New Testament Manuscripts Archives - Page 7 of 19 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

How Can You Tell If the Text Has Been CHANGED?

There are some passages in the New Testament that have been either added or omitted by scribes in the process of copying them. This is not some kind of “opinion.” It is a fact. In know full well that there are always readers who have said: “Scribes would never do that! This was the Word of God for them!” The logic in this objection is that anyone who held the Bible to be a holy book would not change it. Hey, think about the Jewish scribes in the Middle Ages with the Torah, or the Muslim scribes from as far back as we can go with the Qur’an! Scribes don’t change the texts they are copying if they think they are straight from God! It’s an intriguing argument – I hear it on occasion -- but I’m afraid it is based on complete ignorance. In reality, it is an undeniable fact that scribes sometimes omitted or added to the texts of the NT, whether we are talking about a a word, a phrase, a sentence, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:20-04:00March 4th, 2020|New Testament Manuscripts|

Maybe the Passage wasn’t “Original”!!

How do we know if a passage in the New Testament was “originally” in the New Testament? Scholars are widely agreed, for example (there is not a whole lot of serious debate about the matter) that the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection at the end of Mark’s Gospel (the last twelve verses of Mark 16) were not originally there. The Gospel ends with the announcement that he has been raised and will meet his disciples in Galilee (so that, contrary to what a lot of people say – there definitely *is* a resurrection in Mark); but no one sees him. That makes Mark very different from the other Gospels. So too the famous story of the woman taken in adultery in John 7:53-8:11 – arguably the most famous story from the life of Jesus in the entire New Testament, but almost certainly not originally there. It was added later. So how ‘bout *other* passages? How can we know? I’m addressing this question because ... At the end of this post I explain why it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:19-04:00March 3rd, 2020|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

Rapid Fire Questions and Answers on Biblical Manuscripts

I recently responded to a request from a European journalist writing an article about how we got the Bible and what we can say about the collection and illicit sale of manuscripts. When I get these requests, I'm usually tempted to send back a list of books and tell them to do some homework. But, well, they have deadlines and it ain't gonna happen. So I went ahead and gave some brief answers to some rather important questions. I thought blog readers might enjoy this kind of very condensed (but very simple) exchange. Here are it is, questions in black, responses in red. ******************************************************************************** -Why do you think that some apocryphal books were not included in the Bible? What was the selection criteria? Do you know when the Bible like we know today were completed? Church father debated for centuries which books to include. The side that “won” the debate applied several criteria: The rest of this post is available to all blog members. You too could be among the chosen few, and growing. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:01-04:00January 29th, 2020|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Do Textual Variants Actually Matter For Much??

In light of my previous post, I thought I should address a question I get asked a lot. Or rather, a rhetorical question that I hear posed a lot -- especially by evangelical apologists who want to insist that even though there are hundreds of thousands of differences in our manuscripts, none of them really matters for anything that's important. (This was a perennial objection to my book Misquoting Jesus.) Is that true? I dealt with it many years ago on the blog, and it's time to address it again. ************************************************************ QUESTION: I got the impression (I can’t remember where or if you said this… or if Bruce Metzger said it) that no significant Christian doctrine is threatened by text critical issues… and so, if that is the case, who cares if, in Mark 4: 18, Jesus spoke of the “illusion” of wealth or the “love” of wealth. I mean, who cares other than textual critics and Bible translators? RESPONSE: The first thing to emphasize is a point that I repeatedly make and that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 21st, 2019|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Introduction to the Manuscripts of the New Testament
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Introduction to the Manuscripts of the New Testament

New Testament Manuscripts

Introduction to the Manuscripts of the New Testament

This now will be the next portion of my longer blog post that will serve as an Introduction to the New Testament. The previous section was on how the 27 books came to be collected into “the” New Tesatment; this one is on how the books were copied/transmitted over the centuries. As with the other sections, I’ve made this one pretty short, because I’m trying to be as concise as I can, with links to other blog posts throughout. I don’t want the entire article to be massively long. One could obviously write a book or two on this topic (and many have!); but for a brief introduction, I want to hit only the really key points. The Text of the New Testament How, though, were the books copied? In the ancient world the only way to get a copy of a book was by copying it by hand or by having someone else do so: one page, one sentence, one word at a time. The earliest Christian copyists would not have been trained [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 19th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts|

How Did We Get The 27 Books of the New Testament?

