a thick volume from the bookshelf, he slowly opened it on his desk. It was one of only 450 modern reproductions of Codex Vaticanus, a manuscript dating less than 250 years after the New Testament was written. Some say the original codex was among the fifty Bibles that Emperor Constantine ordered to be produced after the Council of Nicea.
Wallace gently turned the vellum pages to show me the columns of Greek neatly written in uncial (or capital) letters, stealing a glance at my reaction to see if I registered appropriate appreciation for the manuscript’s beauty, history, and significance. The truth was that I was awestruck. So detailed was this copy, meticulously handmade at the Vatican, that it even features holes in the pages at the same spots where the actual manuscript is worn through.
We retired to two facing leather chairs for our chat. Wearing a dark green T-shirt, blue jeans, and white socks, and with gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, Wallace was animated and focused even as the hour began turning late. He was a fascinating blend: a former California surfer who once prowled the churning waters off Newport Beach and who now relishes the countless hours he spends in austere monasteries and dusty libraries around Europe and the Middle East, painstakingly photographing ancient manuscripts to preserve them for scholars.
My plan was to steer our discussion to whether we can really trust the description of Jesus found in the texts we’ve inherited through the centuries — but inevitably, that meant bringing up Ehrman.
POSSIBILITY, PROBABILITY, CERTAINTY
“One conservative scholar wrote that Ehrman ‘has a strong ax to grind, and the fact that he grinds it well in fluid prose makes it all the more beguiling,’ ”18 I said. “But doesn’t this cut both ways? Scholars who are arguing for the reliability of the New Testament might also be accused of bias.”
“You can’t interpret the text without certain biases, but we should challenge our biases as much as possible,” Wallace replied, leaning back precariously in his swivel chair until it creaked in protest.
“One way to do that is to look for viewpoints that are shared by more than one group of people. The fact is that scholars across the theological spectrum say that in all essentials — not in every particular, but in all essentials—our New Testament manuscripts go back to the originals. Ehrman is part of a very small minority of textual critics in what he’s saying. Frankly, I don’t think he has challenged his biases; instead, I think he has fed them.”
“On one level,” I observed, “it seems Ehrman has merely told a general audience about the kind of issues that textual critics have grappled with for centuries.”
“That’s right. He peeled back the curtain on scholarly work, and that revelation alarmed many Christians, who weren’t equipped to fully understand the issues,” said Wallace. “On another level, though, he tries to create strong doubt as to what the original text said, using more innuendo than substance. Readers end up having far more doubts about what the Bible says than any textual critic today would ever have. I think Ehrman has simply overstated his case. Gordon Fee, the highly respected New Testament scholar, put it this way: ‘Unfortunately, Ehrman too often turns mere possibility into probability, and probability into certainty, where other equally viable reasons for [textual] corruption exist.’ ”19
I looked down at my notes. “How would you answer Robert Funk, who wrote with his Jesus Seminar coauthors: ‘Why, if God took such pains to preserve an inerrant text for posterity, did the spirit not provide for the preservation of original copies of the Gospels?’ ”20
Wallace chuckled. “Judging by how the medieval church worshiped all sorts of relics, it’s a good thing God didn’t do that!” he said. “Enough pieces of Jesus’ cross have been found to build the Rose Bowl. What kind of chaos would we have if people claimed to have an original of a particular book? Or if we actually did have the originals intact, what would happen? My guess is that those manuscripts would be venerated but not examined. They would be worshiped but not studied.” Leaning forward in his chair for emphasis, Wallace added: “God doesn’t want anyone — or anything—to be worshiped before him. That includes his Word. Frankly, Funk’s question strikes me as naive and even arrogant. Who is he to set terms for how God should act? And again, his view presupposes that we can’t possibly recover the original. Essentially, scholars do not have to come up with conjecture about what the wording of the original text might be. We have the wording of the original in the manuscripts somewhere. Pragmatically, we could say that the wording of the original can be found in the text of our published Greek New Testaments or in their footnotes.”
I pointed out that Mark D. Roberts, who holds a doctorate from Harvard in the study of religion, said that even if God did preserve the original copies of the New Testament, skeptics would probably say, “Well, that’s great. But this still doesn’t prove that what’s in them is divinely inspired. The Bible is a human book, whether or not you have the original manuscripts.”
“I think Roberts’ point is valid,” Wallace said. “Even if we did have the originals, skeptics who are philosophically committed to their position would try to explain them away. Many skeptics only appear to be liberals; they’re actually a species of fundamentalist. Martin Hengel said that the only difference between a fundamentalist and a radical liberal is their starting presuppositions. Their methods are the same: they start with where they want to end up and then look at all the evidence selective for their purposes, rather than being open to what the evidence actually reveals.”
INSPIRATION, INERRANCY, INFALLIBILITY
I wanted to get some definitions straight at the outset. “The Bible says that all scripture is ‘God-breathed,’ ”21 I said. “Exactly what do Christians believe was the process by which God created the New Testament?”
“We aren’t given a lot regarding the process of inspiration, but we know the Bible wasn’t dictated by God,” Wallace replied. “Look at the Old Testament: Isaiah has a huge vocabulary and is often considered the Shakespeare of the Hebrew prophets, while Amos was a simple farmer with a much more modest vocabulary. Yet both books were inspired. Obviously, this doesn’t mean verbal dictation. God wasn’t looking for stenographers but holy men to write his book.”
“Then how does inspiration work?” I asked.
“We get some clues from where Matthew quotes the Old Testament, saying, ‘This was spoken by the Lord through the prophet.’22 ‘By the Lord’ suggests God is the ultimate agent of that prophecy. ‘Through the prophet’ suggests an intermediate agent who also uses his personality. That means this prophet was not taking dictation from God; instead, God was communicating through visions, dreams, and so forth, and the prophet was putting it in his own words. So the process doesn’t coerce the human personality, yet ultimately the result is exactly what God wanted to produce.”
Seeking a crisp summary, I said, “Complete this sentence: when Christians say the Bible is inspired, they mean that . . .”
“. . . that it’s both the Word of God and the words of men. Lewis Sperry Chafer put it well: ‘Without violating the authors’ personalities, they wrote with their own feelings, literary abilities, and concerns. But in the end, God could say, That’s exactly what I wanted to have written.’
“Remarkably, the New Testament writers didn’t even know they were writing scripture, so obviously God’s work was behind the scenes. In the end, I think this is a greater miracle than a Bible coming down from heaven on golden tablets, because the books of the Bible are a collective product that men embraced as their own while ultimately— and often only much later—recognizing that there was another author behind the scenes. It wasn’t until one of the final books of the New Testament was written that Peter uses the word scripture in referring to Paul’s letters.”23
Wallace stopped for a moment, apparently pondering whether to offer one more remark. “Unfortunately,” he said as he continued, “some evangelicals have what one scholar called a ‘docetic bibliology.’ ”
“Hold on!” I said. “You’re going to have to define that.”
