INTRODUCTION
M ore than almost anything I've ever written about, the subject
of this book has been on my mind for the past thirty years,
since I was in my late teens and just beginning my study of the New
Testament. Because it has been a part of me for so long, I thought I
should begin by giving a personal account of why this material has
been, and still is, very important to me.
The book is about ancient manuscripts of the New Testament and
the differences found in them, about scribes who copied scripture and
sometimes changed it. This may not seem to be very promising as a
key to one's own autobiography, but there it is. One has little control
over such things.
Before explaining how and why the manuscripts of the New Tes
tament have made a real difference to me emotionally and intellectu
ally, to my understanding of myself, the world I live in, my views of
God, and the Bible, I should give some personal background.
I was born and raised in a conservative place and time—the na
tion's heartland, beginning in the mid 1950s. My upbringing was
nothing out of the ordinary. We were a fairly typical family of five,
churchgoing but not particularly religious. Starting the year I was in
fifth grade, we were involved with the Episcopal church in Lawrence,
2 MISQUOTING JESUS
Kansas, a church with a kind and wise rector, who happened also
to be a neighbor and whose son was one of my friends (with whom I
got into mischief later on in junior high school—something involving
cigars). As with many Episcopal churches, this one was socially re
spectable and socially responsible. It took the church liturgy seriously,
and scripture was part of that liturgy. But the Bible was not overly
emphasized: it was there as one of the guides to faith and practice,
along with the church's tradition and common sense. We didn't actu
ally talk about the Bible much, or read it much, even in Sunday school
classes, which focused more on practical and social issues, and on how
to live in the world.
The Bible did have a revered place in our home, especially for my
mom, who would occasionally read from the Bible and make sure
that we understood its stories and ethical teachings (less so its "doc
trines"). Up until my high school years, I suppose I saw the Bible as a
mysterious book of some importance for religion; but it certainly was
not something to be learned and mastered. It had a feel of antiquity to
it and was inextricably bound up somehow with God and church and
worship. Still, I saw no reason to read it on my own or study it.
Things changed drastically for me when I was a sophomore in
high school. It was then that I had a "bornagain" experience, in a set
ting quite different from that of my home church. I was a typical
"fringe" kid—a good student, interested and active in school sports
but not great at any of them, interested and active in social life but not
in the upper echelon of the school's popular elite. I recall feeling a
kind of emptiness inside that nothing seemed to fill—not running
around with my friends (we were already into some serious social
drinking at parties), dating (beginning to enter the mysterium tremen
dum of the world of sex), school (I worked hard and did well but was
no superstar), work (I was a doortodoor salesman for a company
that sold products for the blind), church (I was an acolyte and pretty
devout—one had to be on Sunday mornings, given everything that
happened on Saturday nights). There was a kind of loneliness associ
ated with being a young teenager; but, of course, I didn't realize that
INTRODUCTION 3
it was part of being a teenager—I thought there must be something
missing.
That's when I started attending meetings of a Campus Life Youth
for Christ club; they took place at kids' houses—the first I went to was
a yard party at the home of a kid who was pretty popular, and that
made me think the group must be okay. The leader of the group was a
twentysomethingyearold named Bruce who did this sort of thing
for a living—organized Youth for Christ clubs locally, tried to convert
high school kids to be "born again" and then get them involved in se
rious Bible studies, prayer meetings, and the like. Bruce was a com
pletely winsome personality—younger than our parents but older and
more experienced than we—with a powerful message, that the void
we felt inside (We were teenagers! All of us felt a void!) was from not
having Christ in our hearts. If we would only ask Christ in, he would
enter and fill us with the joy and happiness that only the "saved"
could know.
Bruce could quote the Bible at will, and did so to an amazing de
gree. Given my reverence for, but ignorance of, the Bible, it all
sounded completely convincing. And it was so unlike what I got at
church, which involved old established ritual that seemed more
geared toward old established adults than toward kids wanting fun
and adventure, but who felt empty inside.
To make a short story shorter, I eventually got to know Bruce,
came to accept his message of salvation, asked Jesus into my heart,
and had a bona fide bornagain experience. I had been born for real
only fifteen years earlier, but this was a new and exciting experience
for me, and it got me started on a lifelong journey of faith that has
taken enormous twists and turns, ending up in a dead end that proved
to be, in fact, a new path that I have since taken, now well over thirty
years later.
Those of us who had these bornagain experiences considered
ourselves to be "real" Christians—as opposed to those who simply went
to church as a matter of course, who did not really have Christ in their
hearts and were therefore simply going through the motions with
4 MISQUOTING JESUS
none of the reality. One of the ways we differentiated ourselves from
these others was in our commitment to Bible study and prayer. Espe
cially Bible study. Bruce himself was a Bible man; he had gone to
Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and could quote an answer from
the Bible to every question we could think of (and many we would
never think of). I soon became envious of this ability to quote scrip
ture and got involved with Bible studies myself, learning some texts,
understanding their relevance, and even memorizing the key verses.
