Has Jesus Been Misquoted?

1. Has Jesus Been Misquoted? Dr. Bob Stewart

2. Challenges to Biblical Reliability Textual Reliability Authorship Other Gospels Christianity and Ancient Myths Historical Issues Scientific Issues

3. The first question to address in relation to the trustworthiness of an ancient document is the question of the transmission of texts. “Can we be sure that we have anything even close to what the author originally wrote?”

4. Major Types of Textual Charges Conspiracy Theories Text Critical Issues

5. Joseph Smith “I believe the Bible as it read when it came from the pen of the original writers. Ignorant translators, careless transcribers or designing priests have committed many errors.” Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 327

6. Joseph Smith “From sundry revelations which had been received, it was apparent that many points touching the salvation of men, had been taken from the Bible, or lost before it was compiled.” Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 9-10

7. The Watchtower Society “While Jews refuse to pronounce God’s name, the apostate Christian church managed to remove it completely from Greek language manuscripts from both parts of the Bible as well as from other language versions.” The Divine Name That Will Endure Forever http://watchtower.org/e/na/article_06.htm

8. Mary Baker Eddy “The decisions by vote of church councils as to what should and should not be considered holy writ, the manifest mistakes in the ancient versions, the 30,000 different readings in the Old Testament and the 300,000 in the New, these facts show how a mortal and material sense stole into the divine record with its own hue darkening to some extent the inspired pages.” Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 139

9. Holy Blood, Holy Grail “When Constantine commissioned new versions of these documents, it enabled the custodians of orthodoxy to revise, edit, and rewrite their material as they saw fit, in accordance with their tenets. 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. The importance of Constantine’s commission must not be underestimated. Of the five thousand extant

10. Holy Blood, Holy Grail early manuscript versions of the New Testament, not one predates the fourth century. The New Testament as it exists today is essentially a product of fourth-century editors and writers—custodians of orthodoxy, “adherents of the message,” with vested interests to protect.” -Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln

11. Bart Ehrman “There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament” (Misquoting Jesus, 90). “Mistakes multiply and get repeated. Sometimes they get corrected, sometimes they get compounded—and so it goes—for centuries” (Misquoting Jesus, 57).

12. Bart Ehrman “The more I study the manuscript tradition of the New Testament the more I discover just how radically the text had been altered over the years at the hands of scribes, who were not only conserving Scripture but also changing it” (Misquoting Jesus, 207).

13. An Equally Qualified NT Text Critic “As one might expect, however, these raw numbers are somewhat deceptive. For the vast majority of these textual differences are easily recognized as simple scribal mistakes, errors caused by carelessness, ineptitude, or fatigue. The single largest category of mistake is orthographic. An examination of almost any of our oldest manuscripts

14. An Equally Qualified NT Text Critic will show that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most people can today. Scribes can at least be excused on this score: they lived, after all, in a world that was for the most part without dictionaries, let alone spell check.” Bart Ehrman, “Text and Tradition:The Role of New Testament Manuscripts in Early Christian Studies,” 9

15. What do we know? • We have no original MS of any ancient text. • We need to separate the facts from the interpretation of the facts. • All scholars have an agenda but an agenda does not disprove a report. • Over 5,700 Greek MSS of the NT are known today (only about 500-1,000 are given significant weight by Text Critics). • Over 10,000 Latin MSS, 1,000 Coptic MSS, and many other languages dating from the 3rd Century AD are extant.

16. What do we know? • Ancient classical writings usually exhibit gaps of at least 700 years between the time of the original and the earliest available copy. • We have at least a dozen 2nd C. MSS, at least 64 3rd C. MSS, & at least 48 4th C. MSS. Collectively these comprise the entire NT. • John Ryland fragment ca. AD 130 • Often only parts of ancient texts remain, e.g., we have only 25% of Livy’s 142 volumes are extant, and we have only 1/3 of Tacitus’ texts. • Codex VaticanusΒ(most of NT) AD 325-350 • Codex Sinaiticusא (complete NT) AD 350

17. Representative Ancient Writings

18. What do we know? • Patristic writings contain something like a million quotations from the NT. The entire NT could be reproduced simply from the writings of the Patristics. • There are 138,000 words in the NT and around 400,000 variants in the NT. • This is true but this way of speaking about variants is somewhat deceptive.

19. What do we know? • There are somewhere around 100,000,000 words in the NT when the total number of words from all the MSS are counted in the same way that variants are recorded. The result when counting apples to apples is that less than 1% of the text of the NT is problematic in any way. • The NT text history is remarkably stable. • There are hundreds of copies of each and every NT book.

20. What do we know? • Why are there so many variants and copies? Because Christians were copying these books like mad. They were under persecution—and they wanted as many copies as possible. • In short, nobody controlled the process, nobody had enough control to “take out” unpopular doctrines from all these texts. • By AD 325 (Council of Nicea) there were too many MSS for anyone to destroy all MSS teaching something deemed to be inappropriate—or to “correct” them.