“That means they regard the Bible only as divine and not also a human product. Many seminary students start that way. I looked over a student’s shoulder while he was translating Greek in a workbook and said, ‘That must be from the Gospel of Mark, because the grammar is so bad.’ The student was surprised. I said, “Well, yeah, he’s one of the worst writers of Greek in the New Testament.’ But that doesn’t impact inspiration, because we’re dealing with what the product is, not how it’s communicated. If Mark Twain can say ‘ain’t,’ and it’s considered good writing, then you can have Mark do the same kind of thing.”
“Now, finish this sentence,” I said. “When Christians say the Bible is inerrant, they mean . . .”
“They mean a number of things. For some, it’s almost a magic-wand approach, where the Bible is treated like a modern scientific and historical textbook that’s letter perfect. Some Christians would say, for example, that the words of Jesus are in red letters because that’s exactly what he said.
“Well, if you compare the same incident in different Gospels, you’ll notice some differences in wording. That’s fine as long as we’re not thinking in terms of quotations being nailed exactly, like a tape recorder. They didn’t even have quotation marks in Greek. In ancient historiography, they were concerned with correctly getting the gist of what was said. The other view of inerrancy, on the other end of the spectrum, is to say the Bible is true in what it touches. So we can’t treat it like a scientific book or a twenty-first-century historical document.” “How do you define infallibility? ” I asked.
“My definition of infallibility is the Bible is true in what it teaches. My definition of inerrancy is that the Bible is true in what it touches. So infallibility is a more foundational doctrine, which says the Bible is true with reference to faith and practice. Inerrancy is built on that doctrine and it says that the Bible is also true when it comes to dealing with historical issues, but we still have to look at it in light of first-century historical practices.
“So if we were to build a pyramid of bibliology, the broad foundation would be: ‘I believe that God has done great acts in history and the Bible has recorded some of those.’ On top of that would be: ‘The Bible is telling me the truth when it comes to matters of faith and practice.’ And on top would be: ‘The Bible is true in what it touches.’ “Unfortunately, some have inverted the pyramid and tried to make it stand on its head. Then if you take someone like Ehrman, when a professor tries to kick the legs out from under inerrancy, it’s like the whole pyramid falls over. Ehrman ends up throwing out everything. The problem was that he was putting his priorities in the wrong place.”
“It was almost as if Ehrman were saying: ‘Find me one error and I’ll throw out the whole Bible,’ ” I said. “That’s something you hear at some ultraconservative Christian schools.”
“Good grief, that’s such a shockingly naive approach to take!” Wallace exclaimed. “You’ve basically turned the Bible into the fourth person of the Trinity, as if it should be worshiped. I’ve actually had Christians tell me Jesus is called the Word, the Bible is called the Word, and so I worship the Bible. That’s scary.”
I knew from Ehrman’s own account how finding one apparent discrepancy in the New Testament launched him on a journey toward agnosticism. I wondered what would happen to Wallace in a similar situation. “What if you found an incontrovertible error in the Bible?” I asked. “How would you react?”
He thought for a moment, then replied: “I’d say, well, I guess I have to make some adjustments about what I think about that top level of the pyramid. But it wouldn’t affect my foundational view of Christ. I don’t start by saying, ‘If the Bible has a few mistakes, I have to throw it all out.’ That’s not a logical position. We don’t take that attitude toward Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, or any other ancient historian’s writings. For instance, does the first-century Jewish historian Josephus need to be inerrant before we can affirm that he got anything right?
“If we do that to the Bible, we’re putting it on a pedestal and just inviting people to try to knock it off. What we need to do with scripture instead is say it’s a great witness to the person of Jesus Christ and the acts of God in history. Now, is it more than that? Yes, I think so. But whether it is or not, my salvation is still secure in Christ.”
“So it’s not necessary for a person to believe in inerrancy to be a Christian?” I asked.
“Personally, I believe in inerrancy,” he began. “However, I wouldn’t consider inerrancy to be a primary or essential doctrine for saving faith. It’s what I call a ‘protective shell’ doctrine. Picture a concentric circle, with the essential doctrines of Christ and salvation at the core. A little bit further out are some other doctrines until, finally, outside of everything is inerrancy. Inerrancy is intended to protect these inner doctrines. But if inerrancy is not true, does that mean that infallibility is not true? No. It’s a non sequitur to say I can’t trust the Bible in the minutiae of history, so therefore I can’t trust it in matters of faith and practice.
“The question I’m asking is: What must a person believe to be saved? Can you be saved if you don’t believe Jesus was raised from the dead or that he’s not God in the flesh? I don’t think the scriptures allow you that privilege. Can you be saved if you think that the demons in the Gospels were not real? I don’t think you’re in a good position to say that, but I don’t think it impacts your salvation directly. Can you be saved if you don’t believe in inerrancy? Yeah.
“Keep in mind that the first Christians didn’t even have a New Testament. All they had was the Old Testament and the proclamation of the eyewitnesses to the resurrection. And Christians down through church history have not always believed in inerrancy. It really became a major issue during the Reformation, and especially in the twentieth-century debates between modernism and fundamentalism. So it’s possible to be a Christian without holding to inerrancy or even infallibility.”
I nodded as he talked to indicate I was following him. “With that concentric-circle approach, then, a supposed error in the New Testament should not be fatal to a person’s faith,” I said.
“Absolutely,” he replied without hesitation. “It might affect inerrancy, which is an outer-shell doctrine, but dismantling that would not affect Christ, who’s a core doctrine.”
Looking for further clarification, I asked, “Are you saying doctrines like inerrancy and infallibility aren’t important?”
“No, not at all,” he said. “I’m just saying they’re not necessary for salvation. However, they are important — for instance, for spiritual health and growth.”
“How so?”
“If you doubt whether the Bible is an authoritative guide for faith and practice, it will inevitably affect your spiritual journey. You might begin questioning passages that are clear in their meaning, but they’re too convicting for you, so you reject them. You begin to pick and choose out of the Bible what you want to believe and obey. Thus, infallibility and inerrancy are important for the health of the church, but are not essential for the life of the church.”
“You obviously have a high view of scripture,” I observed. “Why?”
“Because Jesus did,” he said matter-of-factly.
“How do you know? ” I asked.
“One criterion that scholars use for determining authenticity is called ‘dissimilarity.’ If Jesus said or did something that’s dissimilar to the Jews of his day or earlier, then it’s considered authentic,” he said. “And he’s constantly ripping on the Pharisees for adding tradition to scripture and not treating it as ultimately and finally authoritative. When he says that the scripture cannot be broken, he’s making a statement about the truth and reliability of scripture.24
“The Judeo-Christian scriptures are the only ones in the world that are intended to subject themselves to historical inquiry,” Wallace continued. “If God became man in time, space, and history, then he’s inviting us to examine the historical evidence for the life of Jesus, the miracles of Jesus, the prophecies of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus.
“The Gospels don’t merely say, ‘Jesus performed a miracle somewhere. I can’t recall if there were any eyewitnesses. I don’t recall exactly where or when it took place, and I’m not sure if it was a healing miracle or something else. All I know is Jesus is great! ’ No, they name names, specify places, identify the exact miracles performed, and mention eyewitnesses. When Paul says five hundred people saw the risen Jesus and that most of them were still alive, he meant, ‘This is verifiable.’ When Jesus was raised from the dead, the rock of the tomb was rolled back, not to let him out, but apparently so the disciples could say, ‘The body isn’t there.’
