Misquoting Jesus in the Bible - Professor Bart D. Ehrman

well thank you very much for that generous introduction and you're welcome it's a pleasure to be to be with you all this evening so I as Bob was pointing out I teach the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill which as you all know is in the it's the buckle of the Bible Belt which creates certain interesting moments in teaching historical approaches toward early Christianity and the New Testament this last year I was teaching my course on the New Testament so I had a class about 360 students in it and I decided to do something this last year that I had never done before I began my class by asking students the following question I said how many of you in here would agree with the proposition that the Bible is the inspired Word of God boom the entire room raises his hand all right good great now uh how many of you have read The Da Vinci Code I asked boom the entire purpose is oh good okay now how many of you've read the entire Bible scattered hands I said all right now I'm not telling you that I think God wrote the Bible you're telling me that you think God wrote the Bible I can see why you might want to read a book by Dan Brown that means God wrote a book what wouldn't you want to see what he had to say just one of the mysteries of living in south well the the Bible the Bible is the most widely purchased most thoroughly revered and probably most broadly misunderstood book in the history of human civilization one of the things that's misunderstood at least by my 19 year old students of Chapel Hill is that when we're reading the Bible we're not actually reading the words of Matthew Mark Luke or John we're reading translations from the Greek language in which these books were written and something is always lost in translation not only that but we're not reading translations of the originals of these books because we don't have the originals of these books or of any of the other books of the New Testament what we have are copies made centuries later many of them many many centuries later these thousands of copies that we have are all different from one another in lots of little ways and sometimes in big ways there are places where we don't know what the authors of the New Testament originally wrote now for some Christians that's not a problem because they don't have a high view of Scripture for others it's a very big problem what does it mean to say that God inspired the words of the text if we don't have the words moreover why should one think that God performed the miracle of inspiring the words of the Bible if he didn't perform the miracle of preserving the words of the Bible if he meant to give us his very words why didn't he make sure we receive them the problem of not having the originals of the New Testament though is a problem for everyone not simply for those who believe that the Bible was inspired by God for all of us I think the Bible is the most important book in the history of Western civilization it continues to be cited in public debates over gay rights abortion over whether to go to war with foreign countries over how to organize and run our society but how do we interpret the New Testament it's hard to know what the words of the New Testament mean if we don't know what the words were and so in this lecture I'll be talking about not knowing what the words were and what we might what we might know about the originals of the New Testament how they got lost and how possibly they might be reconstructed so let me begin by talking about on a fairly basic level how it is that we got the books of the New Testament the books of the New Testament were all written in Greek they were all written in the 1st century of the Common Era they were written by Greek speaking Christians who wanted to share with their community their views of Jesus of the faith of what to believe in how to behave so an author like Mark the author of our first gospel sat down and wrote out one day his gospel about Jesus now we don't know where Mark actually lived some scholars have thought that mark may be lived in Rome so let's say he lived in Rome mark writes his book well how does this book get in into circulation the problem is we're dealing with an age in which there were no Xerox machines there wasn't desktop publishing yet no PDF files in fact there wasn't carbon paper how did people copy how do people get copies of books well in the ancient world the only way to get a copy of a book was to copy it by hand one page one sentence one word one letter at a time mark makes his book and somebody in his community wants another copy of it and so that person either makes a copy himself or has somebody else to make a copy form now part of the problem is that in the ancient world at this time period in the Roman Empire probably something like 90% of the population was illiterate couldn't read or write so not anybody could just make a copy you and most people who could write couldn't write very well and so somebody makes a copy we don't know who it we don't know who it was who made the first copy we don't know if this person was competent or incompetent but he made a copy and probably if he made a copy of this book by hand one page one sentence once one word one letter at a time he made mistakes now my students sometimes have difficulty believing that people make mistakes when they copy things by hand and so I tell them well you know you sit down tonight and copy the Gospel of Mark and see how you do well in fact they'll make mistakes now here here we have a problem created because we have the second copy of mark that is also put in circulation and somebody wants a copy of mark and so they copied the copy but the copy has mistakes in it and so the next person who copies it copies the mistakes thinking that they're the original wording and the second person also makes mistakes of his own and so he not only reproduces the mistakes of his predecessor he introduces his own mistakes and then another person comes along and copies that copy making the mistakes of both of his predecessors and creating mistakes of his own and then that book gets booed puddin and pretty soon you've got copies around the city of Rome that are all different from one another now a visitor comes to Rome from Ephesus and they have a church back in Ephesus too and they want a copy of this gospel and so he takes a copy makes a copy takes it back to Ephesus then that copy gets copied and that copy gets copying that copy gets copied then somebody comes from Smyrna and they want a copy and so and so it goes for year after year after year we don't have a copy of mark until around the Year 200 about a hundred fifty years after mark was originally written so not only do we not have the originals we don't have the first copies where the copies of the copies are the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies etc etc mistakes were made on route and these mistakes were replicated now the only way a mistake gets corrected is if you're copying a copy of mark and you come across a sentence that you're pretty sure is wrong because it doesn't make sense and you try and correct it and so you you correct it to say something other than what it says the problem is there's no guarantee that you will correct the mistake correctly right you might correct the mistake incorrectly in which case you've got three forms of the text the original text the mistake and the mistaken correction of the mistake and so it goes on for year after year decade after decade the originals end up getting lost they get lost they're either they're either worn out of existence or people figure well we don't need this I've got a brand new copy of it so they throw it away and all all of the books of the New Testament 27 books experience the same fate and so that is the situation we're dealing with this is not a situation that's unique to the New Testament this is a situation that we find for every book from the ancient world every ancient book has this problem the problems exacerbated with the New Testament simply because the New Testament has come to be revered as Scripture and also because as it turns out we have more copies of the New Testament than of any other book from the ancient world that would seem like a good thing but it also means that we have more mistakes for the New Testament than for any other book and so the abundance of evidence we have creates an abundance of problems let me talk about the surviving copies that we do have first give you a sense of the numbers of books that we're talking about New Testament was originally written in Greek and at last count we had over 5,700 copies of the New Testament in the Greek language in which it was originally written now when I said we have 5,700 copies I don't mean that we have complete copies of all the books from beginning to end what I mean is we have either complete copies or fragmentary copies some of these fragmentary copies are very small little fragments found in trash heaps in Egypt that where the rest of the book was destroyed and we just have a little scrap so we have from little scraps to enormous tomes that are in in medieval libraries we have 5,700 copies in Greek and we have copies in other languages because as Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire people translated the New Testament into other languages such as lat we have something like 10,000 copies of the Bible in the New Testament in Latin in Coptic the ancient Egyptian language in Syriac in in Georgian and Armenian and Old Church Slavonic etc etc of all sorts of copies in all sorts of languages these these copies can be compared with one another and when you compare these copies with one another there are lots of mistakes in them because no two of these copies are exactly alike in their wording how old are these copies that we have well the oldest copy that we have of any book of the New Testament is actually a little fragment that was discovered in Egypt this fragment is about the size of a credit card and it's written on both front and back that's significant by the way that it's written on both front and back because it tells you that this copy actually came from a book like we have books today where you've got pages written on front and back as opposed to a scroll Christians early on prefer writing their their scriptures in books rather than in scrolls that made these books different from other books throughout the Roman world this little credit card size scrap that we have is called P 52 it's called P 52 because it's written on papyrus so P papyrus is an ancient writing material and it's called P 52 because it was the fifty-second papyrus that was discovered and categorized classified cataloged so this little scrap has a few lines on it from John chapter 18 it's the passage where Jesus is talking to Pontius Pilate in his trial before Pilate where Pilate says what is true what is truth that line so that's that it's written on and it's written both front and back now the thing is if you have a little scrap like that and it's written on the front in the back and you know what passage it comes from then you can actually do some interesting things because you can figure out even though you don't have a complete line on this page you can figure out where this thing was on the page and if you've got if you do it right if you figure if you've got it one margin you can figure