Bruce convinced me that I should consider becoming a "serious"
Christian and devote myself completely to the Christian faith. This
meant studying scripture full time at Moody Bible Institute, which,
among other things, would involve a drastic change of lifestyle. At
Moody there was an ethical "code" that students had to sign off on: no
drinking, no smoking, no dancing, no card playing, no movies. And
lots of Bible. As we used to say, "Moody Bible Institute, where Bible is
our middle name." I guess I looked on it as a kind of Christian boot
camp. In any event, I decided not to go halfmeasures with my faith; I
applied to Moody, got in, and went there in the fall of 1973.
The Moody experience was intense. I decided to major in Bible
theology, which meant taking a lot of biblical study and systematic the
ology courses. Only one perspective was taught in these courses, sub
scribed to by all the professors (they had to sign a statement) and by all
the students (we did as well): the Bible is the inerrant word of God. It
contains no mistakes. It is inspired completely and in its very words—
"verbal, plenary inspiration." All the courses I took presupposed and
taught this perspective; any other was taken to be misguided or even
heretical. Some, I suppose, would call this brainwashing. For me, it
was an enormous "step up" from the milquetoast view of the Bible I
had had as a socializing Episcopalian in my younger youth. This was
hardcore Christianity, for the fully committed.
There was an obvious problem, however, with the claim that the
Bible was verbally inspired—down to its very words. As we learned
at Moody in one of the first courses in the curriculum, we don't actu
ally have the original writings of the New Testament. What we have
are copies of these writings, made years later—in most cases, many
INTRODUCTION 5
years later. Moreover, none of these copies is completely accurate,
since the scribes who produced them inadvertently and/or intention
ally changed them in places. All scribes did this. So rather than actu
ally having the inspired words of the autographs (i.e., the originals) of
the Bible, what we have are the errorridden copies of the autographs.
One of the most pressing of all tasks, therefore, was to ascertain what
the originals of the Bible said, given the circumstances that (1) they
were inspired and (2) we don't have them.
I must say that many of my friends at Moody did not consider this
task to be all that significant or interesting. They were happy to rest
on the claim that the autographs had been inspired, and to shrug off,
more or less, the problem that the autographs do not survive. For me,
though, this was a compelling problem. It was the words of scripture
themselves that God had inspired. Surely we have to know what
those words were if we want to know how he had communicated to
us, since the very words were his words, and having some other words
(those inadvertently or intentionally created by scribes) didn't help us
much if we wanted to know His words.
This is what got me interested in the manuscripts of the New Tes
tament, already as an eighteenyearold. At Moody, I learned the basics
of the field known as textual criticism—a technical term for the sci
ence of restoring the "original" words of a text from manuscripts that
have altered them. But I wasn't yet equipped to engage in this study:
first I had to learn Greek, the original language of the New Testament,
and possibly other ancient languages such as Hebrew (the language
of the Christian Old Testament) and Latin, not to mention modern
European languages like German and French, in order to see what
other scholars had said about such things. It was a long path ahead.
At the end of my three years at Moody (it was a threeyear diploma),
I had done well in my courses and was more serious than ever about
becoming a Christian scholar. My idea at the time was that there were
plenty of highly educated scholars among the evangelical Christians,
but not many evangelicals among the (secular) highly educated schol
ars, so I wanted to become an evangelical "voice" in secular circles, by
getting degrees that would allow me to teach in secular settings while
6 MISQUOTING JESUS
retaining my evangelical commitments. First, though, I needed to
complete my bachelor's degree, and to do that I decided to go to a top
rank evangelical college. I chose Wheaton College, in a suburb of
Chicago.
At Moody I was warned that I might have trouble finding real
Christians at Wheaton—which shows how fundamentalist Moody
was: Wheaton is only for evangelical Christians and is the alma mater
of Billy Graham, for example. And at first I did find it to be a bit lib
eral for my tastes. Students talked about literature, history, and philoso
phy rather than the verbal inspiration of scripture. They did this from
a Christian perspective, but even so: didn't they realize what really
mattered ?
I decided to major in English literature at Wheaton, since reading
had long been one of my passions and since I knew that to make in
roads into the circles of scholarship, I would need to become well
versed in an area of scholarship other than the Bible. I decided also to
commit myself to learning Greek. It was during my first semester at
Wheaton, then, that I met Dr. Gerald Hawthorne, my Greek teacher
and a person who became quite influential in my life as a scholar,
teacher, and, eventually, friend. Hawthorne, like most of my profes
sors at Wheaton, was a committed evangelical Christian. But he was
not afraid of asking questions of his faith. At the time, I took this as a
sign of weakness (in fact, I thought I had nearly all the answers to the
questions he asked); eventually I saw it as a real commitment to truth
and as being willing to open oneself up to the possibility that one's views
need to be revised in light of further knowledge and life experience.