“This isn’t true of other religions. For instance, you can’t scrutinize the teachings of Buddha that way, because they don’t connect with history. The Bible claims more. It says it’s faith, and it’s in the real world. The Bible deserves to be rigorously investigated because the Bible claims to be a historical document. We have to ask the Bible tough questions because that’s what Christ not only invites us to do, but requires of us to do.”
Wallace has been subjecting the New Testament’s text to scrutiny for decades. “Has your scholarship shaken your belief that the Bible is trustworthy? ” I asked.
“No, not at all. But it has caused me to see it in a different light,” he said. “For example, I thought when I started out that when I saw the words of Jesus, they must be exactly those words that he uttered. But historians of that day were trying to accurately get the gist of what was said.
“For example, it would take you no more than two hours to say all of Jesus’ words in the Gospels. Well, that’s not a very long time to speak. It takes only fifteen minutes to get through the Sermon on the Mount— but when Jesus delivered his sermons, people were often hungry at the end. I don’t think Jesus gave fifteen-minute sermonettes for Chris-tianettes. So the Gospels contain a summary of what he said. And if it’s a summary, maybe Matthew used some of his own words to condense it. That doesn’t trouble me in the slightest. It’s still trustworthy.”
“Do you think this idea of inerrancy has been elevated out of proportion to its genuine importance? ” I asked.
“At times. Some have made it the litmus test for whether a person is a Christian,” Wallace said. “Theologian Carl F. H. Henry argued against this in 1976. He urged young evangelicals to recognize that while inerrancy is important, it’s not on the level of certain other crucial truths—and belief in inerrancy shouldn’t be used as an excuse not to engage seriously with history. Still, sometimes Christians put a roadblock in front of somebody, saying they can’t become a Christian until they believe in inerrancy.”
Wallace paused. “May I tell you a story along these lines?” he asked.
“Please,” I said.
“Some years ago I met a Muslim girl who was interested in Christianity,” he said. “She came to me with six handwritten, single-spaced pages of supposed discrepancies in the Gospels. She had been taught by Muslims that if you can find one error in the Gospels, then you can’t believe anything they say. She said to me, ‘You’re going to have to answer every single one of these before I can believe anything about Christianity.’ My response was, ‘Don’t you think this list proves that the writers didn’t conspire and collude when they wrote their Gospels?’ She said, ‘I’ve never thought of it that way.’
“I said, ‘What you need to do is look at the places where the Gospels do not disagree at all. And what do you find? You find a core message that is revolutionary: Jesus was confessed as the Messiah by his disciples, he performed miracles and healed people, he forgave sins, he prophesied his own death and resurrection, he died on a Roman cross, and he was raised bodily from the dead.
“ ‘So now, what are you going to do with Jesus? Even if the Gospel writers have differences in their accounts—whether we should really call them discrepancies is a topic for later—then this only adds to their credibility by showing they weren’t huddled together in a corner cooking all of this up. Doesn’t their agreement on an absolute core of central beliefs suggest that they got the basics right, precisely because they were reporting on the same events? ’ ”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“Two weeks later, she became a Christian, and now she’s a student at Dallas Seminary. My point is this: inerrancy is important, but the gospel is bigger than inerrancy.”
Wallace’s analysis seemed logical to me. In fact, I was reminded of the way I looked at the Bible when I checked out Christianity for the first time. “When I was an atheist, I set aside the issue of inerrancy and merely treated the New Testament as a set of ancient documents, which it obviously is,” I told Wallace. “That way, I could evaluate them as I could any other ancient documents—and, of course, some differences are expected in all such records. Is that a legitimate way to evaluate the New Testament? ”
As he was listening, Wallace was sitting back with his arms folded across his chest. “I think it’s thoroughly legitimate,” he replied. “As one British scholar said, ‘We should treat the Bible like any other book in order to show it’s not like any other book.’ That’s better than the opposite position that has become an evangelical mantra: ‘Hands off the Bible—we don’t want people to find any mistakes in it, because we hold to inerrancy.’ ”
I brought Wallace back to the apparent discrepancy in Mark 2:26 that essentially wrecked Ehrman’s faith. In that passage, Jesus is teaching that the Sabbath was made for people, not vice versa. He cites an incident in the Old Testament where King David and his hungry soldiers ate the showbread in the temple, though this was reserved for the priests to eat. Mark says this happened when Abiathar was the high priest, but 1 Samuel 21:1 - 6 indicates Abiathar’s father, Ahim-elech, was priest.
“I’m just curious,” I said. “Have you looked at that passage?”
“I wrote a paper for the Evangelical Theological Society that described five possible explanations in dealing with this,” he said.25
“Did you conclude that one of those explanations was best?” I asked.
“In the end, I didn’t have a conclusion,” he replied, “but I said whatever you do with this, don’t throw out Christ if you’re going to question inerrancy. And I think that’s fair. Personally, I believe in inerrancy, but I’m not going to die for inerrancy. I will die for Christ. That’s where my heart is, because that’s where salvation is,” he said with conviction.
“The Bible wasn’t hanged on the cross; Jesus was.”
Some people have likened textual criticism to the children’s game of telephone, in which a short message is communicated to an individual by whispering in that person’s ear. That person then whispers in the next person’s ear and so on for several people. Then the last individual says the message out loud, and inevitably it has become terribly garbled by the time it goes all the way down the chain. The implication is that because textual criticism is like this, people simply can’t trust what the New Testament says today. In short, we can’t have any confidence that it accurately represents the original.
Wallace, however, said that analogy breaks down at several key points.
“First of all,” he said, “rather than having one stream of transmission, we have multiple streams. Now suppose you were to interrogate the last person in, say, three lines. All of them repeat the message they heard in their own line, and that message ultimately goes back to one source. There would certainly be differences in the resultant message, but there also would be similarities. By a little detective work, you could figure out much of what the original message was by comparing the three different reports of it. Of course, you still would have a lot of doubt as to whether you got it right.
“A second difference with the telephone game,” he continued, “is that rather than dealing with an oral tradition, textual criticism deals with a written tradition. Now, if each person in the line wrote down what he heard from the person in front of him, the chances for garbling the message would be remote—and you’d have a pretty boring game!” he added with a smile.
“A third difference is that the textual critic —the person trying to reconstruct what the original message was — does not have to rely on that last person in the chain. He can interrogate several folks who are closer to the original source.”
His conclusion? “Putting all this together, the cross-checks among the various streams of transmission, the examination of early generations of copies — often exceedingly early — and the written records rather than oral tradition, make textual criticism quite a bit more exacting and precise than the game of telephone,” he said.
There is, however, another game that does demonstrate the effectiveness of textual criticism. Wallace himself has conducted seminars called “The Gospel According to Snoopy” for the past thirty years at universities and other settings. His goal is to demonstrate in a practical way how textual criticism can succeed in reconstructing a missing text.