out how many letters were in each line and you can figure out how many must have been on the page in order to get from this part to that part see what I'm saying so you can actually reconstruct how long the page was and then you can calculate how many pages were in this manuscript because how many pages would it take with this many letters in it to create the Gospel of John and so this one scrap can tell you how long the manuscript was so there are people who do this for a living it turns out so this is the oldest scrap how old is it this scrap p-52 is usually dated to the first half of the second century the way they date ancient manuscripts is actually on the basis of the handwriting analysis the science of this is called paleography paleo mean ancient graffiti writing ancient writing so the study of ancient writing is called paleography and there there are scholars who are pale iographer 'z who can date manuscripts within about 50 years of their production the the the way the the science works is that handwriting in the ancient world before there is the invention of printing changed slowly over time so people made letters in certain distinctive ways depending on when they lived and so if you are familiar with how handwriting was in different periods of history then you can determine when when a manuscript was written that's that's the science of paleography and you can a good pay the agra fir can get within about fifty years so this thing and you need a fifty year gap because some scribe is copying a manuscript when he's 70 probably writing the same way he did when he learned how to write when he was 20 and so you needed to fit you need a 50 or 50 or gap so this thing is dated to around 125 plus or minus 25 years well that's pretty early this is from the Gospel of John this is this this little piece was probably written about 30 or 40 years after John itself had been produced so that that's pretty good we don't get a complete copy of the Gospel of John until again around the Year 200 but we do have this little scrap most of the manuscripts we have are not anywhere near this early though we start getting full manuscripts at the beginning of the third century around the Year 200 150 hundred 70 years after Jesus death these are about a hundred twenty years after most of the books have been written and we still don't start getting numerous manuscripts until the seventh eighth or ninth centuries and then we start getting lots of them because then you've got monasteries where monks are spending their days copying manuscripts and we have we have a lot of their manuscripts and so five thousand seven hundred manuscripts some of them going back into the second century none of them being the originals or within a few even within a few years of the originals so with with all of these differences without with all of these manuscripts how many differences are there throughout the Middle Ages it appears that the scholars didn't realize that there was a problem of not having the original text or very few scholars realize that this was a problem even the scribes copying the text they sometimes would realize there are differences in the manuscripts they're copying but they didn't make a very big deal about it the first time somebody made a really big deal about this was exactly 300 years ago this year in the year 1707 there was a there is a scholar named John mill at Oxford I think he's unrelated to the Victorian John Stuart Mill that this john mill was a was a scholar of the bible and he had spent 30 years looking at manuscripts of the of the new testament now this is obviously after the invention of printing and printers have to decide what text they're going to print and the problem is they've got manuscripts that have differences among them and so how does the printer decide which manuscript to print well it's a problem that that's when they start realizing that this was an issue well john mill wanted to produce a printed edition of the greek new testament he spent 30 years looking at the manuscripts available to him he had available to him a hundred manuscripts approximately a hundred manuscripts and he printed up his edition of the greek new testament in which he'd give he'd give a verse and then at the bottom of the page he would indicate the places where the manuscripts differed from one another for for that verse to the shock and dismay of many of his readers when john mill produced his edition of the greek new testament and included an apparatus at the bottom of the page that sighted 30,000 cases where the manuscripts differed from one another 30,000 places where there were manuscript variations among the manuscripts that he had discovered and the striking thing is John mill didn't give all of the differences he found he only cited the differences that he thought were significant some of his detractors claimed that John mill was working to render the text of Scripture uncertain his supporters pointed out that he didn't create these differences he simply noticed that they exist so what do we know today about the numbers of mistakes in our manuscripts well mill looked at a hundred manuscripts and now we have 5,700 manuscripts nobody knows how many differences there are among the manuscripts that we now have because nobody yet even with the development of computer technologies nobody has been able to add up all of the differences sometimes a scholars guess there may be a couple hundred thousand differences some people say three hundred thousand some say four hundred thousand there are different guesses the way I usually put it to my students is in comparative terms there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament well this obviously creates a problem if you want to know what Mark actually said and all you've got are copies of mark that are hundreds of years later that have so many differences in them how can you possibly reconstruct it well that is a problem now having said that we have these hundreds of thousands of differences I wanted to emphasize a particular point which is most of these differences that we have in our manuscripts are completely insignificant unimportant and don't matter for a thing many of these differences in the manuscripts are so unimportant that you can't replicate them in translation okay in other words you like they change the word order in Greek where you'd have to translate it the same way no matter what the Greek word order is so I mean it doesn't really matter very much by far the vast majority of these hundreds of thousands of differences are significant for nothing more than showing that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than my students can today and scribes of course didn't have spellcheck scribes in fact in you have dictionaries it's Crichton many scribes didn't care how they spelled anything sometimes you'll be reading a manuscript and they'll be the same word that occurs say three times within a couple of lines and the scribe will spell the same word three different ways it just doesn't care how the word is spelled well so you know you've got you've got lots and lots of those kinds of changes and what do they matter for they don't matter at all so having said there are all these hundreds of thousands of differences I want to stress that most of them don't matter for very much some of these some of these changes the ones that don't matter basically are accidental mistakes scribes were sometimes tired or sleepy sometimes they were distracted sometimes they were inept or unqualified and they made mistakes they would leave out a word they'd leave out as a verse sometimes they leave out a page they just made mistakes sometimes one of the common mistakes of scribes is actually kind of interesting there sometimes you know in the New Testament you'll have a saying where you'll have two lines that end with the same words like Jesus in John Luke chapter 12 says that whoever confesses me before people will be confessed before the angels of heaven and whoever denies me before people will be denied before the angels of heaven so you've got two lines that end with the words before the angels of heaven and what scribes sometimes would do is they'd copy down the words before the angels of heaven on the first occurrence and then you know they copy down then they're I would go back to the page and there I would alight on the second occurrence of the same words thinking that that's what they had just copied they'd go then to the next line and start copying there and as a result they would leave out the intervening line see how that works that kind of that kind of phenomenon is a it's an where your eye skips from one line to another it's called Parab lapses Parab lapses and when you words that end the line the same way that that's known as home oil tell you Tong so this kind of mistake is called Parab lapses occasion by homo tell you Tom it's on my final exam at Chapel Hill probably the most egregious mistake in any manuscript of the New Testament one of my favorites is in a manuscript that's manuscript 109 it's 109 because it's written on parchment and a you know animal skin instead of papyrus and it was as 109th manuscript that was cloud that was cataloged this is a 10th century manuscript that was written by a scribe who wasn't paying attention and this this scribe was copying the Gospel of Luke now the Gospel of Luke is one of the two Gospels in the New Testament that has a genealogy of Jesus genealogies usually aren't the favorite reading of my students at Chapel Hill and I think probably it wasn't the favorite reading of this guy because he wasn't really paying attention to what he was doing but you know and Luke's genealogy it looks genealogy is actually fairly interesting because in in math Matthew's the other gospel that gives a genealogy of Jesus and it traces Jesus line all the way back to Abraham the father of the Jews in Matthew Luke doesn't stop there Luke keeps going Luke traces Jesus genealogy all the way back to Adam as an Adam and Eve this is a fantastic genealogy okay I've got an aunt who's a genealogist who's traced my family you know back to the Mayflower the Mayflower Adam and Eve so so it's you know Jesus is supposedly the son of Joseph who's the son of so-and-so the son of so-and-so the son of so-and-so is the son of David some Jesse something so it goes all the way back you know Isaac son of Abraham back to you know Seth son of Adam who's the son of God okay this genealogy goes all the way back so this scribe of manuscript 109 is copying a manuscript that evidently gave the genealogy in two columns two columns but the second column didn't go to the bottom of the page it only went partway down the second column so the first column second column partway down and the scribe apparently didn't realize that this genealogy was in two columns and so he copied across the columns instead of copying one column than the other collar leading to some very interesting results as it turns out Adam isn't the first human being there's there was a man named Fair Reeves who's the father of the human race and and as it turns out God is the son of air RAM so so it happens these kinds of mistakes are just pure accidental mistakes that scribes mess up in places there are other kinds of mistakes that are what what I think are probably intentional mistakes I call I differentiate between accidental mistake subscribe just slip-up and intentional mistakes