27 Books of the New Testament. This is now a continuation of my projected longer blog post that will serve as an introduction to the New Testament (possibly around 5000 – 6000 words or so). In the first section, I discussed the layout and structure of the New Testament. In the second I gave brief descriptions of each of the twenty-seven books. This one is spread out over two posts and deals with the question of how we actually got it. How was it collected together into a “book” and how was it transmitted to us over the centuries. How Did We Get The 27 Books of the New Testament? The New Testament did not drop from the sky one day a few years after the death of Jesus. It was written over a number of years by a number of authors with a number of different purposes, interests, and perspectives. But how did we actually get it? That is, who decided on these particular 27 Books of the New Testament (early Christian writings) rather [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 18th, 2019|Early Christian Doctrine, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

Startling and Disturbing Development Involving Manuscripts at the Museum of the Bible

There’s been a new and rather astonishing development in the story involving the so-called “First Century Gospel of Mark.” If you recall, a few years ago some textual scholars began to claim that we now have in our possession the oldest copy of Mark (by a long shot) ever to be discovered. The existence of the manuscript was first announced in 2012 by Prof. Dan Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary, in a public debate he was having, as it turns out, with me at UNC Chapel Hill. Until now, our first fragmentary copy of Mark could be dated to around the beginning of the third century. The earliest full copy of Mark comes to us from the middle of the fourth. Mark itself was written, probably, around 70 CE. So, well, that’s a long time between when the original was first published and when our first complete copy of it was made. Around 300 years. How many changes were made over the years? Were there lots? Were they massive? How could we ever know? But [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:48-04:00October 15th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Religion in the News|

Crazy Things Textual Scholars Say

This post is free and available to anyone who wants to look. On the Bart Ehrman Blog, there are substantial posts on interesting topics like this five days of the week, going back well over seven years. If you belonged to the blog, you could get these posts, and access to all the archives. The membership fee is extremely low, given the value; and every penny goes to charity. So why not join? It makes sense that scholars of the New Testament are predominantly committed Christians interested in knowing as much as they can about the Christian Scriptures. That includes, of course, textual critics, the scholars who devote their research to trying to establish, to the best of their abilities, what the authors of the New Testament (whoever they were) actually wrote – what words they used, passage after passage, verse after verse. The majority of these textual critics, as it turns out, are conservative in their religious/theological views. The reality is that Baptists are more interested in this kind of question than Episcopalians. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:48-04:00October 13th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts|

Did God Want Us To Have His Word?

In my previous post I said that, in my opinion, the best way to approach the “original” text of the New Testament – given the fact that we don’t actually *have* it – is to make a working assumption that we are pretty darn close, in most places, most of the time. I openly admit, and always have, that this is an *assumption*. But since it’s one that “works,” well, I think I’ll continue calling it a working assumption! And I’ll show why there are really very good grounds for it. But first I want to affirm strongly that the assumption is contrary to what most people think about the New Testament – both scholars and lay folk. Among virtually everyone else that I’ve ever heard talk about it, there are two views, one the massive consensus and one the tiny minority; and I don’t agree with either one. The consensus view seems to be that we really do *know* what the authors of the New Testament wrote. Deeply committed Christian readers of the Bible [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:31-04:00October 11th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Misconstruing My Words. Can We Know What the Authors of the New Testament Originally Said?
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Misconstruing My Words. Can We Know What the Authors of the New Testament Originally Said?

Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts

Misconstruing My Words. Can We Know What the Authors of the New Testament Originally Said?

Sometimes people take what I say to an extreme that I don’t mean to convey. That especially happens when I talk about the textual criticism of the New Testament. As a reminder, “textual criticism” is a technical term. It does not refer to the interpretation of texts or to the history behind the composition of texts or to the assessment of the original context of texts or anything like that. It is used to refer specifically to the attempt to reconstruct the words of a text. That is, textual criticism is not interested in understanding what the text means; it is interested in figuring out what words the author originally used. And in seeing how the author’s original words may have been changed over in the process of copying. Textual criticism is a fundamental aspect of literary study – certainly for the Bible, but for all texts. There are textual critics who avidly work on the classics (Homer, Virgil, Cicero, etc. etc.); and on medieval literature and on modern literature. It’s a huge field, e.g., [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:31-04:00October 8th, 2019|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts|

How Did We Get Chapters and Verses?