“In the game, numerous people serve as ‘scribes,’ who copy out an ancient text on a Friday night,” he said. “There are six generations of copies. The scribes all make mistakes, intentionally or unintentionally. In fact, the resultant copies are actually significantly more corrupt than the manuscript copies of the New Testament.”
“How corrupt?” I asked.
“For a fifty-word document, they are able to produce hundreds of textual variants,” he said. “Then the next morning the rest of the folks at the seminar get to work as textual critics, with the scribes as silent onlookers. But they don’t have all the manuscripts to work with. The earliest copies were destroyed or lost. And there are many breaks in the chain. But the textual critics do the best they can with the materials they have.
“After about two hours of work, they come up with what they think the original text said. There are some doubts at almost every turn. But remarkably, even with the doubts, the core idea is hardly changed. Sometimes the doubts have to do with ‘too’ versus ‘also,’ or ‘shall’ versus ‘will.’ Then, I show the group the original text and we compare the two texts, line by line, word by word.”
“How successful are these amateur textual critics?” I asked.
“Altogether, I’ve conducted this seminar over fifty times in churches, colleges, and seminaries — and we have never missed reconstructing the original text by more than three words. In fact, we were off by three words only once. Often, the group has gotten the original wording exactly right—and the essential message of the original is always intact. Sometimes people break out into spontaneous applause at the end!”
“What’s the lesson, then? ” I asked.
“It’s basically this,” he said. “If people who know nothing about textual criticism can reconstruct a text that has become terribly corrupted, then isn’t it likely that those who are trained in textual criticism can do the same with the New Testament?”
As Wallace’s seminar demonstrates, having a handful of copies can help even amateur sleuths to determine the wording of the missing original text. Scholars trying to reconstruct the text of the New Testament, however, have thousands of manuscripts to work with. The more copies, the easier it is to discern the contents of the original. Given their centrality to textual criticism, I asked Wallace to talk about the quantity and quality of New Testament documents.
“Quite simply, we have more witnesses to the text of the New Testament than to any other ancient Greek or Latin literature. It’s really an embarrassment of riches!” he declared.
“Exactly how many copies are in existence? ” I asked.
“We have more than 5,700 Greek copies of the New Testament. When I started seminary, there were 4,800, but more and more have been discovered. There are another 10,000 copies in Latin. Then there are versions in other languages — Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, and so on. These are estimated to number between 10,000 and 15,000. So right there we’ve got 25,000 to 30,000 handwritten copies of the New Testament.”
“But aren’t many of these merely fragments?” I asked.
“A great majority of these manuscripts are complete for the purposes that the scribes intended. For example, some manuscripts were intended just to include the Gospels; others, just Paul’s letters. Only sixty Greek manuscripts have the entire New Testament, but that doesn’t mean that most manuscripts are fragmentary. Most are complete for the purposes intended,” Wallace said.
“Now, if we were to destroy all these manuscripts, would we be left without a witness? ” he asked. Without waiting for a response, he said, “Not at all. The ancient church fathers quoted so often from the New Testament that it would be possible to reconstruct almost the entire New Testament from their writings alone. All told, there are more than one million quotations of the New Testament in their writings. They date as early as the first century and continue through the thirteenth century, so they’re extremely valuable for determining the wording of the New Testament text.”
I asked Wallace about the dates of the manuscripts. “About 10 percent of these manuscripts come from the first millennium,” he said. “Through the first three centuries, we have nearly fifty manuscripts in Greek alone. Yet remarkably, the additions to the text over fourteen centuries of copying amount to about 2 percent of the total. In other words, the New Testament grew over time, but at less than 2 percent growth per millennium—so banking on its expansion would be a poor investment!
“The quantity and quality of the New Testament manuscripts are unequalled in the ancient Greco-Roman world. The average Greek author has fewer than twenty copies of his works still in existence, and they come from no sooner than five hundred to a thousand years later. If you stacked the copies of his works on top of each other, they would be about four feet tall. Stack up copies of the New Testament and they would reach more than a mile high—and, again, that doesn’t include quotations from the church fathers.
“Even the great historians who give us much of our understandings of ancient Roman history are quite incomplete,” he added. “Livy, for example, wrote 142 volumes on the history of Rome, but only 35 survive. When you compare the New Testament to the second most copied Greek author, the differences are truly astounding. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey combined have fewer than 2,400 copies — yet Homer has an eight-hundred-year head start on the New Testament! At bottom, textual criticism for virtually all other ancient literature relies on creative conjectures, or imaginative guesses, at reconstructing the wording of the original. Not so with the New Testament.”
Another critical factor is how early manuscripts are dated. Obviously, those closest to the original are the most valued. When I asked Wallace about the dates of New Testament manuscripts, he smiled and started with a story.
“In 1844, F. C. Baur, the father of modern theological liberalism, argued that the Gospel of John was really a synthesis of Peter and Paul’s Christianity and it had to be dated after AD 160,” he said. “If this were true, then the historical credibility of that Gospel would be very questionable. Baur’s best guess was AD 170—but it was based on philosophical presuppositions. Well, as someone once said, ‘An ounce of evidence is worth a pound of presumption.’
“In 1934, a papyrologist named Colin H. Roberts was rummaging around in the basement of the John Rylands Library at Manchester University in England. He found a papyrus fragment that was no bigger than the palm of my hand. He read one side and—oh my gosh!—this was John 18:31 -33. He flipped it over, and it was John 18:37-38.
“Now, you have to understand that finding a Greek New Testament fragment on papyrus is exceedingly rare. We’ve found somewhere in the neighborhood of 75,000 papyri, and only 117 are from the New Testament. So this finding was just remarkable. Then he sent the fragment to three leading papyrologists in Europe. Each wrote back independently and said, ‘This manuscript is not to be dated any later than AD 150 and is as early as AD 100—and I prefer the earlier date.’ A fourth expert, Adolph Deissman, said it should be dated to the 90s. So this one scrap of papyrus sent two tons of liberal German scholarship to the flames! An ounce of evidence really is worth a pound of presumption.”
“Is that the only fragment from the second century?” I asked. “Not only isn’t it the only one, but in the last five years at least three or four others have also been found from the second century in a museum at Oxford. They were excavated from Oxyrinkchus, Egypt,
in 1906, and have been sitting there for nearly a century. They didn’t have enough papyrologists to go through all the fragments! To this date we have between ten to fifteen papyri from the second century. That’s remarkable — from within a hundred years of when the New Testament was completed. It’s absolutely stunning to have that kind of data.
“And even though they’re fragmentary, they’re not always small. We have, for example, P66, which is from mid-to-late second century and has almost the entirety of John’s Gospel. P46, which dates to about AD 200, has got seven of Paul’s letters and Hebrews in it. P75, which is late second century to early third century, has John and Luke almost in their entirety. P45 is early too — and it has large portions of the four Gospels, so that’s a substantial amount of evidence. The earliest manuscripts were on papyrus, and all the papyri together equal about half of the New Testament.”