where it looks like scribes are actually trying to change the text now I don't know for sure that scribes are trying to change the text I don't have any scribes around to interrogate about the matter but there are some changes that don't look like they could possibly simply be a slip of the pen them and there are others that are debatable whether they were slip of the pattern or not but let me give you a couple of examples and you'll see that some things look like scribes maybe wanted to change the text I'll give you a give you a couple for instances in mark chapter one the Gospel of Mark we read at the very beginning that we read as was written in Isaiah the prophet behold I send my messenger before your face to prepare your way for you okay this is in Isaiah the prophet behold I send my messenger before you this is a very interesting passage because the passage that's quoted is not Isaiah it says in Isaiah the prophet and then gives the quotation the passage quoted is actually Exodus so it's interesting that in the later manuscripts of Mark's Gospel the text is changed not so that no longer says in Isaiah as is written in Isaiah the prophet now it says as is written in the prophets you see getting rid of problem that in fact this isn't a quotation from Isaiah right sees that that I mean maybe that's a slip of the pen but it looks to me like somebody saw that this could be taken as a mistake and they changed it as a result or give you give you a second example in Luke's Gospel chapter two we have the only story of Jesus as a boy in the New Testament Jesus is a twelve-year-old and we're told that he and his family have taken a trip to Jerusalem to celebrate a festival probably the Passover festival this it is a peculiar story because the the they celebrate this festival and then the family gets back and goes back in the caravan back home and three days later they realize Jesus isn't with them I mean you might think they would have checked ahead of time but he's not there and so they go back to Jerusalem to try and find him and on the third day his mother finds him in the temple and this isn't an accident by the way that it's on the third day right this is this is a foreshadowing for Luke of what's going to happen at the resurrection narrative we're on the third day Jesus will rise from the dead well so on the third day his mother finds him in the temple and there's 12 year old Jesus talking to the leaders of of the the Jews and discussing with them matters of the law and Mary is not pleased and she sees Jesus finally after tracking him down for three days and she says son why have you done this your father and I have been looking all over for you now when scribes copied this they they were taken aback your father and I but Joseph wasn't his father right Jesus was born of a virgin so it doesn't make sense for Mary to say your father and I have been looking all over for you and so there are changes in the manuscripts some manuscripts simply say Joseph and I have been looking all over for you some manuscripts say we have been looking all over for you but somebody's changing the man changing the text because there could be read as a problem and so they got rid of the problem give you a third example this example is in one of Jesus discourses in the New Testament in Matthew chapter 24 in which Jesus is talking about what's going to happen at the end of time this passage actually was very important I feel I feel a tangent coming on here by the way that this passage was very important when I moved to Chapel Hill in 1988 this Bob you had been gone for a year at this time in 1988 there was a big furor in North Carolina there were there was a there were Christian groups who thought that the end of the world was going to happen in 1988 that Jesus was going to come back and take everybody out of the world who were his followers that's the rapture right when everybody the rapture and Jesus comes back takes people out of the world and then the all hell breaks out on earth for seven years and then the end comes right so so there's a guy who had written a book based on this passage I'm going to talk about in a second the guy had written this book that was called 88 reasons why the rapture will occur in 1988 this this book was in two million copies I had students whose parents believed it and literally sold the farm they they thought that that Jesus was going to come back in 1988 and so I just showed up in North Carolina kind of blissfully ignorant of these things and yeah I moved from New Jersey where such things were not worried about and we but this guy this guy named Edgar Weiss in it he was a he was a NASA engineer who had this had studied the Bible and come up with 88 reasons why the rapture is going to occur in 1988 and one of the reasons involves this passage I'm going to talk about Jesus tells this path that the disciples want to know when's the end going to come and Jesus tells them learn the parable of the fig tree when the fig tree puts forth its leaves you know that summer is near so - when these things take place you know that the end is near truly I tell you this generation will not pass away before all these things take place so Edgar Wiseman this is one of agra Wyson it's 88 reasons so the way it works is this what is Israel in the Bible Israel's sometimes represented as a fig tree well when the fig tree puts forth its leaves you know that the end is near well okay so if the fig tree is Israel when does when does the fig tree put forth its leaves well the the victory lies dormant over the winter and then when springtime comes it comes back to life when does Israel come back to life 1948 that's when Israel comes back to life becomes a nation again truly I tell you this generation will not pass away before all these things take place how long is a generation in the Bible 40 years 1948 plus 40 bingo 1988 this was one of the 88 reasons now somebody pointed out to Edgar Weiss in it that Jesus in the same passage points out that no one knows the day or the hour when the end will come when Washington had said that it was going to come during the week of Rosh Hashanah in September and so they said but you know G says no one knows the day or the hour and why isn't it was completely unfazed he said I don't know the day or the hour I just know the week all right so so this passage actually throughout Christian history has been then important because people have already been trying to figure out when the end is going to come so uh in this passage Jesus says no one knows the day or the hour not the angels of heaven nor even the son but the father alone okay Matthew 24:36 scribes copying that found it to be a peculiar thing to say though not even the son knows when the end is going to come I mean surely the son of God is all-knowing isn't he omniscient and so how describes deal with problem they deal with the problem by getting rid of the phrase and so in later manuscripts the phrase not even the son is taken out so that now Jesus doesn't claim to be ignorant about when the end is going to come so that's that strikes me is probably an intentional sort of change all right so you get you get accidental changes and you get intentional changes I want to talk about some of the big differences that you get in some of our manuscripts just - just so you can get an idea of how significant this problem can be probably the most familiar story in the New Testament Gospels is the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery I'm pretty sure this is the best-known story of the Gospels because it's in all the Hollywood movies if if you do a movie about Jesus you've got to have Jesus and the woman taken in adultery it's so much a requirement that even Mel Gibson who The Passion of the Christ which is about Jesus last hours has to get this in and so he has a flashback showing this this this scene of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery so the way the story were it's it's found only in the Gospel of John chapter 7 and 8 and Jesus is teaching the temple and the Jewish leaders bring they drag this woman in front of him and they say she's been caught in the act of adultery the law of Moses says were to stone someone like this what do you say see this is setting a trap for Jesus because if Jesus says well ya stoner then he's violating his teachings of love and mercy but if he says no forgive her then he's breaking the law of Moses so what's it going to be well Jesus has his way of kind of getting out of these traps as you know if you read the New Testament so what he does in this case is he he Stoops down and he starts riding on the ground and he looked up and he says let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her Stoops back down starts riding again and one-by-one feeling guilt of their own sins they begin to leave until Jesus looks up again and there's no one left and he says to the woman is there no one left to condemn you and she says no Lord no one Jesus replies neither do i condemn you go and sin no more there is a textual variant in a now lost manuscript which when Jesus about this this line but let the one when he says let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her and this one textual variant it indicates that a stone comes flying out from the crowd nails the woman in the head and Jesus says mom sometimes you really tick me off I made that up this this story the this beautiful story this powerful story which has two terrific lines from Jesus in it this story was not originally in the Gospel of John this is a story that was added to the Gospel of John by later scribes how do I know that we have a number of early manuscripts of the Gospel of John this story is not found in any of our early or best manuscripts of the Gospel of John the Greek authors who wrote commentaries on the Gospel of John over the centuries don't mention this story until the 10th century a thousand years after the days of Jesus the writing style of this story if you read it in Greek the writing style is a completely different writing style from the writing style of the rest of the Gospel of John as a result scholars have known for years that this story did not originally belong in the Gospel of John well why is it in our English Bibles then probably what happened was some scribe had heard the story they'd heard the story and they decided that it Illustrated some of the teachings in John chapter 7 and so they wrote out the story in a margin a second scribe came along saw the story in the margin and thought it belonged in the text and then wrote his manuscript by putting the story in the text another scribe comes along and copies that manuscript and that manuscript gets copied and so on until it becomes part of the textual tradition and it's these later manuscripts that were used by the translators of the King James Bible in 1611 so that the story came into English through the King James Bible so this story however is not a story that was originally in the New Testament so people sometimes ask me well are there any changes that are significant in the new tip yeah well this strikes me as rather significant change that the wood story of the woman taken in adultery wasn't originally there or consider a second instance of another big difference the Gospel of Mark mark is probably my favorite gospel because it's so subtle and understated in places and it says things that you don't expect and nowhere