21. Types of NT Textual Variants • Spelling differences and nonsense errors • Minor differences that do not affect translations or that involve synonyms • Differences that affect the meaning of the text but are not viable (a difference found in a MS that has some likelihood of reflecting the original wording) • Differences that affect the meaning of the text and are viable

22. Spelling Differences and Nonsense Errors • Names are often misspelled or spelled differently, e.g., Iōannēs or Iōanēs • The Greek movableν(nu) can occur after certain words. It is used somewhat like the English indefinite article (a or an) • Words that sound alike, e.g., Greek pronouns like hēmon (our) and humon(your). • Such mistakes are easily identified and rarely repeated because they are corrected.

23. Other Causes of Error in the Transmission of the NT Text • Errors Resulting from Faulty Eyesight • A failure to distinguish between similar looking Greek characters (S E Q O G) • Different handwriting scripts • “Eye-skips” (parablepsis) • Similar ending lines that could cause copyists to skip over a section (homoeoteleuton) • Sometimes two sentences end with the same verbs (haplography), which caused some copyists to skip an entire verse (e.g., Lk. 10:31-32) • Copying the same word twice (dittography)

24. Other Causes of Error in the Transmission of the NT Text • Errors Arising From Faulty Hearing • Poor hearing of the transcribers • Some words with the same pronunciation but different spelling (their/there; red/read) • Differing dialects and pronunciations of the same words • Dipthongs (ou, u) with similar sounds as vowels caused confusion (e.g., Rev. 1:5; lusanti; lousanti)

25. Other Causes of Error in the Transmission of the NT Text • Errors of the Mind • Short-term memory loss • Substitution of synonyms • Variation in the sequence of words • Errors of Judgment • Words or notes in the margins copied into the body of the text (John 5:7?) • Glossing or adding commentary

26. How Would Variants Arise? • Inconsistent/Non-Standardized Spellings • Word Order Differences • Clarifications—Who is speaking, what an expression means • Corrections—From earlier errors • Harmonizations—Agree with other Gospels • Amplifications—Theological explanations behind statements

27. Differences That Don’t Affect Translation or Meaning • In Greek the definite article is sometimes used with proper names. Whether it is present or not does not generally affect translation or meaning. • Transposition—Greek is a highly inflected language in which word order can vary greatly without affecting translation or meaning. • MSS where proper names are inserted in place of pronouns in order to identify the person referred to (often in Lectionary readings). The meaning is the same.

28. Meaningful DifferencesThat Are Not Viable • When a variant is found in a single late MS or group of MSS that by themselves have little or no likelihood of going back to the original text. • When a text has apparently been “harmonized.” (Harmonization into a single text was a common early Christian practice.)

29. Meaningful DifferencesThat Are Viable (to some degree) • Examples include instances where two words are very similar in spelling. A slight misspelling may change the meaning. • For example, it is unclear whether the verb in the second clause of Rom. 5:1 should be understood in the indicative or subjunctive mood. Should it read, echomen(We have peace)or echōmen(Let us have peace). Neither is theologically problematic.

30. Meaningful DifferencesThat Are Viable (to some degree) • “Feeling compassion, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, "I will; be clean” (Mark 1:41) • Some MSS have Jesus “becoming angry” instead of “feeling compassion”. • Both emotions would demonstrate Christ’s humanity, and the situation lends itself to both possibilities.

31. Meaningful DifferencesThat Are Viable (to some degree) • John 7:53-8:11, The Adulteress Pericope • Absent from many early 3rd century manuscripts • The pericope does, however, appear in many early MSS. Some MSS have it at the end of John, once in Luke, and Eusebius of Caesarea wrote that it was in the now-lost Gospel of the Hebrews.

32. Meaningful DifferencesThat Are Viable (to some degree) • Mark 16:9-20 • Some of the earliest MSS (a and B) do not contain the last 12 verses of Mark, nor do many of the older Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian versions. • Some of the patristics (Clement of Alexandria, Origen) show no knowledge of this section.

33. Meaningful DifferencesThat Are Viable (to some degree) • The end of Mark’s Gospel is uncertain; there are four different endings among the MSS. • The shorter ending (ending in vs. 8) • The intermediate ending (“But they reported to Peter and those with him all they had been told. After this Jesus himself sent out by means of them, from east to the west, to the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.”) • The long ending (appearing in the TR & KJV) • The expanded long ending (addition to v. 14).

34. Meaningful DifferencesThat Are Viable (to some degree) • Most contemporary NT translations note significant changes. Examples include Philip’s baptism requirement to the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:37, and 1 John 5:8 (explicitly Trinitarian). Many translations either delete the last two entirely or move them to the margins. But note that none of these affects a cardinal doctrine regardless of how they are treated!

35. Conclusions • Inerrancy relates to the autographs, the texts as originally given. • Inspiration relates only to the biblical authors, not to the thousands of scribes who copied their work. • Even if we accepted all of Bart Ehrman’s conclusions concerning the text, none of those would prove theologically problematic.

36. Conclusion: We Can Have a High Degree of Confidence in the Greek Text of the NT as We Have It Today!

37. Suggested Resource A broad collection of essays by recognized experts that addresses virtually all of the challenges related to biblical reliability.

38. Suggested Resource • Features a debate between Bart Ehrman (UNC) and Dan Wallace (DTS) on the textual reliability of the New Testament • Includes essays on the subject by numerous experts from all sides

39. Suggested Resource A collection of informed, thorough, and academically rigorous essays critiquing the controversial claims of Bart Ehrman.

40. Has Jesus Been Misquoted? Dr. Bob Stewart