Introduction

Has the original text of the New Testament been altered by what became the orthodox, traditional Church, and if so, to what extent? The answer to this fascinating question is sometimes presupposed without any reading or investigation. The modern assumption is that history is written by winners, and therefore, precisely because the traditional Christianity is traditional (i.e. has been established for centuries), it must have tampered with the text. There is certainly some truth to that assumption. Winners do often affect how history was written, and most textual critics today probably would accept that there had been instances where scribes of the orthodox, traditional Christianity changed the text as they were copying it. The problem arises when, on the basis of that assumption alone, conclusions are taken to the extreme – that the original text of the New Testament was significantly different from what it is today, and that even such core doctrines (precisely because they are core to the traditional Church) as the deity of Christ were possibly added later to the text.

While there is no shortage of such views on the shelves of popular literature on Christianity, it is only relatively recently that the specialists in the field of textual criticism have started looking into the question. One of the early major works focusing on theological tendencies in scribal changes was done by Eldon Epp in 1966 [1]. But the book that had the most impact on the general public is certainly Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus (2005), and the scholarly basis that Ehrman used there is his earlier work, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993). It was in this book that Ehrman argued for a level of theologically motivated tampering that was probably unprecedented in the earlier scholarly work. Namely, he argued that as the “orthodox” church engaged in debates with competing (“heretical”) movements, the orthodox scribes in many instances changed the text to reflect their theology. There have been many excellent responses to Ehrman’s work [2], [3], so my goal is not to repeat what has been already said, including issues with Ehrman’s interpretation of such variants as Hebrews 2:9, Matthew 24:36, and John 1:18. I highly recommend reading Daniel Wallace’s take on these [2] to get both sides of the story, and make up your own minds. Here I will add some of my own thoughts. And it should be noted that while my approach will be more critical, I do think that there may be genuine cases where Ehrman demonstrates that the text was changed for theological reasons. His work is certainly worth reading, not only because there is a lot of good information and discussion present in it (especially an overview of various movements that competed with orthodoxy), but also because this work still, in my view, largely forms the foundation of Ehrman’s arguments and views, which are in turn widely influential and often used (sometimes misused) in the more popular literature.

Mark 1:1

One of the examples that I found less convincing, the more I thought about it, is Mark 1:1, which Ehrman discusses in the context of anti-adoptionistic changes (adoptionists, widely speaking, believed that Jesus wasn’t always the Christ or the Son of God, but became one at some point, usually taken to be his baptism) [4]. The Gospel of Mark starts with the words “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1), then proceeds to describe shortly the ministry of John the Baptist (Mark 1:2-8), and follows up with the baptism of Chirst (Mark 1:9-11). During his baptism, a voice comes from heaven saying “You are my one dear Son; in you I take great delight”.

The caveat is that some important witnesses (א , θ, 28^c, 1555, syr^p, arm, geo, Origen) lack the phrase “the Son of God” in Mark 1:1. What Ehrman argues is that if the original text didn’t have the phrase “the Son of God”, that made it possible for the Gospel to be read by both the adoptionists (that Jesus becomes the Son of God at his baptism, once the proclamation from heaven is made) and the (proto)orthodox (that Jesus always was the Son of God). Given that Mark himself does not explicitly state what he means by the phrase “the Son of God”, and nor does he state explicitly when the status was conferred upon Jesus, both adoptionistic and orthodox interpretations could be viewed as valid. Therefore, the orthodox scribes had a motivation to change the text, adding “the Son of God” to the very first verse of the Gospel, so that Jesus is identified as such before his baptism.

After arguing against alternative ideas of how the variant originated, and for the shorter reading as the original, Ehrman puts forward his hypothesis:

“… [It] may have been the orthodox construal of Mark’s Gospel that led to the corruption of the text. Mark entitled his book ‘The Beginnings of the Gospel of Jesus Christ’, and he proceeded to narrate that first significant event of Jesus’ life: his baptism and the accompanying revelatory experience. In order to circumvent an adoptionistic reading of this inaugurating event, early Orthodox scribes made a slight modification of Mark’s opening words, so that now they affirm Jesus’ status as the Son of God prior to his baptism, even prior to the mention of John the Baptist, his forerunner. Now even before he comes forward to be baptized, Jesus is understood by the reader to be the Christ, the Son of God.” (p 88).

This explanation seems to make sense at first, but there are two pretty big problems with it. Firstly, what Ehrman doesn’t mention in this section of his book are the verses that immediately follow Mark 1:1. Let’s read what it says (Mark 1:2-8):

2 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,

“Look, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way, 3 the voice of one shouting in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make his paths straight.’”