is this more true than in the ending of Mark's Gospel in Mark's Gospel Jesus is put on trial and he's crucified he's dead he's buried and on the third day the women go to the tomb the tomb is empty and Jesus is not in it there's some man in there and the man tells the women that Jesus is not here he's been raised from the dead you he tells the women go tell the disciples that he will meet them in Galilee and then it says the women fled from the tomb and they didn't say anything to anyone for they were afraid period that's where it ends that's the end of the Gospel of Mark you think oh yeah how could it in there but I'm they're told to tell the disciples but they don't tell anybody didn't the disciples ever learn didn't they go to Galilee didn't they see Jesus how could that be the end of the story and that's exactly the reaction the scribes had they got to that ending they said I yeah yeah I'll get it in there and scribes then decided it couldn't add there and so they added 12 verses so that in your English Bibles today you'll find 12 more verses after that chapter after chapter 16 verse 8 and often they'll be in double brackets because the translators are ticking will tell you in a footnote these verses weren't originally in here these were added by later scribes in these verses in these added verses the scribes added later but we know they're added later because they're not in the earliest and best manuscripts the writing style is different from the rest of the Gospel of Mark and in fact there are there are inconsistencies between this ending and the verses that precede it so this is clearly an addition to the Gospel of Mark in these final verses a court attorneys final verses the women do go tell the disciple the disciples do go to Galilee they do meet Jesus there and Jesus then tells them that they're to make disciples of all the nations and people become as disciples will be able to speak in foreign languages that they previously didn't know they'll be able to handle deadly snakes and they'll be able to drink poison and it won't harm them these are the verses that the Appalachian snake handlers in my part of the world used to base their liturgical practices I've always thought that sometime on the you know in the ambulance on the way to the hospital somebody should point out well you know actually those verses aren't in the Gospel of Mark so mark actually ends with women not saying anything to anyone for they were afraid somebody added the last twelve let me give you a couple more examples of some differences that strike me as big what one that I think is really quite interesting the scholars debate the the first time I gave you scholars don't debate very much almost everybody agrees that they weren't originally there but there's an interesting change in another story in mark that there's there's a lot of debate about among scholars it's it's the story in mark chapter one where jesus heals a leper and the way the story works is that Jesus is is walking along and a leper comes up to him and the leper says to him so I mean this is you know this guy with leprosy he comes up to him and he says Lord if you're willing you're able to cleanse me and in most manuscripts it says Jesus felt compassion for the man and he reached out his hand and he said I am willing and He healed him but in several ancient manuscripts it says something different in these other manuscripts instead of saying Jesus felt compassion for the man it says and Jesus got angry and reached out his hand and said I am willing be cleansed getting angry now scholars have to debate which is the text that mark originally wrote and which is the text that's been changed by a scribe and one one piece of logic that scholars have used over the years is this ask yourself which text is a scribe more likely to have created out of the other is ascribed likely to have taken the text that says Jesus felt compassion and changed it to say Jesus got angry or is the scribe likely to have found the TExES that Jesus got angry and to change it to say Jesus felt compassion well if you put it like that then we'll the ladders more more likely something a scribe would have changed and so this criterion set ends up sounding kind of backwards but the way the criterion works is that the reading that's the most difficult to understand is probably the original one okay the more difficult reading is to be preferred and so that's one reason for thinking that in fact this text originally said Jesus got angry and there are actually a whole host of reasons for thinking that's what the text said the next the next step then is to ask well what's he angry about in other words you try and figure out what the text means but you can't know what the text means unless you know what the text says you say so you've got to establish the words first and that's what people who are textual critics do they try and decide what the words originally were let me give you one other example and then I'm going to stop and take take any questions that you have um there's another quite moving passage in the Gospel of Luke which is also well known it's a it's a it's a scene in which Jesus is being being crucified and Luke is interesting in in the scene of Jesus crucifixion Luke is interesting at the scene of the crucifixion because it's unlike what happens in Luke is unlike what happens in Mark's Gospel the story of the crucifixion it marks just just to illustrate this for a second in Mark's Gospel which is the first gospel you have a very distinct portrayal of Jesus going to his crucifixion a portrayal that is filled with pathos and and agony people don't realize this that Mark's portrayal is very different from Luke's portrayal and the reason they don't see that there are differences is because of the way that people read the Gospels the way people typically read the Gospels if they read the Gospels at all but if they read the Gospels the normal way of reading a Gospels you start at the beginning and you read to the end so okay you're gonna read the Gospel you start with Matthew you start with the first verse chapter 1 verse 1 and you start reading and you get to the end you'll go from top to bottom then you read mark start at the beginning go to the end top to bottom and it sounds a lot like Matthew same stories a lot of the same word sounds very similar then you read Luke top to bottom sounds exactly the same not exactly it's different but it's basically the same thing they sound alike and then you read John well that's different but well you know in essence it's not that far off so they all sound basically the same because you read them from top to bottom or you read them vertically the way to see differences in the Gospels is to them not vertically but to read them horizontally where you read a story in Matthew and you look at the same story in mark and compare the compare the two stories when you do that you start finding enormous differences people you know there are all these debates about whether there are discrepancies in the Bible if you want to find discrepancies in the Bible all you have to do is is read the text horizontally I give them I give this as an assignment to my students all the time I give them the path I say take the resurrection accounts what really happened at the resurrection depends which author you read and so I have them list what happens in Matthew what happens in mark what happens in Luke what happens in John and I compare the list and it's actually quite striking when you do this with the resurrection narratives because well who is it that goes to the tomb is it Mary Magdalene by herself or Mary with other women if other women how many other women and what are their names it depends which gospel you read what do they find there is the stone world way already or is an author wrote away already depends which gospel you read what do they who do they see there do they see a man there is in mark do they see two men there is in Luke or do they see an angel as in Matthew depends which gospel you read what are they told are they told to tell the disciples to meet Jesus and Galilee are they told to tell the disciples to stay in Jerusalem do they go tell the disciples it depends whether you read mark or whether you read Matthew and Luke if they do tell the disciples what did the disciples do do they go to Galilee or do they say in Jerusalem it depends which gospel you I mean just you just go down the line and it's and it's different and that's how you get if you read these stories against each other well if you do that in the story of the crucifixion in mark and Luke you come up with very very different portrayals the significance of that the significance of that is not just okay it's as other discrepancies yeah there are discrepancies but that isn't the point the point is that if you want to know what Mark has to say you have to read mark and not pretend he's saying the same thing as Luke because they're different and so mark has to stand on its own as a literary production in Mark's Gospel when Jesus is being specified in fact it's a it's a very gripping scene in Mark's Gospel this doesn't say anything while he's being led to the place of crucifixion while he's being crucified he's completely silent when he's hanging on the cross he's mocked by the Jewish leaders by the people who are passing by in front of him he's mocked by both robbers in Mark's Gospel Jesus doesn't say anything until the end in mark scoffs but the end he cries out Eloise Eloise lama sabachthani my god my god why have you forsaken me and he dies that's it that's mark a very very powerful gripping and but people don't realize that this because people think Jesus had all sorts of other things on the cross well why do they think that because they've read Matthew and they've read Luke and they've read John and they end up with the seven last words of the dying Jesus which are found in not one of the Gospels but by smashing all of the Gospels together into one big big gospel now it's perfectly legitimate to do that if you want to do that if you want to read the Gospels and smash them all together so they're all right they're all saying the same thing but you have to realize that if you're doing that you're writing your own gospel and you're making it say something that's different from any of the Gospels of the New Testament okay so I mean that that's the effect of doing that it Luke's Gospel Jesus is not silent he's not silent on the way to be crucified he sees women weeping for money and he turns to them and he says daughters of Jerusalem don't weep for me weep for yourselves and for your children for the faith that's to befall you he's more concerned about these women than himself in Luke's Gospel in Luke's Gospel he's not quiet while he's being nailed to the cross he prays Father forgive them for they don't know what they're doing while he's hanging on the cross he actually has an intelligent conversation with one of the robbers the one guy accused the one guy maligns Jesus the other robber says to the other person to be quiet because Jesus hasn't done anything to deserve this and then he turns to Jesus and says Lord remember me when you come into your kingdom and Jesus says truly I tell you today you will be with me in paradise Jesus knows exactly what's happening to him in Luke's Gospel not in mark but in Luke he knows exactly what's happening to me knows what's going to happen to him after