Here’s a question I get on occasion, about where the Bible’s chapters and verses came from (did the original authors write that way???). I’ve drawn my answer from my textbook on the NT, and since the answer is so brief, I’ll attach another couple of paragraphs drawn from a nearby page in the book, dealing with another somewhat related and even more important (for many people) problem: when did scholars start to think that the differences in our manuscripts were a VERY big deal? QUESTION: About the numbers of the verses, who put them? Who divided the text in verses and chapters, and when? RESPONSE: Here is my answer taken from The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings: Given the fact that ancient manuscripts did not use punctuation, paragraph divisions, or even spaces to separate words, it will come as no surprise to learn that the chapter and verse divisions found in modern translations of the New Testament are not original (as if Paul, when writing Romans, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:13-04:00September 6th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Can We Reconstruct the Entire New Testament from Quotations of the Church Fathers?

I am making this post free to everyone, so that, if you're not a member of the blog, you can see what you're missing. Every week I make five posts on everything connected to the New Testament and Christianity of the first four centuries. Members can read it all, for a small fee. Every penny of the fee goes to support worthy charities. So why not join? QUESTION: Recently you mentioned that your early work involved analysing patristic citations of the New Testament. I believe it has been said that virtually all of the NT could be recreated from such mentions if the need ever arose. Do you believe that this would, indeed, be possible, please? RESPONSE: This is a very interesting question. I may need to unpack what it means before giving an answer. As most of you know, we do not have the original text of any of the books of the New Testament, only copies made many years (centuries) later. We have over 5600 copies in the Greek language in which [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:12-04:00September 1st, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Scribes Who Changed Their Texts on Purpose

I've been browsing through some old posts and came upon this one from years ago, about this time. It's an interesting topic that people on the blog frequently ask me about: did scribes really change the texts of the NT on purpose, and how can we know? The answers are simply: almost certainly yes and it's difficult! Here's an example I talked about back then, one of the most intriguing instances in the Gospel of Mark, where the scribes who changed the text ended up having almost NO effect on Bible translations today; most translators agree on the "original" form of the text. But the change is really interesting, and can show the sorts of reasons scribes were doing this kind of thing. Here's the original post, slightly edited. ************************************************************* I have started giving some instances of what appear to be “intentional” changes made by scribes, as opposed to simple, accidental, slips of the pen. Here's another instance of the phenomenon I stress that these alterations “appear” to be intentional since, technically speaking, we [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:57-04:00August 4th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

The Legality, Morality, and Scandal of Acquiring Ancient Manuscripts: Guest Post by Jennifer Knust

Here is the final part of Jennifer’s Knust’s quest to trace the history of an intriguing Christian manuscript she came across, suspecting it had come to Duke ultimately as a result of Nazi looting decades earlier. Now she details how she tried to track it down. The entire episode leads her, then to reflect on the Green Family Collection, a group of manuscripts and antiquities purchased by the owners of the Hobby Lobby and the basis of the “Museum of the Bible” in Washington D.C. Any visitor to the museum might assume that acquiring such treasures would be relatively simple and involve no issues of legality, morality, and scandal. On the contrary…. Jennifer Knust’s most popular books are To Cast the First Stone and Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity. ************************************************* Part III: Manuscripts are Commodities The Antiquariat was (and is) a bookstore. Günther Koch was a bookseller. Indeed, in a counter-claim filed against the Rosenthals in the 1950s, he described himself as uniquely qualified for the position he undertook during and after the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 9th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Christian Manuscripts and Nazi Loot: Guest Post by Jennifer Knust

This now is the second of Jennifer Knust’s three posts on her current project, tracing the history of a Christian manuscript she came upon from the rare book collection at Duke University. Her research led her to booksellers in London, Munich, and Amsterdamn, and implicates the Aryanization policies of the Nazis. Who knew New Testament scholarship could be so interesting? Find below what she has to say. Jennifer Knust’s most popular books are To Cast the First Stone and Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity. ************************************* Part II: Nazi Loot? My own project began when Aaron Ebert, a doctoral student at Duke University, noticed that the manuscript he was studying was one of three purchased by Duke from the London bookseller Raphael King in the 1950s. Very little information about Mr. King is available, so Aaron reached out to the Ludwig Rosenthal Antiquariaat, a venerable antiquarian bookstore now located in the Netherlands that once owned another of Duke’s manuscripts also sold by King, Greek MS 018. According to an important volume on Byzantine [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 8th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Tracking Down Stolen Manuscripts: Guest Post by Jennifer Knust