Learning Greek was a thrilling experience for me. As it turned
out, I was pretty good at the basics of the language and was always
eager for more. On a deeper level, however, the experience of learning
Greek became a bit troubling for me and my view of scripture. I came
to see early on that the full meaning and nuance of the Greek text of
the New Testament could be grasped only when it is read and studied
in the original language (the same thing applies to the Old Testament,
as I later learned when I acquired Hebrew). All the more reason, I
thought, for learning the language thoroughly. At the same time, this
INTRODUCTION 7
started making me question my understanding of scripture as the ver
bally inspired word of God. If the full meaning of the words of scrip
ture can be grasped only by studying them in Greek (and Hebrew),
doesn't this mean that most Christians, who don't read ancient lan
guages, will never have complete access to what God wants them to
know? And doesn't this make the doctrine of inspiration a doctrine
only for the scholarly elite, who have the intellectual skills and leisure
to learn the languages and study the texts by reading them in the orig
inal? What good does it do to say that the words are inspired by God
if most people have absolutely no access to these words, but only to
more or less clumsy renderings of these words into a language, such as
English, that has nothing to do with the original words?'
My questions were complicated even more as I began to think in
creasingly about the manuscripts that conveyed the words. The more
I studied Greek, the more I became interested in the manuscripts that
preserve the New Testament for us, and in the science of textual criti
cism, which can supposedly help us reconstruct what the original
words of the New Testament were. I kept reverting to my basic ques
tion: 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? What good is it to say that the
autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don't have the origi
nals! We have only errorridden copies, and the vast majority of these
are centuries removed from the originals and different from them,
evidently, in thousands of ways.
These doubts both plagued me and drove me to dig deeper and
deeper, to understand what the Bible really was. I completed my degree
at Wheaton in two years and decided, under the guidance of Profes
sor Hawthorne, to commit myself to the textual criticism of the New
Testament by going to study with the world's leading expert in the
field, a scholar named Bruce M. Metzger who taught at Princeton
Theological Seminary.
Once again I was warned by my evangelical friends against going
to Princeton Seminary, since, as they told me, I would have trouble
8 MISQUOTING JESUS
finding any "real" Christians there. It was, after all, a Presbyterian
seminary, not exactly a breeding ground for bornagain Christians.
But my study of English literature, philosophy, and history—not to
mention Greek—had widened my horizons significantly, and my
passion was now for knowledge, knowledge of all kinds, sacred and
secular. If learning the "truth" meant no longer being able to identify
with the bornagain Christians I knew in high school, so be it. I was
intent on pursuing my quest for truth wherever it might take me,
trusting that any truth I learned was no less true for being unexpected
or difficult to fit into the pigeonholes provided by my evangelical
background.
Upon arriving at Princeton Theological Seminary, I immediately
signed up for firstyear Hebrew and Greek exegesis (interpretation)
classes, and loaded my schedule as much as I could with such courses.
I found these classes to be a challenge, both academically and person
ally. The academic challenge was completely welcome, but the per
sonal challenges that I faced were emotionally rather trying. As I've
indicated, already at Wheaton I had begun to question some of the
foundational aspects of my commitment to the Bible as the inerrant
word of God. That commitment came under serious assault in my de
tailed studies at Princeton. I resisted any temptation to change my
views, and found a number of friends who, like me, came from con
servative evangelical schools and were trying to "keep the faith" (a
funny way of putting it—looking back—since we were, after all, in
a Christian divinity program). But my studies started catching up
with me.
A turning point came in my second semester, in a course I was tak
ing with a much revered and pious professor named Cullen Story. The
course was on the exegesis of the Gospel of Mark, at the time (and
still) my favorite Gospel. For this course we needed to be able to read
the Gospel of Mark completely in Greek (I memorized the entire
Greek vocabulary of the Gospel the week before the semester began);
we were to keep an exegetical notebook on our reflections on the in
terpretation of key passages; we discussed problems in the interpreta
tion of the text; and we had to write a final term paper on an
INTRODUCTION 9
interpretive crux of our own choosing. I chose a passage in Mark 2,
where Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees because his disciples had
been walking through a grain field, eating the grain on the Sabbath.
Jesus wants to show the Pharisees that "Sabbath was made for hu
mans, not humans for the Sabbath" and so reminds them of what the
great King David had done when he and his men were hungry, how
they went into the Temple "when Abiathar was the high priest" and
ate the show bread, which was only for the priests to eat. One of the
wellknown problems of the passage is that when one looks at the Old
Testament passage that Jesus is citing (1 Sam. 21:16), it turns out that
David did this not when Abiathar was the high priest, but, in fact,
when Abiathar's father Ahimelech was. In other words, this is one of
those passages that have been pointed to in order to show that the
Bible is not inerrant at all but contains mistakes.