it happens to him he's going to wake up in paradise and this guy's going to be next to him and at the end the most telling thing of all is that Jesus instead of crying out my God my God why have you forsaken me he doesn't say that in Luke what he says his father into your hands I commend my spirit and he dies in Luke's Gospel Jesus completely in control of the situation he knows what's going on he knows why it's going on unlike mark where he seems to be in doubt this passage this verse about Father forgive them for they don't know what they're doing it's a very interesting verse in early Christianity this verse was interpreted not as a prayer of forgiveness for the Romans who are crucifying him is interpreted as a prayer for the Jews who had turned Jesus over to the authorities Jesus is asking for forgiveness for the Jewish people in the interpretation of the early Christian interpreters of the passage that makes it striking that in some manuscripts from the early deck and from the Erb from the early years this prayer is omitted by some scribes why would scribes take that lovely verse out because well it should be obvious why they took it out they took it out because they interpret it as a prayer of forgiveness for Jews and these scribes didn't think God had ever forgiven the Jews in the 2nd and 3rd centuries Christians started saying that Jews are guilty for the killing of Christ and that in fact the destruction of the city of Jerusalem in the year 70 by the Roman armies was a punishment by God given to the Jewish people for rejecting their own Messiah in the 2nd and 3rd centuries we have Christians who were saying that Jesus was God so that when Jews they would say when Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus we have some author saying Jews are guilty of deicide Jews have killed God and God held them responsible let's ascribe who thinks that going to do with his prayer of forgiveness he's going to take it out and that's exactly what happens some of our early manuscripts are missing the prayer they're missing it because scribes have changed it for reasons of their own these are some of the big differences that you can find in the New Testament manuscripts and there are all sorts of differences that you find some are related to theological disputes of early Christianity where scribes have changed the text and make it coincide more closely with their own theological views some of these changes have to do with relationships of Christians and Jews some of these changes have to do with Christian understandings of women there continued to be debates today and churches Christian churches about whether women should have leadership roles well these these debates often hinge on verses that have been changed by scribes you can guess which way scribes change these verses in the 2nd and 3rd centuries when when women's roles were being suppressed all of a sudden manuscripts start showing up in which women are told to be silent in the churches this is a sort of change that scribes made the textual critic is somebody who tries to deal with this phenomenon of manuscripts that have so many changes in them there are actually two things that the textual critic critic does one thing that is of course primary importance is to figure out what an author actually wrote because you can't interpret an author whether you're talking about Plato or Aristotle YZ or a homer or mark or Matthew or Luke or John you can't interpret what an author said unless you you can't interpret what he said unless you know what he said you've got to have his words and so textual critics try to reconstruct to the best of their ability what an author actually wrote a textual critic also though is interested in knowing why the text got changed why did scribes change the text I mean you know it's interesting to see that sometimes it fell asleep but beyond that what kind of theological motivations were there for changing the text what kind of ideological influence was were affecting these scribes when we know more of that kind of information we're better able to understand both the scribes and their own historical context as people living in the early centuries especially the early centuries a time period about which we have very little information about Christianity otherwise thank you very much [Applause] there are there are microphones on both sides and I think we'll alternate and if can I just say that I will if it doesn't sound like the question was loud enough I'll repeat the question to make sure everybody everybody heard it so yes start over here yes early in your conversation or in your in your presentation you mentioned that the Bible is often used in social situations and you mentioned in particularly abortion war and with the other one gay rights have any of the differences that you have found or others have found affected how those concepts would be interpreted did you all hear that yeah the kinds of social issues that are pressing for for us today we're not pressing to the scribes who are copying the texts they they simply had a whole different range of issues that they were far more concerned about and so the passages the people leap on today to us to try and resolve certain kinds of issues us simply didn't have that kind of importance to most of the scribes so the answer is no most of those passages weren't more it affected are you familiar with the book of your rancher I every time I give a talk I have people ask me to read it but I have not yet done so well it's an interesting read because often there's an expanded text on might be one line in the New Testament and in your Rancher there might be three paragraphs yes I have God commended to you okay thank you your comments on to other books one of them the Gospel of Judas and the other sort of Christian of Constantine also I'm an airman really how do you spell it eh RMA huh huh okay go for it um yeah okay he's asking about two of the books through the Gospel of Judas Iscariot yeah actually let me tell tell a story about the gospel because I I was when National Geographic was considering whether to finance the publication and dissemination of the Gospel of Judas they called me and asked me if I would help them authenticate the manuscript which is my first indication that National Geographic absolutely had no clue what they were doing with this manuscript because it's written in Coptic which which I could I mean I can read Coptic but I'm not a Coptic scholar and so I told the woman who'd call me so look you need to copped ologist do they she said she's Ella yeah great okay what's a cop ologist cop Paula just as an expert in Coptic language you can and I said and she said well we really want to do is date this manuscript and I said ah well today the manuscript then you need to get a pail iographer she said okay great yeah you know what what's a bibliography oh yeah so then she said well really what we want what we really want to do is carbon-14 date the manuscript are you able to help us with a carbon-14 dating so yeah right every Friday night I carbon-14 date manuscripts so no I can't help you with carbon-14 dating you need a scientist for that I said look I'll find you a Coptic paleography and you find a scientist it can carbon-14 in two and they said well we want you to be involved with this though because you know we want somebody's interested in early Christianity knows about Gospels that didn't make it a so then no I'm happy to be involved I said but I was where's the manuscript she said it's in Geneva I said okay count me in and so so we so we went to Geneva I guy I have a friend a guy named Stephen a mole teaches in Germany who's a Coptic paleography and and called him up and I said Stephen I said you know I don't know if you've heard these rumors but the Gospel of Judas is turned up and Emmel says yeah he says you know what I think I saw it 20 years ago oh my god you want to see it again I said yeah I said ok let's go to Geneva and so we did so the Gospel of Judas is a it's the most recent discovery of an early Christian text I was actually discovered 20 years 20 years 30 years ago now 1978 but it it's a very long story it was it was unknown basically to everybody until just a good just three or four years ago when it finally got into the hands of competent scholars and a conservationist who could put it back together because it was it was fragmented in a ton of thousand pieces but it's a very interesting gospel because it's a gospel that is a gnostic gospel that talks about how how how this world we live in is not the creation of the one true God but is a creation of lower inferior divinities and the point of salvation is to escape this world okay if you all know Gnosticism I'm sorry I'm taking a little longer than this than I should but but if you know the world of Gnosticism the Gnostic Gospels Gnostics were Gnostic Christians were people who felt like they were entrapped in the BA their bodies in this world that they were imprisoned in bodies and and that because the creator of this world wasn't the one true God it was a lower divinity so the way I illustrate this with my students is you know house to house sometimes people feel like they're alienated in this world like they just they look around and they just don't feel like they belong here you know they look around and this world just doesn't make sense to them I felt this way to the last election actually I mean I mean I knew people that seemed to meet do just fine but it didn't make sense to me I realized I don't belong here I'm from in another world and my these friends of mine are not from another world they belong here and so these Gnostics thought that they need to escape this world by having secret knowledge and these Gnostic Gospels are Gospels that provide the secret knowledge so the Gospel of Judas is that kind of thing the most important discovery of a Christian book in the last 60 years in my opinion the other question was about the sword of Constantine written by James Carroll which is I think a terrific book a really good read about basically about jewish-christian relations in short but how how do how the relationship of Christianity and Judy has changed when the Emperor Constantine became a Christian I think that's a very very fine book yes I was wondering if you would say a word about Marcion and also if you would consider first Clement to be a first century witness to the text of first Corinthians Wow I feel like I'm in my doctoral exam on son Wow okay yeah okay Marcion uh this the short on Marcion Marcion was probably the most important christian thinker of the second century he was a kind of a teacher philosopher type from from Asia Minor who who took the Apostle Paul very seriously when Paul differentiated between the gospel of Christ and the and the law of the Jews Paul thought that a person could not be made right with God but by keeping the requirements of the Jewish law but a person had to have faith in Christ and so this differentiation between law and gospel from Marcion became an absolute differentiation that the God who gave the law could not be the God who who gave the gospel so that Marcion taught that there were actually two different gods that the god of the Old Testament was in fact a different god from the god of jesus that the god of jesus in fact tried to save people from the condemnation of the god of the Jews the idea is the God of the Jews created this world