“So we have a really small gap, then, between the actual earliest papyrus and the New Testament documents,” I said in summary.
“Right. There’s just no comparison to others,” he said. “For other great historians, there’s a three-hundred-year gap before you get a sliver of a fragment, and then sometimes you have to wait another thousand years before you see something else.”
Among Ehrman’s disclosures that alarmed readers was that there are somewhere between 200,000 and maybe 400,000 variants between New Testament manuscripts—in fact, more variants than the 138,162 words in the published Greek New Testament. This was old news to textual critics, but it was shocking to the general public. Yet are these variants really significant—and do they jeopardize the message of the Gospels and their depiction of Jesus?
“Tell me about these variants —how are they counted, and how did they come about?” I asked Wallace.
“If there’s any manuscript or church father who has a different word in one place, that counts as a textual variant,” Wallace explained. “If you have a thousand manuscripts that have, for instance, ‘Lord’ in John 4:1, and all the rest of the manuscripts have ‘Jesus,’ that still counts as only one variant. If a single fourteenth-century manuscript misspells a word, that counts as a variant.”
“What are the most common variants?” I asked.
“Far and away, the most common are spelling variations, even when the misspelling in Greek makes absolutely no difference in the meaning of the word,” he said.
“For example, the most common textual variant involves what’s called a ‘moveable nu.’ The Greek letter nu—or ‘n’—is used at the end of a word when the next word starts with a vowel. It’s like in English, where you have an indefinite article—an apple or a book. It means the same thing. Whether a nu appears in these words or not has absolutely no effect on its meaning. Yet they still record all those as textual variants.
“Another example is that every time you see the name John, it’s either spelled with one or two n’s. They have to record that as a textual variant — but how it comes out in English is ‘John’ every time. It doesn’t make any difference. The point is, it’s not spelled Mary! Somewhere between 70 to 80 percent of all textual variants are spelling differences that can’t even be translated into English and have zero impact on meaning.”
I did some quick mental math: taking the high estimate of400,000 New Testament variants, that would mean 280,000 to 320,000 of them would be inconsequential differences in spelling. “Please, continue,” I said to Wallace.
“Then you’ve got nonsense errors, where a scribe was inattentive and makes a mistake that’s an obvious no-brainer to spot,” he said. “For example, in a manuscript in the Smithsonian Institution, one scribe wrote the word ‘and’ when he meant to write ‘Lord.’ The words look somewhat similar in Greek—kai versus kurios. It was obvious that the word ‘and’ doesn’t fit the context. So in these cases, it’s easy to reconstruct the right word.
“There are also variants involving synonyms. Does John 4:3 say, ‘When Jesus knew’ or ‘When the Lord knew’? We’re not sure which one goes back to the original, but both words are true. A lot of variants involve the Greek practice of using a definite article with a proper name, which we don’t do in English. For example, a manuscript might refer to ‘the Mary’ or ‘the Joseph,’ but the scribe might have simply written ‘Mary’ or ‘Joseph.’ Again, there’s no impact on meaning, but they’re all counted as variants.
“On top of that, you’ve got variants that can’t even be translated into English. Greek is a highly inflected language. That means the order of words in Greek isn’t as important as it is in English. For example, there are sixteen different ways in Greek to say, ‘Jesus loves Paul,’ and they would be translated into English the very same way. Still, it counts as a textual variant if there’s a difference in the order of words, even if the meaning is unaffected.”
Wallace stopped for a moment to consider the situation. “So if we have approximately 200,000 to 400,000 variants among the Greek manuscripts, I’m just shocked that there are so few!” he declared. “What would the potential number be? Tens of millions! Part of the reason we have so many variants is because we have so many manuscripts. And we’re glad we’ve got so many manuscripts — it helps us immensely in getting back to the original.”
I asked, “How many textual variants really make a difference? ” “Only about one percent of variants are both meaningful, which means they affect the meaning of the text to some degree, and viable, which means they have a decent chance of going back to the original text.”
“Still, that’s a pretty big number,” I said.
“But most of these are not very significant at all,” he said.
“Give me an example.”
“Okay,” he replied. “I’ll describe two of the most notorious issues. One involves Romans 5:1. Did Paul say, ‘We have peace’ or ‘let us have peace’? The difference amounts to one letter in the Greek. Scholars are split on this, but the big point is that neither variant is a contradiction of the teachings of scripture.
“Another famous example is 1 John 1:4. The verse says either, ‘Thus we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete,’ or, ‘Thus we are writing these things so that your joy may be complete.’ There’s ancient testimony for both readings. So, yes, the meaning is affected, but no foundational beliefs are in jeopardy. Either way, the obvious meaning of the verse is that the writing of this letter brings joy.”
It was simply amazing to me that two of the most notorious textual issues are, at bottom, so trivial in their implications.
There are a lot of reasons why textual errors occur, many of them involving scribes being inattentive. Ehrman puts a lot of emphasis, however, on scribes who intentionally altered the text as they reproduced it for the next generation of manuscripts. “That makes people very nervous,” I said to Wallace.
“Well, he’s absolutely correct,” Wallace replied. “Sometimes scribes did intentionally change the text.”
“What’s the most common reason? ” I asked.
“They wanted to make the text more explicit. Through the centuries, for example, the church started using sections of scripture for daily readings. These are called lectionaries. About 2,200 of our Greek manuscripts are lectionaries, where they will set forth a year’s worth of daily or weekly scripture readings.
“Here’s what happened: In the Gospel of Mark, there are eighty-nine verses in a row where the name of Jesus isn’t mentioned once. Just pronouns are used, with ‘he,’ referring to Jesus. Well, if you excerpt a passage for a daily lectionary reading, you can’t start with: ‘When he was going someplace . . .’ The reader wouldn’t know whom you were referring to. So it was logical for the scribe to replace ‘he’ with ‘Jesus’ in order to be more specific in the lectionary. But it’s counted as a variant every single time.
“Or here’s another example: one lectionary reading says, ‘When Jesus was teaching his disciples.’ In the original, it doesn’t say ‘Jesus’ or ‘his disciples,’ but it’s clear from the context that this was meant. So the scribes were merely making things explicit in the lectionaries. No meaning is changed whatsoever—yet it’s counted as a variant.
“Now, I don’t want to give the impression that the scribes didn’t ever change the text for theological reasons. They did, and almost always such changes were in the direction of making the New Testament look more orthodox. Probably the most common group of such changes are harmonizations between the Gospels. The further we get from the original text, the more the copyists harmonized so as to rid the text of any apparent discrepancies. But such harmonizations are fairly easy to detect.”
I interrupted. “Ehrman says: ‘It would be wrong . . . 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 conclusion that one draws from them. . . . Just the opposite is the case.’26Exactly how many Christian doctrines are jeopardized by textual variants in the New Testament?”
“Ehrman is making the best case he can in Misquoting Jesus,” Wallace said. “The remarkable thing is you go through his whole book and you say, Where did he actually prove anything? Ehrman didn’t prove that any doctrine is jeopardized. Let me repeat the basic thesis that has been argued since 1707: No cardinal or essential doctrine is altered by any textual variant that has plausibility of going back to the original. The evidence for that has not changed to this day.”
