The Work
Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why was published by HarperSanFrancisco in 2005. It became a surprise New York Times bestseller, remaining on the list for several weeks - an unusual achievement for a work of academic biblical scholarship. The book is an introduction to the discipline of New Testament textual criticism (the study of the thousands of variant readings in the surviving manuscripts of the New Testament) for a general audience, framed as a personal narrative of Ehrman's journey from evangelical faith to academic skepticism. Its thesis is that the New Testament text as we have it is not the original text but the product of centuries of scribal copying during which deliberate and accidental changes accumulated, and that these changes sometimes have significant theological implications.
The book has sold over 2 million copies, has been translated into over 25 languages, and has been cited more frequently than any other single popular book in discussions about biblical inerrancy and the reliability of the New Testament text. It provoked a substantial wave of apologetic responses from evangelical scholars, including Timothy Paul Jones's Misquoting Truth (2007), Andreas Kostenberger and Michael Kruger's The Heresy of Orthodoxy (2010), and others.
Biblical Engagement
John 7:53-8:11 (the pericope adulterae, or story of the woman caught in adultery) is the most famous and theologically rich of the passages Ehrman discusses. The passage - including the famous 'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone' - does not appear in the earliest and best manuscripts of John (including Papyrus 66, Papyrus 75, and Codex Sinaiticus) and was recognized as a later addition by Jerome, who translated the Latin Vulgate in the late fourth century. Ehrman uses this example to illustrate the dramatic possibility: one of the most beloved stories in the Gospels may not have been part of the original text of John. Scholarly consensus on this point is firm; the theological implications are debated.
Mark 16:9-20 (the longer ending of Mark) is the second of Ehrman's major examples. The Gospel of Mark in the earliest manuscripts (Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus) ends at 16:8: 'And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.' The twelve additional verses that appear in most Bibles - including the instructions to 'take up serpents' and 'speak with new tongues' that have been the basis of snake-handling Pentecostal practice - were added by a later scribe. Ehrman argues that this addition changes the theological message of Mark's Gospel: the original ending leaves the reader in the unresolved tension of the empty tomb and the women's fear; the addition provides the comfortable closure of resurrection appearances and the Great Commission.
1 John 5:7 (the Johannine Comma: 'For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one') is the most doctrinally significant of the passages Ehrman discusses. This explicit Trinitarian statement appears only in late medieval Latin manuscripts and was not part of the Greek text as known to the early church fathers. Erasmus refused to include it in his first printed Greek New Testament (1516), then reluctantly included it in his third edition (1522) after pressure from church authorities. It appeared in the textus receptus that underlies the King James Version, but modern critical editions exclude it. Ehrman uses this example to make the point that the major Trinitarian proof-text in 1 John was not original to the letter.
Luke 22:43-44 ('And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground') is an example of a passage that Ehrman discusses as a possible later addition designed to emphasize Jesus's full humanity against Docetist tendencies. The verses do not appear in the earliest manuscripts and may have been added to counter the view that Jesus was not truly human. Ehrman notes the irony: the addition was motivated by an orthodox theological concern but its status as an addition raises questions about the reliability of other theologically significant passages.
Author and Context
Bart D. Ehrman was born on October 5, 1955, in Lawrence, Kansas, into a mainline Protestant family. He was converted to evangelical Christianity at Moody Bible Institute (where he was taught that the Bible was 'the inerrant word of God'), and then studied at Wheaton College and Princeton Theological Seminary, where he was trained in New Testament textual criticism by Bruce Metzger, the leading American textual critic of the twentieth century. His Princeton dissertation was a study of the transmission of the New Testament text.
Ehrman's personal narrative of intellectual journey - from evangelical inerrancy to liberal Protestantism and eventually to agnosticism - is a central element of Misquoting Jesus and is what distinguishes it from purely academic presentations of the same material. He describes a specific moment of crisis: writing a seminary paper about the apparent historical error in Mark 2:26 (where Mark attributes Abiathar's name to a high priest who was actually Ahimelech), he concluded that if the Bible could contain a historical error, it could contain other kinds of errors as well, and the doctrine of inerrancy could not be maintained. This moment of disillusionment shaped the book's emotional register.
The Discipline of Textual Criticism
The discipline that Ehrman presents is genuinely important and not controversial among New Testament scholars. The Greek New Testament survives in approximately 5,700 manuscripts (fragments, papyri, majuscules, minuscules, and lectionaries), and no two manuscripts are identical. Scholars estimate between 200,000 and 400,000 variant readings in the manuscript tradition. The task of textual criticism is to use these manuscripts, along with the ancient translations (Latin Vulgate, Syriac Peshitta, Coptic, Armenian, etc.) and the quotations of the church fathers, to reconstruct the original text as accurately as possible.
The critical edition that results from this work - the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, now in its 28th edition - is what modern Bible translations are based on, and it differs from the textus receptus (the 16th-century Greek text that underlies the King James Version) in hundreds of places. Ehrman's presentation of this material is broadly accurate, and the specific examples he uses (the woman caught in adultery, the longer ending of Mark, the Johannine Comma) are standard examples in textual criticism courses.
Critical Reception and Evangelical Responses
Ehrman's book was received with enthusiasm by secular readers and journalists, who found in it confirmation of suspicions about the reliability of the Bible that they had held but had lacked scholarly backing for. Within New Testament scholarship, the response was more careful: most scholars agreed with Ehrman's specific textual conclusions while questioning his broader framing - particularly his implication that the changes in the text fundamentally undermine the reliability of the New Testament as a historical source or as the basis of Christian theology.
The main evangelical response was to argue that Ehrman's framing exaggerated the theological significance of the variants: the vast majority of the thousands of variants are trivial (differences in spelling, word order, or synonyms), and no central Christian doctrine is affected by any of the genuinely significant variants. The text of the New Testament is, in fact, better attested and more reliably reconstructed than that of any other ancient document, and the discovery of variants is a sign of the health of the textual critical process rather than evidence of its failure.
Theological Significance
The book's significance lies in its forcing of a public conversation about what exactly Christians mean when they claim that the Bible is the word of God. If the 'original autographs' to which inerrancy claims apply no longer exist, and if the text as transmitted contains scribal changes, what precisely is being claimed? The apologetic responses to Ehrman have in many cases produced more sophisticated accounts of biblical authority that distinguish between the reliability of the overall message and the inerrancy of the specific original wording.
Legacy
Ehrman has continued to produce popular scholarly books that address similar questions: Lost Christianities (2003), The New Testament: A Historical Introduction (multiple editions), Jesus, Interrupted (2009), Forged (2011), How Jesus Became God (2014). Each book has produced similar waves of evangelical response and has contributed to the broadening public discussion of biblical scholarship. His work has been valuable in forcing evangelical Christianity to engage more seriously with the history of the biblical text.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should work with John 7:53-8:11 (woman caught in adultery - noting the brackets in modern translations), Mark 16:1-8 and 16:9-20 (noting the footnote about the longer ending), Luke 22:39-46 (the agony in the garden, noting the textual uncertainty about verses 43-44), 1 John 5:6-8 (the Johannine Comma), and 2 Timothy 3:16-17 (the doctrine of Scripture that the debate is about).
Further Reading
- Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament (4th edition, 2005, with Ehrman) - the standard academic textbook of New Testament textual criticism, by Ehrman's own teacher and a believing Christian. - Timothy Paul Jones, Misquoting Truth (2007) - the most accessible evangelical response to Ehrman's specific arguments. - D.A. Carson, The King James Version Debate (1979) - older but still valuable discussion of the textual criticism questions that Ehrman popularized.