gave Israel the law everybody breaks this law and so this Jewish God condemns them justly I mean they broke the law so they're condemned Jesus comes from a higher God who never had anything to do with this world before Jesus showed up Jesus came to save people from the wrathful God of the Jews and so Marcion tried to propound this point of view and and won a lot of converts in fact in his day is extremely successful there are a lot of Marci night churches that started up and in some parts of the Christian world it looks like this Marci night understanding Christianity was the dominant form of Christianity in this form of Christianity the the the Christian Bible didn't have an Old Testament because that was the does the book of the Jews and it had the the Christian New Testament consisted of Paul's letters marcin knew of 10/10 of paul's letters and one gospel the Gospel of Luke so is Luke and and 10 letters I mean some of us are glad that marcin didn't succeed because those of the teacher New Testament would only have half time jobs now and so so so anyway so that was marcin the second question is does first Clement give us any attestation for the text of first Corinthians huh yeah so first climate is a is a book from that is in a collection called the app stock father's it was probably written in the mid 90s and so is actually written before some of the books of the New Testament it was written to the church in Corinth by the Christians of Rome and the deal is actually kind of interesting situation that led to this letter the there apparently was some kind of ecclesiastical coup in Corinth where the leaders of the church had been ousted somehow or other we don't know how and some other people had taken over and the people in Rome didn't like it and they tried to reverse this this coup that had happened and so this author then is were authors is writing to the church in Corinth to try and straighten things out and this author knows about first corinthians in fact reflects a lot of Paul's letter first corinthians which is written about thirty years earlier i I don't think it gives us any help for knowing the text of first Corinthians if by that you mean does it help us reconstruct what the actual words of first Corinthians were I don't I don't think it helps us with that but it does reflect many of the things that you find in first Corinthians yes with the possible exception of Matthew 24 where Jesus says I don't not even the son knows none of the textual examples that you've given tonight pose any problem for fundamental Christian doctrines and I'm wondering if there are textual examples that are more threatening on that front my second question is to what extent were Canon and and textual problems discussed it Nicaea okay the second the second question is quite easy to what extent were Canon the formation of the Canon the New Testament the text and Testament disgusted Nicaea the answer is not at all The Da Vinci Code says they were so uh yeah good so who should I believe yes I think I think you need to trust Dan Brown he he did a lot of research for this book he learned for example that Leonardo's name was really da Vinci yeah yeah you know the cat according to according to da vinci code of the Council of Nicaea is where there was a vote on whether Jesus was the son of God or not and and it was actually a close vote and that it's completely bogus everything he says about the Council of Nicaea is absolutely wrong Council and IC didn't talk about the formation of the Canon which books would go in which books will go out Constantine had no role to play in that decision at all nothing to do with it so far as we know so I so that's just you know it's something he came up with it that is not no very own historical reality I think are there textual changes that affect Christian doctrine well it kind of depends how you look at things there are there certainly are passages that affect Christian doctrine there are passages in which Jesus scribes changed passages to emphasize that Jesus was divine they changed other passes is to emphasize that he was human and so they wanted emphasize that he was both human and divine and so they changed passages so that it would look that way one passage in particular is kind of interesting that is directly related to Christian doctrine is that the doctrine of the Train is not explicitly taught in any passage of the Bible in other words the doctrine that there are three gods not haha sorry Dan Brown speaking once more the doctrine that there's one God manifest in three persons that these three persons are each individually completely God but there's only one God not three gods but one God but not one person three persons so the three and one this is not taught in any passage of the Bible except first John chapter five verses 7 and 8 which in which the author says that there are three witnesses in heaven the father the word and the holy spirit and these three are one that's that's that's a pretty explicit statement about the about the Trinity now there's an interesting story about this passage because it doesn't show up in the granny scripts the first John it's in the Latin manuscripts of first John when the first scholar to put together a Greek a printed Greek New Testament produced his work this was an Erasmus it was a humanist at from Rotterdam in the year 1516 he put together the first for the first time the printed edition of the Greek New Testament he didn't include the verse because it wasn't in it wasn't in the manuscripts that he had and the Latin theologians went went ballistic and according to the story that circulated Erasmus said look it's not in any of the Greek manuscripts and they said yes but it's part of the Church's doctrine you've gotten rid of the Trinity and and an Erasmus said look if you can produce a Greek manuscript that has it in it all including my next edition and so they produced a Greek manuscript and so they copied out agreed somebody copied I agree and when they got to that point they translated the Latin back into Greek stuck it in Erasmus was true to his word and included that in his next edition and it was on the basis of that addition that the King James Bible Translators put the Bible into English so that's why the verse showed up in the King James translation so yeah that certainly affects affects doctrine now now the thing is you could argue the the doctrine of the Trinity without that verse you can argue theology without any particular verse because that in the theology is never just kind of rooted in a particular word or pretty--it's it's a it's a bigger thing than all that and so my view is that that Christian doctrine isn't based on any of these textual variations what happens those these textual variations sometimes change the way a pervert what a verse means sometimes they affect what an entire chunk of a book mean sometimes these textual changes affect the very meaning of an entire book and that's theologically significant to me not that it necessarily changes anybody's precious doctrines or their chosen doctrines but it does affect what what the books of the Bible mean and that that's the logically significant I think yes yes I appreciate your lecture I haven't read misquoting Jesus but I enjoyed your DaVinci Code book last year it was got me thinking seriously I did like a lot um a question I have regarding the attempts to harmonize the crucifixion accounts whether they can be harmonized or not concerns the logical approach that's appropriate to use and this is what I asked your comment on Aristotelian logic basically indicates that omission is not necessarily contradiction at the Stanford philosophy website I think it's the cyclopædia philosophy I forget exactly there's a very elegant summary of Aristotle's definition of a contradiction basically in my limited style I'll just say it's it's a situation where you have two statements that cannot both be true at the same time regarding the same situation the statement that Bart Airmen and Bob Gregor in this room does not contradict the statement that Bart is in this room it does contradict the statement that only Bart is in this room so when you add the word only that's a concern and so given the fact that the you know the Gospel writers were not attempting to be exhaustive as long as Mark doesn't say the only thing Jesus said was Eli lama sabachthani I I'm not sure that there's a there's an issue there it's like if there was a traffic accident one witness might say well the the red car swerved and hit the pedestrian another person might say well actually before that it was a blue car that cut the red car off that I saw that hit the pedestrian but but there's not have different details but that the tests the the threshold for saying it's a contradiction seems to me to be higher than what you're setting it at yeah okay good yeah thank you it's very good question and I think you know part of it there are a couple things to say about one is it depends what you're after if you're after what each witness is saying then it's not fair to make the one witness say what the other witness is saying because they're saying different things and so if what you're interested in is what the witness has to say then you have to stick with without witness has to say there are problems there there are problems of reconciling things because if you go with the idea that omission isn't a contradiction you end up the way you end up reconciling things leads to some very peculiar situations for example when I was in college there I bought a book I was an evangelical Christian who believe who held this kind of view and I and I believe that in fact the text could all be reconciled with one another and I bought a book that was called the life of Christ in stereo which was the idea as you know it's kind of stereophonic sound with the Gospels and you need them all going at the same time to get the full full thing and so and so but you know there there there are problems because in Mark's Gospel Jesus tells Peter that before the crows twice you will deny me three times now Matthew's Gospel says before the crows you'll deny me three times so what do you do in the life of Christ and stereo will you put the two together and it ends up that Peter denies Jesus six times once before the crows and once before it grows twice now that's perfectly possible and it reconciles the difference but it makes it the text say something different from what any of the texts say and as it turns out there are flat-out contradictions too which which your way of doing it wouldn't wouldn't work in my in my opinion just give you one example the well I mean one one example is when on air I okay what day did Jesus die on depends which text you read in Mark's Gospel it's quite explicit that Jesus has a Passover meal with his disciples mark 1412 where do you want us to prepare the Passover for you Jesus tells them they go home that night they have the Passover meal they eat the meal after the meal Jesus is arrested he spends the night in jail next morning appears for Pontius Pilate Pontius Pilate kills him the morning after the Passover meals eat you read the Gospel of John and Jesus has a meal with his disciples it's not called a Passover meal he's arrested after the meal spent the night in jail shows up on shows violate he's condemned and it says that he is sent off to be crucified just after noon on the day of preparation for the