“What comes the closest?”
“Mark 9:29 could impact orthopraxy, which is right practice, but not orthodoxy, which is right belief. Here Jesus says you can’t cast out a certain kind of demon except by prayer—and some manuscripts add, ‘and fasting.’ So if ‘and fasting’ is part of what Jesus said, then here’s a textual variant that affects orthopraxy — is it necessary to fast to do certain kinds of exorcisms? But seriously, does my salvation depend on that? Most Christians have never even heard of that verse or will ever perform an exorcism.
“Another orthopraxy issue is 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, where it says let women keep silent in the churches. Ehrman and another scholar I mentioned earlier, Gordon Fee, have argued that those verses are not authentic because the manuscripts either put this after verse 33 or verse 40. And that has caused some scholars to say maybe this wasn’t in the original text at all.
“Most New Testament scholars would say, yes, this was in the original text, but it was probably a marginal note that Paul added before that manuscript ever went out the door, and the scribes weren’t sure where exactly it should go. I should emphasize that all the manuscripts have the wording in one place or the other. But still, let’s say it isn’t authentic. The role of women in the church has never been a doctrinal point that’s necessary for salvation. Of course, I’m not trying to trivialize the role of women in the church. My point is simply that this passage does not alter any essential doctrine.
“Another one would be 1 Corinthians 9:20, where Paul says, ‘To those under the law I became like one under the law.’ Then there’s the line: ‘Though I myself am not under the law,’ which is omitted in some later manuscripts. So is Paul actually claiming that he’s not under the law, or is he not claiming that?
“When you think about it, it doesn’t really matter. If he’s claiming that he’s not under the law—well, we have clear evidence that Christians are no longer under the Old Testament law anyway. But if he’s not claiming that here, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we are under the law. Even then, it’s a stretch to say that this affects a doctrine.”
“What’s the most interesting example you can give?” I asked.
Wallace’s eyes lit up. “Here’s a fascinating one,” he said. “Everyone knows the number of the beast, right?” he said, motioning for me to answer.
I hesitated, figuring I was being set up. “666,” I ventured.
“Well, that’s what Revelation 13:18 says. A manuscript from the fifth century, however, has the number as 616. Okay, no big deal, since it was only one manuscript. But five years ago at Oxford they found the earliest manuscript of Revelation chapter 13. It’s from the third century—and it also says 616.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I was in Oxford and personally examined the manuscript under a microscope to confirm it for myself. No doubt, it says 616. Now, there’s no doctrinal statement of the church or any Bible college that says the number of the beast must be 666, but it’s interesting, isn’t it?”
Interesting, indeed. “Back to your original point then . . .”
“My original point is this: no cardinal doctrines are affected by any viable variants.”
It’s one of the most beloved stories in the Bible: a woman caught in the act of adultery is brought before Jesus. It’s really a trap—the Pharisees knew that she should be stoned to death under the law of Moses, and they wanted to test Jesus.
Jesus bent down and began using his finger to write something in the dirt. Those words aren’t recorded, promoting all sorts of speculation through the centuries. Finally, Jesus uttered those often-quoted words, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” Chastened, the Pharisees walked away one at a time, the oldest ones first. Once they were gone, Jesus said to the adulteress: “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She replied, “No one, sir.” Then Jesus said: “Then neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.”27
The only problem with this story is that scholars have known for more than a century that it’s not authentic. This was disturbing news, though, to readers of Ehrman’s book. Many people seemed to take the loss personally—and they began to ask what else in their Bible can’t be trusted.
“This is one of those sad stories, frankly,” Wallace said when I asked him about the adultery account. “When you read this passage, you say, ‘Oh my gosh, that takes my breath away! I’m just amazed at the love and the grace and the mercy of Jesus and how he could stand up to these Pharisees.’ We say, ‘I want this to be in the Bible.’ And that’s exactly what the copyists said. They read this as an independent story and ended up putting it in at least half a dozen different locations in John and Luke. It’s as if the scribes said, ‘I want this to go into my Bible, so I’m going to insert it here or here or here.’ ”
“So this was a story that came down through time?” I asked. “Apparently, there were two different stories circulating about a woman who had been caught in some sin and Jesus was merciful to her. More than likely, that much of the story was historically true, but it didn’t end up in the scriptures.”
“Was it a woman caught in adultery?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did these Pharisees peel off from the oldest to the youngest? ” “Almost surely that was added later to spice up the story.”
“Did Jesus write something on the ground?”
“Almost surely he did, for a variety of reasons,” he replied. “My hypothesis is this: These twelve verses look more like Luke’s style and vocabulary than John’s. Actually, a group of manuscripts put it in Luke instead of John. What did the story look like when Luke had access to it, and why didn’t he put it into his Gospel? I don’t have the answers yet.”
“But it’s clear that the story in the Bible is not authentic,” I said. “There’s a distinction we need to make,” he said. “Is it literarily authentic — in other words, did John actually write this story? My answer is an unquestionable no. Is it historically authentic? Did it really happen? My answer is a highly qualified yes — something may have happened with Jesus being merciful to a sinner, but the story was originally in a truncated form.”
“Why have Bibles continued to include it?” I asked. “Doesn’t that simply confuse readers?”
“Evangelicals have followed a tradition of timidity by continuing to include this story because they think Bible readers would freak if it were missing,” he said. “Read any Bible translation and you’ll find a marginal note that says this is not found in the oldest manuscripts. But often people don’t read those. When Ehrman reports in the popular sphere that the story isn’t authentic, people think they’ve been hoodwinked.”
I picked up my New International Version of the Bible and flipped to John. Sure enough, there are rules at the top and bottom of the story in order to delineate it, as well as a note in the center of the page that says: “The earliest and most reliable manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53-8:11.” But how many people, I wondered, really understand the implications of that note?
“Are Bible publishers misleading people by putting it in? ” I asked.
“I would be cautious about saying that,” Wallace replied, “but they certainly could do a better job of saying, ‘This is not found in the oldest manuscripts, and furthermore the editors of this translation do not believe these words are authentic.’ Otherwise you’re setting people up for disillusionment if they get this information elsewhere. It’s a Chicken Little mentality that says, ‘Oh my gosh, I never knew that these precious twelve verses aren’t authentic—and what else are you not telling me?’ But the fact is publishers have told them about it, and it’s an exceptional circumstance. There’s only one other passage that’s even close to that length.”
That’s the topic I wanted to address next.
In November 2006, a forty-eight-year-old woman died four hours after she was bitten by a timber rattlesnake during Sunday services in a Kentucky church. She was the seventh such fatality in Kentucky since 1980. In fact, the state felt compelled to pass a law making it a misdemeanor to handle reptiles as part of religious services.28
The journalists reporting the woman’s death all said that according to the Gospel of Mark, believers in Jesus will be able to handle snakes without harm. None of them, however, noted that this verse — and, in fact, the whole last twelve verses of Mark—were not part of the original Gospel but were added at a later date and are not considered authentic.