4 In the wilderness John the baptizer began preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. […] 7 He proclaimed, “One more powerful than I am is coming after me; I am not worthy to bend down and untie the strap of his sandals. 8 I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

John the Baptist is clearly identified as the messenger, as the one “in the wilderness”, – the same Greek word for “wilderness”, ἐρήμῳ, is used in both cases. Who is he preparing the way for? The passage quoted in Mark 1:3 is a paraphrase of Isaiah 40:3 – A voice cries out, “In the wilderness clear a way for the Lord; build a level road through the rift valley for our God.” This is a pretty clear indication of how Mark intends to present Jesus: just as the voice in Isaiah is saying to clear a way for God, so John the Baptist proclaims that the one more powerful (Jesus) than him is coming. Even if Jesus is not explicitly identified here as the Son of God, he is already being called as the one more powerful than John the Baptist, and is being at least paralleled, if not straight out identified, with God. All of this takes place before Jesus’ baptism, which means that the adoptionistic interpretation is already less likely to hold, and hence there is less reason for the orthodox scribes to tamper with the text [5].

But even if the adoptionists had found a way to circumvent Mark’s use of Isaiah, and still hold to their interpretation of Jesus’ status, there is the second (and in my view bigger) problem with Ehrman’s hypothesis. What exactly would adding “the Son of God” to Mark 1:1 accomplish for the orthodox scribes? After all, as Ehrman himself acknowledges, the first verse functioned as a title (see the quote from Ehrman’s book given earlier, where he says “Mark entitled his book…”). How could a change in the title affect the understanding of when Jesus became the Son of God? An adoptionist, reading such a text, would wholeheartedly say “yes, this is the story of Jesus the Son of God, and now Mark will tell us first how Jesus became the Son of God”. One could just as easily write a biography titled “Julius Caesar” and start the story with narrating his childhood. Nobody would think that just because the word “Caesar” occurs in the title of the book and therefore before the description of his inauguration (or whatever the process for Roman rulers was), that the author was somehow implying that Julius was a Caesar already in his childhood. The first verse of Mark is an introductory verse, a title, identifying Jesus in a way that he became known – “Christ, the Son of God” [6] – so that the reader knows who the story is about. It has no bearing on the question of whether, when, or how Jesus became the Son of God, and so would have served as no leverage for the orthodox scribes against the adoptionists. [7]

Matthew 1:18

None of this is to say that it is impossible that “The Son of God” could have been added for theological reasons; the question is whether it is probable, and what the evidence is. Unfortunately, all too often throughout the book Ehrman starts with a possible interpretation, then proceeds to accept it as probable and use it as a basis for his thesis, while acting all too dismissively towards alternative explanations. Another good example of this is his approach to a variant in Matthew 1:18 (pp 88-89), where some manuscripts say “The beginning (γένεσις) of Jesus Christ happened this way,” while others say “The birth (γέννεσις) of Jesus Christ happened this way”. To many textual critics, the difference in one letter (γένεσις vs γέννεσις), as well as the fact that both readings carry similar meaning, would indicate an accidental omission or addition of the letter ν (depending on which reading is the original). Ehrman rejects this explanation by noting that “both variants appear in a wide stretch of the textual tradition, a fact difficult to explain as simple coincidence.” Ehrman believes that γένεσις (“beginning”) is the original reading. He goes on to note that “something more profound may be occurring here”, and points out that while the meaning of the two words, γένεσις and γέννεσις, is similar, the former could also mean “creation”, “beginning”, or “origination”. Given how this could imply that Jesus was a created being, and not the pre-existent Word of God, Ehrman says that the reading “γέννεσις” (birth) therefore indicates an orthodox corruption. This would make it easier for the orthodox to argue that while Jesus was incarnate through the virgin Mary, he was also pre-existent before he took on a human form.

Again, Ehrman provides no actual evidence for the variant reading being used in anti-adoptionistic polemics. The fact that the variant reading could be understood in an anti-adoptionistic manner is enough grounds for Ehrman to conclude that a theologically motivated corruption took place [8]. What is more, Ehrman appears to undermine his own argument against this variant originating accidentally, which, according to him, was the fact of the widespread attestation of both readings. He notes later on that “the anti-adoptionist changes of the text occur sporadically throughout the tradition, not at all with the kind of consistency for which one might have hoped. Given the character of our evidence, however, this uneven distribution and irregular attestation is not surprising. The scribes of our surviving manuscripts more commonly preserved theological variations than created them” (pp 115-116, emphasis in the original). The idea seems to be that the variants originated in manuscripts that no longer exists, and we see a widespread, sporadic attestation of anti-adoptionistic changes in our surviving manuscripts because the scribes often simply copied and preserved the earlier changes. But if this can apply to intentional changes, why can’t it also apply to accidental ones, especially where a variant is almost identical (both grammatically and in terms of meaning)? Why is it unlikely that a few ancestors of the surviving manuscripts had the scribes accidentally add or omit letter “ν”, jumping between “γένεσις” and “γέννεσις”, – a change that would then be copied and preserved by other scribes and therefore be attested in a wide stretch of textual witnesses?