Passover which is the day before the Passover meal is eaten so you know he couldn't die both times either died the day before the Passover the day after the Passover but it couldn't be both and so you have that kind of thing as well as the kind of thing you're pointing out where you know they might just be eyewitnesses telling different parts of the story in my opinion just to clarify there using the Aristotelian definition of a contradiction are the statements in fact about what Jesus said from the cross are those contradictory those accounts or they see I was saying omissions the statements no no but I'm saying that if you if you want to reconcile them by saying that giving the seven last words of the dying Jesus I mean if all you're interested in is Aristotelian logic then the answer is no but if what you're if you're interested in what these texts mean then the answer is yes you get very different portrayals depending which account you read so it depends what you're interested in okay thank you god I was reading your book misquoting Jesus today and it actually made me think a lot of some feminist theory that I've been reading lately about the responsibility of academics bell hooks took a lot of flack for this book feminist theory from margins to Center and so I'm reading misquoting Jesus and thinking this is essentially a book about with an argument about philology that is accessible readable and does not sacrifice the complexity of the argument so one isn't inspiring as an aspiring academic what's your secret and - um do you have a philosophy about what our responsibility is academics is and how do you think about who your audience is yes thank you well thank you for the compliment and uh yeah you know the reality is that most academics don't know how to talk to a normal human being and so I have you know I have friends who want you know they want to write a book that would sell in Barnes & Noble and I you know you have to tell them you know you're not writing this for the guy who's in the office next door you're writing this for your mother you know you've got to think about you know who you need to learn how to communicate with people and so there's not an easy there's not an easy answer to that but that was that was absolutely the challenge of this book what one thing people have gotten upset about what Evan Jellicle scholars have gotten upset about this book is they say well this isn't news we've known about this for hundreds of years which is of course what I say in the book we've known about this for hundreds of years but they're so I'm not trying to present something that is like radically new that scholars have never known before scholars have known this since John Mill in 1707 and so this is this is old news but nobody's bothered to tell the general audience which is you know I mean and the reason they haven't bothered is pretty office it's hard I mean we're talk about Greek manuscripts here how do you talk about Greek manuscripts to people who don't read Greek right well uh you just have to figure out some way to do it so you know the way I do is I like to tell stories so that that's that's how I decided to do it so there's I you know I don't think there's a real seat it could secret other than just learning how to talk to people so yes actually I have been reading the Bible for last five years and specially new Testament there's a statement of Christ be peace on him which I warned that you should explain it over he said that I had been sent not to change the Torah I have to come to fulfill it and act upon his spirit and letter and the only way to go to the heavens is if you follow Torah more than your a bite and then if you read Torah there's no mention about son father a holy host so when they were they created if there were pens very beginning why didn't any all the old prophets in the Old Testament mention about it so I just want to get distantly fight yes thank you well the the path of your codings from Matthew chapter five verse 17 it's distinctive to Matthew Matthew's Gospel is the one that emphasizes that Jesus followers need to follow the Torah it's interesting because the Apostle Paul says just the opposite he says that a person can't be made right with God by following the Torah and in Matthew Jesus says his followers have to follow the Torah and so so that is an interesting issue that the question about what do you do about the fact that the Torah doesn't mention Father Son and Holy Spirit of course that that's exercised theologians for centuries back when they were developing the doctrine of the of the Trinity they had to they had to deal with this and they came up with solutions to that that by modern standards I think would be seen as creative you know when when God says let us make man in our own image who's he talking to right well so so there are there are passages that in the Torah that were used to support a Christian theology but of course other people might say well the these are interpretations of the passage that are really the interpretations that they were they would have had for their first readers yes there's someone over here yeah yeah there can you talk just a little bit more about the relationship between these textual variants and different interpretations of the manuscripts with the actual process of canonization or deciding what should be put into the Christian Canon what should be omitted the relationship between the the changes in the manuscripts and what what should go in and what should go out yeah we're there like you know did that play into the debates of you know this gospel should be left out because we have different copies that are saying different things for instance uh-huh yeah actually you know that that particular issue didn't come up very much about you know can this be in because this manuscript is copies has been changed in so many ways there are interesting questions about the relationship of text in Canon though I mean just just on kind of the most basic level if the woman taken in adultery isn't in the oldest manuscripts but it's in most of the manuscripts from the Middle Ages is it part of the Bible or not you know is it part of the Canon where the last 12 verses of mark they're not in the earliest manuscripts of Mark but they're in most of the manuscripts of mark so is it part of the Bible or not and that that really is a good question and it's not a question that a historian can answer it's a question that if he alodia needs to answer because it has to do not with historical fact but with theological interpretation about the nature of Scripture but it's really I think it's a fundamental question for for theologians because if theology if a biblical theology is rooted on the text you have to know what the text is which is for me one of the reasons I've been surprised over the years the theologians show no interest in textual criticism at all most of them no knowledge of it no interest in it it seems to me it's actually kind of important for biblical theologians anyway so I think you need to go to the mic if you have you have a quick did you have a question here oh yeah well thank you for talk on of all question regarding the discrepancies among the Gospels yes there are obviously their their main differences and then oh it can it sounds like it's almost embarrassing to have those four Gospels put together as a Bible and say that you know this is truth because there are obvious differences yes you know my point is are there are there argument about argument there are if they're embarrassing discrepancies among the Bible in the Bible why would early Christians and why would Christians why would they put them together in this age the Bible Oh although there are obvious differences yes it's a great question why are there why did the early Christians not look at these discrepancies in and say this is a problem why did they include them in the same you know the same covers as the Bible it's a it's a really good question and I think that actually different early Christians had different answers to that one one early Christian in the in the second century was a guy named tation whose answer to this was that you've got these four accounts and the sky tation actually produced a life of Christ in stereo for for Syriac reading christians in the second century he took the four Gospels and he put them together into one big gospel and and reconciled them all together with one another in a book that he that was called the dia tessarin which means through the four then you take the four and through the four you get the big gospel so that was one way of dealing with a problem some some Christian authors thought that if you have contradictions between these texts then what that is is the Holy Spirit telling you that you need to look for the deeper meaning of the text because the surface meaning of the text obviously doesn't work and so it's it's God telling you you need to look for the deeper meaning of the text and the reality is that most Christians in the 2nd 3rd centuries down to today never realize that there are differences I mean most people read the Bible don't realize that there are differences and I think it was that way in the early church - in fact most these people couldn't read anyway so I mean it wasn't that they could do a careful analysis of the synoptic Gospels they can they can read the gospel so they heard him read in church and they'd hear a story one week and then another story next week notice during the next and they didn't occur to them that there are discrepancies and so this idea of kind of finding these discrepancies in a way really wasn't the issue for most of these early Christians I think over question all can you give the reference to what is claimed about the illiteracy in the early Christianity end yes the illiteracy of early Christians give me a king just give me reference yeah the the best study of literacy in the ancient world is William Harris and it's simply called ancient literacy published by Harvard University Press he doesn't deal very much with Chris with Christianity but he does say a few things about it I think you yeah I come across a couple of radical pieces of information on the Bible I wonder if you'd comment on one is that I've read this in several places from biblical historians one is that there was a get-together it called the second Council of Constantinople and around 555 ad in it was one where they did some major deletions in the Bible and they took out just about everything jesus said about reincarnation that's that's one of them well that one's easy that's false okay one of the places I've read this as a book called in Jesus mystery by Janet Bach I don't know if that means anything to you right don't read those books okay okay and in all due respect how are they wrong in your right authority that's it I mean they're they're are responsible historians and there are people who are not responsible historians and and as it's a very good question actually because how do you know the difference you go to a bookstore and you've got these books I mean you know and they some have nice covers and some don't have nice cover how do you know who and it's it's actually not an easy thing and you have to know who to trust and so one thing to do is look at credentials where do these people teach do they teach where did they get their degrees do they have degrees or are they independent researchers and