I have asked my friend and colleague Jennifer Knust (Professor of early Christianity at Duke) to write some guest posts for us on the blog. Jenny is the author of Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity, and she has also recently published the definitive study of the famous passage of the “Woman Taken in Adultery” (containing the line “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her” – a passage not originally in the New Testament), a long, sophisticated, and learned book (co-authored with Tommy Wasserman), called To Cast the First Stone; and I had suggested she write about that for us. Maybe she will later. But for now she has decided to post about some very exciting current research she’s doing, as we speak: tracking down the history of a Christian manuscript that was plundered by the Nazis. Intriguing stuff. This will take several posts. ***************************************************** Jennifer Wright Knust Duke University “In this kind of world no blueprint instructs us how to house what we [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 7th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Is the Qur’an More Reliable than the New Testament?

I often get asked questions about the Qur’an, and I almost always do not answer them, most because I can’t answer them. I’m not an expert on the Qur’an, and tend to talk only about things I have done serious and sustained research on. Otherwise I’m just spreading stuff I’ve heard, and I’m no more authoritative on that than anyone else. So what’s the point of my talking about it? But one question that I get frequently, especially from Muslim readers, is about the manuscript tradition of the Qur’an in relation to the New Testament. Even though I’m not an expert on the manuscript tradition of the Qur’an (oh boy am I not an expert), I know enough to answer with some authority this particular question. The question is whether it simply isn’t true that the Qur’an is more reliable than the New Testament. What the questioner almost always means by that is that the ancient manuscripts of the Qur’an tend to be amazingly similar to one another. Virtually identical up and down the line. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:21-04:00July 2nd, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Is There a Way to Know if a Manuscript is the “Original”?

In response to the recent flurry of posts on the question of a “first-century Mark,” I have received a very interesting question: suppose there *were* a first-century Mark that was discovered (hey, it’s possible! And we’re holding our breaths – what an amazing find it would be).. Would there be a way of showing it was the actual original Mark, the one the author himself wrote with his own hand? I was asked this question on the blog seven years ago, and responded to it by saying I had never thought about it before. (!) Below is the original question and my initial reflections. My views haven’t matured much during the past seven years (and they ain't the only thing), so I give my initial response. If someone can improve on it, let me know. First here is this week’s way of asking the question: QUESTION: Suppose someone did claim to have found the original…. I get that you can show something isn’t original, such as by dating it to two hundred years later. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 28th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Flat-out Lies or Willful Ignorance. How Do They Get Away With It?

Sometimes it’s enough to make my blood boil. Maybe someone can explain it to me. If you were to interview the 7,346,235,000 occupants of this planet, you would find *no* group of people who declare themselves MORE committed to “truth” than the evangelical Christians. Evangelical Christianity, historically, is about nothing other than the Truth. Jesus himself said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father except by me” (John 14:6); and “You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The Christian faith, for these people, is all about finding the Truth that leads to eternal life. So why do so many of their spokespersons simply tell lies? Or at least propagate willful ignorance? Those are the two choices: they either know what they’re saying is absolutely false or they don’t go to the bother of finding out, when the information is readily available to anyone who wants to take 38 seconds to look for it. I don’t get it. Well, OK, I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 26th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Hobby Lobby, Biblical Manuscripts, and Academic Scandal

Yesterday I posted the most recent developments in the scandalous “first-century Mark” affair. Readers of the blog who are not familiar with or invested much in the study of ancient manuscripts may have shrugged their shoulders and not seen what the big deal was. I completely get that. But anyone involved in New Testament textual criticism, the history of the Bible, and the ethics of modern biblical scholarship would have seen that this is a very, very big deal. A blockbuster development. For years now conservative evangelical scholars have been declaring that they have solid proof to support their views about the New Testament, against crazy liberal types (like me): we NOW have, they claimed, reliable *first* century evidence that the Gospels were both written earlier than the skeptics claim *and* that it was being reliably copied. Their evidence? A portion of the Gospel of Mark that had been dated by one of the world’s experts to the first century itself. Amazing! And where was this manuscript of Mark? No one would say. How much [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 25th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Religion in the News|

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