This means Mark ends with three women discovering the empty tomb of Jesus and being told by “a young man dressed in a white robe” that Jesus had risen from the dead. “They said nothing to anyone,” concludes the Gospel, “because they were afraid.” The final twelve verses describe three post-Easter appearances by Jesus and say Christians will be able to pick up snakes without injury, as well as cast out demons, speak in new tongues, and heal the sick.
“How long have scholars known that this longer ending of Mark wasn’t part of the original? ” I asked.
“Well, Codex Vaticanus didn’t have it—and we’ve known about that manuscript since the fifteenth century. And then in 1859 the textual critic Constantin von Tischendorf went to Mount Sinai and brought back Codex Sinaiticus. These are our oldest manuscripts for this passage and neither of them has the twelve verses,” he said. “They both have so many disagreements with each other that they must go back to a common ancestor that goes very far back—into the second century.”
“Where do you think this ending came from?” I asked.
“There are two basic views, but each agrees that the verses aren’t authentic. One group says Mark wrote an ending to his Gospel but it was lost.”
I could tell by his voice that he was skeptical. “You don’t buy that?” I asked.
“This presupposes that Mark was written on a codex rather than a scroll. A page could be lost fairly easily from a codex, because the binding is like a book, but the ending of the Gospel would have been secure on a scroll. The codex, however, wasn’t invented until forty or so years after Mark was written.
“I think a far better view is that Mark was writing about the most unique individual who has ever lived, and he wanted to format the ending of his Gospel in a unique way, in which he leaves it open ended. He’s essentially saying to readers, ‘So what are you going to do with Jesus?’ ”
“Eliminating those twelve verses, then, really has no impact on the doctrine of the resurrection?”
“Not in the slightest. There’s still a resurrection in Mark. It’s prophesied, the angel attests to it, and the tomb is empty. But you can see why an early scribe would say, ‘Oh my gosh, we don’t have a resurrection appearance, and this ends with the women being afraid.’ I think a scribe in the second century drew essentially on Acts — where Paul gets bitten by a snake and people are speaking in tongues—and he wanted to round out Mark’s Gospel so he put on that new ending.”
“Why does the Bible still have it?”
“Once it’s in the Bible, it’s really hard to dislodge it. All Bibles have a note indicating this longer ending isn’t in the oldest manuscripts. Some put these verses in smaller type or otherwise bracket it. Of the disputed verses in the Bible, this and the woman caught in adultery are by far the longest passages—and again, they’re old news.”
There is a third significant passage, however. Ehrman said that “the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly delineates the doctrine of the Trinity” is found in 1 John 5:7 - 8 in the King James Version, which says: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.”
“Wouldn’t you agree that this is inauthentic?” I asked Wallace.
“Absolutely.”
“Where did it come from?”
“That actually came from a homily in the eighth century. It was added to a Latin text and wasn’t even translated into Greek until 1520. To date we have found a grand total of four manuscripts that have it, all from the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, plus four others that have it as a marginal note in a later hand. It’s obviously inauthentic.”
I said, “I got a note from a woman recently who wrote, ‘I’ve got a great verse for you to support the Trinity. And, by the way, you only find it in the King James Version. Take a look; it’s there!’ So some people still think it’s authentic.”
Wallace sighed. “We need to do a better job of training the church. The fact that we’ve been dumbing down the church for so long is just a crime, and now people are panicking when they hear about this sort of thing. You don’t even find this in other translations, except perhaps in a footnote.”
“Atheist Frank Zindler says that deleting this inauthentic reference ‘leaves Christians without biblical proof of the Trinity,’ ” I
observed.29
Wallace reacted firmly. “I’m going to be uncharitable here: that’s just such a stupid comment, I can hardly believe it,” he said. “The Council of Constantinople in AD 381 and Chalcedon in AD 451 emerged with explicit statements affirming the Trinity — obviously, they didn’t need this later, inauthentic passage to see it.
“The Bible clearly contains these four truths: the Father is God, Jesus is God, the Holy Spirit is God, and there’s only one God,” Wallace declared. “And that’s the Trinity.”
Are there any ways in which our understanding of Jesus is significantly altered by textual variants? In Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman presents a few examples, which I decided to test with Wallace. For instance, Ehrman contends that in Mark 1:41, the Gospel incorrectly says Jesus was “filled with compassion” when he healed a leper; actually, said Ehrman, the original text said that Jesus became angry. I asked Wallace about this issue—and I was taken aback by his response.
“I think Ehrman is probably correct about the text,” Wallace said.
“Really?” I asked. “That surprises me.”
“Well, I’ve been wrestling with this over the last couple of years, and I think the original text probably did say that Jesus was angry.”
I said, “Although he doesn’t come out and say it, Ehrman seems to make an implicit argument that if Jesus was angry, he can’t be God, because God is love.”
That triggered a strong response from Wallace. “Wait a minute — there were only two groups in the ancient world—the Stoics and the one branch of the Pharisees—who felt that anger was always wrong. Everybody else felt that righteous indignation had a place in life — and Jesus was one of them.”
“Do you think this change in Mark 1:41 alters our picture of Jesus? ”
“It changes how we interpret this one particular verse,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean we suddenly have a different Jesus.”
“Why not?”
“Later in the same Gospel, Mark 3:5 says Jesus responded in anger because he was distressed at the stubborn hearts of the religious leaders who were looking for an excuse to accuse him. In Mark 10:13-16, he gets indignant toward his disciples because they were blocking people from bringing their little children to be blessed by him. Did Jesus express anger and indignation at times? Yes, we’ve already known that, but this was certainly appropriate on his part.”
“But why,” I asked, “would he have been angry when he healed the leper? ”
“We can hypothesize several reasons. Ehrman summarily dismisses some possibilities out of hand — for instance, that Jesus was angry at the state of the world that’s full of disease or that he loves the sick but hates the sickness. But the text is ambiguous, so we don’t really know. What we do know is that Ehrman fails to back up his claim that Jesus gets angry when anyone questions his authority, ability, or desire to heal. That’s simply unsupported unless you twist the text.”
I moved on to another claim by Ehrman. Hebrews 2:9 is translated as saying that “by the grace of God [Jesus] might taste death for everyone.” But Ehrman maintains that the phrase should read, “apart from God” instead of “by the grace of God.”
“According to Ehrman, this affects the interpretation of the entire book,” I said. “Do you agree?”
“Again, I think he’s overstating his case significantly,” replied Wallace. “For one thing, I think ‘by the grace of God’ is probably correct, although I’ll grant that Ehrman may be right that ‘apart from God’ is the original reading.
“But here’s his real agenda: he links that text to Hebrews 5:7, which says that Jesus prayed ‘with loud cries and tears.’ So Ehrman says Jesus died on the cross ‘apart from God’ in a screaming, terrified, frightened way, and therefore the underlying implication is he can’t be God in the flesh, because God wouldn’t be terrified that way.”
“And you disagree?”