independent researchers somebody who doesn't have a degree usually why don't they have a degree so they might be telling the truth but where they get their information from look at their footnotes and see if they tell you where they got their information from and then read scholars who teach in reputable institutions who have reputable degrees and who whose books go through the kind of vetting process that is typical in scholarship which is that you can't you know anybody can publish a book today but but scholarly presses publish books that have gone through a scholarly process by of evaluation and that's the kind of that's the kind of book you want to read if you want an authoritative account yeah and the second piece of information was that there's 18 years that are missing from the Bible basically from the age of 12 to the age of 30 and it's been said that was deleted and that he spent though she is traveling through India and visiting the various holy man and so forth right and reaching a state of enlightenment right and then coming back - yeah yeah that you know you can even find Gospels that claim that these Gospels were written in the nineteenth century but I mean these find Gospels that say it there are 18 years that are unaccounted for and the question is what would Jesus have been doing during these 18 years and what most historians think is that he would have been doing what any Jewish lad in in a small hamlet in Galilee would have been doing he would have been working every day it's probably a carpenter or the you know apprentice is a carpenter and he probably didn't travel Jews Jews I mean he was very poor probably a hand-to-mouth existence and probably work six days a week and the seventh day you couldn't go anywhere because it was the Sabbath so my guess is he just grew up in Nazareth and there's there there are no ancient sources I mean you know asking you ask me how do I know this I've read all the ancient sources there are no ancient sources that say anything about Jesus going - yeah I just find given the stature of this man that the fact that there was zero written about him in those eighteen years is very suspicious to me I just I just think it must have been a deletion somewhere I mean why didn't somewhere in the Bible it said well it from the age of 12 he just spent the time with his father in this shop and doing this in that and then all of a sudden emerged 30 and did all these miraculous things so anyway yeah thank you okay yes yeah my question concerns essentially languages if I understand correctly and I'm not a biblical scholar but I've done a little bit of work most of what is written is from 30 years the earliest would be some of the earlier letters of Paul 260 and further on years later after Christ passed on much of which is either in Greek or in Latin in spite of what the government of Texas was purported to have said in about 1923 in a trial and bilingual languages they had that same problem when she threw a Bible down and said if English was good enough for Jesus then it's good enough for our students i I suspect that Jesus didn't speak English and actually spoke the language of the common people since he was actually trying to talk to the common people which if I understand correctly in first century Palestine was Aramaic and there are very few Aramaic texts around so could you comment on what's missing between what was actually said and the codices that were actually trying to decode and with no reference to da vinci code here decode as being what he might have said in fact i don't believe he spoke english so he did not say Father forgive them for they know not what they do and in fact I think the Neo Douglas clots and a bunch of others in this Aramaic movement are trying to do something along these lines so could you comment on that and where you stand there yeah so no it's absolutely right Jesus spoke Aramaic my my opinion is they did not know Greek that he did not know Latin I think he probably knew Aramaic the Gospels are written in Greek so already when you're reading the Gospels in Greek you're a step removed from the from the words of Jesus assuming that the words they're being recorded are actually words that he said because they're written 30 or 40 years later and maybe some of these words weren't things that he actually said there are sayings in the Gospels that make better sense if you re translate them into Aramaic from Greek I mean it's tricky to do I mean you know but you know it's fun too so I so give me give you an example there's a saying that doesn't make very good sense in mark chapter 2 I'll use the sexist phrasing of this because it's the one people are familiar with and it's one it's easier to make my point Sabbath was made for man not man for Sabbath therefore the son of man is the lord of the Sabbath okay sounds like familiar but you know it doesn't make any sense man Sabbath is made for man not man for the Sabbath therefore the son of man is the lord of the Sabbath what's the therefore therefore because it doesn't doesn't work well but if you say it in Aramaic the words for man meaning human being and the word for son of man is the same word Barna sha Sabbath was made for Barna sha not barn a shop for the Sabbath therefore Barna Shah is Lord of the Sabbath that makes sense so you ret reverted into Aramaic and it adds up and there are other sayings it just says a sight and so you need to do that actually if you're doing the historical Jesus to the other side of that is there are some things that cannot be retro verted back into Aramaic which means Jesus probably didn't say them give you a famous example every World Series behind home plate you get a somebody holding up a sign you John 3:3 you must be born again this is a very interesting passage that people holding these signs don't realize the linguistic problems which are which is this when Jesus says this in the Gospel of John he says a a person must be born on Othon to see the kingdom of heaven on earth on is Greek word now the word on earth n is interesting because it actually has two meanings it can mean from above or it can mean a second time it means both things and you have to decide which it means depending on the context Nicodemus misunderstands what Jesus says Jesus is saying you have to be born from heaven to see the kingdom of heaven and Nicodemus thinks I've got to go crawl back into my mother's womb and be born a second time and then Jesus corrects his mistake no no no no he tells him what that what he what he met the first time so the conversation hinges on the double entendre then the greek word on othon and you cannot reproduce the do blunt on in aramaic so the conversation hinges on a particular greek word that doesn't have that doesn't have a parallel inner may change the conversation couldn't have happened like that so no hebrew either yeah but they weren't speaking Hebrew in Jesus day they were eating Jesus probably could read Hebrew I think but but I they weren't it wasn't a spoken language in in Palestine at his in his time yes have two questions the first one is how would you compare the copyists of the sulfur een copyists with those of the early Christians which you've made a great point on the your Jewish Jewish scribes from the Middle Ages you're asking about no those are mazarites I'm talking about the copyists in Ezra's time oh the sofa yeah we don't know I don't think we know what you know what what a lot of people say when I when I give a talk on on this about the New Testaments they point out the Jewish that what they say is well Jewish practices were to copy everything meticulously exactly they're usually thinking about the mass of reeds in the middle in the Middle Ages there were Jewish practices that were extremely meticulous but we don't I don't think we know very much about copying practices in antiquity especially in the in the Persian period because we just don't have the kind of evidence we need thank you the second question was may I have your autograph yes you may I'm going to take I'm going to take one more question because this fellow and then I'm going to stay yes in some of the ancient cultures there were oral traditions that seemed to be designed to preserve a certain passages orally very exactly is there any evidence from early Christian times that there in some corner of Christendom such traditions were there and what would they say about the passages yes were oral traditions such that the traditions were being kept intact over the over the years with the retelling and there have been there have been New Testament scholars have argued that Jesus was a rabbi who taught his disciples certain things and they memorize these things so they were and they pass them along without without changing them orally that that that idea has run has run into trouble on to two grounds one is that there have been anthropological studies of oral societies that have that have shown that in most oral cultures it actually doesn't work the way we would think it would work with the way we think it would work is that if you can't write something down that you'd probably want to remember it exactly because you don't have waiver it down so you'd want to remember it exactly but that idea that you would want to remember it exactly in fact as a product of written cultures in oral societies that isn't how they think because they think I mean most people in oral cultures know that in in an oral presentation you've changed the story depending on the audience the situation that needs a hand etcetera etc so so there's that the other thing is that there's a way to check whether the stories about Jesus were being passed long without changing or being changed orally and that's the fact that we have several different authors who have written down the things Jesus allegedly said and did and you can compare them with one another and when you do that there are discrepancies so it looks like people are changing the stories both orally and at the written stage I think okay I need to stop there thank you very much I've enjoyed thank you for an extraordinary evening Thank You professor Herman for bringing us scholarship that we haven't known for 300 years as you point out since 1707 both here tonight and in your books and thank you all very much for your questions and for your participation this evening [Applause] you

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

Views: 722,090

Rating: 4.5046291 out of 5

Keywords: Stanford University, Misquoting Jesus, Bart D. Ehrman, Agnostic Atheism (Idea), Bible Errors

Id: pfheSAcCsrE

Length: 95min 20sec (5720 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 03 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Simplicious_LETTius]

Bart’s lectures and books are SO MUCH more valuable and accurate than WT’s holy lectures. (And when I say “holy” I mean “full of HOLES!) Their articles are craftily made to omit key information to advance their narratives and doctrine, to make it UNIQUEly “The Truth.”

The WT is a damned wicked slave, exploiting honest-hearted people, stealing their lives away from them for their own gain, and for the service of other entities.

[u/kakonthewarrior]

I’m reading this book right now and it’s so so so so so good!!!

[u/Truthdoesntchange]

I’ve read one of his books but only recently discovered his lectures on YouTube. Like watchtower, his talks are free of charge. But he doesn’t ask for donations.