Final remarks

Getting closer to the conclusion, it is hard to deduce what exactly Ehrman believes about the overall scope of these intentional changes and to what extent they shaped the text. On one hand, in concluding the “anti-adoptionistic” section, Ehrman notes that “almost certainly there was no attempt to create an anti-adoptionistic recension”, that the proto-orthodox scribes “did not, at one level, need to change the text” since they believed that the texts already taught what they believed. He writes that only “to some degree” did the debates have an impact on the text (p 116). On the other hand, in concluding the “anti-docetic” section, he says that the alterations made in the text “prove to be significant […] in showing how this [Orthodox] Christology came to be cemented in the evolving Christian tradition” (p 284), which has a more ambiguous meaning. Perhaps Ehrman is (or was) himself somewhat agnostic on this matter [9]. The fact that he tends to read theological motivations into pretty much any variant that could be interpreted differently makes his case much less definitive than he sets it out to be. He himself, inadvertently, reveals the weakness of this approach in his conclusion of the “anti-patripassianist” section, when he writes: “many of the modifications I have discussed in this chapter are susceptible of other explanations; some for example, may appear at first glance to represent unconscious harmonizations of passages to their parallels or improvements of their grammar or sense. But in no case can we overlook how these changes may have functioned theologically as well” (p 315). Surely the simple fact that, in our view, these modifications may have functioned theologically cannot be used on its own to argue that they arose due to theological motivations, especially when alternative probable explanations are available. But this is the line of argumentation that Ehrman implicitly all too often takes throughout his book, rendering it less impactful than the sheer number of examples he covers would otherwise suggest.

The early centuries of Christianity were replete with various movements attacking what we would call traditional Christianity. Some heretical movements said that Jesus was only God, others that he was merely human, and yet others that he didn’t even have a real body. Some said that he was the same as God the Father, while others went so far as to say that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament (Jesus) were two separate deities, one malevolent and the other benign. In short, the orthodox Church engaged in polemics on both sides, with groups that often tended to go to one extreme or another. In light of this, one cannot help but conclude by quoting Adam G Messer’s comment [10] on Ehrman’s methodology:

“This means that no matter what textual problem relating to the central theme and soul of the Bible (i.e. the Trinitarian God) may be found in the manuscript tradition amid the first centuries – themselves already characterized by a great diversity of variants due to a lack of centralization, various persecutions, and predominantly illiterate populace, – one can always postulate a motivation for an orthodox corruption, whether or not it is probable. This disingenuous method can be applied because no matter whether an article is left off or added, a word slightly shifted or removed, due to orthographic errors or any other unintentional type, it often changes the meaning just enough that there is bound to be a heresy that would contemn the change. If an article is missing, it may seem that the unity of the Godhead is in danger. If the article is present, it may appear to threaten their distinct personalities. If a phrase exemplifying Jesus’ humanity is removed, it was obviously to combat the heresy of Adoptionism. If it is added, it was obviously to combat the heresy of Sabellianism. Realizing that hundreds and perhaps thousands of variants can be construed to favor the orthodox against some heresy, the orthodox can be incriminated with impunity.”

References and endnotes

All quotations of Bible are taken from the NET version

[1] The Theological Tendency of Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis in Acts, Eldon Jay Epp, 1966

[2] The Gospel According to Bart: A Review Article of Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman, Daniel B Wallace, 2006

[3] Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament. Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence (edited by Daniel Wallace, 2011). This is a collection of essays by various scholars, responding to different aspects of Ehrman’s work.

[4] The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, Bart D Ehrman 1993, Updated edition, pp. 85-88

[5] Interestingly, Ehrman discusses Mark’s use of Isaiah later in his book (p. 97), though he never connects the two bits. Mark’s modification of Isaiah (“make straight his paths” in Mark, vs “make straight the paths of our God” in LXX) allows, according to Ehrman, for a “distinctively Christian understanding” (hm, and what would that mean?). The fact that some manuscripts (such as Bezae) change Mark’s version back to LXX version, is seen by Ehrman as yet another anti-adoptionistic change. For some reason, however, Ehrman seems to implicitly deny that even with Mark’s modification there is still a strong hint at Jesus’ divinity, precisely because “our God” is replaced by third person singular “he” in reference to Jesus.

[6] “Christ” means “messiah”, or “savior”, in Greek. I am not saying that “Christ” is identical to “the Son of God”, these are two separate titles by which Jesus became widely known.

[7] This point is falsifiable, if one could show that an early church father used the presence of “the Son of God” in Mark 1:1 in order to argue against adoptionism. Unless I somehow missed it, Ehrman presents no such evidence in his book, meaning that the anti-adoptionistic use of “The Son of God” in Mark 1:1 lacks direct evidence.

[8] Interestingly enough, later on (pp 279-280) Ehrman observes a similar change in Romans 1:3 and Galatians 4:4, but this time he argues that these changes were made in order to combat docetism – a view that is in a way the opposite of adoptionism, saying that Jesus did not have an actual fleshly body at all, but only an apparent, phantom-like one.

[9] Although one can bring up the almost infamous passage from the paperback edition of Misquoting Jesus (2005), where Ehrman answered in a Q&A section at the end of the book that the position he argues for is not at odds with the position of his mentor Bruce Metzger, namely that “essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament” (p. 252)

[10] Patristic Theology and Recension in Matthew 24:36. An Evaluation of Ehrman’s Text-Critical Methodology. Adam G Messer, in Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament, p 181.