“I certainly do. Hebrews 5:7 doesn’t specify that Jesus was crying out to God at his death. It says Jesus offered prayers ‘with loud cries and tears . . . during the days of Jesus’ life on earth.’ In fact, the previous verse says he was ‘a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.’ What do priests do? They pray on behalf of other people! So Ehrman is connecting dots that are illegitimate to connect.”
Wallace then added one last point to seal his case. “Even if the original text says Jesus died ‘apart from God,’ this doesn’t change anything theologically,” he said. “How is this any different from Jesus saying on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ It means the same thing. So again, we’re not being given a new picture of Jesus.”
Wallace had brought balance and perspective to the issue of whether the New Testament’s text can be trusted. While scholars cannot pin down every single word with absolute confidence, there was no dispute over the fundamentals. As for Jesus, there was nothing that would compel a new perspective on his life, character, miracles, or resurrection.
I glanced at my watch; it was getting late. I had one more issue I wanted to raise, but I didn’t relish asking Wallace about it. This wasn’t a critique by a reputable scholar, but claims made by three authors whose book has been discredited by historians in so many ways. Still, I believe its widespread popularity—with millions of copies being sold — made it worth addressing.
“Let me ask you about an assertion made in the bestseller Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” I said.
Wallace rolled his eyes, but I pushed ahead. “The authors claim that in AD 303, Emperor Diocletian destroyed all Christian writings that could be found. That’s why there are no New Testament manuscripts prior to the fourth century. Later, Emperor Constantine commissioned new versions of these documents, which allowed the ‘custodians of orthodoxy to revise, edit, and rewrite their material as they saw fit.’ It was at this point that ‘most of the crucial alterations in the New Testament were probably made and Jesus assumed the unique status he has enjoyed ever since.’ ”30
Wallace looked exasperated. “Good grief!” he exclaimed. “That’s just loony! Do these authors know anything about history at all? Diocletian did not destroy all the Christian manuscripts. He did destroy several, but mostly in the East and South. As far as having no manuscripts prior to the fourth century—well, we have more than four dozen in Greek alone that are prior to the fourth century. And these manuscripts have numerous passages—John 1:1; John 1:18; John 20:28; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 1:8; 2 Peter 1:1—that affirm the deity of Jesus. So it’s nonsense to say Jesus’ deity wasn’t invented until the fourth century when you’ve already got the evidence in earlier manuscripts.
“Besides, we still have lots and lots of quotations by church fathers prior to the fourth century. Ignatius in about AD 110 calls Jesus ‘our God’ and then says, ‘the blood of God,’ referring to Jesus. Where does he get this idea if it wasn’t invented for more than two hundred years? And you have a steady march from Ignatius right through the rest of the patristic writers — I mean, you can’t make that kind of a claim and be any kind of a responsible historian. No historian would ever even entertain that kind of stupidity.”
“Yet apparently millions of people believe it,” I said. “What does that do to you as a scholar?”
“It’s disturbing that when it comes to the Christian faith, people don’t really want—or know how—to investigate the evidence,” he replied. “Christians are not being led into proper historical research by their pastors. I have been saying for some time that I don’t think the evangelical church has fifty years left of life to it until it repents.”
“In what way? ”
“First, we have to quit marginalizing scripture,” he said. “We can’t treat the Bible with kid gloves. We really need to wrestle with the issues, because our faith depends on it. And second, we need to quit turning Jesus into our buddy. He’s the sovereign Lord of the universe, and we need to understand that and respond accordingly.”
“After years of studying these issues in depth, what has surprised you about the manuscripts you’ve analyzed?”
“The most remarkable thing to me is the tedium of looking at manuscript after manuscript after manuscript that just don’t change,” he answered. “Yes, there are differences, but they’re so minor. When I teach textual criticism every year, my students spend about a third of their workload transcribing manuscripts — and invariably they marvel at how little the manuscripts deviate.
“Now, I don’t want to give a false impression that they don’t deviate at all. But the vast majority of differences involve a spelling error or a moveable nu. You don’t see a line out of the blue where a scribe said, ‘Oh, I’m gonna make some kind of bizarre statement here.’ So the bottom line to me is how steady the copies of the manuscripts have been over the centuries.”
“Do you believe that God has accurately preserved enough for us to know him and his truth?”
“Absolutely. Do we have all the essentials? Yes. Do we have all the particulars? No. But that’s the task of a textual critic: to try to get back to the original. I’ll spend the rest of my life looking at manuscripts — transcribing them, photographing them, and publishing them. We still won’t recover the original wording in every single place. But I hope by the end of my life we’ll be a little bit closer—and that’s a worthy goal.”
My interview with Wallace provided strong affirmation that my confidence in the New Testament text was abundantly warranted. Nothing produced by Ehrman even came close to changing the biblical portrait of the real Jesus in any meaningful way.
“When a comparison of the variant readings of the New Testament is made with those of other books which have survived from antiquity, the results are little short of astounding,” said biblical expert Norman Geisler, the author or editor of more than fifty books explaining and defending Christianity. “The evidence for the integrity of the New Testament is beyond question.”31
As I drove away from Wallace’s house, my mind flashed back to my interview several years earlier with a scholar who’s universally acknowledged as the greatest textual critic of his generation. In fact, Bruce M. Metzger was Ehrman’s mentor at Princeton. Ehrman even dedicates Misquoting Jesus to him, calling him “Doctor-Father” and saying he “taught me the field and continues to inspire me in my work.”32
At the time we chatted, Metzger was eighty-three years old. He died in 2007, ten years later. What was fascinating to me was how much his remarks during our interview reflected what Wallace was now telling me years later. For instance, I remember asking Metzger, “So the variations [between manuscripts], when they occur, tend to be minor rather than substantive?”
“Yes, yes, that’s correct,” Metzger replied, adding: “The more significant variations do not overthrow any doctrine of the church.”
Then I recall asking him how his many decades of intensely studying the New Testament’s text had affected his personal faith. “Oh,” he said, sounding happy to discuss the topic, “it has increased the basis of my personal faith to see the firmness with which these materials have come down to us, with a multiplicity of copies, some of which are very ancient.”
“So,” I started to say, “scholarship has not diluted your faith—” He jumped in before I could finish my sentence. “On the contrary,” he stressed, “it has built it. I’ve asked questions all my life, I’ve dug into the text, I’ve studied this thoroughly, and today I know with confidence that my trust in Jesus has been well placed.”
He paused while his eyes surveyed my face. Then he added, for emphasis, “Very well placed.”33
More Resources on This Topic
Geisler, Norman, and William Nix. From God to Us: How We
Got Our Bible. Chicago: Moody, 1980.
Komoszewski, J. Ed, M. James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace.
Reinventing Jesus. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 2006.
Metzger, Bruce M., and Bart D. Ehrman. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. Fourth edition. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Patzia, Arthur G. The Making of the New Testament. Downers Grove, 1ll.: InterVarsity, 1995.
Wegner, Paul D. The Journey from Texts to Translations. Grand Rapids. Mich.: Baker, 1999.
Wegner, Paul D. A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible. Downers Grove, 1ll.: InterVarsity, 2006.