In my paper for Professor Story, I developed a long and compli
cated argument to the effect that even though Mark indicates this
happened "when Abiathar was the high priest," it doesn't really mean
that Abiathar was the high priest, but that the event took place in the
part of the scriptural text that has Abiathar as one of the main charac
ters. My argument was based on the meaning of the Greek words in
volved and was a bit convoluted. I was pretty sure Professor Story
would appreciate the argument, since I knew him as a good Christian
scholar who obviously (like me) would never think there could be
anything like a genuine error in the Bible. But at the end of my paper
he made a simple oneline comment that for some reason went
straight through me. He wrote: "Maybe Mark just made a mistake." I
started thinking about it, considering all the work I had put into the
paper, realizing that I had had to do some pretty fancy exegetical foot
work to get around the problem, and that my solution was in fact a bit
of a stretch. I finally concluded, "Hmm ... maybe Mark did make a
mistake."
Once I made that admission, the floodgates opened. For if there
could be one little, picayune mistake in Mark 2, maybe there could be
mistakes in other places as well. Maybe, when Jesus says later in Mark
4 that the mustard seed is "the smallest of all seeds on the earth,"
10 MISQUOTING JESUS
maybe I don't need to come up with a fancy explanation for how the
mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds when I know full well it isn't.
And maybe these "mistakes" apply to bigger issues. Maybe when
Mark says that Jesus was crucified the day after the Passover meal was
eaten (Mark 14:12; 15:25) and John says he died the day before it
was eaten (John 19:14)—maybe that is a genuine difference. Or when
Luke indicates in his account of Jesus's birth that Joseph and Mary re
turned to Nazareth just over a month after they had come to Bethle
hem (and performed the rites of purification; Luke 2:39), whereas
Matthew indicates they instead fled to Egypt (Matt. 2:1922)—maybe
that is a difference. Or when Paul says that after he converted on the
way to Damascus he did not go to Jerusalem to see those who were
apostles before him (Gal. 1:1617), whereas the book of Acts says that
that was the first thing he did after leaving Damascus (Acts 9:26)—
maybe that is a difference.
This kind of realization coincided with the problems I was en
countering the more closely I studied the surviving Greek manu
scripts of the New Testament. It is one thing to say that the originals
were inspired, but the reality is that we don't have the originals—so
saying they were inspired doesn't help me much, unless I can recon
struct the originals. Moreover, the vast majority of Christians for the
entire history of the church have not had access to the originals, mak
ing their inspiration something of a moot point. Not only do we not
have the originals, we don't have the first copies of the originals. We
don't even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the
copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made
later—much later. In most instances, they are copies made many cen
turies later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many
thousands of places. As we will see later in this book, these copies dif
fer from one another in so many places that we don't even know how
many differences there are. Possibly it is easiest to put it in compara
tive terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than
there are words in the New Testament.
Most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignifi
cant. A good portion of them simply show us that scribes in antiquity
INTRODUCTION 11
could spell no better than most people can today (and they didn't even
have dictionaries, let alone spell check). Even so, what is one to make
of all these differences? If one wants to insist that God inspired the
very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don't have the
very words of scripture? In some places, as we will see, we simply can
not be sure that we have reconstructed the original text accurately. It's
a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don't even
know what the words are!
This became a problem for my view of inspiration, for I came to
realize that it would have been no more difficult for God to preserve
the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire
them in the first place. If he wanted his people to have his words,
surely he would have given them to them (and possibly even given
them the words in a language they could understand, rather than
Greek and Hebrew). The fact that we don't have the words surely
must show, I reasoned, that he did not preserve them for us. And if he
didn't perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think
that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words.
In short, my study of the Greek New Testament, and my investi
gations into the manuscripts that contain it, led to a radical rethinking
of my understanding of what the Bible is. This was a seismic change
for me. Before this—starting with my bornagain experience in high
school, through my fundamentalist days at Moody, and on through
my evangelical days at Wheaton—my faith had been based completely
on a certain view of the Bible as the fully inspired, inerrant word of
God. Now I no longer saw the Bible that way. The Bible began to ap
pear to me as a very human book. Just as human scribes had copied,
and changed, the texts of scripture, so too had human authors origi
nally written the texts of scripture. This was a human book from be
ginning to end. It was written by different human authors at different
times and in different places to address different needs. Many of these
authors no doubt felt they were inspired by God to say what they did,
but they had their own perspectives, their own beliefs, their own
views, their own needs, their own desires, their own understandings,
their own theologies; and these perspectives, beliefs, views, needs,
12 MISQUOTING JESUS